A Little Life

1

THERE HAD BEEN a day, about a month after he turned thirty-eight, when Willem realized he was famous. Initially, this had fazed him less than he would have imagined, in part because he had always considered himself sort of famous — he and JB, that is. He’d be out downtown with someone, Jude or someone else, and somebody would come over to say hello to Jude, and Jude would introduce him: “Aaron, do you know Willem?” And Aaron would say, “Of course. Willem Ragnarsson. Everyone knows Willem,” but it wouldn’t be because of his work — it would be because Aaron’s former roommate’s sister had dated him at Yale, or he had two years ago done a reading for Aaron’s friend’s brother’s friend who was a playwright, or because Aaron, who was an artist, had once been in a group show with JB and Asian Henry Young, and he’d met Willem at the after-party. New York City, for much of his adulthood, had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn. The four of them talked to the same — well, if not the same people, the same types of people at least, that they had in college, and in that realm of artists and actors and musicians, of course he was known, because he always had been. It wasn’t such a vast world; everyone knew everyone else.

Of the four of them, only Jude, and to some degree Malcolm, had experience living in another world, the real world, the one populated with people who did the necessary stuff of life: making laws, and teaching, and healing people, and solving problems, and handling money, and selling and buying things (the bigger surprise, he always thought, was not that he knew Aaron but that Jude did). Just before he turned thirty-seven, he had taken a role in a quiet film titled The Sycamore Court in which he played a small-town Southern lawyer who was finally coming out of the closet. He’d taken the part to work with the actor playing his father, who was someone he admired and who in the film was taciturn and casually vituperative, a man disapproving of his own son and made unkind by his own disappointments. As part of his research, he had Jude explain to him what, exactly, he did all day, and as he listened, he found himself feeling slightly sad that Jude, whom he considered brilliant, brilliant in ways he would never understand, was spending his life doing work that sounded so crushingly dull, the intellectual equivalent of housework: cleaning and sorting and washing and tidying, only to move on to the next house and have to begin all over. He didn’t say this, of course, and on one Saturday he met Jude at Rosen Pritchard and looked through his folders and papers and wandered around the office as Jude wrote.

“Well, what do you think?” Jude asked, and leaned back in his chair and grinned at him, and he smiled back and said, “Pretty impressive,” because it was, in its own way, and Jude had laughed. “I know what you’re thinking, Willem,” he’d said. “It’s okay. Harold thinks it, too. ‘Such a waste,’ ” he said in Harold’s voice. “ ‘Such a waste, Jude.’ ”

“That’s not what I’m thinking,” he protested, although really, he had been: Jude was always bemoaning his own lack of imagination, his own unswervable sense of practicality, but Willem had never seen him that way. And it did seem a waste: not that he was at a corporate firm but that he was in law at all, when really, he thought, a mind like Jude’s should be doing something else. What, he didn’t know, but it wasn’t this. He knew it was ridiculous, but he had never truly believed that Jude’s attending law school would actually result in his becoming a lawyer: he had always imagined that at some point he’d give it up and do something else, like be a math professor, or a voice teacher, or (although he had recognized the irony, even then) a psychologist, because he was such a good listener and always so comforting to his friends. He didn’t know why he clung to this idea of Jude, even after it was clear that he loved what he did and excelled at it.

The Sycamore Court had been an unexpected hit and had won Willem the best reviews he’d ever had, and award nominations, and its release, paired with a larger, flashier film that he had shot two years earlier but had been delayed in postproduction, had created a certain moment that even he recognized would transform his career. He had always chosen his roles wisely — if he could be said to have superior talent in anything, he always thought it was that: his taste for parts — but until that year, there had never been a time in which he felt that he was truly secure, that he could talk about films he’d like to do when he was in his fifties or sixties. Jude had always told him that he had an overdeveloped sense of circumspection about his career, that he was far better along than he thought, but it had never felt that way; he knew he was respected by his peers and by critics, but a part of him always feared that it would end abruptly and without warning. He was a practical person in the least practical of careers, and after every job he booked, he would tell his friends he would never book another, that this was certain to be the last, partly as a way of staving off his fears — if he acknowledged the possibility, it was less likely to happen — and partly to give voice to them, because they were real.

Only later, when he and Jude were alone, would he allow himself to truly worry aloud. “What if I never work again?” he would ask Jude.

“That won’t happen,” Jude would say.

“But what if it does?”

“Well,” said Jude, seriously, “in the extraordinarily unlikely event that you never act again, then you’ll do something else. And while you figure it out, you’ll move in with me.”

He knew, of course, that he would work again: he had to believe it. Every actor did. Acting was a form of grifting, and once you stopped believing you could, so did everyone else. But he still liked having Jude reassure him; he liked knowing he had somewhere to go just in case it really did end. Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly, uncharacteristically self-pitying, he would think of what he would do if it ended: he thought he might work with disabled children. He would be good at it, and he would enjoy it. He could see himself walking home from an elementary school he imagined might be on the Lower East Side, west to SoHo, toward Greene Street. His apartment would be gone, of course, sold to pay for his master’s program in education (in this dream, all the millions he’d earned, all the millions he had never spent, had somehow vanished), and he would be living in Jude’s apartment, as if the past two decades had never happened at all.

But after The Sycamore Court, these mopey fantasies had diminished in frequency, and he spent the latter half of his thirty-seventh year feeling closer to confidence than he ever had before. Something had shifted; something had cemented; somewhere his name had been tapped into stone. He would always have work; he could rest for a bit if he wanted to.

It was September, and he was coming back from a shoot and about to embark upon a European publicity tour; he had one day in the city, just one, and Jude told him he’d take him anywhere he wanted. They’d see each other, they’d have lunch, and then he’d get back into the car and go straight to the airport for the flight to London. It had been so long since he had been in New York, and he really wanted to go somewhere cheap and downtown and homey, like the Vietnamese noodle place they had gone to when they were in their twenties, but he instead picked a French restaurant known for its seafood in midtown so Jude wouldn’t have to travel far.

The restaurant was filled with businessmen, the kinds of people who telegraphed their wealth and power with the cut of their suits and the subtlety of their watches: you had to be wealthy and powerful yourself in order to understand what was being communicated. To everyone else, they were men in gray suits, indistinguishable from one another. The hostess brought him to Jude, who was there already, waiting, and when Jude stood, he reached over and hugged him very close, which he knew Jude didn’t like but which he had recently decided he would start doing anyway. They stood there, holding each other, surrounded on either side by gray-suited men, until he released Jude and they sat.

“Did I embarrass you enough?” he asked him, and Jude smiled and shook his head.

There were so many things to discuss in so little time that Jude had actually written an agenda on the back of a receipt, which he had laughed at when he had seen it but which they ended up following fairly closely. Between Topic Five (Malcolm’s wedding: What were they going to say in their toasts?) and Topic Six (the progression of the Greene Street apartment, which was being gutted), he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and as he walked back to the table, he had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched. He was of course used to being appraised and inspected, but there was something different about the quality of this attention, its intensity and hush, and for the first time in a long time, he was self-conscious, aware of the fact that he was wearing jeans and not a suit, and that he clearly didn’t belong. He became aware, in fact, that everyone was wearing a suit, and he was the only one not.

“I think I’m wearing the wrong thing,” he said quietly to Jude as he sat back down. “Everyone’s staring.”

“They’re not staring at you because of what you’re wearing,” Jude said. “They’re staring at you because you’re famous.”

He shook his head. “To you and literally dozens of other people, maybe.”

“No, Willem,” Jude had said. “You are.” He smiled at him. “Why do you think they didn’t make you wear a jacket? They don’t let just anyone waltz in here who’s not in corporate mufti. And why do you think they keep bringing over all these appetizers? It’s not because of me, I guarantee you.” Now he laughed. “Why did you choose this place anyway? I thought you were going to pick somewhere downtown.”

He groaned. “I heard the crudo was good. And what do you mean: Is there a dress code here?”

Jude smiled again and was about to answer when one of the discreet gray-suited men came over to them and, vividly embarrassed, apologized for interrupting them. “I just wanted to say that I loved The Sycamore Court,” he said. “I’m a big fan.” Willem thanked him, and the man, who was older, in his fifties, was about to say something else when he saw Jude and blinked, clearly recognizing him, and stared at him for a bit, obviously recategorizing Jude in his head, refiling what he knew about him. He opened his mouth and shut it and then apologized again as he left, Jude smiling serenely at him the entire time.

“Well, well,” said Jude, after the man had hurried away. “That was the head of the litigation department of one of the biggest firms in the city. And, apparently, an admirer of yours.” He grinned at Willem. “Now are you convinced you’re famous?”

“If the benchmark for fame is being recognized by twentysomething female RISD graduates and aging closet cases, then yes,” he said, and the two of them started snickering, childishly, until they were both able to compose themselves again.

Jude looked at him. “Only you could be on magazine covers and not think you’re famous,” he said, fondly. But Willem wasn’t anywhere real when those magazine covers came out; he was on set. On set, everyone acted like they were famous.

“It’s different,” he told Jude. “I can’t explain it.” But later, in the car to the airport, he realized what the difference was. Yes, he was used to being looked at. But he was only really used to being looked at by certain kinds of people in certain kinds of rooms — people who wanted to sleep with him, or who wanted to talk to him because it might help their own careers, or people for whom the simple fact that he was recognizable was enough to trigger something hungry and frantic in them, to crave being in his presence. He wasn’t, however, accustomed to being looked at by people who had other things to do, who had bigger and more important matters to worry about than an actor in New York. Actors in New York: they were everywhere. The only time men with power ever looked at him was at premieres, when he was being presented to the studio head and they were shaking his hand and making small talk even as he could see them examining him, calculating how well he’d tested and how much they’d paid for him and how much the film would have to earn in order for them to look at him more closely.

Perversely, though, as this began happening more and more — he would enter a room, a restaurant, a building, and would feel, just for a second, a slight collective pause — he also began realizing that he could turn his own visibility on and off. If he walked into a restaurant expecting to be recognized, he always was. And if he walked in expecting not to be, he rarely was. He was never able to determine what, exactly, beyond his simply willing it, made the difference. But it worked; it was why, six years after that lunch, he was able to walk through much of SoHo in plain sight, more or less, after he moved in with Jude.

He had been at Greene Street since Jude got home from his suicide attempt, and as the months passed, he found that he was migrating more and more of his things — first his clothes, then his laptop, then his boxes of books and his favorite woolen blanket that he liked to wrap about himself and shuffle around in as he made his morning coffee: his life was so itinerant that there really wasn’t much else he needed or owned — to his old bedroom. A year later, he was living there still. He’d woken late one morning and made himself some coffee (he’d had to bring his coffeemaker as well, because Jude didn’t have one), and had meandered sleepily about the apartment, noticing as if for the first time that somehow his books were now on Jude’s shelves, and the pieces of art he’d brought over were hanging on Jude’s walls. When had this happened? He couldn’t quite remember, but it felt right; it felt right that he should be back here.

Even Mr. Irvine agreed. Willem had seen him at Malcolm’s house the previous spring for Malcolm’s birthday and Mr. Irvine had said, “I hear you’ve moved back in with Jude,” and he said he had, preparing himself for a lecture on their eternal adolescence: he was going to be forty-four, after all; Jude was nearly forty-two. But “You’re a good friend, Willem,” Mr. Irvine had said. “I’m glad you boys are taking care of each other.” He had been deeply rattled by Jude’s attempt; they all had, of course, but Mr. Irvine had always liked Jude the best of all of them, and they all knew it.

“Well, thanks, Mr. Irvine,” he’d said, surprised. “I’m glad, too.”

In the first, raw weeks after Jude had gotten out of the hospital, Willem used to go into his room at odd hours to give himself confirmation that Jude was there, and alive. Back then, Jude slept constantly, and he would sometimes sit on the end of his bed, staring at him and feeling a sort of horrible wonder that he was still with them at all. He would think: If Richard had found him just twenty minutes later, Jude would have been dead. About a month after Jude had been released, Willem had been at the drugstore and had seen a box cutter hanging on the rack — such a medieval, cruel instrument, it seemed — and had almost burst into tears: Andy had told him that the emergency room surgeon had said Jude’s had been the deepest, most decisive self-inflicted incisions he had ever seen in his career. He had always known that Jude was troubled, but he was awestruck, almost, by how little he knew him, by the depths of his determination to harm himself.

He felt that he had in some ways learned more about Jude in the past year than he had in the past twenty-six, and each new thing he learned was awful: Jude’s stories were the kinds of stories that he was unequipped to answer, because so many of them were unanswerable. The story of the scar on the back of his hand — that had been the one that had begun it — had been so terrible that Willem had stayed up that night, unable to sleep, and had seriously contemplated calling Harold, just to be able to have someone else share the story with him, to be speechless alongside him.

The next day he couldn’t stop himself from staring at Jude’s hand, and Jude had finally drawn his sleeve over it. “You’re making me self-conscious,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said.

Jude had sighed. “Willem, I’m not going to tell you these stories if you’re going to react like this,” he said, finally. “It’s okay, it really is. It was a long time ago. I never think about it.” He paused. “I don’t want you to look at me differently if I tell you these things.”

He’d taken a deep breath. “No,” he said. “You’re right. You’re right.” And so now when he listened to these stories of Jude’s, he was careful not to say anything, to make small, nonjudgmental noises, as if all his friends had been whipped with a belt soaked in vinegar until they had passed out or been made to eat their own vomit off the floor, as if those were normal rites of childhood. But despite these stories, he still knew nothing: He still didn’t know who Brother Luke was. He still didn’t know anything except isolated stories about the monastery, or the home. He still didn’t know how Jude had made it to Philadelphia or what had happened to him there. And he still didn’t know the story about the injury. But if Jude was beginning with the easier stories, he now knew enough to know that those stories, if he ever heard them, would be horrific. He almost didn’t want to know.

The stories had been part of a compromise when Jude had made it clear that he wouldn’t go to Dr. Loehmann. Andy had been stopping by most Friday nights, and he came over one evening shortly after Jude had returned to Rosen Pritchard. As Andy examined Jude in his bedroom, Willem made everyone drinks, which they had on the sofa, the lights low and the sky outside grainy with snow.

“Sam Loehmann says you haven’t called him,” Andy said. “Jude — this is bullshit. You’ve got to call him. This was part of the deal.”

“Andy, I’ve told you,” Jude said, “I’m not going.” Willem was pleased, then, to hear that Jude’s stubbornness had returned, even though he disagreed with him. Two months ago, when they had been in Morocco, he had looked up from his plate at dinner to see Jude staring at the dishes of mezze before him, unable to serve himself any of them. “Jude?” he’d asked, and Jude had looked at him, his face fearful. “I don’t know how to begin,” he’d said, quietly, and so Willem had reached over and spooned a little from each dish onto Jude’s plate, and told him to start with the scoop of stewed eggplant at the top and eat his way clockwise through the rest of it.

“You have to do something,” Andy said. He could tell Andy was trying to remain calm, and failing, and that too he found heartening: a sign of a certain return to normalcy. “Willem thinks so too, right, Willem? You can’t just keep going on like this! You’ve had a major trauma in your life! You have to start discussing things with someone!”

“Fine,” said Jude, looking tired. “I’ll tell Willem.”

“Willem’s not a health-care professional!” said Andy. “He’s an actor!” And at that, Jude had looked at him and the two of them had started laughing, so hard that they had to put their drinks down, and Andy had finally stood and said that they were both so immature he didn’t know why he bothered and had left, Jude trying to call after him—“Andy! We’re sorry! Don’t leave!”—but laughing too hard to be intelligible. It was the first time in months — the first time since even before the attempt — that he had heard Jude laugh.

Later, when they had recovered, Jude had said, “I thought I might, you know, Willem — start telling you things sometimes. But do you mind? Is it going to be a burden?” And he had said of course it wouldn’t be, that he wanted to know. He had always wanted to know, but he didn’t say this; he knew it would sound like criticism.

But as much as he was able to convince himself that Jude had returned to himself, he was also able to recognize that he had been changed. Some of these changes were, he thought, good ones: the talking, for example. And some of them were sad ones: although his hands were much stronger, and although it was less and less frequent, they still shook occasionally, and he knew Jude was embarrassed by it. And he was more skittish than ever about being touched, especially, Willem noticed, by Harold; a month ago, when Harold had visited, Jude had practically danced out of the way to keep Harold from hugging him. He had felt bad for Harold, seeing the expression on his face, and so had gone over and hugged him himself. “You know he can’t help it,” he told Harold quietly, and Harold had kissed him on the cheek. “You’re a sweet man, Willem,” he’d said.

Now it was October, thirteen months after the attempt. During the evening he was at the theater; two months after his run ended in December, he’d start shooting his first project since he returned from Sri Lanka, an adaptation of Uncle Vanya that he was excited about and was being filmed in the Hudson Valley: he’d be able to come home every night.

Not that the location was a coincidence. “Keep me in New York,” he’d instructed his manager and his agent after he’d dropped out of the film in Russia the previous fall.

“For how long?” asked Kit, his agent.

“I don’t know,” he’d said. “At least the next year.”

“Willem,” Kit had said, after a silence, “I understand how close you and Jude are. But don’t you think you should take advantage of the momentum you have? You could do whatever you wanted.” He was referring to The Iliad and The Odyssey, which had both been enormous successes, proof, Kit liked to point out, that he could do anything he wanted now. “From what I know of Jude, he’d say the same thing.” And then, when he didn’t say anything, “It’s not like this is your wife, or kid, or something. This is your friend.”

“You mean ‘just your friend,’ ” he’d said, testily. Kit was Kit; he thought like an agent, and he trusted how Kit thought — he had been with him since the beginning of his career; he tried not to fight with him. And Kit had always guided him well. “No fat, no filler,” he liked to brag about Willem’s career, reviewing the history of his roles. They both knew that Kit was far more ambitious for him than he was — he always had been. And yet it had been Kit who’d gotten him on the first flight out of Sri Lanka after Richard had called him; Kit who’d had the producers shut down production for seven days so he could fly to New York and back.

“I don’t mean to offend you, Willem,” Kit had said, carefully. “I know you love him. But come on. If he were the love of your life, I’d understand. But this seems extreme to me, to inhibit your career like this.”

And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real.

In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. “If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,” his teacher had said.

He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and harder it was to find your way back. Was it any wonder that so many of his peers were such wrecks? They made their money, their lives, their identities by impersonating others — was it a surprise, then, that they needed one set, one stage after the next, to give their lives shape? Without them, what and who were they? And so they took up religions, and girlfriends, and causes to give them something that could be their own: they never slept, they never stopped, they were terrified to be alone, to have to ask themselves who they were. (“When an actor talks and there’s no one to hear him, is he still an actor?” his friend Roman had once asked. He sometimes wondered.)

But to Jude, he wasn’t an actor: he was his friend, and that identity supplanted everything else. It was a role he had inhabited for so long that it had become, indelibly, who he was. To Jude, he was no more primarily an actor than Jude was primarily a lawyer — it was never the first or second or third way that either of them would describe the other. It was Jude who remembered who he had been before he had made a life pretending to be other people: someone with a brother, someone with parents, someone to whom everything and everyone seemed so impressive and beguiling. He knew other actors who didn’t want anyone to remember them as they’d been, as someone so determined to be someone else, but he wasn’t that person. He wanted to be reminded of who he was; he wanted to be around someone for whom his career would never be the most interesting thing about him.

And if he was to be honest, he loved what came with Jude as well: Harold and Julia. Jude’s adoption had been the first time he had ever felt envious of anything Jude had. He admired a lot of what Jude had — his intelligence and thoughtfulness and resourcefulness — but he had never been jealous of him. But watching Harold and Julia with him, watching how they watched him even when he wasn’t looking at them, he had felt a kind of emptiness: he was parentless, and while most of the time he didn’t think about this at all, he felt that, for as remote as his parents had been, they had at least been something that had anchored him to his life. Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust. He and Jude had been united in this.

Of course, he knew this envy was ridiculous, and beyond mean: he had grown up with parents, and Jude hadn’t. And he knew that Harold and Julia felt an affection for him as well, as much as he did for them. They had both seen every one of his films, and both sent him long and detailed reviews of them, always praising his performance and making intelligent comments about his costars and the cinematography. (The only one they had never seen — or at least never commented on — was The Prince of Cinnamon, which was the film he had been shooting when Jude had tried to kill himself. He had never seen it himself.) They read every article about him — like his reviews, he avoided these articles — and bought a copy of every magazine that featured him. On his birthday, they would call and ask him what he was going to do to celebrate, and Harold would remind him of how old he was getting. At Christmas, they always sent him something — a book, along with a jokey little gift, or a clever toy that he would keep in his pocket to fiddle with as he talked on the phone or sat in the makeup chair. At Thanksgiving, he and Harold would sit in the living room watching the game, while Julia kept Jude company in the kitchen.

“We’re running low on chips,” Harold would say.

“I know,” he’d say.

“Why don’t you go get more?” Harold would say.

“You’re the host,” he’d remind Harold.

“You’re the guest.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Call Jude and get him to bring us more.”

“You call him!”

“No, you call him.”

“Fine,” he’d say. “Jude! Harold wants more chips!”

“You’re such a confabulator, Willem,” Harold would say, as Jude came in to refill the bowl. “Jude, this was completely Willem’s idea.”

But mostly, he knew that Harold and Julia loved him because he loved Jude; he knew they trusted him to take care of Jude — that was who he was to them, and he didn’t mind it. He was proud of it.

Lately, however, he had been feeling differently about Jude, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. They had been sitting on the sofa late one Friday night — he just home from the theater, Jude just home from the office — and talking, talking about nothing in particular, when he had almost leaned over and kissed him. But he had stopped himself, and the moment had passed. But since then, he had been revisited by that impulse again: twice, three times, four times.

It was beginning to worry him. Not because Jude was a man: he’d had sex with men before, everyone he knew had, and in college, he and JB had drunkenly made out one night out of boredom and curiosity (an experience that had been, to their mutual relief, entirely unsatisfying: “It’s really interesting how someone so good-looking can be such a turnoff,” had been JB’s exact words to him). And not because he hadn’t always felt a sort of low-key hum of attraction for Jude, the way he felt for more or less all his friends. It was because he knew that if he tried anything, he would have to be certain about it, because he sensed, powerfully, that Jude, who was casual about nothing, certainly wouldn’t be casual about sex.

Jude’s sex life, his sexuality, had been a subject of ongoing fascination for everyone who knew him, and certainly for Willem’s girlfriends. Occasionally, it had come up among the three of them — he and Malcolm and JB — when Jude wasn’t around: Was he having sex? Had he ever? With whom? They had all seen people looking at him at parties, or flirting with him, and in every case, Jude had remained oblivious.

“That girl was all over you,” he’d say to Jude as they walked home from one party or another.

“What girl?” Jude would say.

They talked about it with one another because Jude had made it clear he wouldn’t discuss it with any of them: when the topic was raised, he would give them one of his stares and then change the subject with a declarativeness that was impossible to misinterpret.

“Has he ever spent the night away from home?” asked JB (this was when he and Jude were living on Lispenard Street).

“Guys,” he’d say (the conversation made him uncomfortable), “I don’t think we should be talking about this.”

“Willem!” JB would say. “Don’t be such a pussy! You’re not betraying any confidences. Just tell us: yes or no. Has he ever?”

He’d sigh. “No,” he’d say.

There would be a silence. “Maybe he’s asexual,” Malcolm would say, after a while.

“No, that’s you, Mal.”

“Fuck off, JB.”

“Do you think he’s a virgin?” JB would ask.

“No,” he’d say. He didn’t know why he knew this, but he was certain he wasn’t.

“It’s such a waste,” JB would say, and he and Malcolm would look at each other, knowing what was coming next. “His looks’ve been wasted on him. I should’ve gotten his looks. I would’ve had a good time with them, at least.”

After a while, they grew to accept it as part of who Jude was; they added the subject to the list of things they knew not to discuss. Year after year passed and he dated no one, they saw him with no one. “Maybe he’s living some hot double life,” Richard once suggested, and Willem had shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. But really, although he had no proof of this, he knew that Jude wasn’t. It was in this same, proof-less way that he assumed Jude was probably gay (though maybe not), and probably hadn’t ever had a relationship (though he really hoped he was wrong about this). And as much as Jude claimed otherwise, Willem wasn’t ever convinced that he wasn’t lonely, that he didn’t, in some small dark part of himself, want to be with someone. He remembered Lionel and Sinclair’s wedding, where it had been Malcolm with Sophie and he with Robin and JB — though they hadn’t been speaking then — with Oliver, and Jude with no one. And although Jude hadn’t seemed bothered by this, Willem had looked at him across the table and had felt sad for him. He didn’t want Jude to get old alone; he wanted him to be with someone who would take care of him and be attracted to him. JB was right: it was a waste.

And so was this what this was, this attraction? Was it fear and sympathy that had morphed itself into a more palatable shape? Was he convincing himself he was attracted to Jude because he couldn’t stand to see him alone? He didn’t think so. But he didn’t know.

The person he would’ve once discussed this with was JB, but he couldn’t speak to JB about this, even though they were friends again, or at least working toward friendship. After they had returned from Morocco, Jude had called JB and the two of them had gone out for dinner, and a month later, Willem and JB had gone out on their own. Oddly, though, he found it much more difficult to forgive JB than Jude had, and their first meeting had been a disaster — JB showily, exaggeratedly blithe; he seething — until they had left the restaurant and started yelling at each other. There they had stood on deserted Pell Street — it had been snowing, lightly, and no one else was out — accusing each other of condescension and cruelty; irrationality and self-absorption; self-righteousness and narcissism; martyrdom and cluelessness.

“You think anyone hates themselves as much as I do?” JB had shouted at him. (His fourth show, the one that documented his time on drugs and with Jackson, had been titled “The Narcissist’s Guide to Self-Hatred,” and JB had referenced it several times during their dinner as proof that he had punished himself mightily and publicly and had now been reformed.)

“Yeah, JB, I do,” he’d shouted back at him. “I think Jude hates himself far more than you could ever hate yourself, and I think you knew that and you made him hate himself even more.”

“You think I don’t know that?” JB had yelled. “You think I don’t fucking hate myself for that?”

“I don’t think you hate yourself enough for it, no,” he’d yelled back. “Why did you do that, JB? Why did you do that to him, of all people?” And then, to his surprise, JB had sunk, defeated, to the curb. “Why didn’t you ever love me the way you love him, Willem?” he asked.

He sighed. “Oh, JB,” he said, and sat down next to him on the chilled pavement. “You never needed me as much as he did.” It wasn’t the only reason, he knew, but it was part of it. No one else in his life needed him. People wanted him — for sex, for their projects, for his friendship, even — but only Jude needed him. Only to Jude was he essential.

“You know, Willem,” said JB, after a silence, “maybe he doesn’t need you as much as you think he does.”

He had thought about this for a while. “No,” he said, finally, “I think he does.”

Now JB sighed. “Actually,” he had said, “I think you’re right.”

After that, things had, strangely, improved. But as much as he was — cautiously — learning to enjoy JB again, he wasn’t sure he was ready to discuss this particular topic with him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear JB’s jokes about how he had already fucked everything with two X chromosomes and so was now moving on to the Ys, or about his abandonment of heteronormative standards, or, worst of all, about how this attraction he thought he was feeling for Jude was really something else: a misplaced guilt for the suicide attempt, or a form of patronization, or simple, misdirected boredom.

So he did nothing and said nothing. As the months passed, he dated, casually, and he examined his feelings as he did. This is crazy, he told himself. This is not a good idea. Both were true. It would be so much easier if he didn’t have these feelings at all. And so what if he did? he argued with himself. Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated. He had whole pages of dialogue with himself, imagining the lines — his and JB’s, both spoken by him — typeset on white paper.

But still, the feelings persisted. They went to Cambridge for Thanksgiving, the first time in two years that they’d done so. He and Jude shared his room because Julia’s brother was visiting from Oxford and had the upstairs bedroom. That night, he lay awake on the bedroom sofa, watching Jude sleep. How easy would it be, he thought, to simply climb into bed next to him and fall asleep himself? There was something about it that seemed almost preordained, and the absurdity was not in the fact of it but in his resistance to the fact of it.

They had taken the car to Cambridge, and Jude drove them home so he could sleep. “Willem,” Jude said as they were about to enter the city, “I want to ask you about something.” He looked at him. “Are you okay? Is something on your mind?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“You’ve seemed really — pensive, I guess,” Jude said. He was quiet. “You know, it’s been a huge gift having you live with me. And not just live with me, but — everything. I don’t know what I would have done without you. But I know it must be draining for you. And I just want you to know: if you want to move back home, I’ll be fine. I promise. I’m not going to hurt myself.” He had been staring at the road as he spoke, but now he turned to him. “I don’t know how I got so lucky,” he said.

He didn’t know what to say for a while. “Do you want me to move home?” he asked.

Jude was silent. “Of course not,” he said, very quietly. “But I want you to be happy, and you haven’t seemed very happy recently.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been distracted, you’re right. But it’s certainly not because I’m living with you. I love living with you.” He tried to think of the right, the perfect next thing to add, but he couldn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Don’t be,” Jude said. “But if you want to talk about any of it, ever, you always can.”

“I know,” he said. “Thanks.” They were quiet the rest of the way home.

And then it was December. His run finished. They went to India on holiday, the four of them: the first trip they’d taken as a unit in years. In February, he began filming Uncle Vanya. The set was the kind he treasured and sought but only rarely found — he had worked with everyone before, and they all liked and respected one another, and the director was shaggy and mild and gentle, and the adaptation, which had been done by a novelist Jude admired, was beautiful and simple, and the dialogue was a pleasure to get to speak.

When Willem was young, he had been in a play called The House on Thistle Lane, which had been about a family that was packing up and leaving a house in St. Louis that had been owned by the father’s family for generations, but which they could no longer afford to maintain. But instead of a set, they had staged the play on one floor of a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem, and the audience had been allowed to wander between the rooms as long as they remained outside a roped-off area; depending on where you stood to watch, you saw the actors, and the space itself, from different perspectives. He had played the eldest, most damaged son, and had spent most of the first act mute and in the dining room, wrapping dishes in pieces of newspaper. He had developed a nervous tic for the son, who couldn’t imagine leaving his childhood house, and as the character’s parents fought in the living room, he would put down the plates and press himself into the far corner of the dining room near the kitchen and peel off the wallpaper in shreds. Although most of that act took place in the living room, there would always be a few audience members who would remain in his room, watching him, watching him scraping off the paper — a blue so dark it was almost black, and printed with pale pink cabbage roses — and rolling it between his fingers and dropping it to the floor, so that every night, one corner would become littered with little cigars of wallpaper, as if he were a mouse inexpertly building its tiny nest. It had been an exhausting play, but he had loved it: the intimacy of the audience, the unlikeliness of the stage, the small, detailed physicality of the role.

This production felt very much like that play. The house, a Gilded Age mansion on the Hudson, was grand but creaky and shabby — the kind of house his ex-girlfriend Philippa had once imagined they’d live in when they were married and ancient — and the director used only three rooms: the dining room, the living room, and the sunporch. Instead of an audience, they had the crew, who followed them as they moved through the space. But although he relished the work, part of him also recognized that Uncle Vanya was not exactly the most helpful thing he could be doing at the moment. On set, he was Dr. Astrov, but once he was back at Greene Street, he was Sonya, and Sonya — as much as he loved the play and always had, as much as he loved and pitied poor Sonya herself — was not a role he had ever thought he might perform, under any circumstance. When he had told the others about the film, JB had said, “So it’s a gender-blind cast, then,” and he’d said, “What do you mean?” and JB had said, “Well, you’re obviously Elena, right?” and everyone had laughed, especially him. This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew. “He’s far too old to play Elena,” Jude had added, affectionately, and everyone had laughed again.

Vanya was an efficient shoot, just thirty-six days, and was over by the last week in March. One day shortly after it had ended, he met an old friend and former girlfriend of his, Cressy, for lunch in TriBeCa, and as he walked back to Greene Street in the light, dry snow, he was reminded of how much he enjoyed the city in the late winter, when the weather was suspended between one season and the next, and when Jude cooked every weekend, and when you could walk the streets for hours and never see anyone but a few lone people taking their dogs out for a stroll.

He was heading north on Church Street and had just crossed Reade when he glanced into a café on his right and saw Andy sitting at a table in the corner, reading. “Willem!” said Andy, as he approached him. “What’re you doing here?”

“I just had lunch with a friend and I’m walking home,” he said. “What’re you doing here? You’re so far downtown.”

“You two and your walks,” Andy said, shaking his head. “George is at a birthday party a few blocks from here, and I’m waiting until I have to go pick him up.”

“How old is George now?”

“Nine.”

“God, already?”

“I know.”

“Do you want some company?” he asked. “Or do you want to be alone?”

“No,” said Andy. He tucked a napkin into his book to mark his place. “Stay. Please.” And so he sat.

They talked for a while of, of course, Jude, who was on a business trip in Mumbai, and Uncle Vanya (“I just remember Astrov as being an unbelievable tool,” Andy said), and his next project, which began shooting in Brooklyn at the end of April, and Andy’s wife, Jane, who was expanding her practice, and their children: George, who had just been diagnosed with asthma, and Beatrice, who wanted to go to boarding school the following year.

And then, before he could stop himself — not that he felt any particular need to try — he was telling Andy about his feelings for Jude, and how he wasn’t sure what they meant or what to do about them. He talked and talked, and Andy listened, his face expressionless. There was no one else in the café but the two of them, and outside, the snow fell faster and thicker, and he felt, despite his anxiety, deeply calm, and glad he was telling somebody, and that that somebody was a person who knew him and Jude both, and had for many years. “I know this seems strange,” he said. “And I’ve thought about what it could be, Andy, I really have. But part of me wonders if it was always meant to be this way; I mean, I’ve dated and dated for decades now, and maybe the reason it’s never worked out is because it was never meant to, because I was supposed to be with him all along. Or maybe I’m telling myself this. Or maybe it’s simple curiosity. But I don’t think it is; I think I know myself better than that.” He sighed. “What do you think I should do?”

Andy was quiet for a while. “First,” he said, “I don’t think it’s strange, Willem. I think it makes sense in a lot of ways. You two have always had something different, something unusual. So — I always wondered, despite your girlfriends.

“Selfishly, I think it’d be wonderful: for you, but especially for him. I think if you wanted to be in a relationship with him, it’d be the greatest, most restorative gift he could ever get.

“But Willem, if you do this, you should go in prepared to make some sort of commitment to him, and to being with him, because you’re right: you’re not going to be able to just fool around and then get out of it. And I think you should know that it’s going to be very, very hard. You’re going to have to get him to trust you all over again, and to see you in a different way. I don’t think I’m betraying anything when I say that it’s going to be very tough for him to be intimate with you, and you’re going to have to be really patient with him.”

They were both silent. “So if I do it, I should do so thinking it’s going to be forever,” he told Andy, and Andy looked at him for a few seconds and then smiled.

“Well,” Andy said, “there are worse life sentences.”

“True,” he said.

He went back to Greene Street. April arrived, and Jude returned home. They celebrated Jude’s birthday—“Forty-three,” Harold sighed, “I vaguely remember forty-three”—and he began shooting his next project. An old friend of his, a woman he’d known since graduate school, was starring in the production as well — he was playing a corrupt detective, and she was playing his wife — and they slept together a few times. Everything marched along as it always had. He worked; he came home to Greene Street; he thought about what Andy had said.

And then one Saturday morning he woke very early, just as the sky was brightening. It was late May, and the weather was unpredictable: some days it felt like March, other days, like July. Ninety feet away from him lay Jude. And suddenly his timidity, his confusion, his dithering seemed silly. He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him — he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?

He remembered a conversation he’d had with Robin when he had been preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad, neither of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college. This was when they had first begun dating, and were both still trying to impress each other, when a sort of giddiness was derived from deferring to the other’s expertise. “What’re the most overrated lines from the poem?” he’d asked, and Robin had rolled her eyes and recited: “ ‘We have still not reached the end of our trials. One more labor lies in store — boundless, laden with danger, great and long, and I must brave it out from start to finish.’ ” She made some retching noises. “So obvious. And somehow, that’s been co-opted by every losing football team in the country as their pregame rallying cry,” she added, and he’d laughed. She looked at him, slyly. “You played football,” she said. “I’ll bet those’re your favorite lines as well.”

“Absolutely not,” he’d said, in mock outrage. This was part of their game that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t know.

“Then tell me what they are,” she’d challenged him, and after he did, she’d looked at him, intently. “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting.”

Now he got out of bed and wrapped his blanket around himself, yawning. That evening, he’d talk to Jude. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he would be safe; he would keep them both safe. He went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home, coming back to Greene Street after a long time away—“And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”—as all around him, the apartment filled with light.

Every morning he gets up and swims two miles, and then comes back upstairs and sits down and has breakfast and reads the papers. His friends make fun of him for this — for the fact that he actually prepares a meal instead of buying something on the way to work; for the fact that he actually still gets the papers delivered, in paper form — but the ritual of it has always calmed him: even in the home, it was the one time when the counselors were too mild, the other boys too sleepy to bother him. He would sit in the corner of the dining area and read and eat his breakfast, and for those minutes he would be left alone.

He is an efficient reader, and he skims first through The Wall Street Journal, and then the Financial Times, before beginning with The New York Times, which he reads front to back, when he sees the headline in Obituaries: “Caleb Porter, 52, Fashion Executive.” Immediately, his mouthful of scrambled eggs and spinach turns to cardboard and glue, and he swallows hard, feeling sick, feeling every nerve ending thrumming alive. He has to read the article three times before he can make sense of any of the facts: pancreatic cancer. “Very fast,” said his colleague and longtime friend. Under his stewardship, emerging fashion label Rothko saw aggressive expansion into the Asian and Middle Eastern markets, as well as the opening of their first New York City boutique. Died at his home in Manhattan. Survived by his sister, Michaela Porter de Soto of Monte Carlo, six nieces and nephews, and his partner, Nicholas Lane, also a fashion executive.

He is still for a moment, staring at the page until the words rearrange themselves into an abstraction of gray before his eyes, and then he hobbles as fast as he can to the bathroom near the kitchen, where he vomits up everything he’s just eaten, gagging over the toilet until he’s coughing up long strands of saliva. He lowers the toilet seat and sits, resting his face in his hands, until he feels better. He wishes, desperately, for his razors, but he has always been careful not to cut himself during the day, partly because it feels wrong and partly because he knows he has to impose limits upon himself, however artificial, or he’d be cutting himself all day. Lately, he has been trying very hard not to cut himself at all. But tonight, he thinks, he will grant himself an exception. It is seven a.m. In around fifteen hours, he’ll be home again. All he has to do is make it through the day.

He puts his plate in the dishwasher and walks quietly through the bedroom and into the bathroom, where he showers and shaves and then gets dressed in the closet, first making sure that the door between the closet and the bedroom is completely closed. At this point, he has added a new step to his morning routine: now, if he were to do what he has been for the past month, he would open the door and walk over to the bed, where he’d perch on its left side and put his hand on Willem’s arm, and Willem would open his eyes and smile at him.

“I’m off,” he’d say, smiling back, and Willem would shake his head. “Don’t go,” Willem would say, and he’d say, “I have to,” and Willem would say, “Five minutes,” and he’d say, “Five.” And then Willem would lift his end of the blanket and he’d crawl beneath it, with Willem pressed against his back, and he would close his eyes and wait for Willem to wrap his arms around him and wish he could stay forever. And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, he would at last, reluctantly, get up, and kiss Willem somewhere near, but not on, his mouth — he is still having trouble with this, even four months later — and leave for the day.

This morning, however, he skips this step. He instead pauses at the dining-room table to write Willem a note explaining that he had to leave early and didn’t want to wake him, and then, as he’s walking to the door, he comes back and grabs the Times off the table and takes it with him. He knows how irrational it is, but he doesn’t want Willem to see Caleb’s name, or picture, or any evidence of him. Willem still doesn’t know about what Caleb did to him, and he doesn’t want him to. He doesn’t even want him to be aware of Caleb’s very existence — or, he realizes, his once-existence, for Caleb no longer exists. Beneath his arm, the paper feels almost alive with heat, Caleb’s name a dark knot of poison cradled inside its pages.

He decides to drive to work so he’ll be able to be alone for a little while, but before he leaves the garage, he takes out the paper and reads the article one more time before folding it up again and shoving it into his briefcase. And then suddenly, he is crying, frantic, breathy sobs, the kind that come from his diaphragm, and as he leans his head on the steering wheel, trying to regain control, he is finally able to admit to himself how plainly, profoundly relieved he is, and how frightened he has been for the past three years, and how humiliated and ashamed he is still. He retrieves the paper, hating himself, and reads the obituary again, stopping at “and by his partner, Nicholas Lane, also a fashion executive.” He wonders: Did Caleb do to Nicholas Lane what he did to him, or is Nicholas — as he must be — someone undeserving of such treatment? He hopes that Nicholas never experienced what he had, but he’s also certain he hasn’t, and the knowledge of that makes him cry harder. That had been one of Harold’s arguments when he was trying to get him to report the attack; that Caleb was dangerous, and that by reporting him, by having him arrested, he would be protecting other people from him. But he had known that wasn’t true: Caleb wouldn’t do to other people what he did to him. He hadn’t hit and hated him because he hit and hated other people; he had hit and hated him because of who he was, not because of who Caleb was.

Finally, he’s able to compose himself, and he wipes his eyes and blows his nose. The crying: another leftover from his time with Caleb. For years and years he was able to control it, and now — ever since that night — it seems he is always crying, or on the verge of it, or actively trying to stop himself from doing it. It’s as if all his progress from the past few decades has been erased, and he is again that boy in Brother Luke’s care, so teary and helpless and vulnerable.

He’s about to start the car when his hands begin shaking. Now he knows he can do nothing but wait, and he folds them in his lap and tries to make his breaths deep and regular, which sometimes helps. By the time his phone rings a few minutes later, they’ve slowed somewhat, and he hopes he sounds normal as he answers. “Hi, Harold,” he says.

“Jude,” says Harold. His voice is flattened, somehow. “Have you read the Times today?”

Immediately, the shaking intensifies. “Yes,” he says.

“Pancreatic cancer is a terrible way to go,” says Harold. He sounds grimly satisfied. “Good. I’m glad.” There’s a pause. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he says, “yes, I’m fine.”

“The connection keeps cutting out,” says Harold, but he knows it’s not: it’s because he’s shaking so badly that he can’t hold the phone steady.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m in the garage. Look, Harold, I’d better get up to work. Thanks for calling.”

“Okay.” Harold sighs. “You’ll call me if you want to talk, right?”

“Yes,” he says. “Thanks.”

It’s a busy day, for which he’s grateful, and he tries to give himself no time to think about anything but work. Late in the morning, he gets a text from Andy—Assume you’ve seen that the asshole is dead. Pancreatic cancer = major suffering. You okay? — and writes back to assure him he’s fine, and over lunch he reads the obituary one last time before stuffing the entire paper into the shredder and turning back to his computer.

In the afternoon he gets a text from Willem saying that the director he’s meeting with about his next project has pushed back their dinner, so he doesn’t think he’ll be home before eleven, and he is relieved. At nine, he tells his associates he’s leaving early, and then drives home and goes directly to the bathroom, shucking his jacket and rolling up his sleeves and unstrapping his watch as he goes; he’s almost hyperventilating with desire by the time he makes the first cut. It has been nearly two months since he’s made more than two cuts in a single sitting, but now he abandons his self-discipline and cuts and cuts and cuts, until finally his breathing slows and he feels the old, comforting emptiness settle inside him. After he’s done, he cleans up and washes his face and goes to the kitchen, where he reheats some soup he’d made the weekend before and has his first real meal of the day, and then brushes his teeth and collapses into bed. He is weak from the cutting, but he knows if he rests for a few minutes, he’ll be fine. The goal is to be normal by the time Willem comes home, to not give him anything to worry about, to not do anything else to upset this impossible and delirious dream he’s been living in for the past eighteen weeks.

When Willem had told him of his feelings, he had been so discomfited, so disbelieving, that it was only the fact that it was Willem saying it that convinced him it wasn’t some terrible joke: his faith in Willem was more powerful than the absurdity of what Willem was suggesting.

But only barely. “What are you saying?” he asked Willem for the tenth time.

“I’m saying I’m attracted to you,” Willem said, patiently. And then, when he didn’t say anything, “Judy — I don’t think it’s all that odd, really. Haven’t you ever felt that way about me, in all these years?”

“No,” he said instantly, and Willem had laughed. But he hadn’t been joking. He would never, ever have been so presumptuous as to even picture himself with Willem. Besides, he wasn’t what he had ever imagined for Willem: he had imagined someone beautiful (and female) and intelligent for Willem, someone who would know how fortunate she was, someone who would make him feel fortunate as well. He knew this was — like so many of his imaginings about adult relationships — somewhat gauzy and naïve, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. He was certainly not the kind of person Willem should be with; for Willem to be with him over the theoretical fantasy woman he’d conjured for him was an unbelievable tumble.

The next day, he presented Willem with a list of twenty reasons why he shouldn’t want to be with him. As he handed it to him, he could see that Willem was amused, slightly, but then he started to read it and his expression changed, and he retreated to his study so he wouldn’t have to watch him.

After a while, Willem knocked. “Can I come in?” he asked, and he told him he could.

“I’m looking at point number two,” said Willem, seriously. “I hate to tell you this, Jude, but we have the same body.” He looked at him. “You’re an inch taller, but can I remind you that we can wear each other’s clothes?”

He sighed. “Willem,” he said, “you know what I mean.”

“Jude,” Willem said, “I understand that this is strange for you, and unexpected. If you really don’t want this, I’ll back off and leave you alone and I promise things won’t change between us.” He stopped. “But if you’re trying to convince me not to be with you because you’re scared and self-conscious — well, I understand that. But I don’t think it’s a good enough reason not to try. We’ll go as slowly as you want, I promise.”

He was quiet. “Can I think about it?” he asked, and Willem nodded. “Of course,” he said, and left him alone, sliding the door shut behind him.

He sat in his office in silence for a long time, thinking. After Caleb, he had sworn he would never again do this to himself. He knew Willem would never do anything bad to him, and yet his imagination was limited: he was incapable of conceiving of a relationship that wouldn’t end with his being hit, with his being kicked down the stairs, with his being made to do things he had told himself he would never have to do again. Wasn’t it possible, he asked himself, that he could push even someone as good as Willem to that inevitability? Wasn’t it foregone that he would inspire a kind of hatred from even Willem? Was he so greedy for companionship that he would ignore the lessons that history — his own history — had taught him?

But then there was another voice inside him, arguing back. You’re crazy if you turn this opportunity down, said the voice. This is the one person you have always trusted. Willem isn’t Caleb; he would never do that, not ever.

And so, finally, he had gone to the kitchen, where Willem was making dinner. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Willem had looked at him and smiled. “Come here,” he said, and he did, and Willem kissed him. He had been scared, and panicky, and once again he had thought of Brother Luke, and he had opened his eyes to remind himself that this was Willem after all, not someone to fear. But just as he was relaxing into it, he had seen Caleb’s face flashing through his mind like a pulse, and he pulled away from Willem, choking, rubbing his hand across his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said, pivoting away from him. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this, Willem.”

