Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

He sits down on the living-room sofa to wait, and when he opens his eyes, Willem is sitting next to him, smiling at him and saying his name, and he puts his arms around him, careful not to let his left arm exert any pressure, and for that one moment, everything seems both possible — and indescribably difficult.

How could I go on without this? he asks himself.

And then: What am I going to do?

Nine days , the voice inside him nags. Nine days . But he ignores it.

“Willem,” he says aloud, from within the huddle of Willem’s arms. “You’re home, you’re home.” He gives a long exhalation of air; hopes Willem doesn’t hear its shudder. “Willem,” he says again and again, letting his name fill his mouth. “Willem, Willem — you don’t know how much I missed you.”

The best part about going away is coming home . Who said that? Not him, but it might as well have been, he thinks as he moves through the apartment. It is noon: a Tuesday, and tomorrow they will drive to Boston.

If you love home — and even if you don’t — there is nothing quite as cozy, as comfortable, as delightful, as that first week back. That week, even the things that would irritate you — the alarm waahing from some car at three in the morning; the pigeons who come to clutter and cluck on the windowsill behind your bed when you’re trying to sleep in — seem instead reminders of your own permanence, of how life, your life, will always graciously allow you to step back inside of it, no matter how far you have gone away from it or how long you have left it.

Also that week, the things you like anyway seem, in their very existence, to be worthy of celebration: the candied-walnut vendor on Crosby Street who always returns your wave as you jog past him; the falafel sandwich with extra pickled radish from the truck down the block that you woke up craving one night in London; the apartment itself, with its sunlight that lopes from one end to the other in the course of a day, with your things and food and bed and shower and smells.

And, of course, there is the person you come back to: his face and body and voice and scent and touch, his way of waiting until you finish whatever you’re saying, no matter how lengthy, before he speaks, the way his smile moves so slowly across his face that it reminds you of moonrise, how clearly he has missed you and how clearly happy he is to have you back. Then there are the things, if you are particularly lucky, that this person has done for you while you’re away: how in the pantry, in the freezer, in the refrigerator will be all the food you like to eat, the scotch you like to drink. There will be the sweater you thought you lost the previous year at the theater, clean and folded and back on its shelf. There will be the shirt with its dangling buttons, but the buttons will be sewn back in place. There will be your mail stacked on one side of his desk; there will be a contract for an advertising campaign you’re going to do in Germany for an Austrian beer, with his notes in the margin to discuss with your lawyer. And there will be no mention of it, and you will know that it was done with genuine pleasure, 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. And in these moments — almost a week back home — you will wonder why you leave so often, and you will wonder whether, after the next year’s obligations are fulfilled, you ought not just stay here for a period, where you belong.

But you will also know — as he knows — that part of your constant leaving is reactive. After his relationship with Jude was made public, while he and Kit and Emil were waiting to see what would happen next, he had experienced that same insecurity that had visited him as a younger man: What if he never worked again? What if this was it? And although things had, he could now see, continued with almost no discernible hitch at all, it had taken him a year to be reassured that his circumstances hadn’t changed, that he was still as he had been, desirable to some directors and not to others (“Bullshit,” Kit had said, and he was grateful for him; “anyone would want to work with you”), and at any rate, the same actor, no better or worse, that he had been before.

But if he was allowed to be the same actor, he was not allowed to be the same person, and in the months after he was declared gay — and never refuted it; he didn’t have a publicist to issue these sorts of denials and avowals — he found himself in possession of more identities than he’d had in a very long time. For much of his adult life, he had been placed in circumstances that required the shedding of selves: no longer was he a brother; no longer was he a son. But with a single revelation, he had now become a gay man; a gay actor; a high-profile gay actor; a high-profile, nonparticipating gay actor; and, finally, a high-profile traitorous gay actor. A year or so ago he had gone to dinner with a director named Max whom he’d known for many years, and over dinner Max had tried to get him to give a speech at a gala dinner benefiting a gay-rights organization at which he would announce himself as gay. Willem had always supported this organization, and he told Max that although he would be pleased to present an award or sponsor a table — as he had every year for the past decade — he wouldn’t come out, because he didn’t believe there was anything to come out of: he wasn’t gay.

“Willem,” Max said, “you’re in a relationship, a serious relationship, with a man. That is the very definition of gay.”

“I’m not in a relationship with a man,” he said, hearing how absurd the words were, “I’m in a relationship with Jude.”

“Oh my god,” Max muttered.

He’d sighed. Max was sixteen years older than he; he had come of age in a time when identity politics were your very identity, and he understood Max’s — and the other people who pecked at and pleaded with him to come out, and then accused him of self-loathing, and cowardice, and hypocrisy, and denial, when he didn’t — arguments; he understood that he had come to represent something he had never asked to represent; he understood that whether he wanted this representation or not was almost incidental. But he still couldn’t do it.

Jude had told him that he and Caleb had told no one in their lives about the other, and although Jude’s secretiveness had been motivated by shame (and Caleb’s, Willem could only hope, by at least some small glint of guilt), he too felt that his relationship with Jude existed to no one but themselves: it seemed something sacred, and fought-for, and unique to them. Of course, this was ridiculous, but it was the way he felt — to be an actor in his position was to be, in many ways, a possession, to be fought over and argued about and criticized by anyone who wanted to say something, anything, about his abilities or appearance or performance. But his relationship was different: in it, he played a role for one other person, and that person was his only audience, and no one else ever saw it, no matter how much they thought they might.

His relationship also felt sacred because he had just recently — in the last six months or so — felt he had gotten the rhythm of it. The person he thought he knew had turned out to be, in some ways, not the person before him, and it had taken him time to figure out how many facets he had yet to see: it was as if the shape he had all along thought was a pentagram was in reality a dodecahedron, many sided and many fractaled and much more complicated to measure. 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. When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.