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“Pardon me,” said the waiter. “Should I come back?” “No, don’t worry,” Harold said, picking up his menu. “I’m just yelling at my son, but I can do that after we order.”
SOBBING
And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him. He has a better life than so many people, a better life than he had ever thought he would have. To wish for companionship along with everything else he has seems a kind of greed, a gross entitlement.
“Five and a half more months,” Willem says at the end of one conversation. “Five and a half more,” he repeats.
Their companionship makes me want to sob
But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, of perpetual doubt.
he turns to the person on his right, whom he doesn’t recognize from Rhodes’s other parties, a dark-haired man with a nose that looks like it’s been broken: it starts heading decisively in one direction before reversing directions, just as decisively, right below the bridge. “Caleb Porter.” “Jude St. Francis.” “Let me guess: Catholic.” “Let me guess: not.” Caleb laughs. “You’re right about that.”
how cutie
They stop and he’s about to get out when Caleb tells him to wait, he has an umbrella and will walk him into the building, and before he can object, Caleb is getting out and unsnapping an umbrella, and the two of them huddle beneath it and into the lobby, the door thudding shut behind him, leaving them standing in the darkened entryway.
AWWEEE
He had wanted to vanish, then, to close his eyes and reel back time, back to before he had ever met Caleb. He would have turned down Rhodes’s invitation; he would have kept living his little life; he would have never known the difference.
“Whose wheelchair is that?” He looked where Caleb was looking. “Mine,” he said, after a pause. “But why?” Caleb had asked him, looking confused. “You can walk.” He didn’t know what to say. “Sometimes I need it,” he said, finally. “Rarely. I don’t use it that often.” “Good,” said Caleb. “See that you don’t.”
Ok. Jk. I hate this man actually with my whole chest
“I want to keep seeing you,” he said, at last. “But—but I can’t be around these accessories to weakness, to disease. I just can’t. I hate it. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel—not depressed, but furious, like I need to fight against it.”
Uggghhhhh
When he is with Caleb, he feels simultaneously more and less human. The first time Caleb hit him, he was both surprised and not.
now i see where everyones reactions to this book comes from...
He still can’t quite understand why he let Caleb come up that night. If he is to admit it to himself, he feels there was something inevitable, even, in a small way, a relief, about Caleb’s hitting him: all along, he had been waiting for some sort of punishment for his arrogance, for thinking he could have what everyone else has, and here—at last—it was.
):
But Caleb, he knows, is no longer human. He is a wolf, he is a coyote. He is muscle and rage. And he is nothing to Caleb, he is prey, he is disposable.
I can feel my heartbeat in my ears reading this. This is so beyond devastating
“Listen to me, Jude,” says Harold slowly, and reaches for him, but he pulls himself back against the window, away from Harold’s hands. “You are the most beautiful person I have ever met—ever.”
The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers:
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.
But really, he is a prisoner: of his job, of his relationship, and mostly, of his own willful naïveté.
“But you know, I’ve been lucky all my life.”
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.
“Don’t go,” he hears Willem say. “Don’t leave me.” “I promise I won’t,” he says. “I promise.
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.”
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.
...more
“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.”
He has finally managed to achieve what Willem had always hoped for him; all it took was Willem being taken from him.
),:
“What if we’d never left?” Willem would occasionally ask him. “What if I had never made it? What if you’d stayed at the U.S. Attorney’s Office? What if I was still working at Ortolan? What would our lives be like now?” “How theoretical do you want to get here, Willem?” he’d ask him, smiling. “Would we be together?” “Of course we’d be together,” Willem would say. “That part would be the same.”
“Jude,” says Dr. Loehmann. “You’ve come back.” He takes a breath. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve decided to stay.”
But although I could never have imagined the person he would become for me, I knew how he would leave me: despite all my hopes, and pleas, and insinuations, and threats, and magical thoughts, I knew. And five months later—June twelfth, a day with no significant anniversaries associated with it, a nothing day—he did.
maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist.
And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