“What do you mean?” Willem had asked, turning him back around. “You’re great at it,” and he had felt himself sag with relief that Willem wasn’t angry at him.

Since then, he has been constantly pitting what he knows of Willem against what he expects of someone — anyone — who has any physical desire for him. It is as if he somehow expects that the Willem he has known will be replaced by another; as if there will be a different Willem for what is a different relationship. In the first few weeks, he was terrified that he might upset or disappoint Willem in some way, that he might drive him toward anger. He had waited for days, summoning his courage, to tell Willem that he couldn’t tolerate the taste of coffee in his mouth (although he didn’t explain to him why: Brother Luke, his awful, muscular tongue, the grain of coffee grounds that had permanently furred his gumline. This had been one of the things he had appreciated about Caleb: that he hadn’t drunk coffee). He apologized and apologized until Willem told him to stop. “Jude, it’s fine,” he said. “I should’ve realized: really. I just won’t drink it.”

“But you love coffee,” he said.

Willem had smiled. “I enjoy it, yes,” he said, “but I don’t need it.” He smiled again. “My dentist will be thrilled.”

Also in that first month, he had talked to Willem about sex. They had these conversations at night, in bed, when it was easier to say things. He had always associated night with cutting, but now it was becoming about something else — those talks with Willem in a darkened room, when he was less self-conscious about touching him, and where he could see every one of Willem’s features and yet was also able to pretend that Willem couldn’t see his.

“Do you want to have sex someday?” he asked him one night, and even as he was saying it, he heard how stupid he sounded.

But Willem didn’t laugh at him. “Yes,” he said, “I’d like to.”

He nodded. Willem waited. “It’s going to take me a while,” he said, at last.

“That’s okay,” Willem said. “I’ll wait.”

“But what if it takes me months?”

“Then it’ll take months,” Willem said.

He thought about that. “What if it takes longer?” he asked, quietly.

Willem had reached over and touched the side of his face. “Then it will,” he said.

They were quiet for a long time. “What’re you going to do in the meantime?” he asked, and Willem laughed. “I do have some self-control, Jude,” he said, smiling at him. “I know this comes as a shock to you, but I can go for stretches without having sex.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” he began, remorseful, but Willem grabbed him and kissed him, noisily, on the cheek. “I’m kidding,” he said. “It’s okay, Jude. You’ll take as long as you need.”

And so they still haven’t had sex, and sometimes he is even able to convince himself that maybe they never will. But in the meantime, he has grown to enjoy, to crave even, Willem’s physicality, his affection, which is so easy and natural and spontaneous that it makes him feel easier and more spontaneous as well. Willem sleeps on the left side of the bed, and he on the right, and the first night they slept in the same bed, he turned to his right on his side, the way he always did, and Willem pressed up against him, tucking his right arm under his neck and then across his shoulders, and his left arm around his stomach, moving his legs between his legs. He was surprised by this, but once he overcame his initial discomfort, he found he liked it, that it was like being swaddled.

One night in June, however, Willem didn’t do it, and he worried he had done something wrong. The next morning — early mornings were the other time they talked about things that seemed too tender, too difficult, to be said in the daylight — he asked Willem if he was upset with him, and Willem, looking surprised, said no, of course not.

“I just wondered,” he began, stammering, “because last night you didn’t—” But he couldn’t finish the sentence; he was too embarrassed.

But then he could see Willem’s expression clear, and he rolled into him and wrapped his arms around him. “This?” he asked, and he nodded. “It was just because it was so hot last night,” Willem said, and he waited for Willem to laugh at him, but he didn’t. “That’s the only reason, Judy.” Since then, Willem has held him in the same way every night, even through July, when not even the air-conditioning could erase the heaviness from the air, and when they both woke damp with sweat. This, he realizes, is what he wanted from a relationship all along. This is what he meant when he hoped he might someday be touched. Sometimes Caleb had hugged him, briefly, and he always had to resist the impulse to ask him to do it again, and for longer. But now, here it is: all the physical contact that he knows exists between healthy people who love each other and are having sex, without the dreaded sex itself.

He cannot bring himself to initiate contact with Willem, nor ask for it, but he waits for it, for every time that Willem grabs his arm as he passes him in the living room and pulls him close to kiss him, or comes up behind him as he stands at the stove and puts his arms around him in the same position — chest, stomach — that he does in bed. He has always admired how physical JB and Willem are, both with each other and with everyone around them; he knew they knew not to do it with him, and as grateful as he was for their carefulness with him, it sometimes made him wistful: he sometimes wished they would disobey him, that they would lay claim to him with the same friendly confidence they did with everyone else. But they never did.

It took him three months, until the end of August, to finally take off his clothes in front of Willem. Every night he came to bed in his long-sleeve T-shirt and sweatpants, and every night Willem came to bed in his underwear. “Is this uncomfortable for you?” Willem asked, and he shook his head, even though it was — uncomfortable, but not entirely unwelcome. Every day the month before, he promised himself: he would take off his clothes and be done with it. He would do it that night, because he had to do it at some point. But that was as far as his imagination would let him proceed; he couldn’t think about what Willem’s reaction might be, or what he might do the following day. And then night would come, and they would be in bed, and his resolve would fail him.

One night, Willem reached beneath his shirt and put his hands on his back, and he yanked himself away so forcefully that he fell off the bed. “I’m sorry,” he told Willem, “I’m sorry,” and he climbed back in, keeping himself just at the edge of the mattress.

They were quiet, the two of them. He lay on his back and stared at the chandelier. “You know, Jude,” Willem said at last. “I have seen you without your shirt on.”

He looked at Willem, who took a breath. “At the hospital,” he said. “They were changing your dressings, and giving you a bath.”

His eyes turned hot, and he looked back up at the ceiling. “How much did you see?” he asked.

“I didn’t see everything,” Willem reassured him. “But I know you have scars on your back. And I’ve seen your arms before.” Willem waited, and then, when he didn’t say anything, sighed. “Jude, I promise you it’s not what you think it is.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to be disgusted by me,” he was finally able to say. Caleb’s words floated back to him: You really are deformed; you really are. “I don’t suppose I could just never take my clothes off at all, right?” he asked, trying to laugh, to turn it into a joke.

“Well, no,” Willem said. “Because I think — although it’s not going to feel like it, initially — it’ll be a good thing for you, Judy.”

And so the next night, he did it. As soon as Willem came to bed, he undressed quickly, under the covers, and then flung the blanket away and rolled onto his side, so his back was facing Willem. He kept his eyes shut the entire time, but when he felt Willem place his palm on his back, just between his shoulder blades, he began to cry, savagely, the kind of bitter, angry weeping he hadn’t done in years, tucking into himself with shame. He kept remembering the night with Caleb, the last time he had been so exposed, the last time he had cried this hard, and he knew that Willem would only understand part of the reason he was so upset, that he didn’t know that the shame of this very moment — of being naked, of being at another’s mercy — was almost as great as his shame for what he had revealed. He heard, more from the tone than the words themselves, that Willem was being kind to him, that he was dismayed and was trying to make him feel better, but he was so distraught that he couldn’t even comprehend what Willem was saying. He tried to get out of the bed so he could go to the bathroom and cut himself, but Willem caught him and held him so tightly that he couldn’t move, and eventually he somehow calmed himself.

When he woke the following morning — late: it was a Sunday — Willem was staring at him. He looked tired. “How are you?” he asked.

The night returned to him. “Willem,” he said, “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened.” He realized, then, that he still wasn’t wearing any clothes, and he put his arms beneath the sheet, and pulled the blanket up to his chin.

“No, Jude,” Willem said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was going to be so traumatic for you.” He reached over and stroked his hair. They were quiet. “That was the first time I’ve ever seen you cry, you know.”

“Well,” he said, swallowing. “For some reason it’s not as successful a seduction method as I’d hoped,” and smiled at Willem, a little, and Willem smiled back.

They lay in bed that morning and talked. Willem asked him about certain scars, and he told him. He explained how he had gotten the scars on his back: about the day he had been caught trying to run away from the home; the beating that had followed; the resulting infection, the way his back had wept pus for days, the bubbles of blisters that had formed around the stray splinters from the broom handle that had embedded themselves into his flesh; what he had been left with when it was all over. Willem asked him when he was last naked before anyone and he lied and told him that — except for Andy — it had been when he was fifteen. And then Willem said various kind and unbelievable things about his body, which he chose to ignore, because he knew they weren’t true.

“Willem, if you want out, I understand,” he said. It had been his idea not to tell anyone that their friendship might be changing into something else, and although he had told Willem it would give them space, and privacy, to figure out how to be with each other, he had also thought it would give Willem time to reconsider, opportunities to change his mind without fear of everyone else’s opinions. Of course, with this decision he cannot help but hear the echoes of his last relationship, which had also been conducted in secrecy, and he had to remind himself that this one was different; it was different unless he made it the same.

“Jude, of course I don’t,” Willem said. “Of course not.”

Willem was running his fingertip over his eyebrow, which for some reason he found a comforting gesture: it was affectionate without being in the least sexual. “I just feel like I’m going to be this series of nasty surprises for you,” he said at last, and Willem shook his head. “Surprises, maybe,” he said. “But not nasty ones.”

And so every night, he tries to remove his clothes. Sometimes he can do it; other times, he can’t. Sometimes he can allow Willem to touch him on his back and arms, and other times, he can’t. But he has been unable to be naked before Willem in the daytime, or even in light, or to do any of the things that he knows from movies and eavesdropping on other people that couples are supposed to do around each other: he cannot get dressed in front of Willem, or shower with him, which he’d had to do with Brother Luke, and which he had hated.

His own self-consciousness has not, however, proven contagious, and he is fascinated by how often, and how matter-of-factly, Willem is naked. In the morning, he pulls back Willem’s side of the blanket and studies Willem’s sleeping form with a clinical rigor, noting how perfect it is, and then remembers, with a strange queasy giddiness, that he is the one seeing it, that it is being bestowed upon him.

Sometimes, the improbability of what has happened wallops him, and he is stilled. His first relationship (can it be called a relationship?): Brother Luke. His second: Caleb Porter. And his third: Willem Ragnarsson, his dearest friend, the best person he knows, a person who could have virtually anyone he wanted, man or woman, and yet for some bizarre set of reasons — a warped curiosity? madness? pity? idiocy? — has settled on him. He has a dream one night of Willem and Harold sitting together at a table, their heads bent over a piece of paper, Harold adding up figures on a calculator, and he knows, without being told, that Harold is paying Willem to be with him. In the dream, he feels humiliation along with a kind of gratitude: that Harold should be so generous, that Willem should play along. When he wakes, he is about to say something to Willem when logic reasserts itself, and he has to remind himself that Willem certainly doesn’t need the money, that he has plenty of his own, that however perplexing and unknowable Willem’s reasons are for being with him, for choosing him, that he has not been coerced, that he has made the decision freely.

That night he reads in bed as he waits for Willem to come home, but falls asleep anyway and wakes to Willem’s hand on the side of his face.

“You’re home,” he says, and smiles at him, and Willem smiles back.

They lie awake in the dark talking about Willem’s dinner with the director, and the shoot, which begins in late January in Texas. The film, Duets, is based on a novel he likes, and follows a closeted lesbian and a closeted gay man, both music teachers at a small-town high school, through a twenty-five-year marriage that spans the nineteen-sixties through the nineteen-eighties. “I’m going to need your help,” Willem tells him. “I really, really have to brush up on my piano playing. And I am going to be singing in it, after all. They’re getting me a coach, but will you practice with me?”

“Of course,” he says. “And you don’t need to worry: you have a beautiful voice, Willem.”

“It’s thin.”

“It’s sweet.”

Willem laughs, and squeezes his hand. “Tell Kit that,” he says. “He’s already freaking out.” He sighs. “How was your day?” he asks.

“Fine,” he says.

They begin to kiss, which he still has to do with his eyes open, to remind himself that it is Willem he is kissing, not Brother Luke, and he is doing well until he remembers the first night he had come back to the apartment with Caleb, and Caleb’s pressing him against the wall, and everything that followed, and he pulls himself abruptly away from Willem, turning his face from him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He has not taken off his clothes tonight, and now he pulls his sleeves down over his hands. Beside him, Willem waits, and into the silence, he hears himself saying, “Someone I know died yesterday.”

“Oh, Jude,” says Willem. “I’m so sorry. Who was it?”

He is silent for a long time, trying to speak the words. “Someone I was in a relationship with,” he says at last, and his tongue feels clumsy in his mouth. He can feel Willem’s focus intensify, can feel him move an inch or two closer to him.

“I didn’t know you were in a relationship,” says Willem, quietly. He clears his throat. “When?”

“When you were shooting The Odyssey,” he says, just as quietly, and again, he feels the air change. Something happened while I was away, he remembers Willem saying. Something’s wrong. He knows Willem is remembering the same conversation.

“Well,” says Willem, after a long pause. “Tell me. Who was the lucky person?”

He can barely breathe now, but he keeps going. “It was a man,” he begins, and although he’s not looking at Willem — he’s concentrating on the chandelier — he can feel him nod, encouragingly, willing him to continue. But he can’t; Willem will have to prompt him, and he does.

“Tell me about him,” Willem says. “How long did you go out for?”

“Four months,” he says.

“And why did it end?”

He thinks of how to answer this. “He didn’t like me very much,” he says at last.

He can feel Willem’s anger before he hears it. “So he was a moron,” Willem says, his voice tight.

“No,” he says. “He was a very smart guy.” He opens his mouth to say something else — what, he doesn’t know — but he can’t continue, and he shuts it, and the two of them lie there in silence.

Finally, Willem prompts him again. “Then what happened?” he asks.

He waits, and Willem waits with him. He can hear them breathing in tandem, and it is as if they are bringing all the air from the room, from the apartment, from the world, into their lungs and then releasing it, just the two of them, all by themselves. He counts their breaths: five, ten, fifteen. At twenty, he says, “If I tell you, Willem, do you promise you won’t get mad?” and he feels Willem shift again.

“I promise,” Willem says, his voice low.

He takes a deep breath. “Do you remember the car accident I was in?”

“Yes,” says Willem. He sounds uncertain, strangled. His breathing is quick. “I do.”

“It wasn’t a car accident,” he says, and as if on cue, his hands begin to shake, and he plunges them beneath the covers.

“What do you mean?” Willem asks, but he remains silent, and eventually he feels, rather than sees, Willem realize what he’s saying. And then Willem is flopping onto his side, facing him, and reaching beneath the covers for his hands. “Jude,” Willem says, “did someone do that to you? Did someone”—he can’t say the words—“did someone beat you?”

He nods, barely, thankful that he’s not crying, although he feels like he’s going to explode: he imagines bits of flesh bursting like shrapnel from his skeleton, smacking themselves against the wall, dangling from the chandelier, bloodying the sheets.

“Oh god,” Willem says, and drops his hands, and he watches as Willem hurries out of bed.

“Willem,” he calls after him, and then gets up and follows him into the bathroom, where Willem is bent over the sink, breathing hard, but when he tries to touch his shoulder, Willem shrugs his hand off.

He goes back to their room and waits on the edge of the bed, and when Willem comes out, he can tell he’s been crying.

For several long minutes they sit next to each other, their arms touching, but not saying anything. “Was there an obituary?” Willem asks, finally, and he nods. “Show me,” Willem says, and they go to the computer in his study and he stands back and watches Willem read it. He watches as Willem reads it twice, three times. And then Willem stands and holds him, very tightly, and he holds Willem back.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Willem says into his ear.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” he says, and Willem steps back and looks at him, holding him by the shoulders.

He can see Willem trying to control himself, and he watches as he holds his long mouth firm, his jaw muscles moving against themselves. “I want you to tell me everything,” Willem says. He takes his hand and walks him to the sofa in his study and sits him down. “I’m going to make myself a drink in the kitchen, and then I’m coming back,” Willem says. He looks at him. “I’ll make you one, too.” He can do nothing but nod.

As he waits, he thinks of Caleb. He never heard from Caleb after that night, but every few months, he would look him up. There he was, for anyone to see: pictures of Caleb smiling at parties, at openings, at shows. An article about Rothko’s first freestanding boutique, with Caleb talking about the challenges a young label encounters when trying to break out in a crowded market. A magazine piece about the reemergence of the Flower District, with a quote from Caleb about living in a neighborhood that, despite its hotels and boutiques, still felt appealingly rough-edged. Now, he thinks: Did Caleb ever look him up as well? Did he show a picture of him to Nicholas? Did he say, “I once went out with him; he was grotesque”? Did he demonstrate to Nicholas — whom he imagines as blond and neat and confident — how he had walked, did they laugh with each other about how terrible, how lifeless, he had been in bed? Did he say, “He disgusted me”? Or did he say nothing at all? Did Caleb forget him, or at least choose never to consider him — was he a mistake, a brief sordid moment, an aberration to be wrapped in plastic and shoved to the far corner of Caleb’s mind, with broken toys from childhood and long-ago embarrassments? He wishes he too could forget, that he too could choose never to consider Caleb again. Always, he wonders why and how he has let four months — months increasingly distant from him — so affect him, so alter his life. But then, he might as well ask — as he often does — why he has let the first fifteen years of his life so dictate the past twenty-eight. He has been lucky beyond measure; he has an adulthood that people dream about: Why, then, does he insist on revisiting and replaying events that happened so long ago? Why can he not simply take pleasure in his present? Why must he so honor his past? Why does it become more vivid, not less, the further he moves from it?

Willem returns with two glasses of ice and whiskey. He has put on a shirt. For a while, they sit on the sofa, sipping at their drinks, and he feels his veins fill with warmth. “I’m going to tell you,” he says to Willem, and Willem nods, but before he does, he leans over and kisses Willem. It is the first time in his life that he has ever initiated a kiss, and he hopes that with it he is conveying to Willem everything he cannot say, not even in the dark, not even in the early-morning gray: everything he is ashamed of, everything he is grateful for. This time, he keeps his eyes closed, imagining that soon, he too will be able to go wherever people go when they kiss, when they have sex: that land he has never visited, that place he wants to see, that world he hopes is not forbidden to him forever.

When Kit was in town, they met either for lunch or dinner or at the agency’s New York offices, but when he came to the city in early December, Willem suggested they meet instead at Greene Street. “I’ll make you lunch,” he told Kit.

“Why?” asked Kit, instantly wary: although the two of them were close in their own way, they weren’t friends, and Willem had never invited him over to Greene Street before.

“I need to talk to you about something,” he said, and he could hear Kit making his breaths long and slow.

“Okay,” said Kit. He knew better than to ask what that something might be, and whether something was wrong; he just assumed it. “I need to talk to you about something” was not, in Kit’s universe, a prelude to good news.

He knew this, of course, and although he could have reassured Kit, the slightly diabolical part of him decided not to. “Okay!” he said, brightly. “See you next week!” On the other hand, he thought after he hung up, maybe his refusal to reassure Kit wasn’t just childishness: he thought what he had to tell Kit — that he and Jude were now together — wasn’t bad news, but he wasn’t sure Kit would see it the same way.

They had decided to tell just a few people about their relationship. First they told Harold and Julia, which was the most rewarding and enjoyable reveal, although Jude had been very nervous for some reason. This had been just a couple of weeks ago, at Thanksgiving, and they had both been so happy, so excited, and they had both hugged him and Harold had cried, a little, while Jude sat on the sofa and watched the three of them, a small smile on his face.

Then they told Richard, who hadn’t been as surprised as they’d anticipated. “I think this is a fantastic idea,” he’d said, firmly, as if they’d announced they were investing in a piece of property together. He hugged them both. “Good job,” he said. “Good job, Willem,” and he knew what Richard was trying to communicate to him: the same thing he had tried to communicate to Richard when he told him, years ago, that Jude needed somewhere safe to live, when really, he was asking Richard to look over Jude when he could not.

Then they told Malcolm and JB, separately. First, Malcolm, who they thought would either be shocked or sanguine, and who had turned out to be the latter. “I’m so happy for you guys,” he said, beaming at them both. “This is so great. I love the idea of you two together.” He asked them how it had happened, and how long ago, and, teasingly, what they’d discovered about the other that they hadn’t known before. (The two of them had glanced at each other then — if only Malcolm knew! — and had said nothing, which Malcolm had smiled at, as if it was evidence of a rich cache of sordid secrets that he would someday unearth.) And then he’d sighed. “I’m just sad about one thing, though,” he’d said, and they had asked him what it was. “Your apartment, Willem,” he said. “It’s so beautiful. It must be so lonely by itself.” Somehow, they had managed not to laugh, and he had reassured Malcolm that he was actually renting it to a friend of his, an actor from Spain who had been shooting a project in Manhattan and had decided to stay on for another year or so.

JB was trickier, as they’d known he would be: they knew he would feel betrayed, and neglected, and possessive, and that all of these feelings would be exacerbated by the fact that he and Oliver had recently split up after more than four years. They took him out to dinner, where there was less of a chance (though, as Jude pointed out, no guarantee) that he would make a scene, and Jude — around whom JB was still slightly careful and to whom JB was less likely to say something inappropriate — delivered the news. They watched as JB put his fork down and put his head in his hands. “I feel sick,” he said, and they waited until he looked up and said, “But I’m really happy for you guys,” before they exhaled. JB forked into his burrata. “I mean, I’m pissed that you didn’t tell me earlier, but happy.” The entrées came, and JB stabbed at his sea bass. “I mean, I’m actually really pissed. But. I. Am. Happy.” By the time dessert arrived, it was clear that JB — who was frantically spooning up his guava soufflé—was highly agitated, and they kicked each other under the table, half on the verge of hysterics, half genuinely concerned that JB might erupt right there in the restaurant.

After dinner they stood outside and Willem and JB had a smoke and they discussed JB’s upcoming show, his fifth, and his students at Yale, where JB had been teaching for the past few years: a momentary truce that was ruined by some girl coming up to him (“Can I get a picture with you?”), at which JB made a sound that was somewhere between a snort and a groan. Later, back at Greene Street, he and Jude did laugh: at JB’s befuddlement, at his attempts at graciousness, which had clearly cost him, at his consistent and consistently applied self-absorption. “Poor JB,” Jude said. “I thought his head was going to blow off.” He sighed. “But I understand it. He’s always been in love with you, Willem.”

“Not like that,” he said.

Jude looked at him. “Now who can’t see themselves for who they are?” he asked, because that was what Willem was always telling him: that Jude’s vision, his version of himself was singular to the point of being delusional.

He sighed, too. “I should call him,” he said.

“Leave him alone tonight,” Jude said. “He’ll call you when he’s ready.”

And so he had. That Sunday, JB had come over to Greene Street, and Jude had let him in and then had excused himself, saying he had work to do, and closed himself in his study so Willem and JB could be alone. For the next two hours, Willem had sat and listened as JB delivered a disorganized roundelay whose many accusations and questions were punctuated by his refrain of “But I really am happy for you.” JB was angry: that Willem hadn’t told him earlier, that he hadn’t even consulted him, that they had told Malcolm and Richard — Richard! — before him. JB was upset: Willem could tell him the truth; he’d always liked Jude more, hadn’t he? Why couldn’t he just admit it? Also, had he always felt this way? Were his years of fucking women just some colossal lie that Willem had created to distract them? JB was jealous: he got the attraction to Jude, he did, and he knew it was illogical and maybe a tiny bit self-involved, but it wouldn’t be truthful if he didn’t tell Willem that part of him was miffed that Willem had picked Jude and not him.

“JB,” he said, again and again, “it was very organic. I didn’t tell you because I needed time to figure it out in my own head. And as for being attracted to you, what can I say? I’m not. And you aren’t attracted to me, either! We made out once, remember? You said it was a huge turnoff for you, remember?”

JB ignored all this, however. “I still don’t understand why you told Malcolm and Richard first,” he said, sullenly, to which Willem had no response. “Anyway,” JB said, after a silence, “I really am happy for you two. I am.”

He sighed. “Thank you, JB,” he said. “That means a lot.” They were both quiet again.

“JB,” said Jude, coming out of his study, looking surprised that JB was still there. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“What’re you having?”

“Cod. And I’ll roast some potatoes the way you like them.”

“I guess,” JB said, sulkily, and Willem grinned at Jude over JB’s head.

He joined Jude in the kitchen and began making a salad, and JB slumped to the dining-room table and started flipping through a novel Jude had left there. “I read this,” he called over to him. “Do you want to know what happens in the end?”

“No, JB,” said Jude. “I’m only halfway through.”

“The minister character dies after all.”

“JB!”

After that, JB’s mood seemed to improve. Even his final salvos were somewhat listless, as if he were delivering them out of obligation rather than true depth of feeling. “In ten years, I’ll bet you two will have made the full transition to lesbiandom. I predict cats,” was one, and “Watching you two in the kitchen is like watching a slightly more racially ambiguous version of that John Currin painting. Do you know what I’m talking about? Look it up,” was another.

“Are you going to come out or keep it quiet?” JB asked over dinner.

“I’m not sending out a press release, if that’s what you mean,” Willem said. “But I’m not going to hide it, either.”

“I think it’s a mistake,” Jude added, quickly. Willem didn’t bother answering; they had been having this argument for a month.

After dinner, he and JB lounged on the sofa and drank tea and Jude loaded the dishwasher. By this time, JB seemed almost appeased, and he recalled that this was the arc of most dinners with JB, even back at Lispenard Street: he began the evening as something sharp and tart, and ended it as something soothed and gentled.

“How’s the sex?” JB asked him.

“Amazing,” he said, immediately.

JB looked glum. “Dammit,” he said.

But of course, this was a lie. He had no idea if the sex was amazing, because they hadn’t had sex. The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they’d told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude’s father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged. Willem had walked him to the door, and as they were waiting for the elevator, Andy said to him, quietly, “How’s it going?”

He paused. “Okay,” he said at last, and Andy, as if he could discern everything he wasn’t saying, squeezed his shoulder. “I know it’s not easy, Willem,” he said. “But you must be doing something right — I’ve never seen him more relaxed or happier, not ever.” He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but what could he say? He couldn’t say, Call me if you want to talk about him, or Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with, and so instead he left, giving Willem a little salute as the elevator sank out of sight.

That night, after JB had gone home, he thought of the conversation he and Andy had had in the café that day, and how even as Andy had been warning him how difficult it would be, he hadn’t fully believed him. In retrospect, he was glad he hadn’t: because believing Andy might have intimidated him, because he might have been too scared to try.

He turned and looked at Jude, who was asleep. This was one of the nights he’d taken off his clothes, and he was lying on his back, one of his arms crooked near his head, and Willem, as he often did, ran his fingers down the inside of this arm, its scars rendering it into a miserable terrain, a place of mountains and valleys singed by fire. Sometimes, when he was certain Jude was very deeply asleep, he would switch on the light near his side of the bed and study his body more closely, because Jude refused to let himself be examined in daylight. He would uncover him and move his palms over his arms, his legs, his back, feeling the texture of the skin change from rough to glossy, marveling at all the permutations flesh could take, at all the ways the body healed itself, even when attempts had been made to destroy it. He had once shot a film on the Big Island of Hawaii, and on their day off, he and the rest of the cast had trekked across the lava fields, watching the land change from rock as porous and dry as petrified bone into a gleaming black landscape, the lava frozen into exuberant swirls of frosting. Jude’s skin was as diverse, as wondrous, and in places so unlike skin as he had felt or understood it that it too seemed something otherworldly and futuristic, a prototype of what flesh might look like ten thousand years from now.

“You’re repulsed,” Jude had said, quietly, the second time he had taken his clothes off, and he had shaken his head. And he hadn’t been: Jude had always been so secretive, so protective of his body that to see it for real was somehow anticlimactic; it was so normal, finally, so less dramatic than what he had imagined. But the scars were difficult for him to see not because they were aesthetically offensive, but because each one was evidence of something withstood or inflicted. Jude’s arms were for that reason the part of his body that upset him the most. At nights, as Jude slept, he would turn them over in his hands, counting the cuts, trying to imagine himself in a state in which he would willingly inflict pain on himself, in which he would actively try to erode his own being. Sometimes there were new cuts — he always knew when Jude had cut himself, because he slept in his shirt on those nights, and he would have to push up his sleeves as he slept and feel for the bandages — and he would wonder when Jude had made them, and why he hadn’t noticed. When he had moved in with Jude after the suicide attempt, Harold had told him where Jude hid his bag of razors, and he, like Harold, had begun throwing them away. But then they had disappeared entirely, and he couldn’t figure out where Jude was keeping them.

Other times, he would feel not curiosity, but awe: he was so much more damaged than Willem had comprehended. How could I have not known this? he would ask himself. How could I not have seen this?

And then there was the matter of sex. He knew Andy had warned him about sex, but Jude’s fear of and antipathy toward it disturbed and occasionally frightened him. One night toward the end of November, after they’d been together six months, he had reached his hands down Jude’s underwear and Jude had made a strange, strangled noise, the kind of noise an animal makes when it’s being caught in another animal’s jaws, and had jerked himself away with such violence that he had cracked his head against his nightstand. “I’m sorry,” they had apologized to each other, “I’m sorry.” And that was the first moment that Willem, too, had felt a certain fear. All along he had assumed that Jude was shy, profoundly so, but that eventually, he would abandon some of his self-consciousness, that he would feel comfortable enough to have sex. But in that moment, he realized that what he had thought was a reluctance to have sex was actually a terror of it: that Jude would perhaps never be comfortable, that if and when they did eventually have sex, it would be because Jude decided he had to or Willem decided he had to force him. Neither option appealed to him. People had always given themselves to him; he had never had to wait, never had to try to convince someone that he wasn’t dangerous, that he wasn’t going to hurt them. What am I going to do? he asked himself. He wasn’t smart enough to figure this out on his own — and yet there was no one else he could ask. And then there was the fact that with every week, his desire grew sharper and less ignorable, his determination greater. It had been a long time since he had wanted to have sex with anyone so keenly, and the fact that it was someone he loved made the waiting both more unbearable and more absurd.

As Jude slept that night, he watched him. Maybe I made a mistake, he thought.

Aloud, he said, “I didn’t know it was going to be this complicated.” Next to him, Jude breathed, ignorant of Willem’s treachery.

And then the morning arrived and he was reminded why he had decided to pursue this relationship to begin with, his own naïveté and arrogance aside. It was early, but he had woken anyway, and he watched as, through the half-open closet door, Jude got dressed. This had been a recent development, and Willem knew how difficult it was for him. He saw how hard Jude tried; he saw how everything he and everyone he knew took for granted — getting dressed in front of someone; getting undressed in front of someone — were things Jude had to practice again and again: he saw how determined he was, he saw how brave he was being. And this reminded him that he, too, had to keep trying. Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who would ever be worth such hardships, such difficulties, such insecurities and exposure.

When he opened his eyes again, Jude was sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling at him, and he was filled with affection for him: for how beautiful he was, for how dear he was, for how easy it was to love him. “Don’t go,” he said.

“I have to,” Jude said.

“Five minutes,” he said.

“Five,” Jude said, and slid beneath the covers, and Willem wrapped his arms around him, careful not to wrinkle his suit, and closed his eyes. And this too he loved: he loved knowing that in those moments, he was making Jude happy, loved knowing that Jude wanted affection and that he was the person who was allowed to provide it. Was this arrogance? Was this pride? Was this self-congratulation? He didn’t think so; he didn’t care. That night, he told Jude that he thought they should tell Harold and Julia that they were together when they went up for Thanksgiving that week. “Are you sure, Willem?” Jude had asked him, looking worried, and he knew that Jude was really asking if he was sure about the relationship itself: he was always holding the door open for him, letting him know he could leave. “I want you to really think about this, especially before we tell them.” He didn’t need to say it, but Willem knew, once again, what the consequences would be if they told Harold and Julia and, later, he changed his mind: they would forgive him, but things would never be the same. They would always, always pick Jude over him. He knew this: it was the way it should be.

“I’m positive,” he’d said, and so they had.

He thought of this conversation as he poured Kit a glass of water and carried the plate of sandwiches to the table. “What is this?” Kit asked, looking suspiciously at the sandwiches.

“Grilled peasant bread with Vermont cheddar and figs,” he said. “And escarole salad with pears and jamón.”

Kit sighed. “You know I’m trying not to eat bread, Willem,” he said, although he didn’t know. Kit bit into a sandwich. “Good,” he said, reluctantly. “Okay,” he continued, putting it down, “tell me.”

And so he did, and added that while he wasn’t planning on announcing the relationship, he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise about it, either, and Kit groaned. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck. I thought it might be this. I don’t know why, I just did. Fuck, Willem.” He put his forehead down on the table. “I need a minute,” Kit said to the table. “Have you told Emil?”

“Yeah,” he said. Emil was Willem’s manager. Kit and Emil worked with each other best when they were united against Willem. When they agreed, they liked each other. When they didn’t, they didn’t.

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘God, Willem, I’m so happy that you’ve finally committed to someone you truly love and feel comfortable around, and I couldn’t be happier for you as your friend and longtime supporter.’ ” (What Emil had actually said was, “Christ, Willem. Are you sure? Did you talk to Kit yet? What did he say?”)

Kit lifted his head and glared at him (he didn’t have much of a sense of humor). “Willem, I am happy for you,” he said. “I care about you. But have you thought about what’s going to happen to your career? Have you thought about how you’re going to be typecast? You don’t know what it’s like being a gay actor in this business.”

“I don’t really think of myself as gay, though,” he began, and Kit rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so naïve, Willem,” he said. “Once you’ve touched a dick, you’re gay.”

“Said with subtlety and grace, as always.”

“Whatever, Willem; you can’t afford to be cavalier about this.”

“I’m not, Kit,” he said. “But I’m not a leading man.”

“You keep saying that! But you are, whether you like it or not. You’re just acting like your career is going to keep going on the same trajectory it’s been on — do you not remember what happened to Carl?” Carl was a client of a colleague of Kit’s, and one of the biggest movie stars of the previous decade. Then he had been forced out of the closet, and his career had faded. Ironically, it was Carl’s obsolescence, his sudden unpopularity, that had encouraged the rise of Willem’s own career — at least two roles that Willem had gotten were ones that would once have gone, reflexively, to Carl. “Now, look: you’re far more talented than Carl, and more diversified as well. And it’s a different climate now than when Carl came out — domestically, at least. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t tell you to prepare for a certain chill. You’re private as it is: Can’t you just keep this under wraps?”

He didn’t reply, just reached for another sandwich, and Kit studied him. “What does Jude think?”

“He thinks I’m going to end up performing in a Kander and Ebb revue on a cruise ship to Alaska,” he admitted.

Kit snorted. “Somewhere between how Jude thinks and how you think is how you need to think, Willem,” he said. “After everything we’ve built together,” he added, mournfully.

He sighed, too. The first time Jude had met Kit, almost fifteen years ago, he’d turned to Willem afterward and said, smiling, “He’s your Andy.” And over the years, he had come to realize how true this was. Not only did Kit and Andy actually, creepily know each other — they were in the same class, and had lived in the same dorm their freshman year — but they both liked to present themselves as, to some extent, Willem’s and Jude’s creators. They were their defenders and their guardians, but they also tried, at every opportunity, to determine the shape and form of their lives.

“I thought you’d be a little more supportive of this, Kit,” he said, sadly.

“Why? Because I’m gay? Being a gay agent is far different than being a gay actor of your stature, Willem,” said Kit. He grunted. “Well, at least someone’s going to be happy about this. Noel”—the director of Duets—“will be fucking thrilled. This is going to be great publicity for his little project. I hope you like doing gay movies, Willem, because that’s what you might end up doing for the rest of your life.”

“I don’t really think of Duets as a gay movie,” he said, and then, before Kit could roll his eyes and start lecturing him again, “and if that’s how it ends up, that’s fine.” He told Kit what he had told Jude: “I’ll always have work; don’t worry.”

(“But what if your film work dries up?” Jude had asked.

“Then I’ll do plays. Or I’ll work in Europe: I’ve always wanted to do more work in Sweden. Jude, I promise you, I will always, always work.”

Jude had been silent, then. They had been lying in bed; it had been late. “Willem, I really won’t mind — not at all — if you want to keep this quiet,” he said.

“But I don’t want to,” he said. He didn’t. He didn’t have the energy for it, the sense of planning for it, the endurance for it. He knew a couple of other actors — older, much more commercial than he — who actually were gay and yet were married to women, and he saw how hollow, how fabricated, their lives were. He didn’t want that life for himself: he didn’t want to step off the set and still feel he was in character. When he was home, he wanted to feel he was truly at home.

“I’m just afraid you’re going to resent me,” Jude admitted, his voice low.

“I’ll never resent you,” he promised him.)

Now, he listened to Kit’s gloomy predictions for another hour, and then, finally, when it was clear that Willem wouldn’t change his mind, Kit seemed to change his. “Willem, it’ll be fine,” he said, determinedly, as if Willem had been the one who was concerned all along. “If anyone can do this, you can. We’re going to make this work for you. It’s going to be fine.” Kit tilted his head, looking at him. “Are you guys going to get married?”

“Jesus, Kit,” he said, “you were just trying to break us up.”

“No, I wasn’t, Willem. I wasn’t. I was just trying to get you to keep your mouth shut, that’s all.” He sighed again, but resignedly this time. “I hope Jude appreciates the sacrifice you’re making for him.”

“It’s not a sacrifice,” he protested, and Kit cut his eyes at him. “Not now,” he said, “but it may be.”

Jude came home early that night. “How’d it go?” he asked Willem, looking closely at him.

“Fine,” he said, staunchly. “It went fine.”

“Willem—” Jude began, and he stopped him.

“Jude,” he said, “it’s done. It’s going to be fine, I swear to you.”

Kit’s office managed to keep the story quiet for two weeks, and by the time the first article was published, he and Jude were on a plane to Hong Kong to see Charlie Ma, Jude’s old roommate from Hereford Street, and from there to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He tried not to check his messages while he was on vacation, but Kit had gotten a call from a writer at New York magazine, and so he knew there would be a story. He was in Hanoi when the piece was published: Kit forwarded it to him without comment, and he skimmed it, quickly, when Jude was in the bathroom. “Ragnarsson is on vacation and was unavailable for comment, but his representative confirmed the actor’s relationship with Jude St. Francis, a highly regarded and prominent litigator with the powerhouse firm of Rosen Pritchard and Klein and a close friend since they were roommates their freshman year of college,” he read, and “Ragnarsson is the highest-profile actor by far to ever willingly declare himself in a gay relationship,” followed, obituary-like, with a recapping of his films and various quotes from various agents and publicists congratulating him on his bravery while simultaneously predicting the almost-certain diminishment of his career, and nice quotes from actors and directors he knew promising his revelation wouldn’t change a thing, and a concluding quote from an unnamed studio executive who said that his strength had never been as a romantic lead anyway, and so he’d probably be fine. At the end of the story, there was a link to a picture of him with Jude at the opening of Richard’s show at the Whitney in September.

When Jude came out, he handed him the phone and watched him read the article as well. “Oh, Willem,” he said, and then, later, looking stricken, “My name’s in here,” and for the first time, it occurred to him that Jude may have wanted him to keep quiet as much for his own privacy as for Willem’s.

“Don’t you think you should ask Jude first if I can confirm his identity?” Kit had asked him when they were deciding what he’d say to the reporter on Willem’s behalf.

“No, it’s fine,” he’d said. “He won’t mind.”

Kit had been quiet. “He might, Willem.”

But he really hadn’t thought he would. Now, though, he wondered if he had been arrogant. What, he asked himself, just because you’re okay with it, you thought he would be, too?

“Willem, I’m sorry,” Jude said, and although he knew that he should reassure Jude, who was probably feeling guilty, and apologize to him as well, he wasn’t in the mood for it, not then.

“I’m going for a run,” he announced, and although he wasn’t looking at him, he could feel Jude nod.

It was so early that outside, the city was still quiet and still cool, the air a dirtied white, with only a few cars gliding down the streets. The hotel was near the old French opera house, which he ran around, and then back to the hotel and toward the colonial-era district, past vendors squatted near large, flat, woven-bamboo baskets piled with tiny, bright green limes, and stacks of cut herbs that smelled of lemon and roses and peppercorns. As the streets grew threadlike, he slowed to a walk, and turned down an alley that was crowded with stall after stall of small, improvised restaurants, just a woman standing behind a kettle roiling with soup or oil, and four or five plastic stools on which customers sat, eating quickly before hurrying back to the mouth of the alley, where they got on their bikes and pedaled away. He stopped at the far end of the alley, waiting to let a man cycle past him, the basket strapped to the back of his seat loaded with spears of baguettes, their hot, steamed-milk fragrance filling his nostrils, and then headed down another alley, this one busy with vendors crouched over more bundles of herbs, and black hills of mangosteens, and metal trays of silvery-pink fish, so fresh that he could hear them gulping, could see their eyes rolling desperately back in their sockets. Above him, necklaces of cages were strung like lanterns, each containing a vibrant, chirping bird. He had a little cash with him, and he bought Jude one of the herb bouquets; it looked like rosemary but smelled pleasantly soapy, and although he didn’t know what it was, he thought Jude might.

He was so naïve, he thought as he made his slow way back to the hotel: about his career, about Jude. Why did he always think he knew what he was doing? Why did he think he could do whatever he wanted and everything would work out the way he imagined it? Was it a failure of creativity, or arrogance, or (as he assumed) simple stupidity? People, people he trusted and respected, were always warning him — Kit, about his career; Andy, about Jude; Jude, about himself — and yet he always ignored them. For the first time, he wondered if Kit was right, if Jude was right, if he would never work again, or at least not the kind of work he enjoyed. Would he resent Jude? He didn’t think so; he hoped not. But he had never thought he would have to find out, not really.

But greater than that fear was the one he was rarely able to ask himself: What if the things he was making Jude do weren’t good for him after all? The day before, they had taken a shower together for the first time, and Jude had been so silent afterward, so deep inside one of his fugue states, his eyes so flat and blank, that Willem had been momentarily frightened. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but Willem had coerced him, and in the shower, Jude had been rigid and grim, and Willem had been able to tell from the set of Jude’s mouth that he was enduring it, that he was waiting for it to be over. But he hadn’t let him get out of the shower; he had made him stay. He had behaved (unintentionally, but who cared) like Caleb — he had made Jude do something he didn’t want to, and Jude had done it because he had told him to do it. “It’ll be good for you,” he’d said, and remembering this — although he had believed it — he felt almost nauseated. No one had ever trusted him as unquestioningly as Jude did. But he had no idea what he was doing.

“Willem’s not a health-care professional,” he remembered Andy saying. “He’s an actor.” And although both he and Jude had laughed at the time, he wasn’t sure Andy was wrong. Who was he to try to direct Jude’s mental health? “Don’t trust me so much,” he wanted to say to Jude. But how could he? Wasn’t this what he had wanted from Jude, from this relationship? To be so indispensable to another person that that person couldn’t even comprehend his life without him? And now he had it, and the demands of the position terrified him. He had asked for responsibility without understanding completely how much damage he could do. Was he able to do this? He thought of Jude’s horror of sex and knew that behind that horror lay another, one he had always surmised but had never inquired about: So what was he supposed to do? He wished there was someone who could tell him definitively if he was doing a good job or not; he wished he had someone guiding him in this relationship the way Kit guided him in his career, telling him when to take a risk and when to retreat, when to play Willem the Hero and when to be Ragnarsson the Terrible.

Oh, what am I doing? he chanted to himself as his feet smacked against the road, as he ran past men and women and children readying themselves for the day, past buildings as narrow as closets, past little shops selling stiff, brick-like pillows made of plaited straw, past a small boy cradling an imperious-looking lizard to his chest, What am I doing, oh what am I doing?

By the time he returned to the hotel an hour later, the sky was shading from white to a delicious, minty pale blue. The travel agent had booked them a suite with two beds, as always (he hadn’t remembered to have his assistant correct this), and Jude was lying on the one they had both slept in the night before, dressed for the day, reading, and when Willem came in, he stood and came over and hugged him.

“I’m all sweaty,” he mumbled, but Jude didn’t let go.

“It’s okay,” Jude said. He stepped back and looked at him, holding him by the arms. “It’s going to be fine, Willem,” he said, in the same firm, declarative way Willem sometimes heard him speak to clients on the phone. “It really is. I’ll always take care of you, you know that, right?”

He smiled. “I know,” he said, and what comforted him was not so much the reassurance itself, but that Jude seemed so confident, so competent, so certain that he, too, had something to offer. It reminded Willem that their relationship wasn’t a rescue mission after all, but an extension of their friendship, in which he had saved Jude and, just as often, Jude had saved him. For every time he had gotten to help Jude when he was in pain, or defend him against people asking too many questions, Jude had been there to listen to him worrying about his work, or to talk him out of his misery after he hadn’t gotten a part, or to (for three consecutive months, humiliatingly) pay his college loans when a job had fallen through and he didn’t have enough money to cover them himself. And yet somehow in the past seven months he had decided that he was going to repair Jude, that he was going to fix him, when really, he didn’t need fixing. Jude had always taken him at face value; he needed to try to do the same for him.

“I ordered breakfast,” Jude said. “I thought you might want some privacy. Do you want to take a shower?”

“Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’ll wait until after we eat.” He took a breath. He could feel his anxiety fade; he could feel himself returning to who he was. “But would you sing with me?” Every morning for the past two months, they had been singing with each other in preparation for Duets. In the film, his character and the character’s wife led an annual Christmas pageant, and both he and the actress playing his wife would be performing their own vocals. The director had sent him a list of songs to work on, and Jude had been practicing with him: Jude took the melody, and he took the harmony.

“Sure,” Jude said. “Our usual?” For the past week, they’d been working on “Adeste Fideles,” which he would have to sing a cappella, and for the past week, he’d been pitching sharp at the exact same point, at “Venite adoremus,” right in the first stanza. He’d wince every time he did it, hearing the error, and Jude would shake his head at him and keep going, and he’d follow him until the end. “You’re overthinking it,” Jude would say. “When you go sharp, it’s because you’re concentrating too hard on staying on key; just don’t think about it, Willem, and you’ll get it.”

That morning, though, he felt certain he’d get it right. He gave Jude the bunch of herbs, which he was still holding, and Jude thanked him, pinching its little purple flowers between his fingers to release its perfume. “I think it’s a kind of perilla,” he said, and held his fingers up for Willem to smell.

“Nice,” he said, and they smiled at each other.

And so Jude began, and he followed, and he made it through without going sharp. And at the end of the song, just after the last note, Jude immediately began singing the next song on the list, “For Unto Us a Child Is Born,” and after that, “Good King Wenceslas,” and again and again, Willem followed. His voice wasn’t as full as Jude’s, but he could tell in those moments that it was good enough, that it was maybe better than good enough: he could tell it sounded better with Jude’s, and he closed his eyes and let himself appreciate it.

They were still singing when the doorbell chimed with their breakfast, but as he was standing, Jude put his hand on his wrist, and they remained there, Jude sitting, he standing, until they had sung the last words of the song, and only after they had finished did he go to answer the door. Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he’d found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn’t known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life.

