Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

THE FIRST TIMEWillem 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.