“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 measu
re 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.
A Little Life Page 73