2

THE FIRST TIME Willem left him — this was some twenty months ago, two Januarys ago — everything went wrong. Within two weeks of Willem’s departure to Texas to begin filming Duets, he’d had three episodes with his back (including one at the office, and another, this one at home, that had lasted a full two hours). The pain in his feet returned. A cut (from what, he had no idea) opened up on his right calf. And yet it had all been fine. “You’re so damn cheerful about all of this,” Andy had said, when he was forced to make his second appointment with him in a week. “I’m suspicious.”

“Oh, well,” he’d said, even though he could hardly speak because the pain was so intense. “It happens, right?” That night, though, as he lay in bed, he thanked his body for keeping itself in check, for controlling itself for so long. For those months he secretly thought of as his and Willem’s courtship, he hadn’t used his wheelchair once. His episodes had been seldom, and brief, and never in Willem’s presence. He knew it was silly — Willem knew what was wrong with him, he had seen him at his worst — but he was grateful that as the two of them were beginning to view each other in a different way, he had been allowed a period of reinvention, a spell of being able to impersonate an able-bodied person. So when he was returned to his normal state, he didn’t tell Willem about what had been happening to him — he was so bored by the subject that he couldn’t imagine anyone else wouldn’t be as well — and by the time Willem came home in March, he was more or less better, walking again, the wound once again mostly under control.

Since that first time, Willem has been gone for extended periods four additional times — twice for shooting, twice for publicity tours — and each time, sometimes the very day Willem left, his body had broken itself somehow. But he had appreciated its sense of timing, its courtesy: it was as if his body, before his mind, had decided for him that he should pursue this relationship, and had done its part by removing as many obstacles and embarrassments as possible.

Now it is mid-September, and Willem is preparing to leave again. As has become their ritual — ever since the Last Supper, a lifetime ago — they spend the Saturday before Willem’s departure having dinner somewhere extravagant and then the rest of the night talking. Sunday they sleep late into the morning, and Sunday afternoon, they review practicalities: things to be done while Willem is away, outstanding matters to be resolved, decisions to be made. Ever since their relationship has changed from what it had been into what it now is, their conversations have become both more intimate and more mundane, and that final weekend is always a perfect, condensed reflection of that: Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.

He likes both types of conversations with Willem, but he appreciates the mundane ones more than he’d imagined he would. He had always felt bound to Willem by the big things — love; trust — but he likes being bound to him by the small things as well: bills and taxes and dental checkups. He is always reminded of a visit to Harold and Julia’s he’d made years ago, when he had come down with a terrible cold and had wound up spending most of the weekend on the living-room sofa, wrapped in a blanket and sliding in and out of sleep. That Saturday evening, they had watched a movie together, and at one point, Harold and Julia had begun talking about the Truro house’s kitchen renovation. He half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull that he couldn’t follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

“So I left a message with the tree guy and told him you’re going to call this week, right?” Willem asks. They are in the bedroom, doing the last of Willem’s packing.

“Right,” he says. “I wrote myself a note to call him tomorrow.”

“And I told Mal you’d go up with him to the site next weekend, you know.”

“I know,” he says. “I have it in my schedule.”

Willem has been dropping stacks of clothes into his bag as he talks, but now he stops and looks at him. “I feel bad,” he says. “I’m leaving you with so much stuff.”

“Don’t,” he says. “It’s not a problem, I swear.” Most of the scheduling in their lives is handled by Willem’s assistant, by his secretaries: but they are managing the details of the house upstate themselves. They never discussed how this happened, but he senses it’s important for them both to be able to participate in the creation and witness of this place they are building together, the first place they will have built together since Lispenard Street.

Willem sighs. “But you’re so busy,” he says.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Really, Willem. I can handle it,” although Willem continues to look worried.

That night, they lie awake. For as long as he has known Willem, he has always had the same feeling the day before he leaves, when even as he speaks to Willem he is already anticipating how much he’ll miss him when he’s gone. Now that they are actually, physically together, that feeling has, curiously, intensified; now he is so used to Willem’s presence that his absence feels more profound, more debilitating. “You know what else we have to talk about,” Willem says, and when he doesn’t say anything, Willem pushes down his sleeve and holds his left wrist, loosely, in his hand. “I want you to promise me,” Willem says.

“I swear,” he says. “I will.” Next to him, Willem releases his arm and rolls onto his back, and they are quiet.

“We’re both tired,” Willem yawns, and they are: in less than two years, Willem has been reclassified as gay; Lucien has retired from the firm and he has taken over as the chair of the litigation department; and they are building a house in the country, eighty minutes north of the city. When they are together on the weekends — and when Willem is home, he too tries to be, going into the office even earlier on the weekdays so he doesn’t have to stay as late on Saturdays — they sometimes spend the early evening simply lying together on the sofa in the living room, not speaking, as around them the light leaves the room. Sometimes they go out, but far less frequently than they used to.

“The transition to lesbiandom took much less time than I anticipated,” JB observed one evening when they had him and his new boyfriend, Fredrik, over for dinner, along with Malcolm and Sophie and Richard and India and Andy and Jane.

“Give them a break, JB,” said Richard, mildly, as everyone else laughed, but he didn’t think Willem minded, and he certainly didn’t himself. After all, what did he care about anything but Willem?

For a while he waits to see if Willem will say anything else. He wonders if he will have to have sex; he is still mostly unable to determine when Willem wants to and when he doesn’t — when an embrace will become something more invasive and unwanted — but he is always prepared for it to happen. It is — and he hates admitting this, hates thinking it, would never say it aloud — one of the very few things he anticipates about Willem’s departures: for those weeks or months that he is away, there is no sex, and he can finally relax.

They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion), and Willem had waited for him for almost ten. During those months, he had been intensely aware that there was a clock somewhere counting itself down, and that although he didn’t know how much time he had left, he did know that as patient as Willem was, he wouldn’t be patient forever. Months before, when he had overheard Willem lie to JB about how amazing their sex life was, he had vowed to himself that he would tell Willem he was ready that night. But he had been too frightened, and had allowed himself to let the moment pass. A little more than a month after that, when they were on holiday in Southeast Asia, he once again promised himself he’d try, and once again, he had done nothing.

And then it was January, and Willem had left for Texas to film Duets, and he had spent the weeks alone readying himself, and the night after Willem came home — he was still astonished that Willem had come back to him at all; astonished and ecstatic, so happy he had wanted to lean his head out the window and scream for no other reason but the improbability of it all — he had told Willem that he was ready.

Willem had looked at him. “Are you sure?” he’d asked him.

He wasn’t, of course. But he knew that if he wanted to be with Willem, he would have to do it eventually. “Yes,” he said.

“Do you want to, really?” Willem asked next, still looking at him.

What was this, he wondered: Was this a challenge? Or was this a real question? It was better to be safe, he thought. So “Yes,” he said. “Of course I do,” and he knew by Willem’s smile that he’d chosen the correct answer.

But first he’d had to tell Willem about his diseases. “When you have sex in the future, you’d better make sure you always disclose beforehand,” one of the doctors in Philadelphia had told him, years ago. “You don’t want to be responsible for passing these on to someone else.” The doctor had been stern, and he had never forgotten the shame he had felt, nor the fear that he might share his filth with another. And so he had written down a speech for himself and recited it until he had it memorized, but the actual telling had been much more difficult than he had expected, and he had spoken so quietly that he’d had to repeat himself, which was somehow even worse. He had given this talk only once before, to Caleb, who had been silent and then had said in his low voice, “Jude St. Francis. A slut after all,” and he had made himself smile and agree. “College,” he had managed to say, and Caleb had smiled back at him, slightly.

Willem too had been silent, watching him, and had asked, “When did you get these, Jude?” and then, “I’m so sorry.”

They had been lying next to each other, Willem on his side, facing him, he on his back. “I had a lost year in D.C.,” he said at last, although that hadn’t been true, of course. But telling the truth would mean a longer conversation, and he wasn’t ready to have that conversation, not yet.

“Jude, I’m sorry,” Willem had said, and had reached for him. “Will you tell me about it?”

“No,” he’d said, stubbornly. “I think we should do it. Now.” He had already prepared himself. Another day of waiting wasn’t going to change things, and he would only lose his nerve.

So they had. A large part of him had hoped, expected even, that things would be different with Willem, that he would, finally, enjoy the process. But once it had begun, he could feel every bad old sensation returning. He tried to direct his attention to how this time was clearly better: how Willem was more gentle than Caleb had been, how he didn’t get impatient with him, how it was, after all, Willem, someone he loved. But when it was over, there was the same shame, the same nausea, the same desire to hurt himself, to scoop out his insides and hurl them against the wall with a bloody thwack.

“Was it okay?” Willem asked, quietly, and he turned and looked at Willem’s face, which he loved so much.

“Yes,” he said. Maybe, he thought, it would be better the next time. And then, the next time, when it had been the same, he thought it might be better the time after that. Every time, he hoped things would be different. Every time, he told himself it would be. The sorrow he felt when he realized that even Willem couldn’t save him, that he was irredeemable, that this experience was forever ruined for him, was one of the greatest of his life.

Eventually, he made some rules for himself. First, he would never refuse Willem, ever. If this was what Willem wanted, he could have it, and he would never turn him away. Willem had sacrificed so much to be with him, and had brought him such peace, that he was determined to try to thank him however he could. Second, he would try — as Brother Luke had once asked him — to show a little life, a little enthusiasm. Toward the end of his time with Caleb, he had begun reverting to what he had done all his life: Caleb would turn him over, and pull down his pants, and he would lie there and wait. Now, with Willem, he tried to remember Brother Luke’s commands, which he had always obeyed—Roll over; Now make some noise; Now tell me you like it—and incorporate them when he could, so he would seem like an active participant. He hoped his competency would somehow conceal his lack of enthusiasm, and as Willem slept, he made himself remember the lessons that Brother Luke taught him, lessons he had spent his adulthood trying to forget. He knew Willem was surprised by his fluency: he, who had always remained silent when the others had bragged about what they’d done in bed, or what they hoped to; he, who could and did tolerate every conversation his friends had about the subject but had never engaged in them himself.

The third rule was that he would initiate sex once for every three times Willem did, so it didn’t seem so uneven. And fourth, whatever Willem wanted him to do, he would do. This is Willem, he would remind himself, again and again. This is someone who would never intentionally hurt you. Whatever he asks you to do is within reason.

But then he would see Brother Luke’s face before him. You trusted him, too, the voice nagged him. You thought he was protecting you, too.

How dare you, he would argue with the voice. How dare you compare Willem to Brother Luke.

What’s the difference? the voice snapped back. They both want the same thing from you. You’re the same thing to them in the end.

Eventually his fear of the process diminished, though not his dread. He had always known that Willem enjoyed sex, but he had been surprised and dismayed that he seemed to enjoy it so much with him. He knew how unfair he was being, but he found himself respecting Willem less for this, and hating himself more for those feelings.

He tried to focus on what had improved about the experience since Caleb. Although it was still painful, it was less painful than it had been with anyone else, and surely that was a good thing. It was still uncomfortable, although again, less so. And it was still shameful, although with Willem, he was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was giving at least a small bit of pleasure to the person he cared about most, and that knowledge helped sustain him every time.

He told Willem that he had lost the ability to have erections because of the car injury, but that wasn’t true. According to Andy (this was years ago), there was no physical reason why he couldn’t have them. But at any rate, he couldn’t, and hadn’t for years, not since he was in college, and even then, they had been rare and uncontrollable. Willem asked if there was something he could do — a shot, a pill — but he told him that he was allergic to one of the ingredients in those shots and pills, and that it didn’t make a difference to him.

Caleb hadn’t been so bothered by this inability of his, but Willem was. “Isn’t there something we can do to help you?” he asked, again and again. “Have you talked to Andy? Should we try something different?” until finally he snapped at Willem to stop asking him, that he was making him feel like a freak.

“I’m sorry, Jude; I didn’t mean to,” Willem said after a silence. “I just want you to enjoy this.”

“I am,” he said. He hated lying so much to Willem, but what was the alternative? The alternative meant losing him, meant being alone forever.

Sometimes, often, he cursed himself, and how limited he was, but at other times, he was kinder: he recognized how much his mind had protected his body, how it had shut down his sexual drive in order to shelter him, how it had calcified every part of him that had caused him such pain. But usually, he knew he was wrong. He knew his resentment of Willem was wrong. He knew his impatience with Willem’s affection for foreplay — that long, embarrassing period of throat-clearing that preceded every interaction, the small physical gestures of intimacy that he knew were Willem’s way of experimenting with the depths of his own ability for arousal — was wrong. But sex in his experience was something to be gotten through as quickly as possible, with an efficiency and brusqueness that bordered on the brutal, and when he sensed Willem was trying to prolong their encounters he began offering direction with a sort of decisiveness that he later realized Willem must mistake for zeal. And then he would hear Brother Luke’s triumphant declaration in his head—I could hear you enjoying yourself—and cringe. I don’t, he had always wanted to say, and he wanted to say it now: I don’t. But he didn’t dare. They were in a relationship. People in relationships had sex. If he wanted to keep Willem, he had to fulfill his side of the bargain, and his dislike for his duties didn’t change this.

Still, he didn’t give up. He promised himself he would work on repairing himself, for Willem’s sake if not his own. He bought — surreptitiously, his face prickling as he placed the order — three self-help books on sex and read them while Willem was on one of his publicity tours, and when Willem returned, he tried to use what he had learned, but the results had been the same. He bought magazines meant for women with articles about being better in bed, and studied them carefully. He even ordered a book about how victims of sexual abuse — a term he hated and didn’t apply to himself — dealt with sex, which he read furtively one night, locking his study door so Willem wouldn’t discover him. But after about a year, he decided to alter his ambitions: he might not ever be able to enjoy sex, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make it more enjoyable for Willem, both as an expression of gratitude and, more selfishly, a way to keep him close. So he fought past his feelings of shame; he concentrated on Willem.

Now that he was having sex again, he realized how much he had been surrounded by it all these years, and how completely he had managed to banish thoughts of it from his waking life. For decades, he had shied from discussions of sex, but now he listened to them wherever he encountered them: he eavesdropped on his colleagues, on women in restaurants, on men walking past him on the street, all talking about sex, about when they were having it, about how they wanted it more (no one wanted it less, it seemed). It was as if he was back in college, his peers once again his unwitting teachers: always, he was alert for information, for lessons on how to be. He watched talk shows on television, many of which seemed to be about how couples eventually stop having sex; the guests were married people who hadn’t had sex in months, occasionally in years. He would study these shows, but none of them ever gave him the information he wanted: How long into the relationship did the sex last? How much longer would he have to wait until this happened to him and Willem, too? He looked at the couples: Were they happy? (Obviously not; they were on talk shows telling strangers about their sex lives and asking for help.) But they seemed happy, didn’t they, or a version of happy at least, that man and woman who hadn’t had sex in three years and yet, through the touch of the man’s hand on the woman’s arm, obviously still had affection for each other, obviously stayed together for reasons more important than sex. On planes, he watched romantic comedies, farces about married people not having sex. All the movies with young people were about wanting sex; all the movies with old people were about wanting sex. He would watch these films and feel defeated. When did you get to stop wanting to have sex? At times he would appreciate the irony of this: Willem, the ideal partner in every way, who still wanted to have sex, and he, the unideal partner in every way, who didn’t. He, the cripple, who didn’t, and Willem, who somehow wanted him anyway. And still, Willem was his own version of happiness; he was a version of happiness he never thought he’d have.

He assured Willem that if he missed having sex with women, he should, and that he wouldn’t mind. But “I don’t,” Willem said. “I want to have sex with you.” Another person would have been moved by this, and he was too, but he also despaired: When would this end? And then, inevitably: What if it never did? What if he was never allowed to stop? He was reminded of the years in the motel rooms, although even then he’d had a date to anticipate, however false: sixteen. When he turned sixteen, he would be able to stop. Now he was forty-five, and it was as if he was eleven once again, waiting for the day when someone — once Brother Luke, now (unfair, unfair) Willem — would tell him “That’s it. You’ve fulfilled your duty. No more.” He wished someone would tell him that he was still a full human being despite his feelings; that there was nothing wrong with who he was. Surely there was someone, someone in the world who felt as he did? Surely his hatred for the act was not a deficiency to be corrected but a simple matter of preference?

One night, he and Willem were lying in bed — both of them tired from their respective days — and Willem had begun talking, abruptly, of an old friend he’d had lunch with, a woman named Molly he’d met once or twice over the years, and who, Willem said, had been having a difficult time; now, after decades, she had finally told her mother that her father, who had died the year before, had sexually abused her.

“That’s terrible,” he said, automatically. “Poor Molly.”

“Yes,” said Willem, and there was a silence. “I just told her that she had nothing to be ashamed of, that she hadn’t done anything wrong.” He could feel himself getting hot. “You were right,” he said at last, and yawned, extravagantly. “Good night, Willem.”

For a minute or two, they were quiet. “Jude,” Willem said, gently. “Are you ever going to tell me about it?”

What could he say, he thought, as he held himself still. Why was Willem asking about this now? He thought he had been doing such a good job being normal — but maybe he hadn’t. He would have to try harder. He never had told Willem about what had happened to him with Brother Luke, but along with being unable to speak of it, part of him knew he didn’t need to: in the past two years, Willem had tried to approach the subject through various directions — through stories of friends and acquaintances, some named, some not (he had to assume some of these people were creations, as surely no one person could have such a vast collection of sexually abused friends), through stories about pedophilia he read in magazines, through various discourses on the nature of shame, and how it was often unearned. After each speech, Willem would stop, and wait, as if he were mentally extending a hand and asking him to dance. But he never took Willem’s hand. Each time, he would remain silent, or change the subject, or simply pretend Willem had never spoken at all. He didn’t know how Willem had come to learn this about him; he didn’t want to know. Obviously the person he thought he was presenting wasn’t the person Willem — or Harold — saw.

“Why are you asking me this?” he asked.

Willem shifted. “Because,” he said, and then stopped. “Because,” he continued, “I should’ve made you talk about this a long time ago.” He stopped again. “Certainly before we started having sex.”

He closed his eyes. “Am I not doing a good enough job?” he asked, quietly, and regretted the question as soon as he said it: it was something he would have asked Brother Luke, and Willem was not Brother Luke.

He could tell from Willem’s silence that he was taken aback by the question as well. “No,” he said. “I mean, yes. But Jude — I know something happened to you. I wish you’d tell me. I wish you’d let me help you.”

“It’s over, Willem,” he said at last. “It was a long time ago. I don’t need help.”

There was another silence. “Was Brother Luke the person who hurt you?” Willem asked, and then, when he was quiet, the seconds ticking past, “Do you like having sex, Jude?”

If he spoke, he would cry, and so he didn’t speak. The word no, so short, so easy to say, a child’s sound, a noise more than a word, a sharp exhalation of air: all he had to do was part his lips, and the word would come out, and — and what? Willem would leave, and take everything with him. I can endure this, he would think when they had sex, I can endure this. He could endure it for every morning he woke next to Willem, for every affection Willem gave him, for the comfort of his company. When Willem was watching television in the living room and he was walking by, Willem would reach out his hand and he would take it, and they would remain there, Willem watching the screen and sitting, he standing, their hands in each other’s, and finally he would let go and continue moving. He needed Willem’s presence; every day since Willem had moved back in with him, he had experienced that same feeling of calm he had when Willem had stayed with him before he left to shoot The Prince of Cinnamon. Willem was his ballast, and he clung to him, even though he was always aware of how selfish he was being. If he truly loved Willem, he knew, he would leave him. He would allow Willem — he would force him, if he had to — to find someone better to love, someone who would enjoy having sex with him, someone who actually desired him, someone with fewer problems, someone with greater charms. Willem was good for him, but he was bad for Willem.

“Do you like having sex with me?” he asked when he could finally speak.

“Yes,” said Willem, immediately. “I love it. But do you like it?”

He swallowed, counted to three. “Yes,” he said, quietly, furious at himself and relieved as well. He had won himself more time: of Willem’s presence, but also of sex. What, he wonders, if he had said no?

And so on they went. But in compensation for the sex, there is the cutting, which he has been doing more and more: to help ease the feelings of shame, and to rebuke himself for his feelings of resentment. For so long, he had been so disciplined: once a week, two cuts each time, no more. But in the past six months, he has broken his rules again and again, and now he is cutting himself as much as he had when he was with Caleb, as much as he had in the weeks before the adoption.

His accelerated cutting was the topic of their first truly awful fight, not only as a couple but ever, in their entire twenty-nine years of friendship. Sometimes the cutting has no place in their relationship. And sometimes it is their relationship, their every conversation, the thing they are discussing even when they’re not saying anything. He never knows when he’ll come to bed in his long-sleeved T-shirt and Willem will say nothing, or when Willem will begin interrogating him. He has explained to Willem so many times that he needs it, that it helps him, that he is unable to stop, but Willem cannot or will not comprehend him.

“Don’t you understand why this upsets me so much?” Willem asks him.

“No, Willem,” he says. “I know what I’m doing. You have to trust me.”

“I do trust you, Jude,” Willem says. “But trust is not the issue here. The issue is you hurting yourself.” And then the conversation deadends itself.

Or there is the conversation that leads to Willem saying, “Jude, how would you feel if I did this to myself?” and him saying, “It’s not the same thing, Willem,” and Willem saying, “Why?” and him saying, “Because, Willem — it’s you. You don’t deserve it,” and Willem saying, “And you do?” and him being unable to answer, or at least not able to provide an answer that Willem would find adequate.

About a month before the fight, they’d had a different fight. Willem had, of course, noticed that he was cutting himself more, but he hadn’t known why, only that he was, and one night, after he was certain Willem was asleep, he was creeping toward the bathroom, when suddenly, Willem had grabbed him hard around the wrist, and he had gasped from fright. “Jesus, Willem,” he’d said. “You scared me.”

“Where are you going, Jude?” Willem had asked, his voice tense.

He’d tried to pull his arm free, but Willem’s grip was too strong. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said. “Let go, Willem, I’m serious.” They had stared at each other in the dark until finally Willem had released him, and then had gotten out of bed as well.

“Let’s go, then,” he’d said. “I’m going to watch you.”

They had quarreled, then, hissing at each other, each of them furious at the other, each of them feeling betrayed, he accusing Willem of treating him like a child, Willem accusing him of keeping secrets from him, each as close as they had ever been to yelling at the other. It had ended with him wrenching out of Willem’s grasp and trying to run toward his study so he could lock himself in and cut himself with a pair of scissors, but in his panic he had stumbled and fallen and split his lip, and Willem had hurried over with a bag of ice and they had sat there on the living-room floor, halfway between their bedroom and his study, their arms around each other, apologizing.

“I can’t have you doing this to yourself,” Willem had said the next day.

“I can’t not,” he said, after a long silence. You don’t want to see me without it, he wanted to tell Willem, as well as: I don’t know how I’d make my way through life without it. But he didn’t. He was never able to explain to Willem what the cutting did for him in a way he’d understand: how it was a form of punishment and also of cleansing, how it allowed him to drain everything toxic and spoiled from himself, how it kept him from being irrationally angry at others, at everyone, how it kept him from shouting, from violence, how it made him feel like his body, his life, was truly his and no one else’s. Certainly he could never have sex without it. Sometimes he wondered: If Brother Luke hadn’t given it to him as a solution, who would he have become? Someone who hurt other people, he thought; someone who tried to make everyone feel as terrible as he did; someone even worse than the person he was.

Willem had been silent for even longer. “Try,” he said. “For me, Judy. Try.”

And he did. For the next few weeks, when he woke in the night, or after they’d had sex and he was waiting for Willem to fall asleep so he could go to the bathroom, he instead made himself lie still, his hands in fists, counting his breaths, the back of his neck perspiring, his mouth dry. He pictured one of the motels’ stairwells, and throwing himself against it, the thud he would make, how satisfyingly tiring it would be, how much it would hurt. He both wished Willem knew how hard he was trying and was grateful that he didn’t.

But sometimes this wasn’t enough, and on those nights, he would skulk down to the ground floor, where he would swim, trying to exhaust himself. In the mornings, Willem demanded to look at his arms, and they had fought over that as well, but in the end it had been easier to just let Willem look. “Happy?” he barked at him, jerking his arms back from Willem’s hands, rolling his sleeves back down and buttoning the cuffs, unable to look at him.

“Jude,” Willem said, after a pause, “come lie down next to me before you go,” but he shook his head and left, and all day he had regretted it, and with every passing day that Willem didn’t ask him again, he hated himself more. Their new morning ritual was Willem examining his arms, and every time, sitting next to Willem in bed as Willem looked for evidence of cuts, he felt his frustration and humiliation increase.

One night a month after he had promised Willem he would try harder, he had known that he was in trouble, that there would be nothing he could do to quell his desires. It had been an unexpectedly, peculiarly memory-rich day, one in which the curtain that separated his past from his present had been oddly gauzy. All evening he had seen, as if in peripheral vision, fragments of scenes drifting before him, and over dinner he had fought to stay rooted, to not let himself wander into that frightening, familiar shadow world of memories. That night was the first night he had almost told Willem he didn’t want to have sex, but in the end he had managed not to, and they had.

Afterward, he was exhausted. He always struggled to remain present when they were having sex, to not let himself float away. When he was a child and had learned that he could leave himself, the clients had complained to Brother Luke. “His eyes look dead,” they had said; they hadn’t liked it. Caleb had said the same thing to him. “Wake up,” he’d once said, tapping him on the side of his face. “Where are you?” And so he worked to stay engaged, even though it made the experience more vivid. That night he lay there, watching Willem asleep on his stomach, his arms tucked under his pillow, his face more severe in sleep than it was in wakefulness. He waited, counting to three hundred, and then three hundred again, until an hour had passed. He snapped on the light next to his side of the bed and tried to read, but all he could see was the razor, and all he could feel was his arms tingling with need, as if he had not veins but circuitry, fizzing and blipping with electricity.

“Willem,” he whispered, and when Willem didn’t answer, he placed his hand on Willem’s neck, and when Willem didn’t move, he finally got out of bed and walked as softly as he could into their closet, where he retrieved his bag, which he had learned to store in the interior pocket of one of his winter coats, and then out of the room and across the apartment to the bathroom at the opposite end, where he closed the door. Here too there was a large shower, and he sat down inside of it and took off his shirt and leaned his back against the cool stone. His forearms were now so thickened from scar tissue that from a distance, they appeared to have been dipped in plaster, and you could barely distinguish where he had made the cuts in his suicide attempt: he had cut between and around each stripe, layering the cuts, camouflaging the scars. Lately he had begun concentrating more on his upper arms (not the biceps, which were also scarred, but the triceps, which were somehow less satisfying; he liked to see the cuts as he made them without twisting his neck), but now he made long, careful cuts down his left tricep, counting the seconds it took to make each one — one, two, three — against his breaths.

Down he cut, four times on his left, and three times on his right, and as he was making the fourth, his hands fluttery from that delicious weakness, he had looked up and had seen Willem in the doorway, watching him. In all his decades of cutting himself, he had never been witnessed in the act itself, and he stopped, abruptly, the violation as shocking as if he had been slugged.

Willem didn’t say anything, but as he walked toward him, he cowered, pressing himself against the shower wall, mortified and terrified, waiting for what might happen. He watched Willem crouch, and gently remove the razor from his hand, and for a moment they remained in those positions, both of them staring at the razor. And then Willem stood and, without preamble or warning, sliced the razor across his own chest.

He snapped alive, then. “No!” he shouted, and tried to get up, but he didn’t have the strength, and he fell back. “Willem, no!”

“Fuck!” Willem yelled. “Fuck!” But he made a second cut anyway, right under the first.

“Stop it, Willem!” he shouted, almost in tears. “Willem, stop it! You’re hurting yourself!”

“Oh, yeah?” asked Willem, and he could tell by how bright Willem’s eyes were that he was almost crying himself. “You see what it feels like, Jude?” And he made a third cut, cursing again.

“Willem,” he moaned, and lunged for his feet, but Willem stepped out of his way. “Please stop. Please, Willem.”

He had begged and begged, but it was only after the sixth cut that Willem stopped, slumping down against the opposite wall. “Fuck,” he said, quietly, bending over at the waist and wrapping his arms around himself. “Fuck, that hurts.” He scooted over to Willem with his bag to help clean him up, but Willem moved away from him. “Leave me alone, Jude,” he said.

“But you need to bandage them,” he said.

“Bandage your own goddamn arms,” Willem said, still not looking at him. “This isn’t some fucked-up ritual we’re going to share, you know: bandaging each other’s self-inflicted cuts.”

He shrank back. “I wasn’t trying to suggest that,” he said, but Willem didn’t answer him, and finally, he did clean off his cuts, and then slid the bag over toward Willem, who at last did the same, wincing as he did.

They sat there in silence for a long, long time, Willem still bent over, he watching Willem. “I’m sorry, Willem,” he said.

“Jesus, Jude,” Willem said, a while later. “This really hurts.” He finally looked at him. “How can you stand this?”

He shrugged. “You get used to it,” he said, and Willem shook his head.

“Oh, Jude,” Willem said, and he saw that Willem was crying, silently. “Are you even happy with me?”

He felt something in him break and fall. “Willem,” he began, and then started again. “You’ve made me happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Willem made a sound that he later realized was a laugh. “Then why are you cutting yourself so much?” he asked. “Why has it gotten so bad?”

“I don’t know,” he said, softly. He swallowed. “I guess I’m afraid you’re going to leave.” It wasn’t the entire story — the entire story he couldn’t say — but it was part of it.

“Why am I going to leave?” Willem asked, and then, when he couldn’t answer, “So is this a test, then? Are you trying to see how far you can push me and whether I’ll stay with you?” He looked up, wiping his eyes. “Is that it?”

He shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, to the marble floor. “I mean, not consciously. But — maybe. I don’t know.”

Willem sighed. “I don’t know what I can say to convince you I’m not going to leave, that you don’t need to test me,” he said. They were quiet again, and then Willem took a deep breath. “Jude,” he said, “do you think you should maybe go back to the hospital for a while? Just to, I don’t know, sort things out?”

“No,” he said, his throat tightening with panic. “Willem, no — you won’t make me, will you?”

Willem looked at him. “No,” he said. “No, I won’t make you.” He paused. “But I wish I could.”

Somehow, the night ended, and somehow, the next day began. He was so tired he was tipsy, but he went to work. Their fight had never ended in any conclusive way — there were no promises extracted, there were no ultimatums given — but for the next few days, Willem didn’t speak to him. Or rather: Willem spoke, but he spoke about nothing. “Have a good day,” he’d say when he left in the morning, and “How was your day?” when he came home at night.

“Fine,” he’d say. He knew Willem was wondering what to do and how he felt about the situation, and he tried to be as unobtrusive as possible in the meantime. At night they lay in bed, and where they usually talked, they were both quiet, and their silence was like a third creature in bed between them, huge and furred and ferocious when prodded.

On the fourth night, he couldn’t tolerate it any longer, and after lying there for an hour or so, both of them silent, he rolled over the creature and wrapped his arms around Willem. “Willem,” he whispered, “I love you. Forgive me.” Willem didn’t answer him, but he plowed on. “I’m trying,” he told him. “I really am. I slipped up; I’ll try harder.” Willem still didn’t say anything, and he held him tighter. “Please, Willem,” he said. “I know it bothers you. Please give me another chance. Please don’t be mad at me.”

He could feel Willem sigh. “I’m not mad at you, Jude,” he said. “And I know you’re trying. I just wish you didn’t have to try; I wish this weren’t something you had to fight against so hard.”

Now it was his turn to be quiet. “Me too,” he said, at last.

Since that night, he has tried different methods: the swimming, of course, but also baking, late at night. He makes sure there’s always flour in the kitchen, and sugar, and eggs and yeast, and as he waits for whatever’s in the oven to finish, he sits at the dining-room table working, and by the time the bread or cake or cookies (which he has Willem’s assistant send to Harold and Julia) are done, it’s almost daylight, and he slips back into bed for an hour or two of sleep before his alarm wakes him. For the rest of the day, his eyes burn with exhaustion. He knows that Willem doesn’t like his late-night baking, but he also knows he prefers it to the alternative, which is why he says nothing. Cleaning is no longer an option: since moving to Greene Street, he has had a housekeeper, a Mrs. Zhou, who now comes four times a week and is depressingly thorough, so thorough that he is sometimes tempted to dirty things up intentionally, only so he can clean them. But he knows this is silly, and so he doesn’t.

“Let’s try something,” Willem says one evening. “When you wake up and want to cut yourself, you wake me up, too, all right? Whatever time it is.” He looks at him. “Let’s try it, okay? Just humor me.”

So he does, mostly because he is curious to see what Willem will do. One night, very late, he rubs Willem’s shoulder and when Willem opens his eyes, he apologizes to him. But Willem shakes his head, and then moves on top of him, and holds him so tightly that he finds it difficult to breathe. “You hold me back,” Willem tells him. “Pretend we’re falling and we’re clinging together from fear.”

He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem’s heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. “Harder,” Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard’s family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and India’s apartment, and Richard’s studio, and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossils and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earth’s core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren’t burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one. When he wakes the next morning, Willem is no longer on top of him but beside him, but they are still intertwined, and he feels slightly drugged, and relieved, for he has not only not cut himself but he has slept, deeply, two things he hasn’t done in months. That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.

But of course he can’t wake Willem up whenever he feels he needs him; he limits himself to once every ten days. The other six or seven bad nights in those ten-day periods he gets through on his own: swimming, baking, cooking. He needs physical work to stave off the craving — Richard has given him a key to his studio, and some nights he heads downstairs in his pajamas, where Richard has left him a task that is both helpfully, mindlessly repetitive and at the same time utterly mysterious: he sorts bird vertebrae by sizes one week, and separates a stack of gleaming and faintly greasy ferret pelts by color another. These tasks remind him of how, years ago, the four of them would spend their weekends untangling hair for JB, and he wishes he could tell Willem about them, but he can’t, of course. He has made Richard promise not to say anything to Willem either, but he knows Richard isn’t exactly comfortable with the situation — he has noticed that he is never given jobs that involve razors or scissors or paring knives, which is significant considering how much of Richard’s work demands sharp edges.

One night, he peers into an old coffee can that has been left out on Richard’s desk and sees that it is full of blades: small angled ones, large wedge-shaped ones, and plain rectangles of the sort he prefers. He dips his hand cautiously into the can, scoops up a loose fistful of the blades, watches them pour from his palm. He takes one of the rectangular blades and slips it into his pants pocket, but when he’s finally ready to leave for the night — so exhausted that the floor tilts beneath him — he returns it gently to the can before he goes. In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.

And then it is Tuesday, a day that feels like summer, and Willem’s last in the city. He leaves for work early that morning but comes home at lunchtime so he can say goodbye.

“I’m going to miss you,” he tells Willem, as he always does.

“I’m going to miss you more,” Willem says, as he always does, and then, also as he always does, “Are you going to take care of yourself?”

“Yes,” he says, not letting go of him. “I promise.” He feels Willem sigh.

“Remember you can always call me, no matter what time it is,” Willem tells him, and he nods.

“Go,” he says. “I’ll be fine,” and Willem sighs again, and goes.

He hates to have Willem leave, but he is excited, too: for selfish reasons, and also because he is relieved, and happy, that Willem is working so much. After they had returned from Vietnam that January, just before he left to film Duets, Willem had been alternately anxious and bluffly confident, and although he tried not to speak of his insecurities, he knew how worried Willem was. He knew Willem worried that his first movie after the announcement of their relationship was, no matter how much he protested otherwise, a gay movie. He knew Willem worried when the director of a science-fiction thriller he wanted to do didn’t call him back as quickly as he had thought he might (though he had in the end, and everything had worked out the way he had hoped). He knew Willem worried about the seemingly endless series of articles, the ceaseless requests for interviews, the speculations and television segments, the gossip columns and the editorials, about his revelation that had greeted them on their return to the States, and which, as Kit told them, they were powerless to control or stop: they would simply have to wait until people grew bored of the subject, and that might take months. (Willem didn’t read stories about himself in general, but there were just so many of them: when they turned on the television, when they went online, when they opened the paper, there they were — stories about Willem, and what he now represented.) When they spoke on the phone — Willem in Texas, he at Greene Street — he could feel Willem trying not to talk too much about how nervous he was and knew it was because Willem didn’t want him to feel guilty. “Tell me, Willem,” he finally said. “I promise I’m not going to blame myself. I swear.” And after he had repeated this every day for a week, Willem did at last tell him, and although he did feel guilty — he cut himself after every one of these conversations — he didn’t ask Willem for reassurances, he didn’t make Willem feel worse than he already did; he only listened and tried to be as soothing as he could. Good, he’d praise himself after they’d hung up, after every time he’d kept his mouth closed against his own fears. Good job. Later, he’d burrow the tip of the razor into one of his scars, flicking the tissue upward with the razor’s corner until he had cut down to the soft flesh beneath.

He thinks it a good sign that the film Willem is shooting in London now is, as Kit would say, a gay film. “Normally I’d say not to,” Kit told Willem. “But it’s too good a script to pass up.” The film is titled The Poisoned Apple, and is about the last few years of Alan Turing’s life, after he was arrested for indecency and was chemically castrated. He idolized Turing, of course — all mathematicians did — and had been moved almost to tears by the script. “You have to do it, Willem,” he had said.

“I don’t know,” Willem had said, smiling, “another gay movie?”

“Duets did really well,” he reminded Willem — and it had: better than anyone had thought it would — but it was a lazy sort of argument, because he knew Willem had already decided to do the film, and he was proud of him, and childishly excited to see him in it, the way he was about all of Willem’s movies.

The Saturday after Willem leaves, Malcolm meets him at the apartment and he drives the two of them north, to just outside Garrison, where they are building a house. Willem had bought the land — seventy acres, with its own lake and its own forest — three years ago, and for three years it had sat empty. Malcolm had drawn plans, and Willem had approved them, but he had never actually told Malcolm he could begin. But one morning, about eighteen months ago, he had found Willem at the dining-room table, looking at Malcolm’s drawings.

Willem held out his hand to him, not lifting his eyes from the papers, and he took it and allowed Willem to pull him to his side. “I think we should do this,” Willem said.

And so they had met with Malcolm again, and Malcolm had drawn new plans: the original house had been two stories, a modernist saltbox, but the new house was a single level and mostly glass. He had offered to pay for it, but Willem had refused. They argued back and forth, Willem pointing out that he wasn’t contributing anything toward the maintenance of Greene Street, and he pointing out that he didn’t care. “Jude,” Willem said at last, “we’ve never fought about money. Let’s not start now.” And he knew Willem was right: their friendship had never been measured by money. They had never talked about money when they hadn’t had any — he had always considered whatever he earned Willem’s as well — and now that they had it, he felt the same way.

Eight months ago, when Malcolm was breaking ground, he and Willem had gone up to the property and had wandered around it. He had been feeling unusually well that day, and had even allowed Willem to hold his hand as they walked down the gentle hill that sloped from where the house would sit, and then left, toward the forest that held the lake in its embrace. The forest was denser than they had imagined, the ground so thick with pine needles that their every footfall sank, as if the earth beneath them was made of something rubbery and squashy and pumped half full of air. It was difficult terrain for him, and he grasped Willem’s hand in earnest, but when Willem asked him if he wanted to stop, he shook his head. About twenty minutes later, when they were almost halfway around the lake, they came to a clearing that looked like something out of a fairy tale, the sky above them all dark green fir tops, the floor beneath them that same soft pelt of the trees’ leavings. They stopped then, looking around them, quiet until Willem said, “We should just build it here,” and he smiled, but inside him something wrenched, a feeling like his entire nervous system was being tugged out of his navel, because he was remembering that other forest he had once thought he’d live in, and was realizing that he was to finally have it after all: a house in the woods, with water nearby, and someone who loved him. And then he shuddered, a tremor that rippled its way through his body, and Willem looked at him. “Are you cold?” he asked. “No,” he said, “but let’s keep walking,” and so they had.

Since then, he has avoided the woods, but he loves coming up to the site, and is enjoying working with Malcolm again. He or Willem go up every other weekend, though he knows Malcolm prefers it when he goes, because Willem is largely uninterested in the details of the project. He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn’t want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he’s found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he’s sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects — hammers; wrenches; pliers — he’s embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors. Aside from the house and the garage, there is an outdoor pool and, in the barn, an indoor pool: the house will be done in a little more than three months, the pool and barn by the following spring.

Now he walks through the house with Malcolm, running his hands over its surfaces, listening to Malcolm instruct the contractor on everything that needs fixing. As always, he is impressed watching Malcolm at work: he never tires of watching any of his friends at work, but Malcolm’s transformation has been the most gratifying to witness, more so than even Willem’s. In these moments, he remembers how carefully and meticulously Malcolm built his imaginary houses, and with such seriousness; once, when they were sophomores, JB had (accidentally, he claimed later) set one on fire when he was high, and Malcolm had been so angry and hurt that he had almost started crying. He had followed Malcolm as he ran out of Hood, and had sat with him on the library steps in the cold. “I know it’s silly,” Malcolm had said after he’d calmed down. “But they mean something to me.”

“I know,” he’d said. He had always loved Malcolm’s houses; he still has the first one Malcolm ever made him all those years ago, for his seventeenth birthday. “It’s not silly.” He knew what the houses meant to Malcolm: they were an assertion of control, a reminder that for all the uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate perfectly, that would always express what he was unable to in words. “What does Malcolm have to worry about?” JB would ask them when Malcolm was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all — Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors — sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.

These days, Malcolm works on fewer and fewer residences; in fact, they see far less of him than they once did. Bellcast now has offices in London and Hong Kong, and although Malcolm handles most of the American business — he is now planning a new wing of the museum at their old college — he is increasingly scarce. But he has overseen their house himself, and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says, “I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

Back in the city, he drops Malcolm off in Cobble Hill and then drives over the bridge and north, to his office. This is the final piece of pleasure he finds in Willem’s absences: because it means he can stay at work later, and longer. Without Lucien, work is simultaneously more and less enjoyable — less, because although he still sees Lucien, who has retired to a life of, as he says, pretending to enjoy golf in Connecticut, he misses talking to him daily, misses Lucien’s attempts to appall and provoke him; more, because he has found that he enjoys chairing the department, that he enjoys being on the firm’s compensation committee, deciding how the company’s profits will be divvied up each year. “Who knew you were such a powermonger, Jude?” Lucien asked him when he admitted this, and he had protested: it wasn’t that, he told Lucien — it was that he took satisfaction in seeing what had actually been brought in each year, how his hours and days at the office — his and everyone else’s — had translated themselves into numbers, and then those numbers into cash, and then that cash into the stuff of his colleagues’ lives: their houses and tuitions and vacations and cars. (He didn’t tell Lucien this part. Lucien would think he was being romantic, and there would be a wry, ironic lecture on his tendency toward sentimentalism.)

Rosen Pritchard had always been important to him, but after Caleb it had become essential. In his life at the firm, he was assessed only by the business he secured, by the work he did: there, he had no past, he had no deficiencies. His life there began with where he had gone to law school and what he had done there; it ended with each day’s accomplishments, with each year’s tallies of billable hours, with each new client he could attract. At Rosen Pritchard, there was no room for Brother Luke, or Caleb, or Dr. Traylor, or the monastery, or the home; they were irrelevant, they were extraneous details, they had nothing to do with the person he had created for himself. There, he wasn’t someone who cowered in the bathroom, cutting himself, but instead a series of numbers: one number to signify how much money he brought in, and another for the number of hours he billed; a third representing how many people he oversaw, a fourth for how much he rewarded them. It was something he had never been able to explain to his friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he worked; he could never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human, his most dignified and invulnerable.

Willem comes home twice during the course of the shoot for long weekends; but one weekend he is sick with a stomach flu, and the next Willem is sick with bronchitis. But both times — as he feels every time he hears Willem walk into the apartment, calling his name — he must remind himself that this is his life, and that in this life, Willem is coming home to him. In those moments, he feels that his dislike of sex is miserly, that he must be misremembering how bad it is, and that even if he isn’t, he has simply to try harder, that he has to pity himself less. Toughen up, he scolds himself as he kisses Willem goodbye at the end of these weekends. Don’t you dare ruin this. Don’t you dare complain about what you don’t even deserve.

And then one night, less than a month before Willem is due to come home for good, he wakes and believes he is in the trailer of a massive semitruck, and that the bed beneath him is a dirtied blue quilt folded in half, and that his every bone is being jounced as the truck trundles its way down the highway. Oh no, he thinks, oh no, and he gets up and hurries to the piano and begins playing as many Bach partitas as he can remember, out of sequence and too loud and too fast. He is reminded of a fable Brother Luke had once told him during one of their piano lessons of an old woman in a house who played her lute faster and faster so the imps outside her door would dance themselves into a sludge. Brother Luke had told him this story to illustrate a point — he needed to pick up his tempo — but he had always liked the image, and sometimes, when he feels a memory encroaching, just a single one, easy to control and dismiss, he sings or plays until it goes away, the music a shield between him and it.

He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday — cooking dinner, filing books at the library, frosting a cake at Batter, looking up an article for Harold — and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. In those years, the memories were tableaux, not narratives, and he would see a single one repeatedly for days: a diorama of Brother Luke on top of him, or one of the counselors from the home, who used to grab him as he walked by, or a client emptying his change from his pants pockets and setting it in the dish on the nightstand that Brother Luke had placed there for that purpose. And sometimes the memories were briefer and vaguer still: a client’s blue sock patterned with horse heads that he had worn even in bed; the first meal in Philadelphia that Dr. Traylor had ever given him (a burger; a paper sleeve of French fries); a peachy woolen pillow in his room at Dr. Traylor’s house that he could never look at without thinking of torn flesh. When these memories announced themselves, he would find himself disoriented: it always took him a moment to remember that these scenes were not only from his life, but his life itself. In those days, he would let them interrupt him, and there would be times in which he would come out of his spell and would find his hand still wrapped around the plastic cone of frosting poised over the cookie before him, or still holding the book half on, half off the shelf. It was then that he began comprehending how much of his life he had learned to simply erase, even days after it had happened, and also that somehow, somewhere, he had lost that ability. He knew it was the price of enjoying life, that if he was to be alert to the things he now found pleasure in, he would have to accept its cost as well. Because as assaultive as his memories were, his life coming back to him in pieces, he knew he would endure them if it meant he could also have friends, if he kept being granted the ability to take comfort in others.

He thought of it as a slight parting of worlds, in which something buried wisped up from the loamy, turned earth and hovered before him, waiting for him to recognize it and claim it as his own. Their very reappearance was defiant: Here we are, they seemed to say to him. Did you really think we would let you abandon us? Did you really think we wouldn’t come back? Eventually, he was also made to recognize how much he had edited — edited and reconfigured, refashioned into something easier to accept — from even the past few years: the film he had seen his junior year of two detectives coming to tell a student at college that the man who had hurt him had died in prison hadn’t been a film at all — it had been his life, and he had been the student, and he had stood there in the Quad outside of Hood, and the two detectives were the people who had found him and arrested Dr. Traylor in the field that night, and they had taken him to the hospital and had made sure Dr. Traylor had gone to prison, and they had come to find him to tell him in person that he had nothing to fear again. “Pretty fancy stuff,” one of the detectives had said, looking around him at the beautiful campus, at its old brick buildings where you could go and be absolutely safe. “We’re proud of you, Jude.” But he had fuzzed this memory, he had changed it to the detective simply saying “We’re proud of you,” and had left off his name, just as he had left out the panic he now remembered he had vividly felt despite their news, the dread that later someone would ask him who those people were that he had been talking to, the almost nauseous wrongness of his past life intruding so physically on his present.

