Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

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.