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“there are worse life sentences.”
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 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.
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?
“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.
This, he realizes, is what he wanted from a relationship all along.
all the physical contact that he knows exists between healthy people who love each other and are having sex, without the dreaded sex itself.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He hated lying so much to Willem, but what was the alternative? The alternative meant losing him, meant being alone forever.
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.
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.
He thought he had been doing such a good job being normal—but maybe he hadn’t.
“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.
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.
and with every passing day that Willem didn’t ask him again, he hated himself more.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
suddenly, Boston seemed less important than tenderness, than someone who would protect him and be good to him.
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?
“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.”
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?
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 title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title—Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street—and he feels his breath abandon him;
what a great moment