Eventually he had learned how to manage the memories. He couldn’t stop them — after they had begun, they had never ended — but he had grown more adept at anticipating their arrival. He became able to diagnose it, that moment or day in which he could tell that something was going to visit him, and he would have to figure out how it wanted to be addressed: Did it want confrontation, or soothing, or simply attention? He would determine what sort of hospitality it wanted, and then he would determine how to make it leave, to retreat back to that other place.

A small memory he could contain, but as the days go by and he waits for Willem, he recognizes that this is a long eel of a memory, slippery and uncatchable, and it whipsaws its way through him, its tail slapping against his organs so that he feels the memory as something alive and wounding, feels its meaty, powerful smack against his intestines, his heart, his lungs. Sometimes they were like this, and these were the hardest to lasso and corral, and with every day it seems to grow inside him, until he feels himself stuffed not with blood and muscle and water and bone but with the memory itself, expanding balloon-like to inflate his very fingertips. After Caleb, he had realized that there were some memories he was simply not going to be able to control, and so his only recourse was to wait until they had tired themselves out, until they swam back into the dark of his subconscious and left him alone again.

And so he waits, letting the memory — the nearly two weeks he had spent in trucks, trying to get from Montana to Boston — occupy him, as if his very mind, his body, is a motel, and this memory his sole guest. His challenge in this period is to fulfill his promise to Willem, to not cut himself, and so he creates a strict and consuming schedule for the hours between midnight and four a.m., which are the most dangerous. On Saturday he makes a list of what he will do each night for the next few weeks, rotating swimming with cooking and piano-playing and baking and work at Richard’s and sorting through all of his and Willem’s old clothes and pruning the bookcases and resewing the loose buttons on Willem’s shirt that he was going to have Mrs. Zhou do but is perfectly capable of doing himself and cleaning out the detritus that has accumulated in the drawer near the stove: twist ties and sticky rubber bands and safety pins and matchbooks. He makes pints of chicken stock and ground-lamb meatballs for Willem’s return and freezes them, and bakes loaves of bread for Richard to take to the food kitchen where they are both on the board and whose finances he helps administer. After feeding the starter, he sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged. He wishes he had a pet — a dumb, grateful dog, panting and smiling; a frigid cat, glaring judgmentally at him through her slitted orange eyes — some other breathing thing in the apartment that he could speak to, the sound of whose soft padding footsteps would bring him back to himself. He works all night, and just before he drops off to sleep, he cuts himself — once on the left arm, once on the right — and when he wakes, he is tired but proud of himself for making it through intact.

But then it is two weeks before Willem is to come home, and just as the memory is fading, checking out of him until the next time it comes to visit, the hyenas return. Or perhaps return is the wrong word, because once Caleb introduced them into his life, they have never left. Now, however, they don’t chase him, because they know they don’t need to: his life is a vast savanna, and he is surrounded by them. They lie splayed in the yellow grass, drape themselves lazily over the baobab trees’ low branches that spread from their trunks like tentacles, and stare at him with their keen yellow eyes. They are always there, and after he and Willem began having sex, they multiplied, and on bad days, or on days when he was particularly dreading it, they multiply further. On those days, he can feel their whiskers twitch as he moves slowly through their territory, he can feel their careless derision: he knows he is theirs, and they know it, too.

And although he craves the vacations from sex that Willem’s work provides him, he knows too that he ought not to, for the reentry into that world is always difficult; it had been that way when he was a child, too, when the only thing worse than the rhythms of sex had been readjusting to the rhythms of sex. “I can’t wait to come home and see you,” Willem says when they next speak, and although there is nothing leering in his tone, although he hasn’t mentioned sex at all, he knows from past experience that Willem will want to have it the night of his return, and that he will want to have it more times than usual for the remainder of his first week back home, and that he will especially want to have it because both of them had taken turns being sick on his two furloughs and so nothing had happened either time.

“Me too,” he says.

“How’s the cutting?” Willem asks, lightly, as if he’s asking about how Julia’s maple trees are faring, or how the weather is. He always asks this at the end of their conversations, as if the subject is something he’s only mildly interested in and is inquiring about to be polite.

“Fine,” he says, as he always does. “Only twice this week,” he adds, and this is true.

“Good, Judy,” Willem says. “Thank god. I know it’s hard. But I’m proud of you.” He always sounds so relieved in these moments, as if he is expecting to hear — which he probably is — some other answer entirely: Not well, Willem. I cut myself so much last night that my arm fell off entirely. I don’t want you to be surprised when you see me. He feels a mix of genuine pride, then, both that Willem should trust him so much and that he is actually getting to tell him the truth, and an enervating, bone-deep sorrow, that Willem should have to ask him at all, that this should be something that they are actually proud of. Other people are proud of their boyfriends’ talents or looks or athleticism; Willem, however, gets to be proud that his boyfriend has managed to pass another night without slicing himself with a razor.

And then, finally, there comes an evening in which he knows that his efforts will not satisfy him any longer: he needs to cut himself, extensively and severely. The hyenas are beginning to make little howls, sharp yelps that seem to come from some other creature within them, and he knows that they will be quieted only by his pain. He considers what to do: Willem will be home in a week. If he cuts himself now, the cuts won’t heal properly before he returns, and Willem will be angry. But if he doesn’t do something — then he doesn’t know. He has to, he has to. He has waited too long, he realizes; he has thought he could see himself through; he has been unrealistic.

He gets up from bed and walks through the empty apartment, into the quiet kitchen. The night’s schedule — cookies for Harold; organize Willem’s sweaters; Richard’s studio — glows whitely from the counter, ignored but beckoning, pleading to be heeded, the salvation it offers as flimsy as the paper it’s printed on. For a moment he stands, unable to move, and then slowly, reluctantly, he walks to the door above the staircase and unbolts it, and then, after another moment’s pause, swings it open.

He hasn’t opened this door since the night with Caleb, and now he leans into its mouth, looking down into its black, clutching its frame as he had on that night, wondering if he can bring himself to do it. He knows this will appease the hyenas. But there is something so degrading about it, so extreme, so sick, that he knows that if he were to do it, he will have crossed some line, that he will, in fact, have become someone who needs to be hospitalized. Finally, finally, he unsticks himself from the frame, his hands shaking, and slams the door shut, slams the bolt back into its slot, and stumps away from it.

At work the next day, he goes downstairs with another of the partners, Sanjay, and a client so the client can smoke. They have a few clients who smoke, and when they go downstairs, he goes with them, and they continue their meeting on the sidewalk. Lucien had a theory that smokers are most comfortable, and relaxed, while smoking, and therefore easier to manipulate in the moment, and although he had laughed when Lucien had told him that, he knows he’s probably correct.

He is in his wheelchair that day because his feet are throbbing, although he hates to have the clients see him so impaired. “Believe me, Jude,” Lucien had said when he had worried aloud about this to him years ago, “the clients think you’re the same ball-crushing asshole whether you’re sitting down or standing up, so for god’s sake, stay in your chair.” Outside it is cold and dry, which makes his feet hurt a little less for some reason, and as the three of them talk, he finds himself staring, hypnotized, at the small orange flame at the tip of the client’s cigarette, which winks at him, growing duller and brighter, as the client exhales and inhales. Suddenly, he knows what he is going to do, but that revelation is followed almost instantly by a blunt punch to his abdomen, because he knows that he is going to betray Willem, and not only is he going to betray him but he is going to lie to him as well.

That day is a Friday, and as he drives to Andy’s, he works out his plan, excited and relieved to have a solution. Andy is in one of his cheerful, combative moods, and he allows himself to be distracted by him, by his brisk energy. Somewhere along the way, he and Andy have begun speaking of his legs the way one would of a troublesome and wayward relative who is nonetheless impossible to abandon and in need of constant care. “The old bastards,” Andy calls them, and the first time he did, he had begun laughing at the accuracy of the nickname, with its suggestion of exasperation that always threatened to overshadow the underlying and reluctant fondness.

“How’re the old bastards?” Andy asks him now, and he smiles and says, “Lazy and sucking up all my resources, as usual.”

But his mind is also full of what he is about to do, and when Andy asks him, “And what does your better half have to say for himself these days?” he snaps at him: “What do you mean by that?” and Andy stops and looks at him, curiously. “Nothing,” he says. “I just wanted to know how Willem’s doing.”

Willem, he thinks, and simply hearing his name said aloud fills him with anguish. “He’s great,” he says, quietly.

At the end of the appointment, as always, Andy examines his arms, and this time, as he has for the last few times, grunts his approval. “You’ve really cut back,” he says. “No pun intended.”

“You know me — always trying to better myself,” he says, keeping his tone jocular, but Andy looks him in the eyes. “I know,” he says, softly. “I know it must be hard, Jude. But I’m glad, I really am.”

Over dinner, Andy complains about his brother’s new boyfriend, whom he hates. “Andy,” he tells him, “you can’t hate all of Beckett’s boyfriends.”

“I know, I know,” Andy says. “It’s just that he’s such a lightweight, and Beckett could do so much better. I did tell you he pronounced Proust as Prowst, right?”

“Several times,” he says, smiling to himself. He had met this new reviled boyfriend of Beckett’s — a sweet, jovial aspiring landscape architect — at a dinner party at Andy’s three months ago. “But Andy — I thought he was nice. And he loves Beckett. And anyway, are you really going to sit around having conversations about Proust with him?”

Andy sighs. “You sound like Jane,” he says, grouchily.

“Well,” he says, smiling again. “Maybe you should listen to Jane.” He laughs, then, feeling lighter than he has in weeks, and not just because of Andy’s sulky expression. “There are worse crimes than not being fully conversant with Swann’s Way, you know.”

As he drives home, he thinks of his plan, but then realizes he will have to wait, because he is going to claim that he has burned himself in a cooking accident, and if something goes wrong and he has to see Andy, Andy will ask him why he was cooking on the same night they were eating dinner. Tomorrow, then, he thinks; I’ll do it tomorrow. That way, he can write an e-mail to Willem tonight in which he’ll mention that he’s going to try to make the fried plantains JB likes: a semi-spontaneous decision that will go terribly wrong.

You do know that this is how mentally ill people make their plans, says the dry and belittling voice inside him. You do know that this planning is something only a sick person would do.

Stop it, he tells it. Stop it. The fact that I know this is sick means I’m not. At that, the voice hoots with laughter: at his defensiveness, at his six-year-old’s illogic, at his revulsion for the word “sick,” his fear that it might attach itself to him. But even the voice, its mocking, swaggering distaste for him, isn’t enough to stop him.

The next evening he changes into a short-sleeve T-shirt, one of Willem’s, and goes to the kitchen. He arranges everything he needs: the olive oil; a long wooden match. He places his left forearm in the sink, as if it’s a bird to be plucked, and chooses an area a few inches above where his palm begins, before taking the paper towel he’s wet with oil and rubbing it onto his skin in an apricot-sized circle. He stares for a few seconds at the gleaming grease stain, and then he takes a breath and strikes the match against the side of its box and holds the flame to his skin until he catches on fire.

The pain is — what is the pain? Ever since the injury, there has not been a single day in which he is not in some sort of pain. Sometimes the pain is infrequent, or mild, or intermittent. But it is always there. “You have to be careful,” Andy is always telling him. “You’ve gotten so inured to it that you’ve lost the ability to recognize when it’s a sign of something worse. So even if it’s only a five or a six, if it looks like this”—they had been speaking about one of the wounds on his legs around which he had noticed that the skin was turning a poisonous blackish gray, the color of rot—“then you have to imagine that for most people it would be a nine or a ten, and you have to, have to come see me. Okay?”

But this pain is a pain he has not felt in decades, and he screams and screams. Voices, faces, scraps of memories, odd associations whir through his mind: the smell of smoking olive oil leads him to a memory of a meal of roasted funghi he and Willem had had in Perugia, which leads him to a Tintoretto exhibit that he and Malcolm had seen in their twenties at the Frick, which leads him to a boy in the home everyone called Frick, but he never knew why, as the boy’s name was Jed, which leads him to the nights in the barn, which leads him to a bale of hay in an empty, fog-smeared meadow outside Sonoma against which he and Brother Luke had once had sex, which leads him to, and to, and to, and to, and to. He smells burning meat, and he breaks out of his trance and looks wildly at the stove, as if he has left something there, a slab of steak seething to itself in a pan, but there is nothing, and he realizes he is smelling himself, his own arm cooking beneath him, and this makes him turn on the faucet at last and the water splashing against the burn, the oily smoke rising from it, makes him scream again. And then he is reaching, again wildly, with his right arm, his left still lying useless in the sink, an amputation in a kidney-shaped metal bowl, and he is grabbing the container of sea salt from the cupboard above the stove, and he is sobbing, rubbing a handful of the sharp-edged crystals into the burn, which reactivates the pain into something whiter than white, and it is as if he is staring into the sun and he is blinded.

When he wakes, he is on the floor, his head against the cupboard beneath the sink. His limbs are jerking; he is feverish, but he is cold, and he presses himself against the cupboard as if it is something soft, as if it will consume him. Behind his closed eyelids he sees the hyenas, licking their snouts as if they have literally fed upon him. Happy? he asks them. Are you happy? They cannot answer, of course, but they are dazed and satiated; he can see their vigilance waning, their large eyes shutting contentedly.

The next day he has a fever. It takes him an hour to get from the kitchen to his bed; his feet are too sore, and he cannot pull himself on his arms. He doesn’t sleep so much as move in and out of consciousness, the pain sloshing through him like a tide, sometimes receding enough to let him wake, sometimes consuming him beneath a grayed, filthy wave. Late that night he rouses himself enough to look at his arm, where there is a large crisped circle, black and venomous, as if it is a piece of land where he has been practicing a terrifying occult ritual: witch-burning, perhaps. Animal sacrifice. A summoning of spirits. It looks not like skin at all (and indeed, it no longer is) but like something that never was skin: like wood, like paper, like tarmac, all burned to ash.

By Monday, he knows it will become infected. At lunchtime he changes the bandage he had applied the night before, and as he eases it off, his skin tears as well, and he stuffs his pocket square into his mouth so he won’t scream out loud. But things are falling out of his arm, clots with the consistency of blood but the color of coal, and he sits on the floor of his bathroom, rocking himself back and forth, his stomach heaving forth old food and acids, his arm heaving forth its own disease, its own excretia.

The next day the pain is worse, and he leaves work early to go see Andy. “My god,” Andy says, seeing the wound, and for once, he is silent, utterly, which terrifies him.

“Can you fix it?” he whispers, because until that point, he had never thought himself capable of hurting himself in a way that couldn’t be fixed. He has, suddenly, a vision of Andy telling him he will lose the arm altogether, and the next thing he thinks is: What will I tell Willem?

But “Yes,” Andy says. “I’ll do what I can, and then you need to go to the hospital. Lie back.” He does, and lets Andy irrigate the wound and clean and dress it, lets Andy apologize to him when he cries out.

He is there for an hour, and when he is finally able to sit — Andy has given him a shot to numb the area — the two of them are silent.

“Are you going to tell me how you got a third-degree burn in such a perfect circle?” Andy asks him at last, and he ignores Andy’s chilly sarcasm, and instead recites to him his prepared story: the plantains, the grease fire.

Then there is another silence, this one different in a way he cannot explain but does not like. And then Andy says, very quietly, “You’re lying, Jude.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, his throat suddenly dry despite the orange juice he has been drinking.

“You’re lying,” Andy repeats, still in that same quiet voice, and he slides off the examining table, the bottle of juice slipping from his grasp and shattering on the floor, and moves for the door.

“Stop,” Andy says, and he is cold, and furious. “Jude, you fucking tell me now. What did you do?”

“I told you,” he says, “I told you.”

“No,” Andy says. “You tell me what you did, Jude. You say the words. Say them. I want to hear you say them.”

“I told you,” he shouts, and he feels so terrible, his brain thumping against his skull, his feet thrust full of smoldering iron ingots, his arm with its simmering cauldron burned into it. “Let me go, Andy. Let me go.”

“No,” Andy says, and he too is shouting. “Jude, you — you—” He stops, and he stops as well, and they both wait to hear what Andy will say. “You’re sick, Jude,” he says, in a low, frantic voice. “You’re crazy. This is crazy behavior. This is behavior that could and should get you locked away for years. You’re sick, you’re sick and you’re crazy and you need help.”

“Don’t you dare call me crazy,” he yells, “don’t you dare. I’m not, I’m not.”

But Andy ignores him. “Willem gets back on Friday, right?” he asks, although he knows the answer already. “You have one week from tonight to tell him, Jude. One week. And after that, I’m telling him myself.”

“You can’t legally do that, Andy,” he shouts, and everything spins before him. “I’ll sue you for so much that you won’t even—”

“Better check your recent case law, counselor,” Andy hisses back at him. “Rodriguez versus Mehta. Two years ago. If a patient who’s been involuntarily committed attempts serious self-injury again, the patient’s doctor has the right — no, the obligation—to inform the patient’s partner or next of kin, whether that patient has fucking given consent or not.”

He is struck silent then, reeling from pain and fear and the shock of what Andy has just told him. The two of them are still standing in the examining room, that room he has visited so many, so many times, but he can feel his legs pleating beneath him, can feel the misery overtake him, can feel his anger ebb. “Andy,” he says, and he can hear the beg in his voice, “please don’t tell him. Please don’t. If you tell him, he’ll leave me.” As he says it, he knows it is true. He doesn’t know why Willem will leave him — whether it will be because of what he has done or because he has lied about it — but he knows he is correct. Willem will leave him, even though he has done what he has done so he can keep having sex, because if he stops having sex, he knows Willem will leave him anyway.

“Not this time, Jude,” says Andy, and although he isn’t yelling any longer, his voice is grim and determined. “I’m not covering for you this time. You have one week.”

“It’s not his business, though,” he says, desperately. “It’s my own.”

“That’s the thing, though, Jude,” Andy says. “It is his business. That’s what being in a goddamned relationship is — don’t you understand that yet? Don’t you get that you just can’t do what you want? Don’t you get that when you hurt yourself, you’re hurting him as well?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, gripping the side of the examining table with his right hand to try to remain upright. “No. I do this to myself so I won’t hurt him. I’m doing it to spare him.”

“No,” Andy says. “If you ruin this, Jude — if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exactly as you are — then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be your fault. And it’ll be your fault not because of who you are or what’s been done to you or the diseases you have or what you think you look like, but because of how you behave, because you won’t trust Willem enough to talk to him honestly, to extend to him the same sort of generosity and faith that he has always, always extended to you. I know you think you’re sparing him, but you’re not. You’re selfish. You’re selfish and you’re stubborn and you’re proud and you’re going to ruin the best thing that has happened to you. Don’t you understand that?”

He is speechless for the second time that evening, and it is only when he begins, finally, to fall, so tired is he, that Andy reaches out and grabs him around his waist and the conversation ends.

He spends the next three nights in the hospital, at Andy’s insistence. During the day, he goes to work, and then he comes back in the evening and Andy readmits him. There are two plastic bags dangling above him, one for each arm. One, he knows, has only glucose in it. The second has something else, something that makes the pain furry and gentle and that makes sleep something inky and still, like the dark blue skies in a Japanese woodblock print of winter, all snow and a silent traveler wearing a woven-straw hat beneath.

It is Friday. He returns home. Willem will be arriving at around ten that night, and although Mrs. Zhou has already cleaned, he wants to make certain there is no evidence, that he has hidden every clue, although without context, the clues — salt, matches, olive oil, paper towels — are not clues at all, they are symbols of their life together, they are things they both reach for daily.

He still hasn’t decided what he will do. He has until the following Sunday — he has begged nine extra days from Andy, has convinced him that because of the holidays, because they are driving to Boston next Wednesday for Thanksgiving, that he needs the time — to either tell Willem, or (although he doesn’t say this) to convince Andy to change his mind. Both scenarios seem equally impossible. But he will try anyway. One of the problems with having slept so much these past few nights is that he has had very little time to think about how he can negotiate this situation. He feels he has become a spectacle to himself, with all the beings who inhabit him — the ferret-like creature; the hyenas; the voices — watching to see what he will do, so they can judge him and scoff at him and tell him he’s wrong.

He sits down on the living-room sofa to wait, and when he opens his eyes, Willem is sitting next to him, smiling at him and saying his name, and he puts his arms around him, careful not to let his left arm exert any pressure, and for that one moment, everything seems both possible — and indescribably difficult.

How could I go on without this? he asks himself.

And then: What am I going to do?

Nine days, the voice inside him nags. Nine days. But he ignores it.

“Willem,” he says aloud, from within the huddle of Willem’s arms. “You’re home, you’re home.” He gives a long exhalation of air; hopes Willem doesn’t hear its shudder. “Willem,” he says again and again, letting his name fill his mouth. “Willem, Willem — you don’t know how much I missed you.”

The best part about going away is coming home. Who said that? Not him, but it might as well have been, he thinks as he moves through the apartment. It is noon: a Tuesday, and tomorrow they will drive to Boston.

If you love home — and even if you don’t — there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back. That week, even the things that would irritate you — the alarm waahing from some car at three in the morning; the pigeons who come to clutter and cluck on the windowsill behind your bed when you’re trying to sleep in — seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it.

Also that week, the things you like anyway seem, in their very existence, to be worthy of celebration: the candied-walnut vendor on Crosby Street who always returns your wave as you jog past him; the falafel sandwich with extra pickled radish from the truck down the block that you woke up craving one night in London; the apartment itself, with its sunlight that lopes from one end to the other in the course of a day, with your things and food and bed and shower and smells.

And, of course, there is the person you come back to: his face and body and voice and scent and touch, his way of waiting until you finish whatever you’re saying, no matter how lengthy, before he speaks, the way his smile moves so slowly across his face that it reminds you of moonrise, how clearly he has missed you and how clearly happy he is to have you back. Then there are the things, if you are particularly lucky, that this person has done for you while you’re away: how in the pantry, in the freezer, in the refrigerator will be all the food you like to eat, the scotch you like to drink. There will be the sweater you thought you lost the previous year at the theater, clean and folded and back on its shelf. There will be the shirt with its dangling buttons, but the buttons will be sewn back in place. There will be your mail stacked on one side of his desk; there will be a contract for an advertising campaign you’re going to do in Germany for an Austrian beer, with his notes in the margin to discuss with your lawyer. And there will be no mention of it, and you will know that it was done with genuine pleasure, and you will know that part of the reason — a small part, but a part — you love being in this apartment and in this relationship is because this other person is always making a home for you, and that when you tell him this, he won’t be offended but pleased, and you’ll be glad, because you meant it with gratitude. And in these moments — almost a week back home — you will wonder why you leave so often, and you will wonder whether, after the next year’s obligations are fulfilled, you ought not just stay here for a period, where you belong.

But you will also know — as he knows — that part of your constant leaving is reactive. After his relationship with Jude was made public, while he and Kit and Emil were waiting to see what would happen next, he had experienced that same insecurity that had visited him as a younger man: What if he never worked again? What if this was it? And although things had, he could now see, continued with almost no discernible hitch at all, it had taken him a year to be reassured that his circumstances hadn’t changed, that he was still as he had been, desirable to some directors and not to others (“Bullshit,” Kit had said, and he was grateful for him; “anyone would want to work with you”), and at any rate, the same actor, no better or worse, that he had been before.

But if he was allowed to be the same actor, he was not allowed to be the same person, and in the months after he was declared gay — and never refuted it; he didn’t have a publicist to issue these sorts of denials and avowals — he found himself in possession of more identities than he’d had in a very long time. For much of his adult life, he had been placed in circumstances that required the shedding of selves: no longer was he a brother; no longer was he a son. But with a single revelation, he had now become a gay man; a gay actor; a high-profile gay actor; a high-profile, nonparticipating gay actor; and, finally, a high-profile traitorous gay actor. A year or so ago he had gone to dinner with a director named Max whom he’d known for many years, and over dinner Max had tried to get him to give a speech at a gala dinner benefiting a gay-rights organization at which he would announce himself as gay. Willem had always supported this organization, and he told Max that although he would be pleased to present an award or sponsor a table — as he had every year for the past decade — he wouldn’t come out, because he didn’t believe there was anything to come out of: he wasn’t gay.

“Willem,” Max said, “you’re in a relationship, a serious relationship, with a man. That is the very definition of gay.”

“I’m not in a relationship with a man,” he said, hearing how absurd the words were, “I’m in a relationship with Jude.”

“Oh my god,” Max muttered.

He’d sighed. Max was sixteen years older than he; he had come of age in a time when identity politics were your very identity, and he understood Max’s — and the other people who pecked at and pleaded with him to come out, and then accused him of self-loathing, and cowardice, and hypocrisy, and denial, when he didn’t — arguments; he understood that he had come to represent something he had never asked to represent; he understood that whether he wanted this representation or not was almost incidental. But he still couldn’t do it.

Jude had told him that he and Caleb had told no one in their lives about the other, and although Jude’s secretiveness had been motivated by shame (and Caleb’s, Willem could only hope, by at least some small glint of guilt), he too felt that his relationship with Jude existed to no one but themselves: it seemed something sacred, and fought-for, and unique to them. Of course, this was ridiculous, but it was the way he felt — to be an actor in his position was to be, in many ways, a possession, to be fought over and argued about and criticized by anyone who wanted to say something, anything, about his abilities or appearance or performance. But his relationship was different: in it, he played a role for one other person, and that person was his only audience, and no one else ever saw it, no matter how much they thought they might.

His relationship also felt sacred because he had just recently — in the last six months or so — felt he had gotten the rhythm of it. The person he thought he knew had turned out to be, in some ways, not the person before him, and it had taken him time to figure out how many facets he had yet to see: it was as if the shape he had all along thought was a pentagram was in reality a dodecahedron, many sided and many fractaled and much more complicated to measure. Despite this, he had never considered leaving: he stayed, unquestioningly, out of love, out of loyalty, out of curiosity. But it hadn’t been easy. In truth, it had been at times aggressively difficult, and in some ways remained so. When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.

The primary issue was sex: their sexual life, and Jude’s attitude about it. Toward the end of the ten-month period in which he and Jude had been together and he had been waiting for him to be ready (the longest sustained period of celibacy he had endured since he was fifteen, and which he had accomplished as partly a challenge to himself, the way other people stopped eating bread or pasta because their boyfriends or girlfriends had stopped eating them as well), he had begun to seriously worry about where this was all going, and about whether sex was something Jude was simply not capable of. Somehow he knew, and had always known, that Jude had been abused, that something awful (maybe several things awful) had happened to him, but to his shame, he was unable to find the words to discuss it with him. He told himself that even if he could find the words, Jude wouldn’t talk about it until he was ready, but the truth, Willem knew, was that he was too much of a coward, and that cowardice was really the only reason for his inaction. But then he had come home from Texas, and they’d had sex after all, and he had been relieved, and relieved too that he had enjoyed it as much as he had, that there had been nothing strained or unnatural about it, and when it turned out that Jude was much more sexually dextrous than he had assumed he would be, he allowed himself to be relieved a third time. He couldn’t bring himself, however, to determine why Jude was so experienced: Had Richard been right, and had Jude been leading some sort of double life all this time? It seemed too tidy an explanation. And yet the alternative — that this was knowledge Jude had accumulated before they had met, which meant these would have been lessons learned in childhood — was overwhelming to him. And so, to his great guilt, he said nothing. He chose to believe the theory that made his life less complicated.

One night, though, he’d had a dream that he and Jude had just had sex (which they had) and that Jude was next to him and crying, trying to stay silent and failing, and he knew, even in the dream, why he was crying: because he hated what he was doing; he hated what Willem was making him do. The next night he had asked Jude, outright: Do you like this? And he had waited, not knowing what the answer would be, until Jude had said yes, and then he had been relieved yet again: that the fiction could continue, that their equilibrium would remain unchanged, that he wouldn’t have to have a conversation that he didn’t know how to begin, much less lead. He had an image of a little boat, a dinghy, rocking wildly on the waves, but then righting itself again and sailing placidly on, even though the waters beneath it were black and filled with monsters and floes of seaweed that threatened with every current to pull the poor small boat beneath the ocean’s surface, where it would glug out of sight and be lost.

But every so often, too sporadically and randomly to track, there would be moments when he would see Jude’s face as he pushed into him, or, after, would feel his silence, so black and total that it was almost gaseous, and he would know that Jude had lied to him: that he had asked him a question to which only one answer was acceptable, and Jude had given him that answer, but that he hadn’t meant it. And then he would argue with himself, trying to justify his behavior, and reproving himself for it as well. But when he was being very honest, he knew there was a problem.

Though he couldn’t quite articulate what the problem was: after all, Jude always seemed to want to have sex whenever he did. (Though wasn’t that suspicious in itself?) But he had never met anyone who was so opposed to foreplay, who didn’t want to even discuss sex, who never said the very word. “This is embarrassing, Willem,” Jude would say whenever he tried. “Let’s just do it.” He felt, often, as if their sessions together were being timed, and that his job was to perform as quickly and thoroughly as he could and then never talk about it. He was less concerned with Jude’s lack of erections than he was with the curious sensation he sometimes experienced — too indefinable and contradictory to even name it with language — that with every encounter they had, he was drawing closer to Jude, even as Jude pulled further from him. Jude said all the right things; he made all the right sounds; he was affectionate and willing: but still, Willem knew something, something was wrong. He found it bewildering; people had always enjoyed having sex with him — so what was happening here? Perversely, it made him want to have it more, if only so he could find some answers, even if he also dreaded them.

And in the same way he knew there was a problem with their sex life, he also knew — knew without knowing, without ever being told — that Jude’s cutting was related to the sex. This realization would always make him shiver, as would his old, careworn way of excusing himself—Willem Ragnarsson, what do you think you’re doing? You’re too dumb to figure this out—from further exploration, from plunging an arm into the snake- and centipede-squirming muck of Jude’s past to find that many-paged book, sheathed in yellowed plastic, that would explain someone he had thought he had fundamentally understood. And then he would think how none of them — not he, not Malcolm, not JB or Richard or even Harold — had been brave enough to try. They had found other reasons to keep themselves from having to dirty their hands. Andy was the only person who could say otherwise.

And yet it was easy for him to pretend, to ignore what he knew, because most of the time, pretending was easy: because they were friends, because they liked being around each other, because he loved Jude, because they had a life together, because he was attracted to him, because he desired him. But there was the Jude he knew in the daylight, and even in the dusk and dawn, and then there was the Jude who possessed his friend for a few hours each night, and that Jude, he sometimes feared, was the real Jude: the one who haunted their apartment alone, the one whom he had watched draw the razor so slowly down his arm, his eyes wide with agony, the one whom he could never reach, no matter how many reassurances he made, no matter how many threats he levied. It sometimes seemed as if it was that Jude who truly directed their relationship, and when he was present, no one, not even Willem, could dispel him. And still, he remained stubborn: he would banish him, through the intensity and the force and the determination of his love. He knew this was childish, but all stubborn acts are childish acts. Here, stubbornness was his only weapon. Patience; stubbornness; love: he had to believe these would be enough. He had to believe that they would be stronger than any habit of Jude’s, no matter how long or diligently practiced.

Sometimes he was given progress reports of sorts from Andy and Harold, both of whom thanked him whenever they saw him, which he found unnecessary but reassuring, because it meant that the changes he thought he saw in Jude — a heightened sense of demonstrativeness; a certain diminishment of physical self-consciousness — weren’t things he was imagining after all. But he also felt keenly alone, alone with his new suspicions about Jude and the depths of his difficulties, alone with the knowledge that he was unable or unwilling to properly address those difficulties. A few times he had been very close to contacting Andy and asking him what to do, asking him whether he was making the right decisions. But he hadn’t.

Instead, he allowed his native optimism to obscure his fears, to make their relationship into something essentially joyous and sunny. Often he was struck by the sensation — which he had experienced at Lispenard Street as well — that they were playing house, that he was living some boyhood fantasy of running away from the world and its rules with his best friend and living in some unsuitable but perfectly commodious structure (a train car; a tree house) that wasn’t meant to be a home but had become one because of its occupants’ shared conviction to make it so. Mr. Irvine hadn’t been entirely wrong, he would think on those days when life felt like an extended slumber party, one they’d been having for almost three decades, one that gave him the thrilling feeling that they had gotten away with something large, something they were meant to have abandoned long ago: you went to parties and when someone said something ridiculous, you’d look across the table, and he’d look back at you, expressionless, with just the barest hint of a raised eyebrow, and you’d have to hurriedly drink some water to keep from spewing out your mouthful of food with laughter, and then back at your apartment — your ridiculously beautiful apartment, which you both appreciated an almost embarrassing amount, for reasons you never had to explain to the other — you would recap the entire awful dinner, laughing so much that you began to equate happiness with pain. Or you got to discuss your problems every night with someone smarter and more thoughtful than you, or talk about the continued awe and discomfort you both felt, all these years later, about having money, absurd, comic-book-villain money, or drive up to his parents’ house, one of you plugging into the car’s stereo an outlandish playlist, with which you would both sing along, loudly, being extravagantly silly as adults the way you never were as children. As you got older, you realized that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing. So: happy. Yes, he was happy. He didn’t have to think about it, not really. He was, he knew, a simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the most complicated of people.

“All I want,” he’d said to Jude one night, trying to explain the satisfaction that at that moment was burbling inside him, like water in a bright blue kettle, “is work I enjoy, and a place to live, and someone who loves me. See? Simple.”

Jude had laughed, sadly. “Willem,” he said, “that’s all I want, too.”

“But you have that,” he’d said, quietly, and Jude was quiet, too.

“Yes,” he said, at last. “You’re right.” But he hadn’t sounded convinced.

That Tuesday night, they are lying next to each other, half talking and half not in one of the meandering almost-conversations they have when they both want to stay awake but are both falling asleep, when Jude says his name with a sort of seriousness that makes him open his eyes. “What is it?” he asks him, and Jude’s face is so still, so sober, that he is frightened. “Jude?” he says. “Tell me.”

“Willem, you know I’ve been trying not to cut myself,” he says, and Willem nods at him and waits. “And I’m going to keep trying,” Jude continues. “But sometimes — sometimes I might not be able to control myself.”

“I know,” he says. “I know you’re trying. I know how hard it is for you.”

Jude turns from him then, and Willem rolls over and wraps his arms around him. “I just want you to understand if I make a mistake,” Jude says, and his voice is muffled.

“Of course I will,” he says. “Jude — of course I will.” There is a long silence, and he waits to see if Jude will say anything else. He is thin, with a marathon runner’s long muscles, but in the past six months, he has become thinner still, almost as thin as when he was released from the hospital, and Willem holds him a little tighter. “You’ve lost more weight,” he tells him.

“Work,” Jude says, and they are quiet again.

“I think you should eat more,” he says. He had to gain weight to play Turing, and although he’s lost some of it, he feels massive beside Jude, something puffed and expansive. “Andy’s going to think I’m not doing a good job taking care of you and he’s going to yell at me,” he adds, and Jude makes a sound he thinks is a laugh.

The next morning, the day before Thanksgiving, they are both cheery — they both like driving — and load their bag and the boxes of cookies and pies and breads that Jude has baked for Harold and Julia into the car and set off early, the car bouncing east over the cobble-stoned streets of SoHo, and then whooshing up the FDR Drive, singing along to the Duets soundtrack. Outside Worcester they stop at a gas station and Jude goes in to buy them mints and water. He waits in the car, leafing through the paper, and when Jude’s phone rings, he reaches over and sees who it is and answers it.

“Have you told Willem yet?” he hears Andy’s voice saying even before he can say hello. “You have three more days after today, Jude, and then I’m telling him myself. I mean it.”

“Andy?” he says, and there is a sudden, sharp silence.

“Willem,” Andy says. “Fuck.” In the background, he can hear a small child’s delighted voice trill out—“Uncle Andy said a bad word!”—and then Andy swears again, and he can hear a door sliding shut. “Why’re you answering Jude’s phone?” Andy asks. “Where is he?”

“We’re driving up to Harold and Julia’s,” he says. “He’s getting water.” On the other end, there is silence. “Tell me what, Andy?” he asks.

“Willem,” Andy says, and stops. “I can’t. I told him I’d let him do it.”

“Well, he hasn’t said anything to me,” he says, and he can feel himself fill with strata of emotions: fear layered upon irritation layered upon fear layered upon curiosity layered upon fear. “Andy, you’d better tell me,” he says. Something in him starts to panic. “Is it bad?” he asks. And then he begins to plead: “Andy, don’t do this to me.”

He hears Andy breathing, slowly. “Willem,” he says, quietly. “Ask him how he really got the burn on his arm. I have to go.”

“Andy!” he yells. “Andy!” But he’s gone.

He twists his head and looks out the window and sees Jude walking toward him. The burn, he thinks: What about the burn? Jude had gotten it when he tried to make the fried plantains JB likes. “Fucking JB,” he’d said, seeing the bandage wrapped around Jude’s arm. “Always fucking everything up,” and Jude had laughed. “Seriously, though,” he’d said, “are you okay, Judy?” And Jude had said he was: he had gone to Andy’s, and they had done a graft with some artificial skin-like material. They’d had an argument, then, that Jude hadn’t told him how serious the burn was — from Jude’s e-mail, he had assumed it was a singe, certainly not something worthy of a skin graft — and another one this morning when Jude insisted on driving, even though his arm was still clearly hurting him, but: What about the burn? And then, suddenly, he realizes that there is only one way to interpret Andy’s words, and he has to quickly lower his head because he is as dizzy as if someone had just hit him.

“Sorry,” Jude says, easing back into the car. “The line took forever.” He shakes the mints out of the bag, and then turns and sees him. “Willem?” he asks. “What’s wrong? You look terrible.”

“Andy called,” he says, and he watches Jude’s face, watches it become stony and scared. “Jude,” he says, and his own voice sounds far away, as if he’s speaking from the depths of a gulch, “how did you get the burn on your arm?” But Jude won’t answer him, just stares at him. This isn’t happening, he tells himself.

But of course it is. “Jude,” he repeats, “how did you get the burn on your arm?” But Jude only keeps staring at him, his lips closed, and he asks again, and again. Finally, “Jude!” he shouts, astonished by his own fury, and Jude ducks his head. “Jude! Tell me! Tell me right now!”

And then Jude says something so quietly he can’t hear him. “Louder,” he shouts at him. “I can’t hear you.”

“I burned myself,” Jude says at last, very softly.

“How?” he asks, wildly, and once again, Jude’s answer is delivered in such a low voice that he misses most of it, but he can still distinguish certain words: olive oil — match — fire.

“Why?” he yells, desperately. “Why did you do this, Jude?” He is so angry — at himself, at Jude — that for the first time since he has known him, he wants to hit him, he can see his fist smashing into Jude’s nose, into his cheek. He wants to see his face shattered, and he wants to be the one to do it.

“I was trying not to cut myself,” Jude says, tinily, and this makes him newly livid.

“So it’s my fault?” he asks. “You’re doing this to punish me?”

“No,” Jude pleads with him, “no, Willem, no — I just—”

But he interrupts him. “Why have you never told me who Brother Luke is?” he hears himself ask.

He can tell that Jude is startled. “What?” he asks.

“You promised me you would,” he says. “Remember? It was my birthday present.” The final words sound more sarcastic than he intended. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me right now.”

“I can’t, Willem,” Jude says. “Please. Please.”

He sees that Jude is in agony, and still he pushes. “You’ve had four years to figure out how to do it,” he says, and as Jude moves to put the keys in the ignition, he reaches over and snatches them from him. “I think that’s enough of a grace period. Tell me right now,” and then, when there is still no reaction, he shouts at Jude again: “Tell me.”

“He was one of the brothers at the monastery,” Jude whispers.

“And?” he screams at him. I am so stupid, he thinks, even as he yells. I am so, so, so stupid. I am so gullible. And then, simultaneously: He’s scared of me. I’m yelling at someone I love and making him scared of me. He suddenly remembers yelling at Andy all those years ago: You’re mad because you can’t figure out how to make him better and so you’re taking it out on me. Oh god, he thinks. Oh god. Why am I doing this?

“And I ran away with him,” Jude says, his voice so faint now that Willem has to lean in to hear him.

“And?” he says, but he can see that Jude is about to cry, and suddenly, he stops, and leans back, exhausted and disgusted with himself, and suddenly frightened as well: What if the next question he asks is the question that finally opens the gates, and everything he has ever wanted to know about Jude, everything he has never wanted to confront, comes surging out at last? They sit there for a long time, the car filling with their shaky breaths. He can feel his fingertips turning numb. “Let’s go,” he finally says.

“Where?” Jude asks, and Willem looks at him.

“We only have an hour to Boston,” he says. “And they’re expecting us,” and Jude nods, and wipes his face with his handkerchief, and takes the keys from him, and drives them slowly out of the gas station.

As they move down the highway, he has a sudden vision of what it really means to set yourself on fire. He thinks of the campfires he had built as a Boy Scout, the tepee of twigs you’d arrange around a knot of newspaper, the way the shimmering flames made the air around them wobbly, their awful beauty. And then he thinks of Jude doing that to his own skin, imagines orange chewing through his flesh, and he is sick. “Pull over,” he gasps to Jude, and Jude screeches off the road and he leans out of the car and vomits until he has nothing more to expel.

“Willem,” he hears Jude saying, and the sound of his voice enrages him and devastates him, both.

They are silent for the rest of the drive, and when Jude pulls the car bumpily into Harold and Julia’s driveway, there is a brief moment in which they look at each other, and it is as if he is looking at someone he has never seen before. He looks at Jude and sees a handsome man with long hands and legs and a beautiful face, the kind of face you look at and keep looking at, and if he were meeting this man at a party or at a restaurant, he would talk to him, because it would be an excuse to keep looking at him, and he would never think that this man would be someone who cut himself so much that the skin on his arms no longer felt like skin, but cartilage, or that he once dated someone who beat him so hard he could have died, or that one night he rubbed his skin with oil so that the flame he touched to his own body would burn brighter and faster, and that he had gotten this idea from someone who had once done this very thing to him, years ago, when he was a child and had done nothing worse than take something shiny and irresistible from a loathed and loathsome guardian’s desk.

He opens his mouth to say something when they hear Harold and Julia calling out their welcomes to them, and they both blink and turn and get out of the car, fixing their mouths into smiles as they do. As he kisses Julia, he can hear Harold, behind him, saying to Jude, “Are you okay? Are you sure? You look a little off,” and then Jude’s murmured assent.

He goes to the bedroom with their bag, and Jude goes directly to the kitchen. He takes out their toothbrushes and electric razors and puts them in the bathroom, and then he lies down on the bed.

He sleeps all afternoon; he is too overwhelmed to do anything else. Dinner is just the four of them, and he looks in the mirror, quickly practicing his laugh, before he joins the others in the dining room. Over dinner, Jude is very quiet, but Willem tries to talk and listen as if everything is normal, though it is difficult, as his mind is full of what he has learned.

Even through his rage and despair, he registers that Jude has almost nothing on his plate, but when Harold says, “Jude, you have to eat more; you’ve gotten way too skinny. Right, Willem?” and looks to him for the support and cajoling he would normally, reflexively offer, he instead shrugs. “Jude’s an adult,” he says, his voice odd to him. “He knows what’s best for him,” and out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Julia and Harold exchange glances with each other, and Jude look down at his plate. “I ate a lot when I was cooking,” he says, and they all know this is untrue, because Jude never snacks while he’s cooking, and doesn’t let anyone else do so, either: “The Snack Stasi,” JB calls him. He watches Jude absentmindedly cup his hand around his sweatered arm right where the burn would be, and then he looks up, and sees Willem staring, and drops his hand and looks back down again.

Somehow they get through dinner, and as he and Julia do the dishes, he keeps the conversation topical and light. After, they go to the living room, where Harold is waiting for him to watch the previous weekend’s game, which he has recorded. At the entryway to the room, he pauses: normally, he would join Jude and squash in beside him on the oversize, overstuffed chair that has been squished in next to what they call Harold’s Chair, but tonight he cannot sit next to Jude — he can barely look at him. And yet if he doesn’t, Julia and Harold will know for certain that something is seriously wrong between them. But as he hesitates, Jude stands and, as if anticipating his quandary, announces that he’s tired and is going to bed. “Are you sure?” Harold asks. “The evening’s just beginning.” But Jude says he is, and kisses Julia good night and waves vaguely in Harold and Willem’s direction, and once again, he sees Julia and Harold look at each other.

Julia eventually leaves as well — she has never understood the appeal of American football — and after she goes, Harold pauses the game and looks over at him. “Is everything okay with you two?” he asks, and Willem nods. Later, when he too is going to bed, Harold reaches out his hand for his own as he passes him. “You know, Willem,” he says, squeezing his palm, “Jude’s not the only one we love,” and he nods again, his vision blurring, and tells Harold good night and leaves.

Their bedroom is silent, and for a while he stands, staring at Jude’s form beneath the blanket. Willem can tell he’s not actually asleep — he is too still to actually be sleeping — but is pretending to be, and finally, he undresses, folding his clothes over the back of the chair near the dresser. When he slips into bed, he can tell Jude is still awake, and the two of them lie there for a long time on their opposite sides of the bed, both of them afraid of what he, Willem, might say.

He sleeps, though, and when he wakes, the room is more silent still, a real silence this time, and out of habit, he rolls toward Jude’s side of the bed, and opens his eyes when he realizes that Jude isn’t there, and that in fact his side of the bed is cool.

He sits. He stands. He hears a small sound, too small to even be named as sound, and then he turns and sees the bathroom door, closed. But all is dark. He goes to the door anyway, and fiercely turns the knob, slams it open, and the towel that’s been jammed under the door to blot out the light trails after it like a train. And there, leaning against the bathtub, is Jude, as he knew he would be, fully dressed, his eyes huge and terrified.

“Where is it?” he spits at him, although he wants to moan, he wants to cry: at his failing, at this horrible, grotesque play that is being performed night after night after night, for which he is the only, accidental audience, because even when there is no audience, the play is staged anyway to an empty house, its sole performer so diligent and dedicated that nothing can prevent him from practicing his craft.

“I’m not,” Jude says, and Willem knows he’s lying.

“Where is it, Jude?” he asks, and he crouches before him, seizes his hands: nothing. But he knows he has been cutting himself: he knows it from how large his eyes are, from how gray his lips are, from how his hands are shaking.

“I’m not, Willem, I’m not,” Jude says — they are speaking in whispers so they won’t wake Julia and Harold, one flight above them — and then, before he can think, he is tearing at Jude, trying to pull his clothes away from him, and Jude is fighting him but he can’t use his left arm at all and isn’t at his strongest anyway, and they are screaming at each other with no sound. He is on top of Jude, then, working his knees into his shoulders the way a fightmaster on a set once taught him to do, a method he knows both paralyzes and hurts, and then he is stripping Jude’s clothes off and Jude is frantic beneath him, threatening and then begging him to stop. He thinks, dully, that anyone watching them would think this was a rape, but he isn’t trying to rape, he reminds himself: he is trying to find the razor. And then he hears it, the ping of metal on tile, and he grabs the edge of it between his fingers and throws it behind him, and then goes back to undressing him, yanking his clothes away with a brutal efficiency that surprises him even as he does it, but it isn’t until he pulls down Jude’s underwear that he sees the cuts: six of them, in neat parallel horizontal stripes, high on his left thigh, and he releases Jude and scuttles away from him as if he is diseased.

“You — are — crazy,” he says, flatly and slowly, after his initial shock has lessened somewhat. “You’re crazy, Jude. To cut yourself on your legs, of all places. You know what can happen; you know you can get infected there. What the hell are you thinking?” He is gasping with exertion, with misery. “You’re sick,” he says, and he is recognizing, again as if Jude is a stranger, how thin he really is, and wondering why he hadn’t noticed before. “You’re sick. You need to be hospitalized. You need—”

“Stop trying to fix me, Willem,” Jude spits back at him. “What am I to you? Why are you with me anyway? I’m not your goddamned charity project. I was doing just fine without you.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks. “Sorry if I’m not living up to being the ideal boyfriend, Jude. I know you prefer your relationships heavy on the sadism, right? Maybe if I kicked you down the stairs a few times I’d be living up to your standards?” He sees Jude move back from him then, pressing himself hard against the tub, sees something in his eyes flatten and close.

“I’m not Hemming, Willem,” Jude hisses at him. “I’m not going to be the cripple you get to save for the one you couldn’t.”

He rocks back on his heels then, stands, backs away, scooping up the razor as he does and then throwing it as hard as he can at Jude’s face, Jude bringing his arms up to shield himself, the razor bouncing off his palm. “Fine,” he pants. “Fucking cut yourself to ribbons for all I care. You love the cutting more than you love me, anyway.” He leaves, wishing he could slam the door behind him, banging off the light switch as he goes.

Back in the bedroom, he grabs his pillows and one of the blankets from the bed and flings himself down on the sofa. If he could leave altogether, he would, but Harold and Julia’s presence stops him, so he doesn’t. He turns facedown and screams, really screams, into the pillow, hitting his fists and kicking his legs against the cushions like a child having a tantrum, his rage mingling with a regret so complete that he is breathless. He is thinking many things, but he cannot articulate or distinguish any of them, and three successive fantasies spool quickly through his mind: he will get in the car and escape and never talk to Jude again; he will go back into the bathroom and hold him until he acquiesces, until he can heal him; he will call Andy now, right now, and have Jude committed first thing in the morning. But he does none of those things, just beats and kicks uselessly, as if he is swimming in place.

At last, he stops, and lies still, and finally, after what feels like a very long time, he hears Jude creep into the room, as soft and slow as something beaten, a dog perhaps, some unloved creature who lives only to be abused, and then the creak of the bed as he climbs into it.

The long ugly night lurches on, and he sleeps, a shallow, furtive slumber, and when he wakes, it isn’t quite daylight, but he pulls on his clothes and running shoes and goes outside, wrung dry with exhaustion, trying not to think of anything. As he runs, tears, whether from the cold or from everything, intermittently cloud his vision, and he rubs his eyes angrily, keeps going, making himself go faster, inhaling the wind in large, punishing gulps, feeling its ache in his lungs. When he returns, he goes back to their room, where Jude is still lying on his side, curled into himself, and for a second he imagines, with a jolt of horror, that he is dead, and is about to speak his name when Jude shifts a bit in his sleep, and he instead goes to the bathroom and showers, packs his running clothes into their bag, dresses for the day, and goes to the kitchen, shutting the bedroom door quietly behind him. There in the kitchen is Harold, who offers him a cup of coffee as he always does, and as always since he began his relationship with Jude, he shakes his head, although right now just the smell of coffee — its woody, barky warmth — makes him almost ravenous. Harold doesn’t know why he’s stopped drinking it, only that he has, and is always, as he says, trying to lead him back down the road to temptation, and although normally he would joke around with him, this morning he doesn’t. He can’t even look at Harold, he is so ashamed. And he is resentful as well: of Harold’s unspoken but, he senses, unshakable expectation that he will always know what to do about Jude; the disappointment, the disdain he knows Harold would feel for him if he knew what he had said and done in the nighttime.

“You don’t look great,” Harold tells him.

“I’m not,” he says. “Harold, I’m really sorry. Kit texted late last night, and this director I thought I was going to meet up with this week is leaving town tonight; I have to get back to the city today.”

“Oh no, Willem, really?” Harold begins, and then Jude walks in, and Harold says, “Willem says you guys have to go back to the city this morning.”

“You can stay,” he says to Jude, but doesn’t lift his eyes from the toast he’s buttering. “Keep the car. But I need to get back.”

“No,” says Jude, after a short silence. “I should get back, too.”

“What the hell kind of Thanksgiving is this? You guys just eat and run? What am I going to do with all that turkey?” Harold says, but his theatrical outrage is muted, and Willem can feel him looking at both of them in turn, trying to figure out what’s happening, what’s gone wrong.

He waits for Jude to get ready, trying to make small talk with Julia and ignore Harold’s unspoken questions. He goes to the car first to make it clear he’s driving, and as he’s saying goodbye, Harold looks at him and opens his mouth, and then shuts it, and hugs him instead. “Drive safely,” he says.

In the car he seethes, keeps accelerating and then reminding himself to slow down. It’s not even eight in the morning, and it’s Thanksgiving Day, and the highway is empty. Next to him, Jude is turned away from him, his face against the glass: Willem still hasn’t looked at him, doesn’t know what expression he wears, can’t see the smudges under his eyes that Andy had told him in the hospital were a telltale sign that Jude has been cutting himself too much. His anger quickens and recedes by the mile: sometimes he sees Jude lying to him — he is always lying to him, he realizes — and the fury fills him like hot oil. And sometimes he thinks of what he said, and the way he behaved, and the entire situation, that the person he loves is so terrible to himself, and feels such a sense of remorse that he has to grip the steering wheel to make himself focus. He thinks: Is he right? Do I see him as Hemming? And then he thinks: No. That’s Jude’s delusion, because he can’t understand why anyone would want to be with him. It’s not the truth. But the explanation doesn’t comfort him, and indeed makes him more wretched.

Just past New Haven, he stops. Normally, the passage through New Haven is the opportunity for him to recount their favorite stories from when he and JB were roommates in grad school: The time he was made to help JB and Asian Henry Young mount their guerrilla exhibition of swaying carcasses of meat outside of the medical college. The time JB cut off all his dreads and left them in the sink until Willem finally cleaned them up two weeks later. The time he and JB danced to techno music for forty straight minutes so JB’s friend Greig, a video artist, could record them. “Tell me the one when JB filled Richard’s tub with tadpoles,” Jude would say, grinning in anticipation. “Tell me the one about the time you dated that lesbian.” “Tell me the one when JB crashed that feminist orgy.” But today neither of them says anything, and they roll past New Haven in silence.

He gets out of the car to gas up and go to the bathroom. “I’m not stopping again,” he tells Jude, who hasn’t moved, but Jude only shakes his head, and Willem slams the door shut, his anger returning.

They are at Greene Street before noon, and they get out of the car in silence, into the elevator in silence, into the apartment in silence. He takes their bag to the bedroom; behind him, he can hear Jude sit down and begin playing something on the piano — Schumann, he recognizes, Fantasy in C: a pretty vigorous number for someone who’s so wan and helpless, he thinks sourly — and realizes he has to get out of the apartment.

He doesn’t even take his coat off, just heads back into the living room with his keys. “I’m going out,” he says, but Jude doesn’t stop playing. “Do you hear me?” he shouts. “I’m leaving.”

Then Jude looks up, stops playing. “When are you coming back?” he asks, quietly, and Willem feels his resolve weaken.

But then he remembers how angry he is. “I don’t know,” he says. “Don’t wait up.” He punches the button for the elevator. There is a pause, and then Jude resumes playing.

And then he is out in the world, and all the stores are closed, and SoHo is quiet. He walks to the West Side Highway, walks up it in silence, his sunglasses on, his scarf, which he bought in Jaipur (a gray for Jude, a blue for him), and which is of such soft cashmere that it snags on even the slightest of stubble, wrapped around his stubbly neck. He walks and walks; later, he won’t even remember what he thought about, if he thought about anything. When he is hungry, he veers east to buy a slice of pizza, which he eats on the street, hardly tasting it, before returning to the highway. This is my world, he thinks, as he stands at the river and looks across it toward New Jersey. This is my little world, and I don’t know what to do in it. He feels trapped, and yet how can he feel trapped when he can’t even negotiate the small place he occupies? How can he hope for more when he can’t comprehend what he thought he did?

Nightfall is abrupt and brief, and the wind more intense, and still he walks. He wants warmth, food, a room with people laughing. But he can’t bear to go into a restaurant, not by himself on Thanksgiving, not in the mood he’s in: he’ll be recognized, and he doesn’t have the energy for the small talk, the bonhomie, the graciousness, that such encounters will necessitate. His friends have always teased him about his invisibility claim, his idea that he can somehow manipulate his own visibility, his own recognizability, but he had really believed it, even when evidence kept disproving him. Now he sees this belief as yet more proof of his self-deception, his way of constantly pretending that the world will align itself to his vision of it: That Jude will get better because he wants him to. That he understands him because he likes to think he does. That he can walk through SoHo and no one will know who he is. But really, he is a prisoner: of his job, of his relationship, and mostly, of his own willful naïveté.

Finally he buys a sandwich and catches a taxi south to Perry Street, to his apartment that is barely his anymore: in a few weeks, in fact, it no longer will be, because he has sold it to Miguel, his friend from Spain, who is spending more time in the States. But tonight, it still is, and he lets himself in, cautiously, as if the apartment may have deteriorated, may have started breeding monsters, since he was last there. It is early, but he takes off his clothes anyway, and picks Miguel’s clothes off Miguel’s chaise longue and takes Miguel’s blanket off Miguel’s bed and lies down on the chaise, letting the helplessness and tumult of the day — only a day, and so much has happened! — descend, and cries.

As he’s crying, his phone rings, and he gets up, thinking it might be Jude, but it’s not: it’s Andy.

“Andy,” he cries, “I fucked up, I really fucked up. I did something horrible.”

“Willem,” Andy says gently. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think it is. I’m sure you’re being too hard on yourself.”

So he tells Andy, haltingly, explaining what has happened, and after he is finished, Andy is silent. “Oh, Willem,” he sighs, but he doesn’t sound angry, only sad. “Okay. It is as bad as you think it is,” and for some reason, this makes him laugh a little, but then also moan.

“What should I do?” he asks, and Andy sighs again.

“If you want to stay with him, I’d go home and talk to him,” he says, slowly. “And if you don’t want to stay with him — I’d go home and talk to him anyway.” He pauses. “Willem, I’m really sorry.”

“I know,” he says. And then, as Andy’s saying goodbye, he stops him. “Andy,” he says, “tell me honestly: Is he mentally ill?”

There’s a very long silence, until Andy says, “I don’t think so, Willem. Or rather: I don’t think there’s anything chemically wrong with him. I think his craziness is all man-made.” He is silent. “Make him talk to you, Willem,” he says. “If he talks to you, I think you’ll — I think you’ll understand why he is the way he is.” And suddenly, he needs to get home, and he is dressing and hurrying out the door, hailing a cab and getting into it, getting out and getting into the elevator, opening the door and letting himself into the apartment, which is silent, disconcertingly silent. On the way over, he had a sudden image, one that felt like a premonition, that Jude had died, that he had killed himself, and he runs through the apartment shouting his name.

“Willem?” he hears, and he runs through their bedroom, with their bed still made, and then sees Jude in the far left corner of their closet, curled up on the ground, facing the wall. But he doesn’t think about why he’s there, he just drops to the floor next to him. He doesn’t know if he has permission to touch him, but he does so anyway, wrapping his arms around him. “I’m sorry,” he says to the back of Jude’s head. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean what I said — I would be distraught if you hurt yourself. I am distraught.” He exhales. “And I never, ever should have gotten physical with you. Jude, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Jude whispers, and they are silent. “I’m sorry about what I said. I’m sorry I lied to you, Willem.”

They are quiet for a long time. “Do you remember the time you told me you were afraid that you were a series of nasty surprises for me?” he asks him, and Jude nods, slightly. “You aren’t,” he tells him. “You aren’t. But being with you is like being in this fantastic landscape,” he continues, slowly. “You think it’s one thing, a forest, and then suddenly it changes, and it’s a meadow, or a jungle, or cliffs of ice. And they’re all beautiful, but they’re strange as well, and you don’t have a map, and you don’t understand how you got from one terrain to the next so abruptly, and you don’t know when the next transition will arrive, and you don’t have any of the equipment you need. And so you keep walking through, and trying to adjust as you go, but you don’t really know what you’re doing, and often you make mistakes, bad mistakes. That’s sometimes what it feels like.”

They’re silent. “So basically,” Jude says at last, “basically, you’re saying I’m New Zealand.”

It takes him a second to realize Jude is joking, and when he does he begins to laugh, unhingedly, with relief and sorrow, and he turns Jude toward him and kisses him. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, you’re New Zealand.”

Then they are quiet again, and serious, but at least they are looking at each other.

“Are you going to leave?” Jude asks, so quietly that Willem can barely hear him.

He opens his mouth; shuts it. Oddly, even with everything he has thought and not thought over the last day and night, he has not considered leaving, and now he thinks about it. “No,” he says. And then, “I don’t think so,” and he watches Jude shut his eyes and then open them, and nod. “Jude,” he says, and the words come to his mouth as he says them, and as he speaks, he knows he is doing the right thing, “I do think you need help — help I don’t know how to give you.” He takes a breath. “I either want you to voluntarily commit yourself, or I want you to start seeing Dr. Loehmann twice a week.” He watches Jude for a long time; he can’t tell what he’s thinking.

“And what if I don’t want to do either?” Jude asks. “Are you going to leave?”

He shakes his head. “Jude, I love you,” he says. “But I can’t — I can’t condone this kind of behavior. I won’t be able to stick around and watch you do this to yourself if I thought you’d interpret my presence as some sort of tacit approval. So. Yes. I guess I would.”

Again they are quiet, and Jude turns over and lies on his back. “If I tell you what happened to me,” he begins, falteringly, “if I tell you everything I can’t discuss — if I tell you, Willem, do I still have to go?”

He looks at him, shakes his head again. “Oh, Jude,” he says. “Yes. Yes, you still have to. But I hope you’ll tell me anyway, I really do. Whatever it is; whatever it is.”

They are quiet once more, and this time, their quiet turns to sleep, and the two of them fit into each other and sleep and sleep until Willem hears Jude’s voice speaking to him, and then he wakes, and he listens as Jude talks. It will take hours, because Jude is sometimes unable to continue, and Willem will wait and hold him so tightly that Jude won’t be able to breathe. Twice he will try to wrench himself away, and Willem will pin him to the ground and hold him there until he calms himself. Because they are in the closet, they won’t know what time it is, only that there has been a day that has arrived and departed, because they will have seen flat carpets of sun unroll themselves into the closet’s doorways from the bedroom, from the bathroom. He will listen to stories that are unimaginable, that are abominable; he will excuse himself, three times, to go to the bathroom and study his face in the mirror and remind himself that he has only to find the courage to listen, although he will want to cover his ears and cover Jude’s mouth to make the stories cease. He will study the back of Jude’s head, because Jude can’t face him, and imagine the person he thinks he knows collapsing into rubble, clouds of dust gusting around him, as nearby, teams of artisans try to rebuild him in another material, in another shape, as a different person than the person who had stood for years and years. On and on and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor: blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery. After Jude has finished telling him about his time with Brother Luke, Willem will ask him, again, if he enjoys having sex at all, even a little, even occasionally, and he will wait the many long minutes until Jude says he doesn’t, that he hates it, that he always has, and he will nod, devastated, but relieved to have the real answer. And then he will ask him, not even knowing where the question has been hiding, if he’s even attracted to men, and Jude will tell him, after a silence, that he’s not certain, that he had always had sex with men, and so assumed he always would. “Are you interested in having sex with women?” he’ll ask him, and he’ll watch as, after another long silence, Jude shakes his head. “No,” he’ll say. “It’s too late for me, Willem,” and he will tell him it’s not, that there are things they can do to help him, but Jude will shake his head again. “No,” he’ll say. “No, Willem, I’ve had enough. No more,” and he will realize, as if slapped, the truth of this, and will stop. They will sleep again, and this time, his dreams will be terrible. He will dream he is one of the men in the motel rooms, he will realize that he has behaved like one of them; he will wake with nightmares, and it will be Jude who has to calm him. Finally they will heave themselves from the floor — it will be Saturday afternoon, and they will have been lying in the closet since Thursday night — and shower and eat something, something hot and comforting, and then they will go directly from the kitchen into the study, where he will listen as Jude leaves a message for Dr. Loehmann, whose card Willem has kept in his wallet all these years and produces, magician-like, within seconds, and from there to bed, and they will lie there, looking at each other, each afraid to ask the other: he to ask Jude to finish his story; Jude to ask him when he is leaving, because his leaving now seems an inevitability, a matter of logistics.

On and on they stare, until Jude’s face becomes almost meaningless as a face to him: it is a series of colors, of planes, of shapes that have been arranged in such a way to give other people pleasure, but to give its owner nothing. He doesn’t know what he is going to do. He is dizzy with what he has heard, with comprehending the enormity of his misconceptions, with stretching his understanding past what is imaginable, with the knowledge that all of his carefully maintained edifices are now destroyed beyond repair.

But for now, they are in their bed, in their room, in their apartment, and he reaches over and takes Jude’s hand, holds it gently in his own.

“You’ve told me about how you got to Montana,” he hears himself saying. “So tell me: What happened next?”

It was a time he rarely thought about, his flight to Philadelphia, because it was a period in which he had been so afloat from himself that even as he had lived his life, it had felt dreamlike and not quite real; there had been times in those weeks when he had opened his eyes and was genuinely unable to discern whether what had just happened had actually happened, or whether he had imagined it. It had been a useful skill, this persistent and unshatterable somnambulism, and it had protected him, but then that ability, like his ability to forget, had abandoned him as well and he was never to acquire it again.

He had first noticed this suspension at the home. At nights, he would sometimes be awakened by one of the counselors, and he would follow them down to the office where one of them was always on duty, and he would do whatever they wanted. After they were done, he would be escorted back to his room — a small space with a bunk bed that he shared with a mentally disabled boy, slow and fat and frightened-looking and prone to rages, whom he knew the counselors also sometimes took with them at night — and locked in again. There were a few of them the counselors used, but aside from his roommate, he didn’t know who the other boys were, only that they existed. He was nearly mute in those sessions, and as he knelt or squatted or lay, he thought of a round clock face, its second hand gliding impassively around it, counting the revolutions until it ended. But he never begged, he never pled. He never bargained or made promises or cried. He didn’t have the energy; he didn’t have the conviction — not any longer, not anymore.

It was a few months after his weekend with the Learys that he tried to run away. He had classes at the community college on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and on those days, one of the counselors would wait for him in the parking lot and drive him back to the home. He dreaded the end of classes, he dreaded the ride home: he never knew which counselor would be waiting for him, and when he reached the parking lot and saw who it was, his footsteps would sometimes slow, but it was as if he was a magnet, something controlled by ions, not will, and into the car he would be drawn.

But one afternoon — this was in March, shortly before he turned fourteen — he had turned the corner and had seen the counselor, a man named Rodger who was the cruelest, the most demanding, the most vicious of them all, and he had stopped. For the first time in a long time, something in him resisted, and instead of continuing toward Rodger, he had crept backward down the hallway, and then, once he was certain he was safely out of sight, he had run.

He hadn’t prepared for this, he had no plan, but some hidden, fiery part of him had, it seemed, been making observations as the rest of his mind sat cocooned in its thick, cottony slumber, and he found himself running toward the science lab, which was being renovated, and then under a curtain of blue plastic tarp that shielded one exposed side of the building, and then worming into the eighteen inches of space that separated the decaying interior wall from the new cement exterior that they were building around it. There was just enough room for him to wedge himself in, and he burrowed himself as deep into the space as he could, carefully working himself into a horizontal position, making sure his feet weren’t visible.

As he lay there, he tried to decide what he could do next. Rodger would wait for him and then, when he didn’t appear, they would eventually look for him. But if he could last here for the night, if he could wait until everything was silent around him, then he could escape. This was as far as he could think, although he was cognizant enough to realize that his chances were poor: he had no food, no money, and although it was only five in the afternoon, it was already very cold. He could feel his back and legs and palms, all the parts pressed against the stone, numbing themselves, could feel his nerves turning to thousands of pinpricks. But he could also feel, for the first time in months, his mind coming alert, could feel, for the first time in years, the giddy thrill of being able to make a decision, however poor or ill-conceived or unlikely. Suddenly, the pinpricks felt like not a punishment but a celebration, like hundreds of miniature fireworks exploding within him and for him, as if his body were reminding him of who he was and of what he still owned: himself.

He lasted two hours before the security guard’s dog found him and he was dragged out by his feet, his palms scraping against the cement blocks he clung to even then, by this time so cold that he tripped as he walked, that his fingers were too iced to open the car door, and as soon as he was inside, Rodger had turned around and hit him in the face, and the blood from his nose was thick and hot and reassuring and the taste of it on his lips oddly nourishing, like soup, as if his body were something miraculous and self-healing, determined to save itself.

That evening they had taken him to the barn, where they sometimes took him at night, and beat him so badly that he had blacked out almost immediately after it had begun. He had been hospitalized that night, and then again a few weeks later, when the wounds had gotten infected. For those weeks, he had been left alone, and although they had been told at the hospital that he was a delinquent, that he was troubled, that he was a problem and a liar, the nurses were kind to him: there was one, an older woman, who had sat by his bed and held a glass of apple juice with a straw in it so he could sip from it without lifting his head (he’d had to lie on his side so they could clean his back and drain the wounds).

“I don’t care what you did,” she told him one night, after she had changed his bandages. “No one deserves this. Do you hear me, young man?”

Then help me, he wanted to say. Please help me. But he didn’t. He was too ashamed.

She sat next to him again and put her hand on his forehead. “Try to behave yourself, all right?” she had said, but her voice had been gentle. “I don’t want to see you back here.”

Help me, he wanted to say again, as she left the room. Please. Please. But he couldn’t. He never saw her again.

Later, as an adult, he would wonder if he had invented this nurse, if he had conjured her out of desperation, a simulacrum of kindness that was almost as good as the real thing. He would argue with himself: If she had existed, truly existed, wouldn’t she have told someone about him? Wouldn’t someone have been sent to help him? But his memories from this period were something slightly blur-edged and unreliable, and as the years went by, he was to come to realize that he was, always, trying to make his life, his childhood, into something more acceptable, something more normal. He would startle himself from a dream about the counselors, and would try to comfort himself: There were only two of them who used you, he would tell himself. Maybe three. The others didn’t. They weren’t all cruel to you. And then he would try, for days, to remember how many there had actually been: Was it two? Or was it three? For years, he couldn’t understand why this was so important to him, why it mattered to him so much, why he was always trying to argue against his own memories, to spend so much time debating the details of what had happened. And then he realized that it was because he thought that if he could convince himself that it was less awful than he remembered, then he could also convince himself that he was less damaged, that he was closer to healthy, than he feared he was.

Finally he was sent back to the home, and the first time he had seen his back, he had recoiled, moving so quickly away from the bathroom mirror that he had slipped and fallen on a section of wet tile. In those initial weeks after the beating, when the scar tissue was still forming, it had made a puffed mound of flesh on his back, and at lunch he would sit alone and the older boys would whip damp pellets of napkin at it, trying to get them to ping off of it as against a target, cheering when they hit him. Until that point, he had never thought too specifically about his appearance. He knew he was ugly. He knew he was ruined. He knew he was diseased. But he had never considered himself grotesque. But now he was. There seemed to be an inevitability to this, to his life: that every year he would become worse — more disgusting, more depraved. Every year, his right to humanness diminished; every year, he became less and less of a person. But he didn’t care any longer; he couldn’t allow himself to.

It was difficult to live without caring, however, and he found himself curiously unable to forget Brother Luke’s promise, that when he was sixteen, his old life would stop and his new life would begin. He knew, he did, that Brother Luke had been lying, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Sixteen, he would think to himself at night. Sixteen. When I am sixteen, this will end.

He had asked Brother Luke, once, what their life would be like after he turned sixteen. “You’ll go to college,” Luke had said, immediately, and he had thrilled to this. He had asked where he would go, and Luke had named the college he had attended as well (although when he had gotten to that college after all, he had looked up Brother Luke — Edgar Wilmot — and had realized there was no record of him having ever attended the school, and he had been relieved, relieved to not have something in common with the brother, although it was he who had let him imagine that he might someday be there). “I’ll move to Boston, too,” Luke said. “And we’ll be married, so we’ll live in an apartment off campus.” Sometimes they discussed this: the courses he would take, the things Brother Luke had done when he was at college, the places they would travel to after he graduated. “Maybe we’ll have a son together one day,” Luke said once, and he had stiffened, for he knew without Luke saying so that Luke would do to this phantom son of theirs what had been done to him, and he remembered thinking that that would never happen, that he would never let this ghost child, this child who didn’t exist, ever exist, that he would never let another child be around Luke. He remembered thinking that he would protect this son of theirs, and for a brief, awful moment, he wished he would never turn sixteen at all, because he knew that once he did, Luke would need someone else, and that he couldn’t let that happen.

But now Luke was dead. The phantom child was safe. He could safely turn sixteen. He could turn sixteen and be safe.

The months passed. His back healed. Now a security guard waited for him after his classes and walked him to the parking lot to wait for the counselor on duty. One day at the end of the fall semester, his math professor talked to him after class had ended: Had he thought about college yet? He could help him; he could help him get there — he could go somewhere excellent, somewhere top-flight. And oh, he wanted to go, he wanted to get away, he wanted to go to college. He was tugged, in those days, between trying to resign himself to the fact that his life would forever more be what it was, and the hope, small and stupid and stubborn as it was, that it could be something else. The balance — between resignation and hope — shifted by the day, by the hour, sometimes by the minute. He was always, always trying to decide how he should be — if his thoughts should be of acceptance or of escape. In that moment he had looked at his professor, but as he was about to answer—Yes; yes, help me—something stopped him. The professor had always been kind to him, but wasn’t there something about that kindness that made him resemble Brother Luke? What if the professor’s offer of help cost him? He argued with himself as the professor waited for his answer. One more time won’t hurt you, said the desperate part of him, the part that wanted to leave, the part that was counting every day until sixteen, the part the other part of him jeered at. It’s one more time. He’s another client. Now is not the time to start getting proud.

But in the end, he had ignored that voice — he was so tired, he was so sore, he was so exhausted from being disappointed — and had shaken his head. “College isn’t for me,” he told the professor, his voice thin from the strain of lying. “Thank you. But I don’t need your help.”

“I think you’re making a big mistake, Jude,” said his professor, after a silence. “Promise me you’ll reconsider?” and he had reached out and touched his arm, and he had jerked away, and the professor had looked at him, strangely, and he had turned and fled the room, the hallway blurring into planes of beige.

That night he was taken to the barn. The barn was no longer a working barn, but a place to store the shop class’s and the auto repair class’s projects — in the stalls were half-assembled carburetors, and hulls of half-repaired trucks, and half-sanded rocking chairs that the home sold for money. He was in the stall with the rocking chairs, and as one of the counselors seesawed into him, he left himself and flew above the stalls, to the rafters of the barn, where he paused, looking at the scene below him, the machinery and furniture like alien sculpture, the floor dusty with dirt and the stray pieces of hay, reminders of the barn’s original life that they never seemed able to fully erase, at the two people making a strange eight-legged creature, one silent, one noisy and grunting and thrusting and alive. And then he was flying out of the round window cut high into the wall, and over the home, over its fields that were so beautiful and green and yellow with wild mustard in the summer, and now, in December, were still beautiful in their own way, a shimmering expanse of lunar white, the snow so fresh and new that no one had yet trampled it. He flew above this all, and across landscapes he had read about but had never seen, across mountains so clean that they made him feel clean just to contemplate them, over lakes as big as oceans, until he was floating above Boston, and circling down and down to that series of buildings that trimmed the side of the river, an expansive ring of structures punctuated by squares of green, where he would go and be remade, and where his life would begin, where he could pretend that everything that had come before had been someone else’s life, or a series of mistakes, never to be discussed, never to be examined.

When he came back to himself, the counselor was on top of him, asleep. His name was Colin, and he was often drunk, as he was tonight, his hot yeasty breath puffing against his face. He was naked; Colin was wearing a sweater but nothing else, and for a while he lay there under Colin’s weight, breathing too, waiting for him to wake so he could be returned to his bedroom and cut himself.

And then, unthinkingly, almost as if he was a marionette, his limbs moving without thought, he was wriggling out from beneath Colin, quiet and quick, and hurrying his clothes back on, and then, again before he knew it, grabbing Colin’s puffed coat from the hook on the inside of the stall and shrugging it on. Colin was much larger than he was, fatter and more muscular, but he was almost as tall, and it was less wieldy than it looked. And then he was grabbing Colin’s jeans from the ground, and snatching out his wallet, and then the money within it — he didn’t count how much it was, but he could tell by how thin a sheaf it was that it wasn’t much — and shoving that into his own jeans pocket, and then he was running. He had always been a good runner, swift and silent and certain — watching him at the track, Brother Luke had always said he must be part Mohican — and now he ran out of the barn, its doors open to the sparkling, hushed night, looking about him as he left, and then, seeing no one, toward the field behind the home’s dormitory.

It was half a mile from the dormitory to the road, and although he would normally have been in pain after what happened in the barn, that night he felt no pain, only elation, a sense of hyper-wakefulness that seemed to have been conjured particularly for this night, for this adventure. At the edge of the property he dropped to the ground and rolled carefully under the barbed wire, wrapping Colin’s jacket sleeves around his hands and then holding the coils of wire above him so he could scoot beneath them. Once he was safely free, his elation only intensified, and he ran and ran in the direction he knew was east, toward Boston, away from the home, from the West, from everything. He knew he would eventually have to leave this road, which was narrow and mostly dirt, and move toward the highway, where he would be more exposed but also more anonymous, and he moved quickly down the hill that led toward the black dense woods that separated the road from the interstate. Running on grass was more difficult, but he did so anyway, keeping close to the edge of the forest so that if a car passed, he could duck within it and hide behind a tree.

As an adult, as a crippled adult, and then as a crippled adult who was truly crippled, as someone who could no longer even walk, as someone for whom running was a magic trick, as impossible as flying, he would look back on that night with awe: how fleet he had been, how fast, how tireless, how lucky. He would wonder how long he had run that night — at least two hours, he thought, maybe three — although at the time he hadn’t thought about that at all, only that he needed to get as far as he could from the home. The sun began to appear in the sky, and he ran into the woods, which were the source of many of the younger boys’ fears, and which were so crowded and lightless that even he was frightened, and he was not frightened in general by nature, but he had gone as deep into them as he could, both because he had to go through the woods to reach the interstate and because he knew that the deeper he hid within them, the less likely he was to be discovered, and finally he had chosen a large tree, one of the largest, as if its size offered some promise of reassurance, as if it would guard and protect him, and had tucked himself between its roots and slept.

When he woke it was dark again, although whether it was late afternoon or late evening or early morning he wasn’t certain. He began moving his way through the trees again, humming to comfort himself and to announce himself to whatever might be waiting for him, to show them he was unafraid, and by the time he had been spat out by the woods on the other side, it was still dark, so he knew it was in fact nighttime, and he had slept all day, and that knowledge made him feel stronger and more energetic. Sleep is more important than food, he remonstrated himself, because he was very hungry, and then to his legs: Move. And he did, running again uphill toward the interstate.

He had realized at some point in the forest that there was only one way he would be able to get to Boston, and so he stood by the side of the road, and when the first truck stopped for him and he climbed aboard, he knew what he would have to do when the truck stopped, and he did it. He did it again and again and again; sometimes the drivers gave him food or money, and sometimes they didn’t. They all had little nests they had made for themselves in the trailers of their trucks, and they lay there, and sometimes after it was over, they would drive him a little farther, and he would sleep, the world moving beneath him in a perpetual earthquake. At filling stations he would buy things to eat and would wait around, and eventually someone would choose him — someone always did — and he would climb into the truck.

“Where’re you headed?” they would ask him.

“Boston,” he would say. “My uncle’s there.”

Sometimes he felt the shame of what he was doing so intensely he wanted to vomit: he knew he would never be able to claim to himself that he had been coerced; he’d had sex with these men freely, he had let them do whatever they wanted, he had performed enthusiastically and well. And sometimes he was unsentimental: he was doing what he had to do. There was no other way. This was his skill, his one great skill, and he was using it to get somewhere better. He was using himself to save himself.

Sometimes the men would want him for longer and they would get a motel room, and he would imagine Brother Luke waiting in the bathroom for him. Sometimes they would talk to him — I have a son your age, they’d say; I have a daughter your age — and he would lie there and listen. Sometimes they would watch television until they were ready to go again. Some of them were cruel to him; some of them made him fear he would be killed, or hurt so badly he wouldn’t be able to escape, and in those moments he would be terrified, and he would wish, desperately, for Brother Luke, for the monastery, for the nurse who had been so kind to him. But most of them were neither cruel nor kind. They were clients, and he was giving them what they wanted.

Years later, when he was able to review these weeks more objectively, he would be dumbstruck by how stupid he had been, by how small his oculus: Why hadn’t he simply escaped? Why hadn’t he taken the money he had earned and bought a bus ticket? He would try and try to remember how much he had earned, and although he knew it hadn’t been much, he thought that it might have been enough for a ticket somewhere, anywhere, even if not Boston. But then, it simply hadn’t occurred to him. It was as if the entire store of resourcefulness he had possessed, every piece of courage, had been spent on his flight from the home, and once on his own, he had simply let his life be dictated to him by others, following one man after the next, the way he had been taught to do. And of all the ways in which he changed himself as an adult, it would be this, this idea that he could create at least some part of his own future, that would be the most difficult lesson to learn, as well as the most rewarding.

Once there had been a man who had smelled so terribly and had been so sweatily large that he had almost changed his mind, but although the sex had been horrific, the man had been gentle with him afterward, had bought him a sandwich and a soda and had asked him real questions about himself and had listened carefully to his made-up answers. He had stayed with the man for two nights, and as he drove, the man had listened to bluegrass music and had sung along: he had had a lovely voice, low and clear, and he had taught him the words, and he had found himself singing along with this man, the road smooth beneath them. “God, you have a nice voice, Joey,” the man had said, and he had — how weak he was, how pathetic! — allowed himself to be warmed by this comment, had gobbled up this affection as a rat would a piece of molding bread. On the second day, the man had asked him if he wanted to stay with him; they were in Ohio, and unfortunately he wasn’t going any farther east, he was headed south now, but if he wanted to stay with him, he would be delighted, he would make sure he was taken care of. He had declined the man’s offer, and the man had nodded, as if he had expected he would, and given him a fold of money and kissed him, the first of them who had. “Good luck to you, Joey,” he said, and later, after the man had left, he had counted the money and realized it was more than he thought, it was more than he’d made in his previous ten days altogether. Later, when the next man was brutish, when he was violent and rough, he had wished he had gone with the other man: suddenly, Boston seemed less important than tenderness, than someone who would protect him and be good to him. He lamented his poor choices, how he seemed unable to appreciate the people who were actually decent to him: he thought again of Brother Luke, how Luke had never hit him or yelled at him; how he had never called him names.

Somewhere he had gotten sick, but he didn’t know if it was from his time on the road or from the home. He made the men use condoms, but a few of them had said they would and then hadn’t, and he had struggled and shouted but there had been nothing he could do. He knew, from past experience, that he would need a doctor. He stank; he was in so much pain he could barely walk. On the outskirts of Philadelphia he decided he’d take a break — he had to. He had torn a small hole in the sleeve of Colin’s jacket and had rolled his money into a tube and shoved it inside and then closed the hole with a safety pin he had found in one of the motel rooms. He climbed out of the last truck, although at the time he hadn’t known it would be the last truck; at the time he had thought: one more. One more and I’ll make it to Boston. He hated that he had to stop now when he was so close, but he knew he needed help; he had waited as long as he could.

The driver had stopped at a filling station near Philadelphia — he didn’t want to drive into the city. There, he made his slow way to the bathroom; he tried to clean himself. The illness made him tired; he had a fever. The last thing he remembered from that day — it had been late January, he thought; still cold, and now with a wet, stinging wind that seemed to slap against him — was walking to the edge of the gas station, where there had been a small tree, barren and unloved and alone, and sitting down against it, resting his back in Colin’s now-filthy jacket against its spindly, unconvincing trunk, and shutting his eyes, hoping that if he slept for a while, he might feel at least a little stronger.

When he woke he knew he was in the backseat of a car, and the car was moving, and there was Schubert playing, and he allowed himself to be comforted by that, because it was something he knew, something familiar in such unfamiliarity, in a strange car being driven by a stranger, a stranger he was too weak to sit up and examine, through a strange landscape to an unknown destination. When he woke again he was in a room, a living room, and he looked around him: at the sofa he was on, the coffee table in front of it, two armchairs, a stone fireplace, all in shades of brown. He stood, still dizzy but less dizzy, and as he did, he noticed there was a man standing in a doorway, watching him, a man a little shorter than he, and thin, but with a sloping stomach and fertile, swelling hips. He had glasses that had black plastic bracketing their top half but were clear glass beneath, and a tonsure of hair trimmed very short and soft, like a mink’s coat.

“Come to the kitchen and have something to eat,” the man said in a quiet toneless voice, and he did, walking slowly after him and into a kitchen that, except for its tiles and walls, was also brown: brown table, brown cupboards, brown chairs. He sat in the chair at the foot of the table, and the man put a plate before him with a hamburger and a slide of fries, a glass filled with milk. “I normally don’t get fast food,” the man said, and looked at him.

He wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you,” he said, and the man nodded. “Eat,” he said, and he did, and the man sat at the head of the table and watched him. Normally this would have made him self-conscious, but he was too hungry to care this time.

When he was finished he sat back and thanked the man again, and the man nodded again, and there was a silence.

“You’re a prostitute,” the man said, and he flushed, and looked down at the table, at its shined brown wood.

“Yes,” he admitted.

The man made a little noise, a little snuffle. “How long have you been a prostitute?” he asked, but he couldn’t answer him and was silent. “Well?” the man asked. “Two years? Five years? Ten years? Your whole life?” He was impatient, or almost impatient, but his voice was soft, and he wasn’t yelling.

“Five years,” he said, and the man made the same small noise again.

“You have a venereal disease,” the man said, “I can smell it on you,” and he cringed, and bent his head, and nodded.

The man sighed. “Well,” he said, “you’re in luck, because I’m a doctor, and I happen to have some antibiotics in the house.” He got up and padded over to one of the cupboards, and came back with an orange plastic bottle, and took out a pill. “Take this,” he said, and he did. “Finish your milk,” the man said, and he did, and then the man left the room and he waited until he came back. “Well?” the man said. “Follow me.”

He did, his legs stringy beneath him, and followed the man to a door across from the living room, which the man unlocked and held open for him. He hesitated, and the man made an impatient clucking noise. “Go on,” he said. “It’s a bedroom,” and he shut his eyes, weary, and then opened them again. He began preparing himself for the man to be cruel; the quiet ones always were.

When he reached the doorway, he saw that it led to a basement, and there was a set of wooden steps, steep like a ladder, that he would have to descend, and he paused once more, wary, and the man made his strange insect-like sound again and shoved him, not hard, against the small of his back, and he stumbled down the stairs.

He had been expecting a dungeon, slippery and leaking and dank, but it really was a bedroom, with a mattress made up with a blanket and sheets, and a blue circular rug beneath it, and lining the left-hand wall, bookcases of the same unfinished wood the staircase had been made from, with books on them. The space was bright-lit in that aggressive, relentless way he remembered from hospitals and police stations, and there was a small window, about the size of a dictionary, cut high into the far wall.

“I put out some clothes for you,” the man said, and he saw that folded on the mattress was a shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and a towel and toothbrush as well. “The bathroom’s there,” the man said, pointing to the far right-hand corner of the room.

And then he began to leave. “Wait,” he called after the man, and the man stopped his climb and looked at him, and he began, under the man’s gaze, to unbutton his shirt. Something changed in the man’s face, then, and he climbed another few steps. “You’re sick,” he said. “You have to get better first,” and then he left the room, the door clicking shut after him.

He slept that night, both from lack of anything else to do and from exhaustion. The next morning he woke and smelled food, and he groaned to his feet and walked slowly up the stairs, where he found a plastic tray with a plate of eggs, poached, and two lengths of bacon, a roll, a glass of milk, a banana, and another of the white pills. He was too wobbly to bring it down without falling, so he sat there, on one of the unfinished wooden steps, and ate the food and swallowed the pill. After resting, he stood to open the door and take the tray to the kitchen, but the knob wouldn’t turn because the door was locked. There was a small square cut into the bottom of the door, a cat door, he assumed, although he hadn’t seen a cat, and he held back its curtain of rubber and poked his head out. “Hello?” he called. He realized he didn’t know the man’s name, which wasn’t unusual — he never knew their names. “Sir? Hello?” But there was no answer, and he could tell from the way the house was silent that he was alone.

He should have felt panic, he should have felt fear, but he felt neither, only a crush of tiredness, and he left the tray at the top of the stairs and worked his way slowly down again, and then into bed, where he slept once more.

He dozed for that entire day, and when he woke, the man was standing above him again, watching him, and he sat up, abruptly. “Dinner,” the man said, and he followed him upstairs, still in his borrowed clothes, which were too wide in the waist and too short in the sleeves and legs, because when he had looked for his own clothes, they were missing. My money, he thought, but he was too addled to think beyond that.

Once again he sat in the brown kitchen, and the man brought him his pill, and a plate with brown meat loaf, and a slop of mashed potatoes, and broccoli, and another plate for himself, and they began to eat in silence. Silence didn’t make him nervous — usually, he was grateful for it — but this man’s silence was closer to inwardness, the way a cat will be silent and watching, watching, watching so fixedly that you don’t know what it sees, and then suddenly it will jump, and trap something beneath its paw.

“What kind of doctor are you?” he asked, tentatively, and the man looked at him.

“A psychiatrist,” the doctor said. “Do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” he said.

The man made his noise again. “Do you like being a prostitute?” he asked, and he felt, unaccountably, tears in his eyes, but then he blinked and they were gone.

“No,” he said.

“Then why do you do it?” the man asked, and he shook his head. “Speak,” the man said.

“I don’t know,” he said, and the man made a huffing noise. “It’s what I know how to do,” he said at last.

“Are you good at it?” the man asked, and once again, he felt that sting, and he was quiet for a long time.

“Yes,” he said, and it was the worst admission he had ever made, the hardest word for him to say.

After they were done, the doctor escorted him once again to the door, and gave him the same little shove inside. “Wait,” he said to the man, as he was closing the door. “My name’s Joey,” and when the man said nothing, only stared at him, “what’s yours?”

The man kept looking at him, but now he was, he thought, almost smiling, or at least he was about to make some sort of expression. But then he didn’t. “Dr. Traylor,” the man said, and then pulled the door quickly shut behind him, as if that very information was a bird that might fly away if it too were not trapped inside with him.

The next day he felt less sore, less febrile. When he stood, though, he realized he was still weak, and he swayed and grabbed at the air and in the end, he didn’t fall. He moved toward the bookshelves, examining the books, which were paperbacks, swollen and buckling from heat and moisture and smelling sweetly of mildew. He found a copy of Emma, which he had been reading in class at the college before he ran away, and carried the book slowly up the stairs with him, where he found the place he’d left off and read as he ate his breakfast and took his pill. This time there was a sandwich as well, wrapped in a paper towel, with the word “Lunch” written on the towel in small letters. After he had eaten, he went downstairs with the book and sandwich and lay in bed, and he was reminded of how much he had missed reading, of how grateful he was for this opportunity to leave behind his life.

He slept again; woke again. By evening, he was very tired, and some of the pain had returned, and when Dr. Traylor held open the door for him, it took him a long time to mount the stairs. At dinner, he didn’t say anything, and neither did Dr. Traylor, but when he offered to help Dr. Traylor with the dishes or the cooking, Dr. Traylor had looked at him. “You’re sick,” he said.

“I’m better,” he said. “I can help you in the kitchen if you want.”

“No, I mean — you’re sick,” Dr. Traylor said. “You’re diseased. I can’t have a diseased person touching my food,” and he had looked down, humiliated.

There was a silence. “Where are your parents?” Dr. Traylor asked, and he shook his head again. “Speak,” Dr. Traylor said, and this time he was impatient, although he still hadn’t raised his voice.

“I don’t know,” he stammered, “I never had any.”

“How did you become a prostitute?” Dr. Traylor asked. “Did you start yourself, or did someone help you do it?”

He swallowed, feeling the food in his stomach turning to paste. “Someone helped me,” he whispered.

There was a silence. “You don’t like it when I call you a prostitute,” the man said, and he managed, this time, to raise his head and look at him. “No,” he said. “I understand,” the man said. “But that is what you are, isn’t it? Although I could call you something else, if you like: a whore, maybe.” He was quiet again. “Is that better?”

“No,” he whispered again.

“So,” the man said, “a prostitute it is, then, right?” and looked at him, and finally, he nodded.

That night in the bedroom, he looked for something to cut himself with, but there was nothing sharp in the room, nothing at all; even the books had only soft bloated pages. So he pressed his fingernails into his calves as hard as he could, bent over and wincing from the effort and discomfort, and finally he was able to puncture the skin, and then work his nail back and forth in the cut to make it wider. He was only able to make three incisions in his right leg, and then he was too tired, and he fell asleep again.

The third morning he felt demonstrably better: stronger, more alert. He ate his breakfast and read his book, and then he moved the tray aside and stuck his head through the flapped cutout and tried and tried to fit his shoulders through it. But no matter what angle he tried, he was simply too large and the opening too small and at last he had to stop.

After he had rested, he poked his head through the hole again. He had a direct view of the living room to his left, and the kitchen area to his right, and he looked and looked as if for clues. The house was very tidy; he could tell from how tidy it was that Dr. Traylor lived alone. If he craned his neck, he could see, on the far left, a staircase leading to a second story, and just beyond that, the front door, but he couldn’t see how many locks it had. Mainly, though, the house was defined by its silence: there was no ticking of clocks, no sound of cars or people outside. It could have been a house zooming through space, so quiet was it. The only noise was the refrigerator, purring its intermittent whir, but when it stopped, the silence was absolute.

But as featureless as the house was, he was also fascinated by it: it was only the third house he had ever been in. The second had been the Learys’. The first house had been a client’s, a very important client, Brother Luke had told him, outside Salt Lake City, who had paid extra because he didn’t want to come to the motel room. That house had been enormous, all sandstone and glass, and Brother Luke had come with him, and had secreted himself in the bathroom — a bathroom as big as one of their motel rooms — off the bedroom where he and the client had had sex. Later, as an adult, he would fetishize houses, especially his own house, although even before he had Greene Street, or Lantern House, or the flat in London, he would treat himself every few months to a magazine about homes, about people who spent their lives making pretty places even prettier, and he would turn the pages slowly, studying every picture. His friends laughed at him for this, but he didn’t care: he dreamed of the day he’d have someplace of his own, with things that were absolutely his.

That night Dr. Traylor let him out again, and again it was the kitchen, and the meal, and the two of them eating in silence. “I feel better now,” he ventured, and then, when Dr. Traylor didn’t say anything, “if you want to do something.” He was realistic enough to know that he wasn’t going to be allowed to leave without repaying Dr. Traylor in some way; he was hopeful enough to think that he might be allowed to leave at all.

But Dr. Traylor shook his head. “You may feel better, but you’re still diseased,” he said. “The antibiotics take ten days to eliminate the infection.” He took a fish bone, so fine it was transluscent, out of his mouth, placed it on the edge of his plate. “Don’t tell me this is the first venereal disease you’ve ever had,” he said, looking up at him, and he flushed again.

That night he thought about what to do. He was almost strong enough to run, he thought. At the next dinner, he would follow Dr. Traylor, and then when his back was turned, he would run to the door and outside and look for help. There were some problems with this plan — he still didn’t have his clothes; he didn’t have any shoes — but he knew that there was something wrong with this house, that there was something wrong with Dr. Traylor, that he had to get out.

He tried to conserve his energy the next day. He was too twitchy to read, and he had to keep himself from pacing the floor. He saved that day’s sandwich and stuffed it into the pocket of the borrowed sweatpants so he would have something to eat if he had to hide for a long period. In the other pocket he shoved the plastic bag that lined the trash can in the bathroom — he thought he could tear it in half and make shoes for himself once he was safely out of Dr. Traylor’s reach. And then he waited.

But that night he wasn’t let out of the room at all. From his perch near the flap, he could see the living room lights turning on, he could smell food cooking. “Dr. Traylor?” he called. “Hello?” But there was silence except for the sound of meat frying in a pan, the evening’s news on the television. “Dr. Traylor!” he called. “Please, please!” But nothing happened, and after calling and calling, he was spent, and slumped back down the stairs.

That night he had a dream that on the upper floor of the house was a series of other bedrooms, all with low beds and round tufted rugs beneath them, and that each bed held a boy: some of the boys were older, because they had been in the house for a long time, and some were younger. None of them knew that the others existed; none of them could hear one another. He realized that he didn’t know the physical dimensions of the house, and in the dream the house became a skyscraper, filled with hundreds of rooms, of cells, each containing a different boy, each waiting for Dr. Traylor to let him out. He woke, then, gasping, and ran to the top of the stairs, but when he pushed against the flap, it didn’t move. He lifted it up and saw that the hole had been closed with a piece of gray plastic, and as hard as he pushed against it, it wouldn’t budge.

He didn’t know what to do. He tried to stay up the rest of the night, but he fell asleep, and when he woke, there was the tray with his breakfast and his lunch and two pills: one for the morning, one for evening. He pinched the pills between his fingers and considered them — if he didn’t take them, he wouldn’t get better, and Dr. Traylor wouldn’t touch him unless he was well. But if he didn’t take them, then he wouldn’t get better, and he knew from prior experience how awful he would feel, how almost unimaginably filthy he would be, as if his entire self, inside and out, had been sprayed with excrement. He began to rock himself, then. What do I do, he asked, what do I do? He thought of the fat truck driver, the one who had been kind to him. Help me, he begged him, help me.

Brother Luke, he pled, help me, help me.

Once again, he thought: I have made the wrong decision. I have left somewhere where I at least had the outdoors, and school, and where I knew what was going to happen to me. And now I have none of those things.

You’re so stupid, the voice inside him said, you’re so stupid.

For six more days it went on like this: his food would appear sometime when he was sleeping. He took the pills; he couldn’t not.

On the tenth day, the door opened, and Dr. Traylor was standing there. He was so alarmed, so surprised, that he hadn’t been prepared, but before he could stand, Dr. Traylor had closed the door and was coming toward him. Over one shoulder he held an iron fire poker, loosely, as one would a baseball bat, and as he came toward him, he was terrified by it: What did it mean? What would be done to him with it?

“Take off your clothes,” Dr. Traylor said, still in his same bland voice, and he did, and Dr. Traylor swung the poker off his shoulder and he ducked, reflexively, lifting his arms over his head. He heard the doctor make his small wet noise. And then Dr. Traylor unbelted his pants and stood before him. “Take them down,” he said, and he did, but before he was able to begin, Dr. Traylor nudged him in the neck with the poker. “You try anything,” he said, “biting, anything, and I will beat you in the head with this until you become a vegetable, do you understand me?”

He nodded, too petrified to say anything. “Speak,” Dr. Traylor yelled, and he startled.

“Yes,” he gulped. “Yes, I understand.”

He was scared of Dr. Traylor, of course; he was scared of all of them. But it had never occurred to him to fight with the clients, had never occurred to him to challenge them. They were powerful and he was not. And Brother Luke had trained him too well. He was too obedient. He was, as Dr. Traylor had made him admit, a good prostitute.

Every day was like this, and although the sex was no worse than what he’d had before, he remained convinced that it was a prelude, that it would eventually get very bad, very strange. He had heard stories from Brother Luke — he had seen videos — about things people did to one another: objects they used, props and weapons. A few times he had experienced these things himself. But he knew that in many ways he was lucky: he had been spared. The terror of what might be ahead of him was, in many ways, worse than the terror of the sex itself. At night he would imagine what he didn’t know to imagine and begin gasping with panic, his clothes — a different set of clothes now, but still not his clothes — becoming clammy with perspiration.

At the end of one session, he asked Dr. Traylor if he could leave. “Please,” he said. “Please.” But Dr. Traylor said that he had given him ten days of hospitality, and that he needed to repay those ten days. “And then can I go?” he asked, but the doctor was already walking out the door.

On the sixth day of his repayment he thought of a plan. There was a second or two — just that — in which Dr. Traylor tucked the fire poker under his left arm and unbelted his pants with his right hand. If he could time it correctly, he could hit the doctor in the face with a book, and try to run out. He would have to be very quick; he would have to be very agile.

He scanned the books on their shelves, wishing yet again that some of them were hardcovers, not these thick bricks of paperbacks. A small one, he knew, would feel more like a slap, would be more wieldy, and so finally he chose a copy of Dubliners: it was thin enough for him to grip, pliable enough to crack against a face. He tucked it under his mattress, and then realized he didn’t even need to bother with the deception; he could just leave it by his side. So he did, and waited.

And then there was Dr. Traylor and the fire poker, and as he began to unbelt his pants, he sprang up and smacked the doctor as hard as he could across his face, and he heard and felt the doctor screaming and the fire poker falling to the cement floor with a clang, and the doctor’s hand grabbing at his ankle, but he kicked away and stumbled up the stairs, tugged open the door, and ran. At the front door he saw a mess of locks, and he nearly sobbed, his fingers clumsy, throwing the bolts this way and that, and then he was outside and running, running faster than he ever had. You can do it, you can do it, screamed the voice in his head, encouraging for once, and then, more urgently, Faster, faster, faster. As he had gotten better, Dr. Traylor’s meals for him had gotten smaller and smaller, which meant that he was always weak, always tired, but now he was vividly alert and he was running, shouting for help as he did. But even as he ran and shouted, he could see that no one would hear his calls: there was no other house in sight, and although he had expected there might be trees, there weren’t, just flat blank stretches of land, with nothing to hide behind. And then he felt how cold it was, and how things were embedding themselves into the soles of his feet, but still he ran.

And then behind him he heard another pair of footsteps slapping against the pavement, and a familiar jangling noise, and he knew it was Dr. Traylor. He didn’t even shout at him, he didn’t even threaten, but as he turned his head to see how close the doctor was — and he was very close, just a few yards behind him — he tripped and fell, his cheek banging against the road.

After he had fallen, all of his energy deserted him, a flock of birds rising noisily and swiftly flying away, and he saw that the jangling noise was Dr. Traylor’s unbuckled belt, which he was sliding out from his pants and then using to beat him, and he huddled into himself as he was hit and hit and hit. All that time, the doctor said nothing, and all he could hear were Dr. Traylor’s breaths, his gasps from exertion as he brought the belt down harder and harder on his back, his legs, his neck.

Back at the house, the beating continued, and over the next days, the next weeks, he was beat more. Not regularly — he never knew when it might happen next — but often enough so that coupled with his lack of food, he was always dizzy, he was always weak: he felt he would never have the strength to run again. As he feared, the sex also got worse, and he was made to do things that he was never able to talk about, not to anyone, not even to himself, and again, although it wasn’t always terrifying, it was often enough so that he lived in a constant half daze of fear, so that he knew that he would die in Dr. Traylor’s house. One night he had a dream of himself as a man, a real adult, but he was still in the basement and waiting for Dr. Traylor, and he knew in the dream that something had happened to him, that he had lost his mind, that he was like his roommate in the home, and he woke and prayed that he might die soon. During the daytime, as he slept, he dreamed of Brother Luke, and when he woke from those dreams he realized how much Luke had always protected him, how well he had treated him, how kind he had been to him. He had limped to the top of the wooden staircase then, and thrown himself down it, and then had pulled himself up and had done it again.

And then one day (Three months later? Four? Later, Ana would tell him that Dr. Traylor had said it was twelve weeks after he had found him at the gas station), Dr. Traylor said, “I’m tired of you. You’re dirty and you disgust me and I want you to leave.”

He couldn’t believe it. But then he remembered to speak. “Okay,” he said, “okay. I’ll leave now.”

“No,” said Dr. Traylor, “you’ll leave how I want you to leave.”

For several days, nothing happened, and he assumed that this too had been a lie, and he was grateful that he hadn’t gotten too excited, that he was finally able to recognize a lie when he was told it. Dr. Traylor had begun to serve him his meals on a fold of the day’s newspaper, and one day he looked at the date and realized it was his birthday. “I am fifteen,” he announced to the quiet room, and hearing himself say those words — the hopes, the fantasies, the impossibilities that only he knew lay behind them — he was sick. But he didn’t cry: his ability to not cry was his only accomplishment, the only thing he could take pride in.

And then one night Dr. Traylor came downstairs with his fire poker. “Get up,” he said, and jabbed him in the back with the poker as he fumblingly climbed the stairs, falling to his knees and getting up again and tripping again and standing again. He was prodded all the way to the front door, which was ajar, just slightly, and then outside, into the night. It was still cold, and still wet, but even through his fear he could recognize that the weather was changing, that even as time had suspended itself for him, it had not for the rest of the world, in which the seasons had marched on uncaringly; he could smell the air turning green. Next to him was a bare bush with a black branch, but at its very tip it was sprouting buboes of pale lilac, and he stared at it frantically, trying to seize a picture of it and hold it in his mind, before he was poked forward.

At the car Dr. Traylor held open the trunk and jabbed him again with the fire poker, and he could hear himself making sounds like sobs, but he wasn’t crying, and he climbed inside, although he was so weak that Dr. Traylor had to help him, pinching the sleeve of his shirt between his fingers so he wouldn’t have to actually touch him.

They drove. The trunk was clean and large, and he rolled about in it, feeling them go around corners and up hills and down hills, and then along long stretches of plain, even road. And then the car swerved left and he was being bounced along some uneven surface and then the car stopped.

For a while, three minutes — he counted — nothing happened, and he listened and listened but he could hear nothing, just his own breaths, his own heart.

The trunk opened, and Dr. Traylor helped him out, plucking his shirt, and shoved him to the front of the car with the fire poker. “Stay there,” he said, and he did, shivering, watching the doctor get back into the car, roll down the window, lean out at him. “Run,” the doctor said, and when he stood there, frozen, “you like running so much, right? So run.” And Dr. Traylor started the engine and finally, he woke and ran.

They were in a field, a large barren square of dirt where there would in a few weeks be grass but now there was nothing, just patches of shallow ice that broke under his bare feet like pottery, and small white pebbles that glowed like stars. The field dipped in the middle, just slightly, and on his right was the road. He couldn’t see how big the road was, only that there was one, but there were no cars passing. To his left the field was fenced with wire, but it was farther away, and he couldn’t see what lay beyond the wire.

He ran, the car just behind him. At first it actually felt good to be running, to be outdoors, to be away from that house: even this, the ice under his feet like glass, the wind smacking against his face, the tap of the fender as it nudged against the back of his legs, even all this was better than that house, that room with its cinder-block walls and window so small it was no window at all.

He ran. Dr. Traylor followed him, and sometimes he would accelerate, and he would run faster. But he couldn’t run like he used to run, and he fell, and fell again. Each time he fell, the car would slow, and Dr. Traylor would call out — not angrily, not even loudly—“Get up. Get up and run; get up and run or we’re going back to the house,” and he would make himself stand and run again.

He ran. He didn’t know then that this was the last time in his life that he would ever run, and much later he would wonder: If I had known that, would I have been able to run faster? But of course it was an impossible question, a non-question, an axiom with no solution. He fell again and again, and on the twelfth time, he was moving his mouth, trying to say something, but nothing would come out. “Get up,” he heard the man say. “Get up. The next time you fall will be the last,” and he got up again.

By this time he was no longer running, he was walking and stumbling, he was crawling from the car and the car was bumping against him harder and harder. Make this stop, he thought, make this stop. He remembered — who had told him this? one of the brothers, but which one? — a story of a piteous little boy, a boy, he had been told, in much worse circumstances than he was in, who after being so good for so long (another way in which he and the boy had been different), prayed one night to God to take him: I’m ready, the boy said in the story, I’m ready, and an angel, terrible and golden-winged, with eyes that burned with fire, appeared and wrapped his wings around the boy and the boy turned to cinders and was gone, released from this world.

I’m ready, he said, I’m ready, and he waited for the angel with his awful, fearsome beauty to come save him.

The last time he fell, he couldn’t get up again. “Get up!” he heard Dr. Traylor yell. “Get up!” But he couldn’t. And then he heard the engine start again, and he felt the headlights coming toward him, two streams of fire like the angel’s eyes, and he turned his head to the side and waited, and the car came toward him and then over him and it was done.

And that was the end. After that, he became an adult. As he lay in the hospital, Ana sitting by his side, he made promises to himself. He evaluated the mistakes he had made. He never had known whom to trust: he had followed anyone who had shown him any kindness. After, though, he decided that he would change this. No longer would he trust people so quickly. No longer would he have sex. No longer would he expect to be saved.

“It’ll never be this bad,” Ana used to say to him in the hospital. “Things’ll never be this bad again,” and although he knew she meant the pain, he also liked to think she meant his life in general: that with every year, things would get better. And she had been right: things did get better. And Brother Luke had been right as well, because when he was sixteen, his life changed. A year after Dr. Traylor, he was in the college he had dreamed of; with every day he didn’t have sex, he was becoming cleaner and cleaner. His life became more improbable by the year. Every year, his own good fortunes multiplied and intensified, and he was astonished again and again by the things and generosities that were bequeathed to him, by the people who entered his life, people so different from the people he had known that they seemed to be another species altogether: How, after all, could Dr. Traylor and Willem both be named the same sort of being? How could Father Gabriel and Andy? How could Brother Luke and Harold? Did what existed in the first group also exist in the second, and if so, how had that second group chosen otherwise, how had they chosen what to become? Things had not just corrected themselves; they had reversed themselves, to an almost absurd degree. He had gone from nothing to an embarrassing bounty. He would remember, then, Harold’s claim that life compensated for its losses, and he would realize the truth of that, although sometimes it would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it, so he would allow it to keep moving him forward. And so, as the years went by, he broke his promises to himself again and again. He did end up following people who were kind to him. He did trust people again. He did have sex again. He did hope to be saved. And he was right to do so: not every time, of course, but most of the time. He ignored what the past had taught him and more often than he should have been, he was rewarded for it. He regretted none of it, not even the sex, because he had had it with hope, and to make someone else happy, someone who had given him everything.

One night shortly after he and Willem had become a couple, they had been at a dinner party at Richard’s, a raucous, casual affair of just people they loved and people they liked — JB and Malcolm and Black Henry Young and Asian Henry Young and Phaedra and Ali and all of their boyfriends and girlfriends, their husbands and wives. He was in the kitchen helping Richard prepare dessert, and JB came in — he was a little drunk — and put his arm around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. “Well, Judy,” he said, “you really ended up with it all in the end, didn’t you? The career, the money, the apartment, the man. How’d you get so lucky?” JB had grinned at him, and he had grinned back. He was glad Willem wasn’t there to overhear that comment, because he knew Willem would get testy at what he saw as JB’s jealousy, at his conviction that everyone else had, and had had, life easier than he did, that he, Jude, was blessed in a way that no one else was.

But he didn’t see it like this. He knew it was in part JB’s way of being ironic, of congratulating him for fortune that they both knew was, yes, excessive but also deeply appreciated. And if he was to be honest, he was also flattered by JB’s jealousy: to JB, he wasn’t a cripple who was being cosmically repaid for a lousy run; he was JB’s equal, someone in whom JB saw only the things to envy and never the things to pity. And besides, JB was right: How did he get so lucky? How did he end up with everything he had? He was never to know; he was always to wonder.

“I don’t know, JB,” he said, handing him the first slice of cake and smiling at him, as from the dining room, he could hear Willem’s voice saying something, and then a blast of laughter from everyone else, a sound of pure delight. “But you know, I’ve been lucky all my life.”

3

THE WOMAN’S NAME is Claudine and she is a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, a jewelry designer, which is something of a deviation for him, as he usually only sleeps with people in the industry, who are more accustomed to, more forgiving of, temporary arrangements.

She is thirty-three, with long dark hair that lightens at its tips, and very small hands, hands like a child’s, on which she wears rings that she has made, dark with gold and glinting with stones; before they have sex, she takes them off last, as if these rings, not her underwear, are what conceal the most private parts of her.

They have been sleeping together — not seeing each other, because he sees no one — for almost two months, which again is a deviation for him, and he knows he will have to end it soon. He had told her when they had begun that it was only sex, that he was in love with someone else, and that he couldn’t spend the night, not ever, and she had seemed fine with that; she had said she was fine with it, anyway, and that she was in love with someone else herself. But he has seen no evidence of another man in her apartment, and whenever he texts, she is always available. Another warning sign: he will have to end it.

Now he kisses her on her forehead, sits up. “I have to go,” he says.

“No,” she says. “Stay. Just a little longer.”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Five minutes,” she says.

“Five,” he agrees, and lies back down. But after five minutes he kisses her again on the side of the face. “I really do have to go,” he tells her, and she makes a noise, one of protest and resignation, and turns over onto her side.

He goes to her bathroom, showers and rinses out his mouth, comes back and kisses her again. “I’ll text you,” he says, disgusted by how he has been reduced to a vocabulary consisting almost entirely of clichés. “Thank you for letting me come over.”

At home, he walks silently through the darkened apartment, and in the bedroom he takes off his clothes, gets into bed with a groan, rolls over and wraps his arms around Jude, who wakes and turns to him. “Willem,” he says, “you’re home,” and Willem kisses him to cover the guilt and sorrow he always feels when he hears the relief and happiness in Jude’s voice.

“Of course,” he says. He always comes home; he has never not. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”

It is a hot night, humid and still, and yet he presses against Jude as if he is trying to warm himself, threading their legs together. Tomorrow, he tells himself, he will end it with Claudine.

They have never discussed it, but he knows Jude knows he is having sex with other people. He has even given Willem his permission. This was after that terrible Thanksgiving, when after years of obfuscation, Jude was revealed to him completely, the shreds of cloud that had always obscured him from view abruptly wiped away. For many days, he hadn’t known what to do (other than run back into therapy himself; he had called his shrink the day after Jude had made his first appointment with Dr. Loehmann), and whenever he looked at Jude, scraps of his narrative would return to him, and he would study him covertly, wondering how he had gotten from where he had been to where he was, wondering how he had become the person he had when everything in his life had argued that he shouldn’t be. The awe he had felt for him, then, the despair and horror, was something one felt for idols, not for other humans, at least no other humans he knew.

“I know how you feel, Willem,” Andy had said in one of their secret conversations, “but he doesn’t want you to admire him; he wants you to see him as he is. He wants you to tell him that his life, as inconceivable as it is, is still a life.” He paused. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I do know,” he said.

In the first bleary days after Jude’s story, he could feel Jude being very quiet around him, as if he was trying not to call attention to himself, as if he didn’t want to remind Willem of what he now knew. One night a week or so later, they were eating a muted dinner at the apartment, and Jude had said, softly, “You can’t even look at me anymore.” He had looked up then and had seen his pale, frightened face, and had dragged his chair close to Jude’s and sat there, looking at him.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m afraid I’m going to say something stupid.”

“Willem,” Jude said, and was quiet. “I think I turned out pretty normal, all things considered, don’t you?” and Willem had heard the strain, and the hope, in his voice.

“No,” he said, and Jude winced. “I think you turned out extraordinary, all things considered or not,” and finally, Jude smiled.

That night, they had discussed what they were going to do. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me,” he began, and when he saw how relieved Jude was, he cursed himself for not making it clearer earlier that he was going to stay. Then he gathered himself and they talked about physical matters: how far he could go, what Jude didn’t want to do.

“We can do whatever you want, Willem,” Jude said.

“But you don’t like it,” he’d said.

“But I owe it to you,” Jude had said.

“No,” he told him. “It shouldn’t feel like something you owe me; and besides, you don’t owe it to me.” He stopped. “If it’s not arousing for you, it’s not for me, either,” he added, although, to his shame, he did still want to have sex with Jude. He wouldn’t, not anymore, not if Jude didn’t want to, but it didn’t mean he would be able to suddenly stop craving it.

“But you’ve sacrificed so much to be with me,” Jude said after a silence.

“Like what?” he asked, curious.

“Normalcy,” Jude said. “Social acceptability. Ease of life. Coffee, even. I can’t add sex to that list.”

They had talked and talked, and he had finally managed to convince him, had managed to get Jude to define what he actually liked. (It hadn’t been much.) “But what are you going to do?” Jude asked him.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said, not really knowing himself.

“You know, Willem,” Jude had said, “you should obviously sleep with whomever you want. I just”—he fumbled—“I know this is selfish, but I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“It’s not selfish,” he said, reaching across the bed for him. “And I wouldn’t do that, not ever.”

That was eight months ago, and in those eight months, things had gotten better: not, Willem thought, his former version of better, in which he pretended everything was fine and ignored all inconvenient evidence or suspicions that suggested otherwise, but actually better. He could tell Jude really was more relaxed: he was less inhibited physically, he was more affectionate, and he was both of those things because he knew that Willem had released him from what he thought were his obligations. He was cutting himself far less frequently. Now he didn’t need Harold or Andy to confirm for him that Jude was better: now he knew it to be true. The only difficulty was that he did still desire Jude, and at times he had to remind himself not to go any further, that he was getting close to the boundaries of what Jude could tolerate, and he would make himself stop. In those moments he would be angry, not at Jude or even at himself — he had never felt guilty about wanting to have sex, and he didn’t feel guilty about wanting to have it now — but at life, at how it had conspired to make Jude afraid of something that he had always associated with nothing but pleasure.

He was careful about who he chose to sleep with: he picked people (women, really: they had almost all been women) who he either sensed or knew, from previous experience, were truly only interested in him for sex and were going to be discreet. Often, they were confused, and he didn’t blame them. “Aren’t you in a relationship with a man?” they would ask, and he would tell them that he was, but that they had an open relationship. “So are you not really gay?” they would ask, and he would say, “No, not fundamentally.” The younger women were more accepting of this: they’d had boyfriends (or had boyfriends) who had slept with other men as well; they had slept with other women. “Oh,” they’d say, and that would usually be it — if they had other concerns, other questions, they didn’t ask. These younger women — actresses, makeup assistants, costume assistants — also didn’t want a relationship with him; often, they didn’t want a relationship at all. Sometimes the women asked him questions about Jude — how they had met, what he was like — and he answered them, and felt wistful, and missed him.

But he was vigilant about not letting this life intrude on his life at home. Once there had been a blind item in a gossip column — forwarded to him by Kit — that was clearly about him, and after debating whether to say something to Jude or not, he had in the end decided not to; Jude would never see the story, and there was no reason to make what Jude knew was happening in theory something he was forced to confront in reality.

JB, however, had seen the item (he supposed other people he knew had seen it as well, but JB was the only one to actually mention it to him), and had asked him if it was true. “I didn’t know you guys had an open relationship,” he said, more curious than accusatory.

“Oh yeah,” he said, casually. “Right from the start.”

It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have to be two distinct realms, but he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere. His friend Roman, for example, was married to a woman who, while beautiful and loyal, was famously unintelligent: she didn’t understand the films Roman was in, and when you talked to her, you found yourself consciously recalibrating the velocity and complexity and content of your conversation, because she so often looked confused when the talk turned to politics, or finance, or literature, or art, or food, or architecture, or the environment. He knew that Roman was aware of this deficiency, in both Lisa and in his relationship. “Ah, well,” he had once said to Willem, unprompted, “if I want good conversation, I can talk to my friends, right?” Roman had been among the first of his friends to get married, and at the time, he had been fascinated by and disbelieving of his choice. But now he knew: you always sacrificed something. The question was what you sacrificed. He knew that to some people — JB; Roman, probably — his own sacrifice would be unthinkable. It would have been once to him as well.

He thought frequently these days of a play he had done in graduate school, by a beetley, plodding woman in the playwriting division who had gone on to have great success as a writer of spy movies but who in graduate school had tried to write Pinteresque dramas about unhappy married couples. If This Were a Movie was about an unhappy married couple — he was a professor of classical music; she was a librettist — who lived in New York. Because the couple was in their forties (at the time, a gray-colored land, impossibly far and unimaginably grim), they were devoid of humor and in a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been romantic, back when life itself had been a romance. He had played the husband, and while he had long ago realized that it had been, really, an awful play (it had included lines like “This isn’t Tosca, you know! This is life!”), he had never forgotten the final monologue he had delivered in the second act, when the wife announces that she wants to leave, that she doesn’t feel fulfilled in their marriage, that she’s convinced that someone better awaits her:

SETH: But don’t you understand, Amy? You’re wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person — sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty — and you get to pick three of those things. Three—that’s it. Maybe four, if you’re very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It’s only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn’t the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That’s real life. Don’t you see it’s a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.

AMY: [crying] So what did you pick?

SETH: I don’t know. [beat] I don’t know.

At the time, he hadn’t believed these words, because at the time, everything really did seem possible: he was twenty-three, and everyone was young and attractive and smart and glamorous. Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic. They all chose differently: Roman had chosen beauty, sweetness, pliability; Malcolm, he thought, had chosen reliability, and competence (Sophie was intimidatingly efficient), and aesthetic compatibility. And he? He had chosen friendship. Conversation. Kindness. Intelligence. When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people’s relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel countless dinner-party conversations: What’s going on there? Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples — in restaurants, on the street, at parties — and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

And perhaps not coincidentally, he also found himself doubting therapy — its promises, its premises — for the first time. He had never before questioned that therapy was, at worst, a benign treatment: when he was younger, he had even considered it a form of luxury, this right to speak about his life, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty minutes proof that he had somehow become someone whose life deserved such lengthy consideration, such an indulgent listener. But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.

“You seem to be holding back, Willem,” said Idriss — his shrink now for years — and he was quiet. Therapy, therapists, promised a rigorous lack of judgment (but wasn’t that an impossibility, to talk to a person and not be judged?), and yet behind every question was a nudge, one that pushed you gently but inexorably toward a recognition of some flaw, toward solving a problem you hadn’t known existed. Over the years, he’d had friends who had been convinced that their childhoods were happy, that their parents were basically loving, until therapy had awakened them to the fact that they had not been, that they were not. He didn’t want that to happen to him; he didn’t want to be told that his contentment wasn’t contentment after all but delusion.

“And how do you feel about the fact that Jude doesn’t ever want to have sex?” Idriss had asked.

“I don’t know,” he’d said. But he did know, and he said it: “I wish he wanted to, for his sake. I feel sad that he’s missing one of life’s greatest experiences. But I think he’s earned the right not to.” Across from him, Idriss was silent. The truth was, he didn’t want Idriss to try to diagnose what was wrong with his relationship. He didn’t want to be told how to repair it. He didn’t want to try to make Jude, or himself, do something neither of them wanted to because they were supposed to. Their relationship was, he felt, singular but workable: he didn’t want to be taught otherwise. He sometimes wondered if it was simple lack of creativity — his and Jude’s — that had made them both think that their relationship had to include sex at all. But it had seemed, then, the only way to express a deeper level of feeling. The word “friend” was so vague, so undescriptive and unsatisfying — how could he use the same term to describe what Jude was to him that he used for India or the Henry Youngs? And so they had chosen another, more familiar form of relationship, one that hadn’t worked. But now they were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.

He didn’t, however, mention his growing skepticism about therapy to Jude, because some part of him did still believe in it for people who were truly ill, and Jude — he was finally able to admit to himself — was truly ill. He knew that Jude hated going to the therapist; after the first few sessions he had come home so quiet, so withdrawn, that Willem had to remind himself that he was making Jude go for his own good.

Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer. “How’s it been with Dr. Loehmann?” he asked one night about a month after Jude had begun.

Jude sighed. “Willem,” he said, “how much longer do you want me to go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Jude had studied him. “So you were thinking I’d go forever,” he said.

“Well,” he said. (He actually had been thinking that.) “Is it really so awful?” He paused. “Is it Loehmann? Should we get you someone else?”

“No, it’s not Loehmann,” Jude said. “It’s the process itself.”

He sighed, too. “Look,” he said. “I know this is hard for you. I know it is. But — give it a year, Jude, okay? A year. And try hard. And then we’ll see.” Jude had promised.

And then in the spring he had been away, filming, and he and Jude had been talking one night when Jude said, “Willem, in the interest of full disclosure, I have something I have to tell you.”

“Okay,” he said, gripping the phone tighter. He had been in London, shooting Henry & Edith. He was playing — twelve years too early and sixty pounds too thin, Kit pointed out, but who was counting? — Henry James, at the beginning of his friendship with Edith Wharton. The film was actually something of a road-trip movie, shot mostly in France and southern England, and he was working his way through his final scenes.

“I’m not proud of this,” he heard Jude say. “But I’ve missed my last four sessions with Dr. Loehmann. Or rather — I’ve been going, but not going.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, I go,” Jude said, “but then — then I sit outside in the car and read through the session, and then when the session’s over, I drive back to the office.”

He was quiet, and so was Jude, and then they both started laughing. “What’re you reading?” he asked when he could finally speak again.

“On Narcissism,” Jude admitted, and they both started laughing again, so hard that Willem had to sit down.

“Jude—” he began at last, and Jude interrupted him. “I know, Willem,” he said, “I know. I’ll go back. It was stupid. I just couldn’t bring myself to go in these past few times; I’m not sure why.”

When he hung up, he was still smiling, and when he heard Idriss’s voice in his head—“And Willem, what do you think about the fact that Jude isn’t going when he said he would?”—he waved his hand before his face, as if fanning the words away. Jude’s lying; his own self-deceptions — both, he realized, were forms of self-protection, practiced since childhood, habits that had helped them make the world into something more digestible than it sometimes was. But now Jude was trying to lie less, and he was trying to accept that there were certain things that would never conform to his idea of how life should be, no matter how intensely he hoped or pretended they might. And so really, he knew that therapy would be of limited use to Jude. He knew Jude would keep cutting himself. He knew he would never be able to cure him. The person he loved was sick, and would always be sick, and his responsibility was not to make him better but to make him less sick. He was never to make Idriss understand this shift in perspective; sometimes, he could hardly understand it himself.

That night he’d had a woman over, the deputy production designer, and as they lay there, he answered all the same questions: he explained how he had met Jude; he explained who he was, or at least the version of who he was that he had created for answers such as these.

“This is a lovely space,” said Isabel, and he glanced at her, a little suspiciously; JB, upon seeing the flat, had said it looked like it had been raped by the Grand Bazaar, and Isabel, he had heard the director of photography proclaim, had excellent taste. “Really,” she said, seeing his face. “It’s pretty.”

“Thanks,” he said. He owned the flat — he and Jude. They had bought it only two months ago, when it had become evident that both of them would be doing more work in London. He had been in charge of finding something, and because it had been his responsibility, he had deliberately chosen quiet, deeply dull Marylebone — not for its sober prettiness or convenience but because of the neighborhood’s surplus of doctors. “Ah,” Jude had said, studying the directory of the building’s tenants as they waited for the estate agent to show them the apartment Willem had settled on, “look at what’s downstairs from the unit: an orthopedic surgeon’s clinic.” He looked at Willem, raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”

He had smiled. “Isn’t it?” he asked. But beneath their joking was something that neither of them had been able to discuss, not just in their relationship but almost in their friendship as a whole — that at some point, they didn’t know when but that it would happen, Jude would get worse. What that might mean, specifically, Willem wasn’t certain, but as part of his new dedication to honesty, he was trying to prepare himself, themselves, for a future he couldn’t predict, for a future in which Jude might not be able to walk, might not be able to stand. And so finally, the fourth-floor Harley Street space had been the only possible option; of all the flats he had seen, this had been the one that had best approximated Greene Street: a single-story apartment with large doors and wide hallways, big square rooms, and bathrooms that could be converted to accommodate a wheelchair (the downstairs orthopedist’s office had been the final, unignorable argument that this apartment should be theirs). They bought the flat; he had moved into it all the rugs and lamps and blankets that he had spent his working life accumulating and that had been packed in boxes in the Greene Street basement; and before he returned to New York after the shoot ended, one of Malcolm’s young former associates who had moved back to London to work in Bellcast’s satellite office would begin renovating it.

Oh, he thought whenever he looked at the plans for Harley Street, it was so difficult, it was so sad sometimes, living in reality. He had been reminded of this the last time he had met with the architect, when he had asked Vikram why they weren’t retaining the old wood-framed windows in the kitchen that overlooked the brick patio, with its views of the rooftops of Weymouth Mews beyond it. “Shouldn’t we keep them?” he’d wondered. “They’re so beautiful.”

“They are beautiful,” Vikram agreed, “but these windows are actually very difficult to open from a sitting position — they demand a good amount of lift from the legs.” He realized then that Vikram had taken seriously what he had instructed him to do in their initial conversation: to assume that eventually one of the people who lived in the apartment might have a very limited range of motion.

“Oh,” he’d said, and had blinked his eyes, rapidly. “Right. Thanks. Thanks.”

“Of course,” Vikram had said. “I promise you, Willem, it’s going to feel like home for both of you.” He had a soft, gentle voice, and Willem had been unsure whether the sorrow he had felt in that moment was from the kindness of what Vikram said, or the kindness with which he said it.

He remembers this now, back in New York. It is the end of July; he has convinced Jude to take a day off, and they have driven to their house upstate. For weeks, Jude had been tired and unusually weak, but then, suddenly, he hadn’t been, and it was on days like this — the sky above them vivid with blue, the air hot and dry, the fields around their house buttery with clumps of yarrow and cowslip, the stones around the pool cool beneath his feet, Jude singing to himself in the kitchen as he made lemonade for Julia and Harold, who had come to stay with them — that Willem found himself slipping back into his old habit of pretending. On these days, he succumbed to a sort of enchantment, a state in which his life seemed both unimprovable and, paradoxically, perfectly fixable: Of course Jude wouldn’t get worse. Of course he could be repaired. Of course Willem would be the person to repair him. Of course this was possible; of course this was probable. Days like this seemed to have no nights, and if there were no nights, there was no cutting, there was no sadness, there was nothing to dismay.

“You’re dreaming of miracles, Willem,” Idriss would say if he knew what he was thinking, and he knew he was. But then again, he would think, what about his life — and about Jude’s life, too — wasn’t it a miracle? He should have stayed in Wyoming, he should have been a ranch hand himself. Jude should have wound up — where? In prison, or in a hospital, or dead, or worse. But they hadn’t. Wasn’t it a miracle that someone who was basically unexceptional could live a life in which he made millions pretending to be other people, that in that life that person would fly from city to city, would spend his days having his every need fulfilled, working in artificial contexts in which he was treated like the potentate of a small, corrupt country? Wasn’t it a miracle to be adopted at thirty, to find people who loved you so much that they wanted to call you their own? Wasn’t it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn’t this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle? And so who could blame him for hoping for one more, for hoping that despite knowing better, that despite biology, and time, and history, that they would be the exception, that what happened to other people with Jude’s sort of injury wouldn’t happen to him, that even with all that Jude had overcome, he might overcome just one more thing?

He is sitting by the pool and talking to Harold and Julia when abruptly, he feels that strange hollowing in his stomach that he occasionally experiences even when he and Jude are in the same house: the sensation of missing him, an odd sharp desire to see him. And although he would never say it to him, this is the way in which Jude reminds him of Hemming — that awareness that sometimes touches him, as lightly as wings, that the people he loves are more temporal, somehow, than others, that he has borrowed them, and that someday they will be reclaimed from him. “Don’t go,” he had told Hemming in their phone calls, back when Hemming was dying. “Don’t leave me, Hemming,” even though the nurses who were holding the receiver to Hemming’s ear hundreds of miles away had instructed him to tell Hemming exactly the opposite: that it was all right for him to leave; that Willem was releasing him. But he couldn’t.

And he hadn’t been able to either when Jude was in the hospital, so delirious from the drugs that his eyes had skittered back and forth with a rapidity that had frightened him almost more than anything else. “Let me go, Willem,” Jude had begged him then, “let me go.”

“I can’t, Jude,” he had cried. “I can’t do that.”

Now he shakes his head to clear the memory. “I’m going to go check on him,” he tells Harold and Julia, but then he hears the glass door slide open, and all three of them turn and look up the sloping hill to see Jude holding a tray of drinks, and all three of them stand to go help him. But there is a moment before they begin heading uphill and Jude begins walking toward them in which they all hold their positions, and it reminds him of a set, in which every scene can be redone, every mistake can be corrected, every sorrow reshot. And in that moment, they are on one edge of the frame, and Jude is on the other, but they are all smiling at one another, and the world seems to hold nothing but sweetness.

The last time in his life he would walk on his own — really walk: not just edging along the wall from one room to the next; not shuffling down the hallways of Rosen Pritchard; not inching his way through the lobby to the garage, sinking into the car seat with a groan of relief — had been their Christmas vacation. He was forty-six. They were in Bhutan: a good choice, he would later realize, for his final sustained spell of walking (although of course he hadn’t known that at the time), because it was a country in which everyone walked. The people they met there, including an old acquaintance of theirs from college, Karma, who was now the minister of forestry, spoke of walking not in terms of kilometers but in terms of hours. “Oh yes,” Karma had said, “when my father was growing up, he used to walk four hours to visit his aunt on the weekends. And then he would walk four hours back home.” He and Willem had marveled at this, although later, they had also agreed: the countryside was so pretty, a series of swooping, treed parabolas, the sky above a thin clear blue, that time spent walking here must move more quickly and pleasantly than time spent walking anywhere else.

He hadn’t felt at his best on that trip, although at least he was mobile. In the months before, he had been feeling weaker, but not in any truly specifiable way, not in any way that seemed to suggest some greater problem. He simply lost energy faster; he was achey instead of sore, a dull, constant thud of pain that followed him into sleep and was there to greet him when he woke. It was the difference, he told Andy, between a month speckled by thundershowers and a month in which it rained daily: not heavily but ceaselessly, a kind of dreary, enervating discomfort. In October, he’d had to use his wheelchair every day, which had been the most consecutive days he had ever been dependent on it. In November, although he had been well enough to make Thanksgiving dinner at Harold’s, he had been in too much pain to actually sit at the table to eat it, and he had spent the evening in his bedroom, lying as still as he could, semi-aware of Harold and Willem and Julia coming in to check on him, semi-aware of his apologizing for ruining the holiday for them, semi-aware of the muted conversation among the three of them and Laurence and Gillian, James and Carey, that he half heard coming from the dining room. After that, Willem had wanted to cancel their trip, but he had insisted, and he was glad he had — for he felt there was something restorative about the beauty of the landscape, about the cleanliness and quiet of the mountains, about getting to see Willem surrounded by streams and trees, which was always where he looked most comfortable.

It was a good vacation, but by the end, he was ready to leave. One of the reasons he had been able to convince Willem that they could go on this trip at all was because his friend Elijah, who now ran a hedge fund that he represented, was going on holiday to Nepal with his family, and they caught flights both from and back to New York on his plane. He had worried that Elijah might be in a talkative mood, but he hadn’t been, and he had slept, gratefully, almost the entire way home, his feet and back blazing with pain.

The day after they returned to Greene Street he couldn’t lift himself out of bed. He was in such distress that his body seemed to be one long exposed nerve, frayed at either end; he had the sense that if he were to be touched with a drop of water, his entire being would sizzle and hiss in response. He was rarely so exhausted, so sore that he couldn’t even sit up, and he could tell that Willem — around whom he made a particular effort, so he wouldn’t worry — was alarmed, and he had to plead with him not to call Andy. “All right,” Willem had said, reluctantly, “but if you’re not better by tomorrow, I’m calling him.” He nodded, and Willem sighed. “Dammit, Jude,” he said, “I knew we shouldn’t’ve gone.”

But the next day, he was better: better enough to get out of bed, at least. He couldn’t walk; all day, his legs and feet and back felt as if they were being driven through with iron bolts, but he made himself smile and talk and move about, though when Willem left the room or turned away from him, he could feel his face drooping with fatigue.

And then that was how it was, and they both grew used to it: although he now needed his wheelchair daily, he tried to walk every day for as much as he could, even if it was just to the bathroom, and he was careful about conserving his energy. When he was cooking, he made certain he had everything assembled on the counter in front of him before he started so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth to the refrigerator; he turned down invitations to dinners, parties, openings, fund-raisers, telling people, telling Willem that he had too much work to attend them, but really he came home and wheeled his way slowly across the apartment, the punishingly large apartment, stopping to rest when he needed to, dozing in bed so he’d have enough life in him to talk to Willem when he returned.

At the end of January he finally went to see Andy, who listened to him and then examined him, carefully. “There’s nothing wrong with you, as such,” he said when he was finished. “You’re just getting older.”

“Oh,” he said, and they were both quiet, for what was there for them to say? “Well,” he said, at last, “maybe I’ll get so weak that I’ll be able to convince Willem I don’t have the energy to go to Loehmann any longer,” because one night that fall he had — stupidly, drunkenly, romantically even — promised Willem he’d see Dr. Loehmann for another nine months.

Andy had sighed but had smiled, too. “You’re such a brat,” he said.

Now, though, he thinks back on this period fondly, for in every other way that mattered, that winter was a glorious time. In December, Willem had been nominated for a major award for his work in The Poisoned Apple; in January, he won it. Then he was nominated again, for an even bigger and more prestigious award, and again, he won. He had been in London on business the night Willem won, but had set his alarm for two a.m. so he could wake and watch the ceremony online; when Willem’s name was called, he shouted out loud, watched Willem, beaming, kiss Julia — whom he had brought as his date — and bound up the stairs to the stage, listened as he thanked the filmmakers, the studio, Emil, Kit, Alan Turing himself, Roman and Cressy and Richard and Malcolm and JB, and “my in-laws, Julia Altman and Harold Stein, for always making me feel like I was their son as well, and, finally and most important, Jude St. Francis, my best friend and the love of my life, for everything.” He’d had to stop himself from crying then, and when he got through to Willem half an hour later, he had to stop himself again. “I’m so proud of you, Willem,” he said. “I knew you would win, I knew it.”

“You always think that,” Willem laughed, and he laughed too, because Willem was right: he always did. He always thought Willem deserved to win awards for whatever he was nominated for; on the occasions he didn’t, he was genuinely perplexed — politics and preferences aside, how could the judges, the voters, deny what was so obviously a superior performance, a superior actor, a superior person?

In his meetings the next morning — in which he had to stop himself from not crying, but smiling, dopily and incessantly — his colleagues congratulated him and asked him again why he hadn’t gone to the ceremony, and he had shaken his head. “Those things aren’t for me,” he said, and they weren’t; of all the awards shows, all the premieres, all the parties that Willem went to for work, he had attended only two or three. This past year, when Willem was being interviewed by a serious, literary magazine for a long profile, he vanished whenever he knew the writer would be present. He knew Willem wasn’t offended by this, that he attributed his scarcity to his sense of privacy. And while this was true, it wasn’t the only reason.

Once, shortly after they had become a couple, there had been a picture of them that had run with a Times story about Willem and the first installment he had completed in a spy movie trilogy. The photo had been taken at the opening of JB’s fifth, long-delayed show, “Frog and Toad,” which had been exclusively images of the two of them, but very blurred, and much more abstract than JB’s previous work. (They hadn’t quite known what to think of the series title, though JB had claimed it was affectionate. “Arnold Lobel?” he had screeched at them when they asked him about it. “Hello?!” But neither he nor Willem had read Lobel’s books as children, and they’d had to go out and buy them to make sense of the reference.) Curiously, it had been this show, even more than the initial New York magazine story about Willem’s new life, that had made their relationship real for their colleagues and peers, despite the fact that most of the paintings had been made from photographs taken before they had become a couple.

It was also this show that would mark, as JB later said, his ascendancy: they knew that despite his sales, his reviews, his fellowships and accolades, he was tormented that Richard had had a mid-career museum retrospective (as had Asian Henry Young), and he hadn’t. But after “Frog and Toad,” something shifted for JB, the way that The Sycamore Court had shifted things for Willem, the way that the Doha museum had shifted things for Malcolm, even the way — if he was to be boastful — that the Malgrave and Baskett suit had shifted things for him. It was only when he stepped outside his firmament of friends that he realized that that shift, that shift they had all hoped for and received, was rarer and more precious than they even knew. Of all of them, only JB had been certain that he deserved that shift, that it was absolutely going to happen for him; he and Malcolm and Willem had had no such certainty, and so when it was given to them, they were befuddled. But although JB had had to wait the longest for his life to change, he was calm when it finally did — something in him seemed to become defanged; he became, for the first time since they had known him, mellowed, and the constant prickly humor that fizzed off of him like static was demagnetized and quieted. He was glad for JB; he was glad he now had the kind of recognition he wanted, the kind of recognition he thought JB should have received after “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days.”

“The question is which one of us is the frog and which is the toad,” Willem had said after they’d first seen the show, in JB’s studio, and read the kindhearted books to each other late that night, laughing helplessly as they did.

He’d smiled; they had been lying in bed. “Obviously, I’m the toad,” he said.

“No,” Willem said, “I think you’re the frog; your eyes are the same color as his skin.”

Willem sounded so serious that he grinned. “That’s your evidence?” he asked. “And so what do you have in common with the toad?”

“I think I actually have a jacket like the one he has,” Willem said, and they began laughing again.

But really, he knew: he was the toad, and seeing the picture in the Times of the two of them together had reminded him of this. He wasn’t so bothered by this for his own sake — he was trying to care less about his own anxieties — but for Willem’s, because he was aware of how mismatched, how distorted a couple they made, and he was embarrassed for him, and worried that his mere presence might be somehow harmful to Willem. And so he tried to stay away from him in public. He had always thought that Willem was capable of making him better, but over the years he feared: If Willem could make him better, didn’t that also mean that he could make Willem sick? And in the same way, if Willem could make him into someone less difficult to regard, couldn’t he also make Willem into something ugly? He knew this wasn’t logical, but he thought it anyway, and sometimes as they were getting ready to go out, he glimpsed himself in the bathroom mirror, his stupid, pleased expression, as absurd and grotesque as a monkey dressed in expensive clothes, and would want to punch the glass with his fist.

But the other reason he was worried about being seen with Willem was because of the exposure it entailed. Ever since his first day of college, he had feared that someday someone from his past — a client; one of the boys from the home — would try to contact him, would try to extort something from him for their silence. “No one will, Jude,” Ana had assured him. “I promise. To do so would be to admit how they know you.” But he was always afraid, and over the years, there had been a few ghosts who had announced themselves. The first arrived shortly after he’d started at Rosen Pritchard: just a postcard, from someone who claimed he had known him from the home — someone with the unhelpfully indistinct name of Rob Wilson, someone he didn’t remember — and for a week, he had panicked, barely able to sleep, his mind scrolling through scenarios that seemed as terrifying as they were inevitable. What if this Rob Wilson contacted Harold, contacted his colleagues at the firm, and told them who he was, told them about the things he had done? But he made himself not react, not do what he wanted to do — write a near-hysterical cease-and-desist letter that would prove nothing but his own existence, and the existence of his past — and he never heard from Rob Wilson again.

But after a few pictures of him with Willem had appeared in the press, he received two more letters and an e-mail, all sent to his work. One of the letters and the e-mail were again from men who claimed they had been at the home with him, but once again, he hadn’t recognized their names, and he never responded, and they never contacted him again. But the second letter had contained a copy of a photograph, black-and-white, of an undressed boy on a bed, and of such low quality that he couldn’t tell if it was him or not. And with this letter, he had done what he had been told to do all those years ago, when he was a child in a hospital bed in Philadelphia, should any of the clients figure out who he was and try to establish communication with him: he had put the letter in an envelope and had sent it to the FBI. They always knew where he was, that office, and every four or five years an agent would appear at his workplace to show him pictures, to ask him if he remembered one man or another, men who were decades later still being uncovered as Dr. Traylor’s, Brother Luke’s, friends and fellow criminals. He rarely had advance warning before these visits, and over the years he had learned what he needed to do in the days afterward in order to neutralize them, how he needed to surround himself with people, with events, with noise and clamor, with evidence of the life he now inhabited.

In this period, the one in which he had received and disposed of the letter, he had felt vividly ashamed and intensely alone — this had been before he had told Willem about his childhood, and he had never given Andy enough context so that he would appreciate the terror that he was experiencing — and after, he had finally made himself hire an investigative agency (though not the one that Rosen Pritchard used) to uncover everything they could about him. The investigation had taken a month, but at its end, there was nothing conclusive, or at least nothing that could conclusively identify him as who he had been. It was only then that he allowed himself to relax, to believe, finally, that Ana had been right, to accept that, for the most part, his past had been erased so completely that it was as if it had never existed. The people who knew the most about it, who had witnessed and made it — Brother Luke; Dr. Traylor; even Ana — were dead, and the dead can speak to no one. You’re safe, he would remind himself. And although he was, it didn’t mean he wasn’t still cautious; it didn’t mean that he should want to have his photograph in magazines and newspapers.

He accepted that this was what his life with Willem would be, of course, but sometimes he wished it could be different, that he could be less circumspect about claiming Willem in public the way Willem had claimed him. In idle moments, he played the clip of Willem making his speech over and over, feeling that same giddiness he had when Harold had first named him as his son to another person. This has really happened, he had thought at the time. This isn’t something I’ve made up. And now, the same delirium: he really was Willem’s. He had said so himself.

In March, at the end of awards season, he and Richard had thrown Willem a party at Greene Street. A large shipment of carved-teak doorways and benches had just been moved out of the fifth floor, and Richard had strung the ceiling with ropes of lights and had lined every wall with glass jars containing candles. Richard’s studio manager had brought two of their largest worktables upstairs, and he had called the caterers and a bartender. They had invited everyone they could think of: all of their friends in common, and all of Willem’s as well. Harold and Julia, James and Carey, Laurence and Gillian, Lionel and Sinclair had come down from Boston; Kit had come out from L.A., Carolina from Yountville, Phaedra and Citizen from Paris, Willem’s friends Cressy and Susannah from London, Miguel from Madrid. He made himself stand and walk through that party, at which people he knew only from Willem’s stories — directors and actors and playwrights — approached him and said they’d been hearing about him for years, and that it was so nice to finally meet him, that they’d been thinking that Willem had invented him, and although he had laughed, he had been sad as well, as if he should have ignored his fears and involved himself more in Willem’s life.

So many people there hadn’t seen one another in so many years that it was a very busy party, the kind of party they had gone to when they were young, with people shouting at one another over the music that one of Richard’s assistants, an amateur DJ, was playing, and a few hours into it he was exhausted, and leaned against the northern wall of the space to watch everyone dance. In the middle of the scrum he could see Willem dancing with Julia, and he smiled, watching them, before noticing that Harold was standing on the other side of the room, watching them as well, smiling as well. Harold saw him, then, and raised his glass to him, and he raised his in return, and then watched as Harold worked his way toward him.

“Good party,” Harold shouted into his ear.

“It’s mostly Richard’s doing,” he shouted back, but as he was about to say something else, the music became louder, and he and Harold looked at each other and laughed and shrugged. For a while they simply stood, both of them smiling, watching the dancers heave and blur before them. He was tired, he was in pain, but it didn’t matter; his tiredness felt like something sweet and warm, his pain was familiar and expected, and in those moments he was aware that he was capable of joyfulness, that life was honeyed. Then the music turned, grew dreamy and slow, and Harold yelled that he was going to reclaim Julia from Willem’s clutches.

“Go,” he told him, but before Harold left him, something made him reach out and put his arms around him, which was the first time he had voluntarily touched Harold since the incident with Caleb. He could see that Harold was stunned, and then delighted, and he felt guilt course through him, and moved away as quickly as he could, shooing Harold onto the dance floor as he did.

There was a nest of cotton-stuffed burlap sacks in one of the corners, which Richard had put down for people to lounge against, and he was headed toward them when Willem appeared, and grabbed his hand. “Come dance with me,” he said.

“Willem,” he admonished him, smiling, “you know I can’t dance.”

Willem looked at him then, appraisingly. “Come with me,” he said, and he followed Willem toward the east end of the loft, and to the bathroom, where Willem pulled him inside and closed and locked the door behind them, placing his drink on the edge of the sink. They could still hear the music — a song that had been popular when they were in college, embarrassing and yet somehow moving in its unapologetic sentimentalism, in its syrup and sincerity — but in the bathroom it was dampened, as if it was being piped in from some far-off valley. “Put your arms around me,” Willem told him, and he did. “Move your right foot back when I move my left one toward it,” he said next, and he did.

For a while they moved slowly and clumsily, looking at each other, silent. “See?” Willem said, quietly. “You’re dancing.”

“I’m not good at it,” he mumbled, embarrassed.

“You’re perfect at it,” Willem said, and although his feet were by this point so sore that he was beginning to perspire from the discipline it was taking not to scream, he kept moving, but so minimally that toward the end of the song they were only swaying, their feet not leaving the ground, Willem holding him so he wouldn’t fall.

When they emerged from the bathroom, there was a whooping from the groups of people nearest to them, and he blushed — the last, the final, time he’d had sex with Willem had been almost sixteen months ago — but Willem grinned and raised his arm as if he was a prizefighter who had just won a bout.

And then it was April, and his forty-seventh birthday, and then it was May, and he developed a wound on each calf, and Willem left for Istanbul to shoot the second installment in his spy trilogy. He had told Willem about the wounds — he was trying to tell him things as they happened, even things he didn’t consider that important — and Willem had been upset.

But he hadn’t been concerned. How many of these wounds had he had over the years? Tens; dozens. The only thing that had changed was the amount of time he spent trying to resolve them. Now he went to Andy’s office twice a week — every Tuesday lunchtime and Friday evening — once for debriding and once for a wound vacuum treatment, which Andy’s nurse performed. Andy had always thought that his skin was too fragile for that treatment, in which a piece of sterile foam was fitted above the open sore and a nozzle moved above it that sucked the dead and dying tissues into the foam like a sponge, but in recent years he had tolerated it well, and it had proven more successful than simply debriding alone.

As he had grown older, the wounds — their frequency, their severity, their size, the level of discomfort that attended them — had grown steadily worse. Long gone, decades gone, were the days in which he was able to walk any great distance when he had them. (The memory of strolling from Chinatown to the Upper East Side — albeit painfully — with one of these wounds was so strange and remote that it didn’t even seem to belong to him, but to somebody else.) When he was younger, it might take a few weeks for one to heal. But now it took months. Of all the things that were wrong with him, he was the most dispassionate about these sores; and yet he was never able to accustom himself to their very appearance. And although of course he wasn’t scared of blood, the sight of pus, of rot, of his body’s desperate attempt to heal itself by trying to kill part of itself still unsettled him even all these years later.

By the time Willem came home for good, he wasn’t better. There were now four wounds on his calves, the most he had ever had at one time, and although he was still trying to walk daily, it was sometimes difficult enough to simply stand, and he was vigilant about parsing his efforts, about determining when he was trying to walk because he thought he could, and when he was trying to walk to prove to himself that he was still capable of it. He could feel he had lost weight, he could feel he had gotten weaker — he could no longer even swim every morning — but he knew it for sure once he saw Willem’s face. “Judy,” Willem had said, quietly, and had knelt next to him on the sofa. “I wish you had told me.” But in a funny way, there had been nothing to tell: this was who he was. And besides his legs, his feet, his back, he felt fine. He felt — though he hesitated to say this about himself: it seemed so bold a statement — mentally healthy. He was back to cutting himself only once a week. He heard himself whistling as he removed his pants at night, examining the area around the bandages to make sure none of them were leaking fluids. People got used to anything their bodies gave them; he was no exception. If your body was well, you expected it to perform for you, excellently, consistently. If your body was not, your expectations were different. Or this, at least, was what he was trying to accept.

Shortly after he returned at the end of July, Willem gave him permission to terminate his mostly silent relationship with Dr. Loehmann — but only because he genuinely didn’t have the time any longer. Four hours of his week were now spent at doctors’ offices — two with Andy, two with Loehmann — and he needed to reclaim two of those hours so he could go twice a week to the hospital, where he took off his pants and flipped his tie over his shoulder and was slid into a hyperbaric chamber, a glass coffin where he lay and did work and hoped that the concentrated oxygen that was being piped in all around him might help hasten his healing. He had felt guilty about his eighteen months with Dr. Loehmann, in which he had revealed almost nothing, had spent most of his time childishly protecting his privacy, trying not to say anything, wasting both his and the doctor’s time. But one of the few subjects they had discussed was his legs — not how they had been damaged but the logistics of caring for them — and in his final session, Dr. Loehmann had asked what would happen if he didn’t get better.

“Amputation, I guess,” he had said, trying to sound casual, although of course he wasn’t casual, and there was nothing to guess: he knew that as surely as he would someday die, he would do so without his legs. He just had to hope it wouldn’t be soon. Please, he would sometimes beg his legs as he lay in the glass chamber. Please. Give me just a few more years. Give me another decade. Let me get through my forties, my fifties, intact. I’ll take care of you, I promise.

By late summer, his new bout of sicknesses, of treatments had become so commonplace to him that he hadn’t realized how affected Willem might be by them. Early that August, they were discussing what to do (something? nothing?) for Willem’s forty-ninth birthday, and Willem had said he thought they should just do something low-key this year.

“Well, we’ll do something big next year, for your fiftieth,” he said. “If I’m still alive by then, that is,” and it wasn’t until he heard Willem’s silence that he had looked up from the stove and seen Willem’s expression and had recognized his mistake. “Willem, I’m sorry,” he said, turning off the burner and making his slow, painful way over to him. “I’m sorry.”

“You can’t joke like that, Jude,” Willem said, and he put his arms around him.

“I know,” he said. “Forgive me. I was being stupid. Of course I’m going to be around next year.”

“And for many years to come.”

“And for many years to come.”

Now it is September, and he is lying on the examining table in Andy’s office, his wounds uncovered and still split open like pomegranates, and at nights he is lying in bed next to Willem. He is often conscious of the unlikeliness of their relationship, and often guilty at his unwillingness to fulfill one of the core duties of couplehood. Every once in a while, he thinks he will try again, and then, just as he is trying to say the words to Willem, he stops, and another opportunity quietly slides away. But his guilt, as great as it is, cannot overwhelm his sense of relief, nor his sense of gratitude: that he should have been able to keep Willem despite his inabilities is a miracle, and he tries, in every other way he can, to always communicate to Willem how thankful he is.

He wakes one night sweating so profusely that the sheets beneath him feel as if they’ve been dragged through a puddle, and in his haze, he stands before he realizes he can’t, and falls. Willem wakes, then, and fetches him the thermometer, standing over him as he holds it under his tongue. “One hundred and two,” he says, examining it, and places his palm on his forehead. “But you’re freezing.” He looks at him, worried. “I’m going to call Andy.”

“Don’t call Andy,” he says, and despite the fever, the chills, the sweating, he feels normal; he doesn’t feel sick. “I just need some aspirin.” So Willem gets it, brings him a shirt, strips and remakes the bed, and they fall asleep again, Willem wrapped around him.

The next night he wakes again with a fever, again with chills, again with sweating. “There’s something going around the office,” he tells Willem this time. “Some forty-eight-hour bug. I must’ve caught it.” Again he takes aspirin; again it helps; again he goes back to sleep.

The day after that is a Friday and he goes to Andy to have his wounds cleaned, but he doesn’t mention the fever, which disappears by daylight. That night Willem is away, having dinner with Roman, and he goes to bed early, swallowing some aspirin before he does. He sleeps so deeply that he doesn’t even hear Willem come in, but when he wakes the following morning, he is so sweaty that it looks as if he’s been standing under the shower, and his limbs are numb and shaky. Beside him, Willem gently snores, and he sits, slowly, running his hands through his wet hair.

He really is better that Saturday. He goes to work. Willem goes to meet a director for lunch. Before he leaves the offices for the evening, he texts Willem and tells him to ask Richard and India if they want to meet for sushi on the Upper East Side, at a little restaurant he and Andy sometimes go to after their appointments. He and Willem have two favorite sushi places near Greene Street, but both of them have flights of descending stairs, and so they have been unable to go for months because the steps are too difficult for him. That night he eats well, and even as the fatigue punches him midway through the meal, he is conscious that he is enjoying himself, that he is grateful to be in this small, warm place, with its yellow-lit lanterns above him and the wooden geta-like slab atop which are laid tongues of mackerel sashimi — Willem’s favorite — before him. At one point he leans against Willem’s side, from exhaustion and affection, but isn’t even aware he’s done so until he feels Willem move his arm and put it around him.

Later, he wakes in their bed, disoriented, and sees Harold sitting next to him, staring at him. “Harold,” he says, “what’re you doing here?” But Harold doesn’t speak, just lunges at him, and he realizes with a sickening lurch that Harold is trying to take his clothes off. No, he tells himself. Not Harold. This can’t be. This is one of his deepest, ugliest, most secret fears, and now it is coming true. But then his old instincts awaken: Harold is another client, and he will fight him away. He yells, then, twisting himself, pinwheeling his arms and what he can of his legs, trying to intimidate, to fluster this silent, determined Harold before him, screaming for Brother Luke’s help.

And then, suddenly, Harold vanishes and is replaced by Willem, his face near his, saying something he can’t understand. But behind Willem’s head he sees Harold’s again, his strange, grim expression, and he resumes his fight. Above him, he can hear words, can hear that Willem is talking to someone, can register, even through his own fright, Willem’s fright as well. “Willem,” he calls out. “He’s trying to hurt me; don’t let him hurt me, Willem. Help me. Help me. Help me — please.” Then there is nothing — a stretch of blackened time — and when he wakes again, he is in the hospital. “Willem,” he announces to the room, and there, immediately, is Willem, sitting at the edge of his bed, taking his hand. There is a length of plastic tubing snaking out of the back of this hand, and out of the other as well. “Careful,” Willem tells him, “the IVs.”

For a while they are silent, and Willem strokes his forehead. “He was trying to attack me,” he finally confesses to Willem, stumbling as he speaks. “I never thought Harold would do that to me, not ever.”

He can see Willem stiffen. “No, Jude,” he says. “Harold wasn’t there. You were delirious from the fever; it didn’t happen.”

He is relieved and terrified to hear this. Relieved to hear that it wasn’t true; terrified because it seemed so real, so actual. Terrified because what does it say about him, about how he thinks and what his fears are, that he should even imagine this about Harold? How cruel can his own mind be to try to convince him to turn against someone he has struggled so hard to trust, someone who has only ever shown him kindness? He can feel tears in his eyes, but he has to ask Willem: “He wouldn’t do that to me, would he, Willem?”

“No,” says Willem, and his voice is strained. “Never, Jude. Harold would never, ever do that to you, not for anything.”

When he wakes again, he realizes he doesn’t know what day it is, and when Willem tells him it’s Monday, he panics. “Work,” he says, “I have to go.”

“No fucking way,” Willem says, sharply. “I called them, Jude. You’re not going anywhere, not until Andy figures out what’s going on.”

Harold and Julia arrive later, and he makes himself return Harold’s embrace, although he cannot look at him. Over Harold’s shoulder, he sees Willem, who nods at him reassuringly.

They are all together when Andy comes in. “Osteomyelitis,” he says to him, quietly. “A bone infection.” He explains what will happen: he will have to stay in the hospital for at least a week—“A week!” he exclaims, and the four of them start shouting at him before he has a chance to protest further — or possibly two, until they get the fever under control. The antibiotics will be dispensed through a central line, but the remaining ten to eleven weeks of treatment will be given to him on an outpatient basis. Every day, a nurse will come administer the IV drip: the treatment will take an hour, and he is not to miss a single one of these. When he tries, again, to protest, Andy stops him. “Jude,” he says. “This is serious. I mean it. I don’t fucking care about Rosen Pritchard. You want to keep your legs, you do this and you follow my instructions, do you understand me?”

Around him, the others are silent. “Yes,” he says, at last.

A nurse comes to prep him so Andy can administer the central venous catheter, which will be inserted into the subclavian vein, directly beneath his right collarbone. “This is a tricky vein to access because it’s so deep,” the nurse says, pulling down the neck of his gown and cleaning a square of his skin. “But you’re lucky to have Dr. Contractor. He’s very good with needles; he never misses.” He isn’t worried, but he knows Willem is, and he holds Willem’s hand as Andy first pierces his skin with the cold metal needle and then threads the coil of guide wire into him. “Don’t look,” he tells Willem. “It’s okay.” And so Willem stares instead at his face, which he tries to keep still and composed until Andy is finished and is taping the catheter’s length of slender plastic tubing to his chest.

He sleeps. He had thought he might be able to work from the hospital, but he is more exhausted than he thought he would be, cloudier, and after talking to the chairs of the various committees and some of his colleagues, he doesn’t have the strength to do anything else.

Harold and Julia leave — they have classes and office hours — but except for Richard and a few people from work, they don’t tell anyone he’s hospitalized; he won’t be there for long, and Willem has decided he needs sleep more than he needs visitors. He is still febrile, but less so, and there have been no further episodes of delirium. And strangely, for all that is happening, he feels, if not optimistic, then at least calm. Everyone around him is so sober, so thin-lipped, that he feels determined to defy them somehow, to defy the severity of the situation they keep telling him he’s in.

He can’t remember when he and Willem started referring to the hospital as the Hotel Contractor, in honor of Andy, but it seems they always have. “Watch out,” Willem would say to him even back at Lispenard Street, when he was hacking at a piece of steak some enraptured sous-chef at Ortolan had sneaked Willem at the end of his shift, “that cleaver’s really sharp, and if you chop off a thumb, we’ll have to go to the Hotel Contractor.” Or once, when he was hospitalized for a skin infection, he had sent Willem (away somewhere, shooting) a text reading “At Hotel Contractor. Not a big deal, but didn’t want you to hear through M or JB.” Now, though, when he tries to make Hotel Contractor jokes — complaining about the Hotel’s increasingly poor food and beverage services; about its poor quality of linens — Willem doesn’t respond.

“This isn’t funny, Jude,” he snaps on Friday evening, as they wait for Harold and Julia to arrive with dinner. “I wish you’d fucking stop kidding around.” He is quiet then, and they look at each other. “I was so scared,” Willem says, in a low voice. “You were so sick and I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I was so scared.”

“Willem,” he says, gently, “I know. I’m so grateful for you.” He hurries on before Willem can tell him he doesn’t need him to be grateful, he needs him to take the situation seriously. “I’m going to listen to Andy, I promise. I promise you I’m taking this seriously. And I promise you I’m not in any discomfort. I feel fine. It’s going to be fine.”

After ten days, Andy is satisfied that the fever has been eliminated, and he is discharged and sent home for two days to rest; he is back at the office on Friday. He had always resisted having a driver — he liked to drive himself; he liked the independence, the solitude — but now Willem’s assistant has hired a driver for him, a small, serious man named Mr. Ahmed, and on his way to and from the office, he sleeps. Mr. Ahmed also picks up his nurse, a woman named Patrizia who rarely speaks but is very gentle, and every day at one p.m., she meets him at Rosen Pritchard. His office there is all glass and looks out onto the floor, and he lowers the shades for privacy and takes off his jacket and tie and shirt, and lies down on the sofa in his undershirt and covers himself with a blanket, and Patrizia cleans the catheter and checks the skin around it to make sure there are no signs of infection — no swelling, no redness — and then inserts the IV and waits as the medicine drips into the catheter and slides into his veins. As they wait, he works and she reads a nursing journal or knits. Soon this too becomes normal: every Friday he sees Andy, who debrides his wounds and then examines him, sending him to the hospital after their session for X-rays so he can track the infection and make sure it isn’t spreading.

They cannot go away on the weekends because he needs to have his treatment, but in early October, after four weeks of antibiotics, Andy announces that he’s been talking to Willem, and if he doesn’t mind, he and Jane are going to come up to stay with them in Garrison for the weekend, and he’ll administer the drip himself.

It is wonderful, and rare, being out of the city, being back at their house, and the four of them enjoy one another’s company. He even feels well enough to give Andy an abbreviated tour of the property, which Andy has visited only in springtime or summer, but which is different in autumn: raw, sad, lovely, the barn’s roof plastered with fallen yellow gingko leaves that make it look as if it’s been laid with sheets of gold leaf.

Over dinner that Saturday night, Andy asks him, “You do realize we’ve now known each other for thirty years, right?”

“I do,” he smiles. He has in fact bought Andy something — a safari vacation for him and his family, to go on whenever he wants — for their anniversary, although he hasn’t told him about it yet.

“Thirty years of being disobeyed,” Andy moans, and the rest of them laugh. “Thirty years of dispensing priceless medical advice gleaned from years of experience and training at top institutions, only to have it ignored by a corporate litigator, who’s decided his understanding of human biology is superior to my own.”

After they’ve stopped laughing, Jane says, “But you know, Andy, if it weren’t for Jude, I never would have married you.” To him, she says, “In medical school, I always thought Andy was sort of a self-absorbed douche bag, Jude; he was so arrogant, so borderline callow”—“What!” Andy says, feigning injury—“that I assumed he was going to be one of those typical surgeons — you know, ‘not always right, but always certain.’ But then I heard him talk about you, how much he loved and respected you, and I thought there might be something more to him. And I was right.”

“You were,” he tells her, after they all laugh again. “You were right,” and they all look at Andy, who gets embarrassed and pours himself another glass of wine.

The week after that, Willem begins rehearsals for his new film. A month ago, when he got sick, he had backed out of the project, and then it had been delayed to wait for him, and now things are stable enough that he has signed on again. He doesn’t understand why Willem had backed out in the first place — the film is a remake of Desperate Characters, and most of the filming will be done just across the river, in Brooklyn Heights — but he is relieved to have Willem at work again and not hovering over him, looking worried and asking him if he’s sure he has the energy to do any of the very basic things (going to the grocery store; making a meal; staying late at work) that he wants to do.

In early November he goes back into the hospital with another fever, but only stays for two nights before he’s released again. Patrizia draws his blood every week, but Andy has told him that he’ll have to be patient; bone infections take a long time to eradicate, and he probably won’t have a sense of whether he’s been healed for good or not until the end of the twelve-week cycle. But otherwise, everything trudges on: He goes to work. He goes to have his treatments in the hyperbaric chamber. He goes to have his wounds vacuum-treated. He goes to have them debrided. One of the side effects from the antibiotics is diarrhea; another is nausea. He is losing weight at a rate even he can tell is problematic; he has eight of his shirts and two of his suits retailored. Andy prescribes him high-calorie drinks meant for malnourished children, and he swallows them five times a day, gulping water afterward to erase their chalky, tongue-coating flavor. Except for the hours he keeps at the office, he is conscious of being more obedient than he ever has been, of heeding every one of Andy’s warnings, of following his every piece of advice. He is still trying not to think of how this episode might end, trying not to worry himself, but in dark, quiet moments, he replays what Andy said to him on one of his recent checkups: “Heart: perfect. Lungs: perfect. Vision, hearing, cholesterol, prostate, blood sugar, blood pressure, lipids, kidney function, liver function, thyroid function: all perfect. Your body’s equipped to work as hard as it can for you, Jude; make sure you let it.” He knows that isn’t the complete measure of who he is — circulation, for example: not perfect; reflexes: not perfect; anything south of his groin: compromised — but he tries to take comfort in Andy’s reassurances, to remind himself that things could be worse, that he is, essentially, still a healthy person, still a lucky person.

Late November. Willem finishes Desperate Characters. They have Thanksgiving at Harold and Julia’s uptown, and although they have been coming into the city every other weekend to see him, he can sense them both trying very hard not to say anything about his appearance, not to bother him about how little he’s eating at dinner. Thanksgiving week also marks his final week of antibiotic treatments, and he submits to another round of blood work and X-rays before Andy tells him he can stop. He says goodbye to Patrizia for what he hopes is the last time; he gives her a gift to thank her for her care.

Although his wounds have shrunk, they haven’t shrunk as much as Andy had hoped, and on his recommendation, they stay in Garrison for Christmas. They promise Andy it will be a quiet week; everyone else will be out of town anyway, so it will be only the two of them and Harold and Julia.

“Your two goals are: sleeping and eating,” says Andy, who is going to visit Beckett in San Francisco for the holidays. “I want to see you five pounds heavier by the first Friday in January.”

“Five pounds is a lot,” he says.

“Five,” Andy repeats. “And then ideally, fifteen more after that.”

On Christmas itself, a year to the day he and Willem had walked along the spine of a low, wavy mountainside in Punakha, one that took them behind the king’s hunting lodge, a simple wooden structure that looked like it might be full of Chaucerian pilgrims, not the royal family, he tells Harold he wants to take a walk. Julia and Willem have gone horseback riding at an acquaintance’s nearby ranch, and he is feeling stronger than he has in a long time.

“I don’t know, Jude,” says Harold, warily.

“Come on, Harold,” he says. “Just to the first bench.” Malcolm has placed three benches along the path he has hacked through the forest to the house’s rear; one is located about a third of a way around the lake; the second at the halfway point; and the third at the two-thirds point. “We’ll go slowly, and I’ll take my cane.” It has been years since he has had to use a cane — not since he was a teenager — but now he needs it for any distance longer than fifty yards or so. Finally, Harold agrees, and he grabs his scarf and coat before Harold can change his mind.

Once they are outdoors, his euphoria increases. He loves this house: he loves how it looks, he loves its quiet, and most of all, he loves that it is his and Willem’s, as far from Lispenard Street as imaginable, but as much theirs as that place was, something they made together and share. The house, which faces a second, different forest, is a series of glass cubes, and preceding it is a long driveway that switchbacks through the woods, so at certain angles you can see only swatches of it, and at other angles it disappears completely. At night, when it is lit, it glows like a lantern, which was what Malcolm had named it in his monograph: Lantern House. The back of the house looks out onto a wide lawn and beyond it, a lake. At the bottom of the lawn is a pool, which is lined with slabs of slate so that the water is always cold and clear, even on the hottest days, and in the barn there is an indoor pool and a living room; every wall of the barn can be lifted up and away from the structure, so that the entire interior is exposed to the outdoors, to the tree peonies and lilac bushes that bloom around it in the early spring; to the panicles of wisteria that drip from its roof in the early summer. To the right of the house is a field that paints itself red with poppies in July; to the left is another through which he and Willem scattered thousands of wildflower seeds: cosmos and daisies and foxglove and Queen Anne’s lace. One weekend shortly after they had moved in, they spent two days making their way through the forests before and behind the house, planting lilies of the valley near the mossy hillocks around the oak and elm trees, and sowing mint seeds throughout. They knew Malcolm didn’t approve of their landscaping efforts — he thought them sentimental and trite — and although they knew Malcolm was probably right, they also didn’t really care. In spring and summer, when the air was fragrant, they often thought of Lispenard Street, its aggressive ugliness, and of how then they wouldn’t even have had the visual imagination to conjure a place like this, where the beauty was so uncomplicated, so undeniable that it seemed at times an illusion.

He and Harold set off toward the forest, where the rough walkway means that it is easier for him to navigate than it had been when construction began. Even so, he has to concentrate, for the path is only cleared once a season, and in the months between it becomes cluttered with saplings and ferns and twigs and tree matter.

They aren’t quite halfway to the first bench when he knows he has made a mistake. His legs began throbbing as soon as they finished walking down the lawn, and now his feet are throbbing as well, and each step is agonizing. But he doesn’t say anything, just grips his cane more tightly, trying to re-center the discomfort, and pushes forward, clenching his teeth and squaring his jaw. By the time they reach the bench — really, a dark-gray limestone boulder — he is dizzy, and they sit for a long time, talking and looking out onto the lake, which is silvery in the cold air.

“It’s chilly,” Harold says eventually, and it is; he can feel the cool of the stone through his pants. “We should get you back to the house.”

“Okay,” he swallows, and stands, and immediately, he feels a hot stake of pain being thrust upward through his feet and gasps, but Harold doesn’t notice.

They are only thirty steps into the forest when he stops Harold. “Harold,” he says, “I need — I need—” But he can’t finish.

“Jude,” Harold says, and he can tell Harold is worried. He takes his left arm, slings it around his neck, and holds his hand in his own. “Lean on me as much as you can,” Harold says, putting his other arm around his waist, and he nods. “Ready?” He nods again.

He’s able to take twenty more steps — such slow steps, his feet tangling in the mulch — before he simply can’t move any more. “I can’t, Harold,” he says, and by this time he can barely speak, the pain is so extreme, so unlike anything he has felt in such a long time. Not since he was in the hospital in Philadelphia have his legs, his back, his feet hurt so profoundly, and he lets go of Harold and falls to the forest floor.

“Oh god, Jude,” Harold says, and bends over him, helping him to sit up against a tree, and he thinks how stupid, how selfish, he is. Harold is seventy-two. He should not be asking a seventy-two-year-old man, even an admirably healthy seventy-two-year-old man, for physical assistance. He cannot open his eyes because the world is torquing itself around him, but he hears Harold take out his phone, hears him try to call Willem, but the forest is so dense that the reception is poor, and Harold curses. “Jude,” he hears Harold say, but his voice is very faint, “I’m going to have to go back to the house and get your wheelchair. I’m so sorry. I’m going to be right back.” He nods, barely, and feels Harold button his coat closed, feels him push his hands into his coat’s pockets, feels him wrap something around his legs — Harold’s own coat, he realizes. “I’ll be right back,” Harold says. “I’ll be right back.” He hears Harold’s feet running away from him, the crunch of the sticks and leaves as they snap and crumple beneath him.

He turns his head to the side and the ground beneath him shifts, dangerously, and he vomits, coughing up everything he has eaten that day, feels it slide off of his lips and drool down his cheek. Then he feels a bit better, and he leans his head against the tree again. He is reminded of his time in the forest when he was running away from the home, how he had hoped the trees might protect him, and now he hopes for it again. He takes his hand out of his pocket, feels for his cane, and squeezes it as hard as he can. Behind his eyelids, bright spangled drops of light burst into confetti, and then blink out into oily smears. He concentrates on the sound of his breath, and on his legs, which he imagines as large lumpen shards of wood into which have been drilled dozens of long metal screws, each as thick as a thumb. He pictures the screws being drawn out in reverse, each one rotating slowly out of him and landing with a ringing clang on a cement floor. He vomits again. He is so cold. He can feel himself begin to spasm.

And then he hears someone running toward him, and he can smell it is Willem — his sweet sandalwood scent — before he hears his voice. Willem gathers him, and when he lifts him, everything sways again, and he thinks he is going to be sick, but he isn’t, and he puts his right arm around Willem’s neck and turns his vomity face into his shoulder and lets himself be carried. He can hear Willem panting — he may weigh less than Willem, but they are still the same height, and he knows how unwieldy he must be, his cane, still in his hand, banging against Willem’s thighs, his calves knocking against Willem’s rib cage — and is grateful when he feels himself being lowered into his chair, hears Willem’s and Harold’s voices above him. He bends over, resting his forehead on his knees, and is pushed back out of the forest and up the hill to the house, and once inside, he is lifted into bed. Someone takes off his shoes, and he screams out and is apologized to; someones wipes his face; someone wraps his hands around a hot-water bottle; someone wraps his legs with blankets. Above him, he can hear Willem being angry—“Why did you fucking go along with this? You know he can’t fucking do this!”—and Harold’s apologetic, miserable replies: “I know, Willem. I’m so sorry. It was moronic. But he wanted to go so badly.” He tries to speak, to defend Harold, to tell Willem it was his fault, that he made Harold come with him, but he can’t.

“Open your mouth,” Willem says, and he feels a pill, bitter as metal, being placed on his tongue. He feels a glass of water being tipped toward his lips. “Swallow,” Willem says, and he does, and soon after, the world ceases to exist.

When he wakes, he turns and sees Willem in bed with him, staring at him. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers, but Willem doesn’t say anything. He reaches over and runs his hand through Willem’s hair. “Willem,” he says, “it wasn’t Harold’s fault. I made him do it.”

Willem snorts. “Obviously,” he says. “But he still shouldn’t have agreed to it.”

They are quiet for a long time, and he thinks of what he needs to say, what he has always thought but never articulated. “I know this is going to sound illogical to you,” he tells Willem, who looks back at him. “But even all these years later, I still can’t think of myself as disabled. I mean — I know I am. I know I am. I have been for twice as long as I haven’t been. It’s the only way you’ve known me: as someone who — who needs help. But I remember myself as someone who used to be able to walk whenever he wanted to, as someone who used to be able to run.

“I think every person who becomes disabled thinks they were robbed of something. But I suppose I’ve always felt that — that if I acknowledge that I am disabled, then I’ll have conceded to Dr. Traylor, then I’ll have let Dr. Traylor determine the shape of my life. And so I pretend I’m not; I pretend I am who I was before I met him. And I know it’s not logical or practical. But mostly, I’m sorry because — because I know it’s selfish. I know my pretending has consequences for you. So — I’m going to stop.” He takes a breath, closes and opens his eyes. “I’m disabled,” he says. “I’m handicapped.” And as foolish as it is — he is forty-seven, after all; he has had thirty-two years to admit this to himself — he feels himself about to cry.

“Oh, Jude,” says Willem, and pulls him toward him. “I know you’re sorry. I know this is hard. I understand why you’ve never wanted to admit it; I do. I just worry about you; I sometimes think I care more about your being alive than you do.”

He shivers, hearing this. “No, Willem,” he says. “I mean — maybe, at one point. But not now.”

“Then prove it to me,” Willem says, after a silence.

“I will,” he says.

January; February. He is busier than he has ever been. Willem is rehearsing a play. March: Two new wounds open up, both on his right leg. Now the pain is excruciating; now he never leaves his wheelchair except to shower and go to the bathroom and dress and undress. It has been a year, more, since he has had a reprieve from the pain in his feet. And yet every morning when he wakes, he places them on the floor and is, for a second, hopeful. Maybe today he will feel better. Maybe today the pain will have abated. But he never does; it never does. And still he hopes. April: His birthday. The play’s run begins. May: Back come the night sweats, the fever, the shaking, the chills, the delirium. Back he goes to the Hotel Contractor. Back goes the catheter, this time into the left side of his chest. But there is a change this time: this time the bacteria is different; this time, he will need an antibiotic drip every eight hours, not every twenty-four. Back comes Patrizia, now two times a day: at six a.m., at Greene Street; at two p.m. at Rosen Pritchard; and at ten p.m. again at Greene Street, a night nurse, Yasmin. For the first time in their friendship, he sees only one performance of Willem’s play: his days are so segmented, so controlled by his medication, that he is simply unable to go a second time. For the first time since this cycle began a year ago, he feels himself tumbling toward despair; he feels himself giving up. He has to remind himself he must prove to Willem that he wants to remain alive, when all he really wants to do is stop. Not because he is depressed, but because he is exhausted. At the conclusion of one appointment, Andy looks at him with a strange expression and tells him that he’s not sure if he’s realized, but it’s been a month since he last cut himself, and he thinks about this. Andy is right. He has been too tired, too consumed to think about cutting.

“Well,” Andy says. “I’m glad. But I’m sorry this is why you’ve stopped, Jude.”

“I am, too,” he says. They are both quiet, both, he fears, nostalgic for the days when cutting was his most serious problem.

Now it is June, now it is July. The wounds on his legs — the old ones, which he has had for more than a year, and the more recent ones, which he has had since March — have not healed. They have barely diminished. And it is then, just after the Fourth of July weekend, just after Willem’s run ends, that Andy asks if he can come talk to him and Willem. And because he knows what Andy is going to say, he lies and says that Willem is busy, that Willem doesn’t have the time, as if by delaying the conversation, he might delay his future as well, but early one Saturday evening he comes home from the office and there they are in the apartment, waiting for him.

The speech is what he expects. Andy recommends — he strongly recommends — amputation. Andy is gentle, very gentle, but he can tell, from how rehearsed his delivery is, from how formal he is, that he is nervous.

“We always knew this day would come,” Andy begins, “but that doesn’t make it any easier. Jude, only you know how much pain, how much inconvenience, you can tolerate. I can’t tell you that. I can tell you that you’ve gone on far longer than most people would. I can tell you you’ve been extraordinarily courageous — don’t make that face: you have been; you are — and I can tell you that I can’t imagine what you’ve been suffering.

“But all of that aside — even if you feel you have the wherewithal to keep going — there are some realities to consider here. The treatments aren’t working. The wounds aren’t healing. The fact that you’ve had two bone infections in less than a year is alarming to me. I’m worried you’re going to develop an allergy to one of the antibiotics, and then we’ll be really, really fucked. And even if you don’t, you’re not tolerating the drugs as well as I’d hoped you would: you’ve lost way too much weight, a troubling amount of weight, and every time I see you, you’ve gotten a little weaker.

“The tissue in your upper legs seems to be healthy enough that I’m pretty certain we’ll be able to spare both knees. And Jude, I promise you that your quality of life will improve instantly if we amputate. There won’t be any more pain in your feet. You’ve never had a wound on your thighs, and I don’t think there’s any immediate fear you will. The prosthetics available now are so infinitely superior than what they were even ten years ago that honestly, your gait will probably be better, more natural, with them than it is with your actual legs. The surgery is very straightforward — just four hours or so — and I’ll do it myself. And the inpatient recovery is brief: less than a week in the hospital, and we’ll fit you with temporary prostheses immediately.”

Andy stops, placing his hands on his knees, and looks at them. For a long while, none of them speaks, and then Willem begins to ask questions, smart questions, questions he should be asking: How long is the outpatient recovery period? What kind of physical therapy would he be doing? What are the risks associated with the surgery? He half listens to the responses, which he already knows, more or less, having researched these very questions, this very scenario, every year since Andy had first suggested it to him, seventeen years ago.

Finally, he interrupts them. “What happens if I say no?” he asks, and he can see the dismay move across both of their faces.

“If you say no, we’ll keep pushing forward with everything we’ve been doing and hope it works eventually,” Andy says. “But Jude, it’s always better to have an amputation when you get to decide to have it, not when you’re forced to have it.” He pauses. “If you get a blood infection, if you develop sepsis, then we will have to amputate, and I won’t be able to guarantee that you’ll keep the knees. I won’t be able to guarantee that you won’t lose some other extremity — a finger; a hand — that the infection won’t spread far beyond your lower legs.”

“But you can’t guarantee me that I’ll even keep the knees this time,” he says, petulant. “You can’t guarantee I won’t develop sepsis in the future.”

“No,” Andy admits. “But as I said, I think there’s a very good chance you will keep them. And I think if we remove this part of your body that’s so gravely infected that it’ll help prevent further disease.”

They are all quiet again. “This sounds like a choice that isn’t a choice,” he mutters.

Andy sighs. “As I said, Jude,” he says, “it is a choice. It’s your choice. You don’t have to make it tomorrow, or even this week. But I want you to think about it, carefully.”

He leaves, and he and Willem are left alone. “Do we have to talk about it now?” he asks, when he can finally look at Willem, and Willem shakes his head. Outside the sky is turning rose-colored; the sunset will be long and beautiful. But he doesn’t want beauty. He wishes, suddenly, that he could swim, but he hasn’t swum since the first bone infection. He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He has had to turn his London clients over to a colleague, because his IV has tethered him to New York. His muscles have disappeared: he is soft flesh on bone; he moves like an old man. “I’m going to bed,” he tells Willem, and when Willem says, quietly, “Yasmin’s coming in a couple of hours,” he wants to cry. “Right,” he says, to the floor. “Well. I’m going to take a nap, then. I’ll wake up for Yasmin.”

That night, after Yasmin has left, he cuts himself for the first time in a long time; he watches the blood weep across the marble and into the drain. He knows how irrational it seems, his desire to keep his legs, his legs that have caused him so many problems, that have cost him how many hours, how much money, how much pain to maintain? But still: They are his. They are his legs. They are him. How can he willingly cut away a part of himself? He knows that he has already cut away so much of himself over the years: flesh, skin, scars. But somehow this is different. If he sacrifices his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won; he will be surrendering to him, to that night in the field with the car.

And it is also different because he knows that once he loses them, he will no longer be able to pretend. He will no longer be able to pretend that someday he will walk again, that someday he will be better. He will no longer be able to pretend that he isn’t disabled. Up, once more, will go his freak-show factor. He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

And he is tired. He doesn’t want to have to learn how to walk again. He doesn’t want to work at regaining weight he knows he will lose, weight on top of the weight he has struggled to replace from the first bone infection, weight that he has re-lost with the second. He doesn’t want to go back into the hospital, he doesn’t want to wake disoriented and confused, he doesn’t want to be visited by night terrors, he doesn’t want to explain to his colleagues that he is sick yet again, he doesn’t want the months and months of being weak, of fighting to regain his equilibrium. He doesn’t want Willem to see him without his legs, he doesn’t want to give him one more challenge, one more grotesquerie to overcome. He wants to be normal, he has only ever wanted to be normal, and yet with each year, he moves further and further from normalcy. He knows it is fallacious to think of the mind and the body as two separate, competing entities, but he cannot help it. He doesn’t want his body to win one more battle, to make the decision for him, to make him feel so helpless. He doesn’t want to be dependent on Willem, to have to ask him to lift him in and out of bed because his arms will be too useless and watery, to help him use the bathroom, to see the remains of his legs rounded into stumps. He had always assumed that there would be some sort of warning before this point, that his body would alert him before it became seriously worse. He knows, he does, that this past year and a half was his warning — a long, slow, consistent, unignorable warning — but he has chosen, in his arrogance and stupid hope, not to see it for what it is. He has chosen to believe that because he had always recovered, that he would once again, one more time. He has given himself the privilege of assuming that his chances are limitless.

Three nights later he wakes again with a fever; again he goes into the hospital; again he is discharged. This fever has been caused by an infection around his catheter, which is removed. A new one is inserted into his internal jugular vein, where it forms a bulge that not even his shirt collars can wholly camouflage.

His first night back home, he is coasting through his dreams when he opens his eyes and sees that Willem isn’t in bed next to him, and he works himself into his wheelchair and glides out of the room.

He sees Willem before Willem sees him; he is sitting at the dining table, the light on above him, his back to the bookcases, staring out into the room. There is a glass of water before him, and his elbow is resting on the table, his hand supporting his chin. He looks at Willem and sees how exhausted he is, how old, his bright hair gone whitish. He has known Willem for so long, has looked at his face so many times, that he is never able to see him anew: his face is better known to him than his own. He knows its every expression. He knows what Willem’s different smiles mean; when he is watching him being interviewed on television, he can always tell when he is smiling because he’s truly amused and when he is smiling to be polite. He knows which of his teeth are capped, and he knows which ones Kit made him straighten when it was clear that he was going to be a star, when it was clear that he wouldn’t just be in plays and independent films but would have a different kind of career, a different kind of life. But now he looks at Willem, at his face that is still so handsome but also so tired, the kind of tiredness he thought only he was feeling, and realizes that Willem is feeling it as well, that his life — Willem’s life with him — has become a sort of drudgery, a slog of illnesses and hospital visits and fear, and he knows what he will do, what he has to do.

“Willem,” he says, and watches Willem jerk out of his trance and look at him.

“Jude,” Willem says. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling sick? Why are you out of bed?”

“I’m going to do it,” he says, and he thinks that they are like two actors on a stage, talking to each other across a great distance, and he wheels himself close to him. “I’m going to do it,” he repeats, and Willem nods, and then they lean their foreheads into each other’s, and both of them start crying. “I’m sorry,” he tells Willem, and Willem shakes his head, his forehead rubbing against his.

“I’m sorry,” Willem tells him back. “I’m sorry, Jude. I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” he says, and he does.

The next day he calls Andy, who is relieved but also muted, as if out of respect to him. Things move briskly after that. They pick a date: the first date Andy proposes is Willem’s birthday, and even though he and Willem have agreed that they’ll celebrate Willem’s fiftieth birthday once he’s better, he doesn’t want to have the surgery on the actual day. So instead he’ll have it at the end of August, the week before Labor Day, the week before they usually go to Truro. In the next management committee meeting, he makes a brief announcement, explaining that this is a voluntary operation, that he’ll only be out of the office for a week, ten days at the most, that it isn’t a big deal, that he’ll be fine. Then he announces it to his department; he normally wouldn’t, he tells them, but he doesn’t want their clients to worry, he doesn’t want them to think that it’s something more serious than it is, he doesn’t want to be the subject of rumors and chatter (although he knows he will be). He reveals so little about himself at work that whenever he does, he can see people sit up and lean forward in their seats, can almost see their ears lift a little higher. He has met all of their wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, but they have never met Willem. He has never invited Willem to one of the company’s retreats, to their annual holiday parties, to their annual summer picnics. “You’d hate them,” he tells Willem, although he knows that isn’t really the case: Willem can have a good time anywhere. “Believe me.” And Willem has always shrugged. “I’d love to come,” he has always said, but he has never let him. He has always told himself that he is protecting Willem from a series of events that he would surely find tedious, but he has never considered that Willem might be hurt by his refusal to include him, might actually want to be a part of his life beyond Greene Street and their friends. He flushes now, realizing this.

“Any questions?” he asks, not really expecting any, when he sees one of the younger partners, a callous but scarily effective man named Gabe Freston, raise his hand. “Freston?” he says.

“I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry, Jude,” says Freston, and around him, everyone murmurs their agreement.

He wants to make the moment light, to say — because it is true—“That’s the first time I’ve heard you be so sincere since I told you what your bonus would be last year, Freston,” but he doesn’t, just takes a deep breath. “Thank you, Gabe,” he says. “Thanks, all of you. Now everyone — back to work,” and they scatter.

The surgery will be on a Monday, and although he stays at the office late on Friday, he doesn’t go in on Saturday. That afternoon, he packs a bag for the hospital; that evening, he and Willem have dinner at the tiny sushi place where they first celebrated the Last Supper. His final sessions with Patrizia and Yasmin had been on Thursday; Andy calls early on Saturday to tell him that he has the X-rays back, and that although the infection hasn’t budged, it also hasn’t spread. “Obviously, it won’t be a problem after Monday,” he says, and he swallows, hard, just as he had when Andy had said earlier that week, “You won’t have this foot pain after next Monday.” He remembers then that it is not the problem that is being eradicated; it is the source of the problem that is being eradicated. One is not the same as the other, but he supposes he has to be grateful, finally, for eradication, however it is delivered.

He eats his final meal on Sunday at seven p.m.; the surgery is at eight the next morning, and so he is to have no more food, no more medication, nothing to drink, for the rest of the night.

An hour later, he and Willem descend in the elevator to the ground floor, for his last walk on his own legs. He has made Willem promise him this walk, and even before they begin — they will go south on Greene one block to Grand, then west just another block to Wooster, then up Wooster four blocks to Houston, then back east to Greene and south to their apartment — he isn’t sure he’ll be able to finish. Above them, the sky is the color of bruises, and he remembers, suddenly, being forced out onto the street, naked, by Caleb.

He lifts up his left leg and begins. Down the quiet street they walk, and at Grand, as they are turning right, he takes Willem’s hand, which he never does in public, but now he holds it close, and they turn right again and begin moving up Wooster.

He had wanted so badly to complete this circuit, but perversely, his inability to do so — at Spring, still two blocks south of Houston, Willem glances at him and, without even asking, starts walking him back east to Greene Street — reassures him: he is making the right decision. He has pressed up against the inevitable, and he has made the only choice he could make, not just for Willem’s sake, but for his own. The walk has been almost unbearable, and when he gets back to the apartment, he is surprised to feel that his face is wet with tears.

The next morning, Harold and Julia meet them at the hospital, looking gray and frightened. He can tell they are trying to remain stoic for him; he hugs and kisses them both, assures them he’ll be fine, that there’s nothing to worry about. He is taken away to be prepped. Since the injury, the hair on his legs has always grown unevenly, around and between the scars, but now he is shaved clean above and below his kneecaps. Andy comes in, holds his face in his hands, and kisses him on his forehead. He doesn’t say anything, just takes out a marker and draws a series of dashes, like Morse code signals, in inverted arcs a few inches below the bottoms of both knees, then tells him he’ll be back, but that he’ll send Willem in.

Willem comes over and sits on the edge of his bed, and they hold each other’s hands in silence. He is about to say something, make some stupid joke, when Willem begins to cry, and not just cry, but keen, bending over and moaning, sobbing like he has never seen anyone sob. “Willem,” he says, desperately, “Willem, don’t cry: I’m going to be fine. I really am. Don’t cry. Willem, don’t cry.” He sits up in the bed, wraps his arms around Willem. “Oh, Willem,” he sighs, near tears himself. “Willem, I’m going to be okay. I promise you.” But he can’t soothe him, and Willem cries and cries.

He senses that Willem is trying to say something, and he rubs his back, asking him to repeat himself. “Don’t go,” he hears Willem say. “Don’t leave me.”

“I promise I won’t,” he says. “I promise. Willem — it’s an easy surgery. You know I have to come out on the other side so Andy can lecture me some more, right?”

It is then that Andy walks in. “Ready, campers?” he asks, and then he sees and hears Willem. “Oh god,” he says, and he comes over, joins their huddle. “Willem,” he says, “I promise I’ll take care of him like he’s my own, you know that, right? You know I won’t let anything happen to him?”

“I know,” they hear Willem gulp, at last. “I know, I know.”

Finally, they are able to calm Willem down, who apologizes and wipes at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” Willem says, but he shakes his head, and pulls on Willem’s hand until he brings his face to his own, kisses him goodbye. “Don’t be,” he tells him.

Outside the operating room, Andy brings his head down to his, and kisses him again, this time on his cheek. “I’m not going to be able to touch you after this,” he says. “I’ll be sterile.” The two of them grin, suddenly, and Andy shakes his head. “Aren’t you getting a little old for this kind of puerile humor?” he asks.

“Aren’t you?” he asks. “You’re almost sixty.”

“Never.”

Then they are in the operating room, and he is gazing at the bright white disk of light above him. “Hello, Jude,” says a voice behind him, and he sees it’s the anesthesiologist, a friend of Andy’s named Ignatius Mba, whom he’s met before at one of Andy and Jane’s dinner parties.

“Hi, Ignatius,” he says.

“Count backward from ten for me,” says Ignatius, and he begins to, but after seven, he is unable to count any further; the last thing he feels is a tingling in his right toes.

Three months later. It is Thanksgiving again, and they are having it at Greene Street. Willem and Richard have cooked everything, arranged everything, while he slept. His recovery has been harder and more complicated than anticipated, and he has contracted infections, twice. For a while he was on a feeding tube. But Andy was right: he has kept both knees. In the hospital, he would wake, telling Harold and Julia, telling Willem, that it felt like there was an elephant sitting on his feet, rocking back and forth on its rump until his bones turned into cracker dust, into something finer than ash. But they never told him that he was imagining this; they only told him that the nurse had just added a painkiller to his IV drip for this very purpose, and that he would be feeling better soon. Now he has these phantom pains less and less frequently, but they haven’t disappeared entirely. And he is still very tired, he is still very weak, and so Richard has placed a mauve velvet wingback chair on casters — one that India sometimes uses for sittings — for him at the head of the table, so he can lean his head against its wings when he feels depleted.

That dinner is Richard and India, Harold and Julia, Malcolm and Sophie, JB and his mother, and Andy and Jane, whose children are visiting Andy’s brother in San Francisco. He starts to give a toast, thanking everyone for everything they have given him and done for him, but before he gets to the person he wants to thank most — Willem, sitting to his right — he finds he cannot continue, and he looks up from his paper at his friends and sees that they are all going to cry, and so he stops.

He is enjoying the dinner, amused even by how people keep adding scoops of different food to his plate, even though he hasn’t eaten much of his first serving, but he is so sleepy, and eventually he burrows back into the chair and closes his eyes, smiling as he listens to the familiar conversation, the familiar voices, fill the air around him.

Eventually Willem notices that he is falling asleep, and he hears him stand. “Okay,” he says, “time for your diva exit,” and turns the chair from the table and begins pushing it away toward their bedroom, and he uses the last of his strength to answer everyone’s laughter, their song of goodbyes, to peek out around the wing of the chair and smile at them, letting his fingers trail behind him in an airy, theatrical wave. “Stay,” he calls out as he is taken from them. “Please stay. Please stay and give Willem some decent conversation,” and they agree they will; it isn’t even seven, after all — they have hours and hours. “I love you,” he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice.

At the doorway to their bedroom, Willem lifts him — he has lost so much weight, and without his prostheses is so less storklike a form, that now even Julia can lift him — and carries him to their bed, helps him undress, helps him remove his temporary prostheses, folds the covers back over him. He pours him a glass of water, hands him his pills: an antibiotic, a fistful of vitamins. He swallows them all as Willem watches, and then for a while Willem sits on the bed next to him, not touching him, but simply near.

“Promise me you’ll go out there and stay up late,” he tells Willem, and Willem shrugs.

“Maybe I’ll just stay here with you,” he says. “They seem to be having a fine time without me.” And sure enough, there is a burst of laughter from the dining room, and they look at each other and smile.

“No,” he says, “promise me,” and finally, Willem does. “Thank you, Willem,” he says, inadequately, his eyes closing. “This was a good day.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” he hears Willem say, and then he begins to say something else, but he doesn’t hear it because he has fallen asleep.

That night his dreams wake him. It is one of the side effects of the particular antibiotic he is on, these dreams, and this time, they are worse than ever. Night after night, he dreams. He dreams that he is in the motel rooms, that he is in Dr. Traylor’s house. He dreams that he is still fifteen, that the previous thirty-three years haven’t even happened. He dreams of specific clients, specific incidents, of things he hadn’t even known he remembered. He dreams that he has become Brother Luke himself. He dreams, again and again, that Harold is Dr. Traylor, and when he wakes, he feels ashamed for attributing such behavior to Harold, even in his subconscious, and at the same time fearful that the dream might be real after all, and he has to remind himself of Willem’s promise: Never, ever, Jude. He would never do that to you, not for anything.

Sometimes the dreams are so vivid, so real, that it takes minutes, an hour for him to return to his life, for him to convince himself that the life of his consciousness is in fact real life, his real life. Sometimes he wakes so far from himself that he can’t even remember who he is. “Where am I?” he asks, desperate, and then, “Who am I? Who am I?”

And then he hears, so close to his ear that it is as if the voice is originating inside his own head, Willem’s whispered incantation. “You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.

“You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen.

“You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.

“You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it.

“You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again.

“You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.”

On and on Willem talks, chanting him back to himself, and in the daytime — sometimes days later — he remembers pieces of what Willem has said and holds them close to him, as much as for what he said as for what he didn’t, for how he hadn’t defined him.

But in the nighttime he is too terrified, he is too lost to recognize this. His panic is too real, too consuming. “And who are you?” he asks, looking at the man who is holding him, who is describing someone he doesn’t recognize, someone who seems to have so much, someone who seems like such an enviable, beloved person. “Who are you?”

The man has an answer to this question as well. “I’m Willem Ragnarsson,” he says. “And I will never let you go.”

“I’m going,” he tells Jude, but then he doesn’t move. A dragonfly, as shiny as a scarab, hums above them. “I’m going,” he repeats, but he still doesn’t move, and it is only the third time he says it that he’s finally able to stand up from the lounge chair, drunk on the hot air, and shove his feet back into his loafers.

“Limes,” says Jude, looking up at him and shielding his eyes against the sun.

“Right,” he says, and bends down, takes Jude’s sunglasses off him, kisses him on his eyelids, and replaces his glasses. Summer, JB has always said, is Jude’s season: his skin darkens and his hair lightens to almost the same shade, making his eyes turn an unnatural green, and Willem has to keep himself from touching him too much. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

He trudges up the hill to the house, yawning, places his glass of half-melted ice and tea in the sink, and crunches down the pebbled driveway to the car. It is one of those summer days when the air is so hot, so dry, so still, the sun overhead so white, that one doesn’t so much see one’s surroundings as hear and smell and taste them: the lawn-mower buzz of the bees and locusts, the faint peppery scent of the sunflowers, the oddly mineral flavor the heat leaves on the tongue, as if he’s just sucked on stones. The heat is enervating, but not in an oppressive way, only in a way that makes them both sleepy and defenseless, in a way that makes torpor not just acceptable but necessary. When it is hot like this they lie by the pool for hours, not eating but drinking — pitchers of iced mint tea for breakfast, liters of lemonade for lunch, bottles of Aligoté for dinner — and they leave the house’s every window, every door open, the ceiling fans spinning, so that at night, when they finally seal it shut, they trap within it the fragrance of meadows and trees.

It is the Saturday before Labor Day, and they would normally be in Truro, but this year they have rented Harold and Julia a house outside Aix-en-Provence for the entire summer, and the two of them are spending the holiday in Garrison instead. Harold and Julia will arrive — maybe with Laurence and Gillian, maybe not — tomorrow, but today Willem is picking up Malcolm and Sophie and JB and his on-again, off-again boyfriend Fredrik from the train station. They’ve seen very little of their friends for months now: JB has been on a fellowship in Italy for the past six months, and Malcolm and Sophie have been so busy with the construction of a new ceramics museum in Shanghai that the last time they saw them all was in April, in Paris — he was filming there, and Jude had come in from London, where he was working, and JB in from Rome, and Malcolm and Sophie had laid over for a couple of days on their way back to New York.

Almost every summer he thinks: This is the best summer. But this summer, he knows, really is the best. And not just the summer: the spring, the winter, the fall. As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.

Jude had smiled when he told him this. “And what era are we in now?” he asked, and Willem had smiled back at him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t come up with a name for it yet.”

But they both agreed that they had at least exited The Awful Years. Two years ago, he had spent this very weekend — Labor Day weekend — in a hospital on the Upper East Side, staring out the window with a hatred so intense it nauseated him at the orderlies and nurses and doctors in their jade-green pajamas congregating outside the building, eating and smoking and talking on their phones as if nothing were wrong, as if above them weren’t people in various stages of dying, including his own person, who was at that moment in a medically induced coma, his skin prickling with fever, who had last opened his eyes four days ago, the day after he had gotten out of surgery.

“He’s going to be fine, Willem,” Harold kept babbling at him, Harold who was in general even more of a worrier than Willem himself had become. “He’s going to be fine. Andy said so.” On and on Harold went, parroting back to Willem everything that he had already heard Andy say, until finally he had snapped at him, “Jesus, Harold, give it a fucking break. Do you believe everything Andy says? Does he look like he’s getting better? Does he look like he’s going to be fine?” And then he had seen Harold’s face change, his expression of pleading, frantic desperation, the face of an old, hopeful man, and he had been punched with remorse and had gone over and held him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Harold, Harold who had already lost one son, who was trying to reassure himself that he wouldn’t lose another. “I’m sorry, Harold, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m being an asshole.”

“You’re not an asshole, Willem,” Harold had said. “But you can’t tell me he’s not going to get better. You can’t tell me that.”

“I know,” he said. “Of course he’s going to get better,” he said, sounding like Harold, Harold echoing Harold to Harold. “Of course he is.” But inside of him, he felt the beetley scrabble of fear: of course there was no of course. There never had been. Of course had vanished eighteen months ago. Of course had left their lives forever.

He had always been an optimist, and yet in those months, his optimism deserted him. He had canceled all of his projects for the rest of the year, but as the fall dragged on, he wished he had them; he wished he had something to distract himself. By the end of September, Jude was out of the hospital, and yet he was so thin, so frail, that Willem had been scared to touch him, scared to even look at him, scared to see the way that his cheekbones were now so pronounced that they cast permanent shadows around his mouth, scared to see the way he could watch Jude’s pulse beating in the scooped-out hollow of his throat, as if there was something living inside of him that was trying to kick its way out. He could feel Jude trying to comfort him, trying to make jokes, and that made him even more scared. On the few occasions he left the apartment—“You have to,” Richard had told him, flatly, “you’re going to go crazy otherwise, Willem”—he was tempted to turn his phone off, because every time it chirped and he saw it was Richard (or Malcolm, or Harold, or Julia, or JB, or Andy, or the Henry Youngs, or Rhodes, or Elijah, or India, or Sophie, or Lucien, or whoever was sitting with Jude for the hour or so that he was distractedly wandering the streets or working out downstairs or, a few times, trying to lie still through a massage or sit through lunch with Roman or Miguel), he would tell himself, This is it. He’s dying. He’s dead, and he would wait a second, another second, before answering the phone and hearing that the call was only a status report: That Jude had eaten a meal. That he hadn’t. That he was sleeping. That he seemed nauseated. Finally he had to tell them: Don’t call me unless it’s serious. I don’t care if you have questions and calling’s faster; you have to text me. If you call me, I’ll think the worst. For the first time in his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.

People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive, a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph to the upper right. But Hemming’s healing — which hadn’t ended with his healing at all — hadn’t been like that, and Jude’s hadn’t either: theirs were a mountain range of peaks and trenches, and in the middle of October, after Jude had gone back to work (still scarily thin, still scarily weak), there had been a night when he had woken with a fever so high that he had started seizing, and Willem had been certain that this was the moment, that this was the end. He had realized then that despite his fear, he had never really prepared himself, that he had never really thought of what it would mean, and although he wasn’t a bargainer by nature, he bargained now, with someone or something he didn’t even know he believed in. He promised more patience, more gratitude, less swearing, less vanity, less sex, less indulgence, less complaining, less self-absorption, less selfishness, less fearfulness. When Jude had lived, Willem’s relief had been so total, so punishing, that he had collapsed, and Andy had prescribed him an antianxiety pill and sent him up to Garrison for the weekend with JB for company, leaving Jude in his and Richard’s care. He had always thought that unlike Jude, he had known how to accept help when it was offered, but he had forgotten this skill at the most crucial time, and he was glad and grateful that his friends had made the effort to remind him.

By Thanksgiving, things had become — if not good, then they had at least stopped being bad, which they accepted as the same thing. But it was only in retrospect that they had been able to recognize it as a sort of fulcrum, as the period in which there were first days, and then weeks, and then an entire month in which nothing got worse, in which they regained the trick of waking each day with not dread but with purpose, in which they were finally, cautiously, able to talk about the future, to worry not just about making it successfully through the day but into days they couldn’t yet imagine. It was only then that they were able to talk about what needed to be done, only then that Andy began making serious schedules — schedules with goals set one month, two months, six months away — that tracked how much weight he wanted Jude to gain, and when he would be fitted with his permanent prostheses, and when he wanted him to take his first steps, and when he wanted to see him walking again. Once again, they rejoined the slipstream of life; once again, they learned to obey the calendar. By February Willem was reading scripts again. By April, and his forty-ninth birthday, Jude was walking again — slowly, inelegantly, but walking — and looking once again like a normal person. By Willem’s birthday that August, almost a year after his surgery, his walk was, as Andy had predicted, better — silkier, more confident — than it had been with his own legs, and he looked, once again, better than a normal person: he looked like himself again.

“We still haven’t had your fiftieth birthday blowout,” Jude had reminded him over his fifty-first birthday dinner — his birthday dinner that Jude had made, standing by himself at the stove for hours, displaying no apparent signs of fatigue — and Willem had smiled.

“This is all I want,” he’d said, and he meant it. It felt silly to compare his experience of such a depleting, brutal two years to Jude’s own experience, and yet he felt transformed by them. It was as if his despair had given rise to a sense of invincibility; he felt that everything extraneous and soft had been burned off of him and he was left as an exposed steel core, indestructible and yet pliant, able to withstand anything.

They spent his birthday in Garrison, just the two of them, and that night, after dinner, they went down to the lake, and he took off his clothes and jumped off the dock into the water, which smelled and looked like a great pool of tea. “Come in,” he told Jude, and then, when he hesitated, “As the birthday boy, I command it.” And Jude had slowly undressed, and taken off his prostheses, and then had finally pushed off the edge of the dock with his hands, and Willem had caught him. As Jude had gotten physically healthier, he had also grown more and more self-conscious about his body, and Willem knew, from how withdrawn Jude would become at times, from how carefully he shielded himself when he was taking off or putting on his legs, how much he struggled with accepting how he now appeared. When he had been weaker, he had let Willem help undress him, but now that he was stronger, Willem saw him unclothed only in glimpses, only by accident. But he had decided to view Jude’s self-consciousness as a certain kind of healthiness, for it was at least proof of his physical strength, proof that he was able to get in and out of the shower by himself, to climb in and out of bed by himself — things he’d had to relearn how to do, things he once hadn’t had the energy to do on his own.

Now they drifted through the lake, swimming or clinging to each other in silence, and after Willem got out, Jude did as well, heaving himself onto the deck with his arms, and they sat there for a while in the soft summer air, both of them naked, both of them staring at the tapered ends of Jude’s legs. It was the first time he had seen Jude naked in months, and he hadn’t known what to say, and in the end had simply put his arm around him and pulled him close, and that had (he thought) been the right thing to say after all.

He was still frightened, intermittently. In September, a few weeks before he left for his first project in more than a year, Jude had woken again with a fever, and this time, he didn’t ask Willem not to call Andy, and Willem didn’t ask him for permission to do so. They had gone directly to Andy’s office, and Andy had ordered X-rays, blood work, everything, and they had waited there, each of them lying on the bed in a different examining room, until the radiologist had called and said that there was no sign of any bone infection, and the lab had called and said that there was nothing wrong.

“Rhinopharyngitis,” Andy had said to them, smiling. “The common cold.” But he had rested his hand on the back of Jude’s head, and they had all been relieved. How fast, how distressingly fast, had their instinct for fear been reawakened, the fear itself a virus that lay dormant but that they would never be able to permanently dispel. Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.

And so off he went to Spain, to Galicia, to film. For as long as he had known him, Jude had wanted to someday walk the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage route that ended in Galicia. “We’ll start at the Aspe Pass in the Pyrenees,” Jude had said (this was before either of them had ever even been to France), “and we’ll walk west. It’ll take weeks! Every night we’ll stay in these communal pilgrim hostels I’ve read about and we’ll survive on black bread with caraway seeds and yogurt and cucumbers.”

“I don’t know,” he said, although back then he had thought less of Jude’s limitations — he was too young at the time, they both were, to truly believe that Jude might have limitations — and more of himself. “That sounds kind of exhausting, Judy.”

“Then I’ll carry you,” Jude had said promptly, and Willem had smiled. “Or we’ll get a donkey, and he’ll carry you. But really, Willem, the point is to walk the road, not ride it.”

As they grew older, as it became clearer and clearer that this dream of Jude’s would forever remain simply that, their fantasies of the Camino became more elaborate. “Here’s the pitch,” Jude would say. “Four strangers — a Chinese Daoist nun coming to terms with her sexuality; a recently released British convict who writes poetry; a Kazakhstani former arms dealer grieving his wife’s death; and a handsome and sensitive but troubled American college dropout — that’s you, Willem — meet along the Camino and develop friendships of a lifetime. You’ll shoot in real time, so the shoot will only last as long as the walk does. And you’ll have to walk the entire time.”

By this time, he would always be laughing. “What happens in the end?” he asked.

“The Daoist nun ends up falling in love with an ex — Israeli Army officer she meets along the way, and the two of them return to Tel Aviv to open a lesbian bar called Radclyffe’s. The convict and the arms dealer end up together. And your character will meet some virginal but, it turns out, secretly slutty Swedish girl along the route and open a high-end B&B in the Pyrenees, and every year, the original group will gather there for a reunion.”

“What’s the movie called?” he asked, grinning.

Jude thought. “Santiago Blues,” he said, and Willem laughed again.

Ever since, they had referred in passing to Santiago Blues, whose cast morphed to accommodate him as he grew older, but whose premise and location never did. “How’s the script?” Jude would ask him whenever something new came in, and he would sigh. “Okay,” he would say. “Not Santiago Blues good, but okay.”

And then, shortly after that pivotal Thanksgiving, Kit, whom Willem had at one point told of his and Jude’s interest in the Camino, had sent him a script with a note that read only “Santiago Blues!” And while it wasn’t exactly Santiago Blues — thank god, he and Jude agreed, it was far better — it was in fact set on the Camino, it would in fact be shot partly in real time, and it did in fact begin in the Pyrenees, at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and ended in Santiago de Compostela. The Stars Over St. James followed two men, both named Paul, both of whom would be played by the same actor: the first was a sixteenth-century French monk traveling the route from Wittenberg on the eve of the Protestant Reformation; the second was a contemporary-day pastor from a small American town who was beginning to question his own faith. Aside from a few minor characters, who would drift in and out of the two Pauls’ lives, his would be the only role.

He gave Jude the script to read, and after he finished, Jude had sighed. “Brilliant,” he said, sadly. “I wish I could come on this with you, Willem.”

“I wish you could, too,” he said, quietly. He wished Jude had easier dreams for himself, dreams he could accomplish, dreams Willem could help him accomplish. But Jude’s dreams were always about movement: they were about walking impossible distances or traversing impossible terrains. And although he could walk now, and although he felt less of it than Willem could remember him feeling for years, he would, they knew, never live a life without pain. The impossible would remain the impossible.

He had dinner with the Spanish director, Emanuel, who was young but already highly acclaimed and who, despite the complexity and melancholy of his script, was buoyant and bright, and kept repeating his astonishment that he, Willem, was going to be in his film, that it was his dream to work with him. He, in turn, told Emanuel of Santiago Blues (Emanuel had laughed when Willem described the plot. “Not bad!” he said, and Willem had laughed, too. “It’s supposed to be bad!” he corrected Emanuel). He told him about how Jude had always wanted to walk this path; how humbled he was that he would get to do it for him.

“Ah,” Emanuel said, teasingly. “I think this is the man for whom you ruined your career, am I right?”

He had smiled back. “Yes,” he said. “That’s him.”

The days on The Stars Over St. James were very long and, as Jude had promised, there was lots of walking (and a caravan of slow-moving trailers instead of donkeys). The cell-phone reception was patchy in parts, and so he would instead write Jude messages, which seemed more appropriate anyway, more pilgrim-like, and in the morning, he sent him pictures of his breakfast (black bread with caraway seeds, yogurt, cucumbers) and of the stretch of road he would walk that day. Much of the road cut through busy towns, and so in places they were rerouted into the countryside. Each day, he chose a few white pebbles from the side of the road and put them in a jar to take home; at night, he sat in his hotel room with his feet wrapped in hot towels.

They finished filming two weeks before Christmas, and he flew to London for meetings, and then back to Madrid to meet Jude, where they rented a car and drove south, through Andalusia. In a town on a cliff high above the sea they stopped to meet Asian Henry Young, whom they watched trudging uphill, waving at them with both arms when he saw them, and finishing the last hundred yards in a sprint. “Thank god you’re giving me an excuse to get the fuck out of that house,” he said. Henry had been living for the past month at an artists’ residency down the hill, in a valley filled with orange trees, but unusually for him, he hated the other six people at the colony, and as they ate dishes of orange rounds floating in a liqueur of their own juice and topped with cinnamon and pulverized cloves and almonds, they laughed at Henry’s stories about his fellow artists. Later, after telling him goodbye and that they’d see him next month in New York, they walked slowly together through the medieval town, whose every structure was a glittering white salt cube, and where striped cats lay in the streets and flicked the tips of their tails as people with wheel carts ground slowly around them.

The next evening, outside Granada, Jude said he had a surprise for him, and they got into the car that was waiting for them in front of the restaurant, Jude with the brown envelope he’d kept by his side all through dinner.

“Where’re we going?” he asked. “What’s in the envelope?”

“You’ll see,” Jude said.

Up and downhill they swooped, until the car stopped before the arched entryway to the Alhambra, where Jude handed the guard a letter, which the guard studied and then nodded at, and the car slid through the doorway and stopped and the two of them got out and stood there in the quiet courtyard.

“Yours,” Jude said, shyly, nodding at the buildings and gardens below. “For the next three hours, anyway,” and then, when Willem couldn’t say anything, he continued, quietly, “Do you remember?”

He nodded, barely. “Of course,” he said, just as quietly. This was always how their own trip on the Camino was supposed to end: with a train ride south to visit the Alhambra. And over the years, even as he knew their walk would never happen, he had never gone to the Alhambra, had never taken a day at the end of one shoot or another and come, because he was waiting for Jude to do it with him.

“One of my clients,” Jude said, before he could ask. “You defend someone, and their godfather turns out to be the Spanish minister of culture, who lets you make a generous donation to the Alhambra’s maintenance fund for the privilege of seeing it alone.” He grinned at Willem. “I told you I’d do something for your fiftieth — albeit a year and a half later.” He placed his hand on Willem’s arm. “Willem, don’t cry.”

“I’m not going to,” he said. “I can do other things in life besides cry, you know,” although he was no longer sure that was even true.

He opened the envelope that Jude handed him, and inside there was a package, and he undid the ribbon and tore the paper away and found a handmade book, organized by chapters—“The Alcazaba”; “The Lion Palace”; “The Gardens”; “Generalife”—each with pages of handwritten notes by Malcolm, who had written his thesis on the Alhambra and who had visited it every year since he was nine. Between each chapter was a drawing of one of the complex’s details — a jasmine bush blooming with small white flowers, a stone façade stippled with cobalt tilework — tipped into the pages, each dedicated to him and signed by someone they knew: Richard; JB; India; Asian Henry Young; Ali. Now he really did begin to cry, smiling and crying, until Jude told him that they had better get moving, that they couldn’t spend their entire time at the entryway, crying, and he grabbed him and kissed him, not caring about the silent, black-clad guards behind them. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Off they moved through the silent night, Jude’s flashlight bouncing a line of light before them. Into palaces they walked, where the marble was so old that the structure appeared to be carved from soft white butter, and into reception halls with vaulted ceilings so high that birds arced soundlessly through the space, and with windows so symmetrical and perfectly placed that the room was bright with moonlight. As they walked, they stopped to consult Malcolm’s notes, to examine details they would have missed had they not been alerted to them, to realize that they were standing in the room where, a thousand years ago, more, a sultan would have dictated his correspondence. They studied the illustrations, matching the images to what they saw before them. Facing each of their friends’ drawings was a note each had written explaining when they had first seen the Alhambra, and why they had chosen to draw what they had. They had that feeling, the same one they had often had as young men, that everyone they knew had seen so much of the world and that they hadn’t, and although they knew this was no longer true, they still felt that same sense of awe at their friends’ lives, at how much they had done and experienced, at how well they knew to appreciate it, at how talented they were at recording it. In the gardens of the Generalife section, they walked into a room that had been cut into a labyrinth hedgerow of cypresses, and he began to kiss Jude, more insistently than he had allowed himself to do in a long time, even though they could hear, faintly, one of the guard’s shoes tapping along the stone walkway.

Back in the hotel room they continued, and he heard himself thinking that in the movie version of this night, they would be having sex now, and he was almost, almost about to say this out loud, when he remembered himself, and stopped, pulling back from Jude as he did. But it was as if he had spoken anyway, because for a while they were silent, staring at each other, and then Jude said, quietly, “Willem, we can if you want to.”

“Do you want to?” he asked, finally.

“Sure,” Jude said, but Willem could tell, by the way he had looked down and the slight catch in his voice, that he was lying.

For a second he thought he would pretend, that he would allow himself to be convinced that Jude was telling him the truth. But he couldn’t. And so “No,” he said, and rolled off of him. “I think this has been enough excitement for one evening.” Next to him, he heard Jude exhale, and as he fell asleep, heard him whisper, “I’m sorry, Willem,” and he tried to tell Jude that he understood, but by this time he was more unconscious than not and couldn’t speak the words.

But that was that period’s only sadness, and the source of their sadnesses were different: For Jude, he knew, the sadness rose from a sense of failure, a certainty — one Willem was never able to displace — that he wasn’t fulfilling his obligations. For him, the sadness was for Jude himself. Occasionally Willem allowed himself to wonder what Jude’s life would have been like if sex had been something he had been left to discover, rather than forced to learn — but it was not a helpful line of thought, and it made him too upset. And so he tried not to consider it. But it was always there, running through their friendship, their lives, like a vein of turquoise forking through stone.

In the meantime, though, there was normalcy, routine, both of which were better than sex or excitement. There was the realization that Jude had walked — slowly, but assuredly — for almost three straight hours that night. There was, back in New York, their lives, the things they used to do, resuming because Jude now had the energy to do so, because he could now stay awake through a play or an opera or a dinner, because he could climb the stairs to reach Malcolm’s front door in Cobble Hill, could walk down the pitched sidewalk to reach JB’s building in Vinegar Hill. There was the comfort of hearing Jude’s alarm blip at five thirty, of hearing him set off for his morning swim, the relief of looking into a box on the kitchen counter and seeing it was full of medical supplies — extra packets of catheter tubing and sterile gauze patches and leftover high-calorie protein drinks that Andy had only recently said Jude could stop ingesting — that Jude would return to Andy, who would donate them to the hospital. In moments he would remember how two years ago from this very date, he would come home from the theater to find Jude in bed asleep, so fragile that it seemed at times that the catheter under his shirt was actually an artery, that he was being steadily and irreversibly whittled down to only nerves and vessels and bone. Sometimes he would think of those moments and feel a sort of disorientation: Was that them, really, those people back then? Where had those people gone? Would they reappear? Or were they now other people entirely? And then he would imagine that those people weren’t so much gone as they were within them, waiting to bob back up to the surface, to reclaim their bodies and minds; they were identities now in remission, but they would always be with them.

Sickness had visited them recently enough so that they still remembered to be grateful for every day that passed so uneventfully, even as they grew to expect them. The first time Willem saw Jude in his wheelchair in months, saw him leave the sofa when they were watching a movie because he was having an episode and wanted to be alone, he had been disquieted, and he’d had to make himself remember that this, too, was who Jude was: he was someone whose body betrayed him, and he always would be. The surgery hadn’t changed this after all — it had changed Willem’s reaction to it. And when he realized that Jude was cutting himself again — not frequently, but regularly — he had to remind himself that, once again, this was who Jude was, and that the surgery hadn’t changed this, either.

Still, “Maybe we should call these The Happy Years,” he told Jude one morning. It was February, it was snowing, and they were lying in bed, which they now did until late every Sunday morning.

“I don’t know,” Jude said, and although he could only see the edge of his face, Willem could tell he was smiling. “Isn’t that tempting fate a little? We’ll call it that and then both of my arms will fall off. Also, that name’s taken already.”

And it was — it was the title of Willem’s next project, in fact, the one he would be leaving for in just a week: six weeks of rehearsals, followed by eleven weeks of filming. But it wasn’t the original title. The original title had been The Dancer on the Stage, but Kit had just told him that the producers had changed it to The Happy Years.

He hadn’t liked this new title. “It’s so cynical,” he told Jude, after complaining first to Kit and then to the director. “There’s something so curdled and ironic about it.” This had been a few nights ago; they had been lying on the sofa after his daily, thoroughly draining ballet class, and Jude was massaging his feet. He would be playing Rudolf Nureyev in the final years of his life, from his appointment as the ballet director of the Paris Opéra in nineteen-eighty-three, through his HIV diagnosis, and until he first noticed the symptoms of his disease, a year before he actually died.

“I know what you mean,” Jude had said after he had finally finished ranting. “But maybe they really were the happy years for him. He was free; he had a job he loved; he was mentoring young dancers; he had turned around an entire company. He was doing some of his greatest choreography. He and that Danish dancer—”

“Erik Bruhn.”

“Right. He and Bruhn were still together, at least for a little while longer. He had experienced everything he had probably never dreamed he would have as a younger man, and he was still young enough to enjoy it all: money and renown and artistic freedom. Love. Friendship.” He dug his knuckles into Willem’s sole, and Willem winced. “That sounds like a happy life to me.”

They were both quiet for a while. “But he was sick,” Willem said, at last.

“Not then,” Jude reminded him. “Not actively, at least.”

“No, maybe not,” he said. “But he was dying.”

Jude had smiled at him. “Oh, dying,” he said dismissively. “We’re all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t happy years, that it wasn’t a happy life.”

He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn’t a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

But he didn’t say this, of course, just sat up and grabbed Jude’s face and kissed him and then fell back against the pillows. “How’d you get so smart?” he asked Jude, and Jude grinned at him.

“Too hard?” he asked in response, still kneading Willem’s foot.

“Not hard enough.”

Now he turned Jude around to face him in bed. “I think we have to stick with The Happy Years,” he told him. “We’ll just have to risk your arms falling off,” and Jude laughed.

The next week, he left for Paris. It was one of the most difficult shoots he’d ever done; he had a double, an actual dancer, for the more elaborate sequences, but he did some of his own dancing as well, and there were days — days spent lifting real ballerinas into the air, marveling at how dense, how ropy with muscle they were — that were so exhausting that by the evening he had only the energy to drop himself into the bathtub and then lift himself out of it. In the past few years, he had found himself subconsciously drawn to ever-more physical roles, and he was always astonished by, and appreciative of, how heroically his body met its every demand. He had been given a new awareness of it, and now, as he stretched his arms behind him as he leaped, he could feel how every sore muscle came alive for him, how it allowed him to do whatever he wanted, how nothing within him ever broke, how it indulged him every time. He knew he wasn’t alone in feeling this, this gratitude: when they visited Cambridge, he and Harold would play tennis every day, and he knew without them ever discussing it how grateful they had both become for their own bodies, how much the act of smacking heavily, unthinkingly across the court to lunge for a ball had come to mean to them both.

Jude came to visit him in Paris at the end of April, and although Willem had promised him that he wouldn’t do anything elaborate for his fiftieth birthday, he had arranged a surprise dinner anyway, and in addition to JB and Malcolm and Sophie, Richard and Elijah and Rhodes and Andy and Black Henry Young and Harold and Julia had all come over, along with Phaedra and Citizen, who had helped him with the planning. The next day Jude had come to watch him on set, one of the very few times he had ever done so. The scene they were working on that morning was one in which Nureyev was trying to correct a young dancer’s cabriole, and after instructing him again and again, finally demonstrates how to do it; but in an earlier scene, one they hadn’t yet shot but that would directly precede this one, he has just been diagnosed with HIV, and as he jumps, scissoring his legs, he falls, and the studio goes quiet around him. The scene ended on his face, a moment in which he had to convey Nureyev’s sudden recognition that he understood how he would die and then, just a second later, his decision to ignore that understanding.

They shot take after take of this scene, and after each take, Willem would have to step away and wait until he could breathe normally again, and hair and makeup would flutter around him, blotting the sweat from his face and neck, and when he was ready, back to his mark he would step. By the time the director was satisfied, he was panting but satisfied as well.

“Sorry,” he apologized, going over to Jude at last. “The tedium of filmmaking.”

“No, Willem,” Jude said. “It was amazing. You were so beautiful out there.” He looked tentative for a moment. “I almost couldn’t believe it was you.”

He took Jude’s hand and clasped it in his, which he knew was the most affection Jude would tolerate in public. But he never knew how Jude felt about witnessing such displays of physicality. The previous spring, during one of his breakups with Fredrik, JB had dated a principal in a well-known modern dance company, and they had all gone to see his performance. During Josiah’s solo, he had glanced over at Jude and had seen that he was leaning forward slightly, resting his chin in his hand, and watching the stage so intently that when Willem put his hand on his back, he startled. “Sorry,” Willem had whispered. Later, in bed, Jude had been very quiet, and he had wondered what he was thinking: Was he upset? Wistful? Sorrowful? But it had seemed unkind to ask Jude to say aloud what he might not have been able to articulate to himself, and so he hadn’t.

It was the middle of June by the time he returned to New York, and in bed Jude had looked at him, closely. “You have a ballet dancer’s body now,” he said, and the next day, he’d examined himself in the mirror and realized that Jude was correct. Later that week, they had dinner on the roof, which they and Richard and India had finally renovated, and which Richard and Jude had planted with grasses and fruit trees, and he had shown them some of what he’d learned, feeling his self-consciousness change to giddiness as he jetéed across the decked surface, his friends applauding behind him, the sun bleeding into nighttime above them.

“Another hidden talent,” Richard had said afterward, and had smiled at him.

“I know,” Jude had said, smiling at him, too. “Willem is full of surprises, even all these years later.”

But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Willem,” JB would occasionally accuse him, and, “Are you keeping secrets from me? Don’t you trust me? I thought we were close.”

“We are, JB,” he’d said. “And I’m not keeping anything from you.” And he hadn’t been: there was nothing to keep. Of all of them, only Jude had secrets, real secrets, and while Willem had in the past been frustrated by what had seemed his unwillingness to reveal them, he had never felt that they weren’t close because of that; it had never impaired his ability to love him. It had been a difficult lesson for him to accept, this idea that he would never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways.

And yet Jude was still being discovered by him, even thirty-four years after they had met, and he was still fascinated by what he saw. That July, for the first time, he invited him to Rosen Pritchard’s annual summer barbeque. “You don’t have to come, Willem,” Jude had added immediately after asking him. “It’s going to be really, really boring.”

“I doubt that,” he said. “And I’m coming.”

The picnic was held on the grounds of a large old mansion on the Hudson, a more polished cousin of the house in which he had shot Uncle Vanya, and the entire firm — partners, associates, staff, and their families — had been invited. As they walked down the clover-thick back lawn toward the gathering, he had felt abruptly and unusually shy, keenly aware that he was an interloper, and when Jude was just minutes later plucked away from him by the firm’s chairman, who said he had some business he needed to discuss, quickly but urgently, he had to resist actually reaching out for Jude, who turned and gave him an apologetic smile and held up his hand—Five minutes—as he left.

So he was grateful for the sudden presence of Sanjay, one of the very few colleagues of Jude’s he had met, and who had the year before joined him as co-chair of his department so Jude could concentrate on bringing in new business while Sanjay handled the administrative and managerial details. He and Sanjay remained at the top of the hill, looking at the crowd beneath them, Sanjay pointing out to him various associates and young partners whom he and Jude hated. (Some of these doomed lawyers would turn and see Sanjay looking in their direction and Sanjay would wave back at them, cheerfully, muttering dark things about their lack of competence and resourcefulness to Willem as he did.) He began noticing that people were glancing up at him and then looking away, and one woman, who had been walking uphill, had ungracefully veered off in the opposite direction after noticing him standing there.

“I can see I’m a big hit here,” he joked to Sanjay, who smiled back at him.

“They’re not intimidated by you, Willem,” he said. “They’re intimidated by Jude.” He grinned. “Okay, and by you as well.”

Finally, Jude was returned to him, and they stood talking to the chairman (“I’m a big fan”) and Sanjay for a while before moving down the hill, where Jude introduced him to some of the people he’d heard about over the years. One of the paralegals asked to take a picture with him, and after he had, other people asked as well, and when Jude was pulled away from him again, he found himself listening to one of the partners in the tax department, who began describing to him his own stunt sequences from the second of his spy movies. At one point during Isaac’s monologue he had looked across the lawn and had caught Jude’s eye, who mouthed his apologies, and he had shaken his head and grinned back at him, but then had tugged on his left ear — their old signal — and although he hadn’t expected it, when he had looked over again, it was to see Jude marching toward him.

“Sorry, Isaac,” he’d said, firmly, “I’ve got to borrow Willem for a while,” and off he had pulled him. “I’m really sorry, Willem,” he whispered as they moved away, “the social ineptitude on display is particularly bad today; are you feeling like a panda at the zoo? On the other hand, I did tell you it was going to be awful. We can go in ten minutes, I promise.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m enjoying myself.” He always found it revealing to witness Jude in this other life of his, around the people who owned him for more hours a day than Willem himself did. Earlier, he had watched as Jude walked toward a group of young associates who were braying loudly over something on one of their phones. But when they saw Jude approaching them, they had nudged one another and grown silent and polite, greeting him with a heartiness so robust and obvious that Willem had cringed, and only once Jude had passed them did they huddle over the phone again, but more quietly this time.

By the time Jude was taken away from him a third time, he was feeling confident enough to begin introducing himself to the small pack of people who orbited him in a loose ring, smiling in his direction. He met a tall Asian woman named Clarissa whom he remembered Jude speaking about approvingly. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” he said, and Clarissa’s face changed into a radiant, relieved smile. “Jude’s talked about me?” she asked. He met an associate whose name he couldn’t remember who told him that Black Mercury 3081 had been the first R-rated movie he had ever seen, which made him feel tremendously old. He met another associate in Jude’s department who said that he’d taken two classes with Harold in law school and wondered what Harold was like, really. He met Jude’s secretaries’ children, and Sanjay’s son, and dozens of other people, a few of whom he had heard about by name but most of whom he hadn’t.

It was a hot, breezeless, brilliant day, and although he had drunk steadily all afternoon — limonata, water, prosecco, iced tea — it had been such a busy gathering that by the time they left, two hours later, neither of them had actually had the opportunity to eat anything, and they stopped at a farm stand to buy corn so they could grill it with zucchini and tomatoes from their garden up at the house.

“I learned a lot about you today,” he told Jude as they ate their dinner under the dark blue sky. “I learned that most of the firm is terrified of you and think that if they kiss up to me, I might put in a good word with you. I learned that I’m even older than I had realized. I learned that you’re right: you do work with a bunch of nerds.”

Jude had been smiling, but now he laughed. “See?” he asked. “I told you, Willem.”

“But I had a great time,” he said. “I did! I want to come again. But next time I think we should invite JB, and blow Rosen Pritchard’s collective mind,” and Jude had laughed again.

That had been almost two months ago, and since then, he has spent most of his time at Lantern House. As an early fifty-second birthday present, he’d asked Jude to take off every Saturday for the rest of the summer, and Jude has: every Friday he drives up to the house; every Monday morning, he drives back to the city. Because Jude would have the car during the week, he’d rented — partly as a joke, though he was secretly enjoying driving around in it — a convertible, in an alarming color that Jude referred to as “harlot red.” During the weekdays, he reads and swims and cooks and sleeps; he has a very busy autumn coming up, and he knows from how replenished and calm he feels that he’ll be ready.

At the grocery store he fills a paper bag with limes, and then a second one with lemons, buys some extra seltzer water, and drives to the train station, where he waits, leaning his head on the seat and closing his eyes until he hears Malcolm calling his name and sits up.

“JB didn’t come,” Malcolm says, sounding annoyed, as Willem kisses him and Sophie hello. “He and Fredrik broke up — maybe — this morning. But maybe they didn’t, because he said he was going to come up tomorrow. I couldn’t really figure out what was going on.”

He groans. “I’ll call him from the house,” he says. “Hi, Soph. Have you guys eaten lunch yet? We can start cooking as soon as we get back.”

They haven’t, so he calls Jude to tell him he can start boiling the water for the pasta, but Jude’s already begun. “I got the limes,” he tells him. “And JB’s not coming until tomorrow; some difficulty with Fredrik that Mal couldn’t quite follow. Do you want to call him and find out what’s happening?”

He loads his friends’ bags into the backseat, and Malcolm gets in, glancing at the car’s trunk as he does. “Interesting color,” he says.

“Thanks,” he says. “It’s called ‘harlot red.’ ”

“Really?”

Malcolm’s persistent credulity makes him grin. “Yes,” he says. “Ready, guys?”

As he drives, they talk about how long it’s been since they’ve seen one another, about how glad Sophie and Malcolm are to be home, about Malcolm’s disastrous driving lessons, about how perfect the weather is, how sweet and haylike the air smells. The best summer, he thinks again.

It is a thirty-minute drive back to the house from the station, a little faster if he hurries, but he doesn’t hurry, because the drive itself is pretty. And when he crosses the final large intersection, he doesn’t even see the truck coming toward him, barreling into traffic against the light, and by the time he feels it, a tremendous crush crumpling the passenger-seat side of the car, where Sophie is sitting next to him, he is already aloft, being ejected into the air. “No!” he shouts, or thinks he does, and then, in an instant, he sees a flash of Jude’s face: just his face, his expression still unresolved, torn from his body and suspended against a black sky. His ears, his head, fill with the roar of pleating metal, of exploding glass, of his own useless howls.

But his final thoughts are not of Jude, but of Hemming. He sees the house he lived in as a child and, sitting in his wheelchair in the center of the lawn, just before it slopes down toward the stables, Hemming, staring at him with a steady, constant gaze, the kind he was never able to give him in life.

He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. “Hemming!” he shouts, and then, nonsensically, “Wait for me!” And he begins to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet strike the ground beneath him.