Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said, not really knowing himself.

“You know, Willem,” Jude had said, “you should obviously sleep with whomever you want. I just”—he fumbled—“I know this is selfish, but I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“It’s not selfish,” he said, reaching across the bed for him. “And I wouldn’t do that, not ever.”

That was eight months ago, and in those eight months, things had gotten better: not, Willem thought, his former version of better, in which he pretended everything was fine and ignored all inconvenient evidence or suspicions that suggested otherwise, but actually better. He could tell Jude really was more relaxed: he was less inhibited physically, he was more affectionate, and he was both of those things because he knew that Willem had released him from what he thought were his obligations. He was cutting himself far less frequently. Now he didn’t need Harold or Andy to confirm for him that Jude was better: now he knew it to be true. The only difficulty was that he did still desire Jude, and at times he had to remind himself not to go any further, that he was getting close to the boundaries of what Jude could tolerate, and he would make himself stop. In those moments he would be angry, not at Jude or even at himself — he had never felt guilty about wanting to have sex, and he didn’t feel guilty about wanting to have it now — but at life, at how it had conspired to make Jude afraid of something that he had always associated with nothing but pleasure.

He was careful about who he chose to sleep with: he picked people (women, really: they had almost all been women) who he either sensed or knew, from previous experience, were truly only interested in him for sex and were going to be discreet. Often, they were confused, and he didn’t blame them. “Aren’t you in a relationship with a man?” they would ask, and he would tell them that he was, but that they had an open relationship. “So are you not really gay?” they would ask, and he would say, “No, not fundamentally.” The younger women were more accepting of this: they’d had boyfriends (or had boyfriends) who had slept with other men as well; they had slept with other women. “Oh,” they’d say, and that would usually be it — if they had other concerns, other questions, they didn’t ask. These younger women — actresses, makeup assistants, costume assistants — also didn’t want a relationship with him; often, they didn’t want a relationship at all. Sometimes the women asked him questions about Jude — how they had met, what he was like — and he answered them, and felt wistful, and missed him.

But he was vigilant about not letting this life intrude on his life at home. Once there had been a blind item in a gossip column — forwarded to him by Kit — that was clearly about him, and after debating whether to say something to Jude or not, he had in the end decided not to; Jude would never see the story, and there was no reason to make what Jude knew was happening in theory something he was forced to confront in reality.

JB, however, had seen the item (he supposed other people he knew had seen it as well, but JB was the only one to actually mention it to him), and had asked him if it was true. “I didn’t know you guys had an open relationship,” he said, more curious than accusatory.

“Oh yeah,” he said, casually. “Right from the start.”

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. His friend Roman, for example, was married to a woman who, while beautiful and loyal, was famously unintelligent: she didn’t understand the films Roman was in, and when you talked to her, you found yourself consciously recalibrating the velocity and complexity and content of your conversation, because she so often looked confused when the talk turned to politics, or finance, or literature, or art, or food, or architecture, or the environment. He knew that Roman was aware of this deficiency, in both Lisa and in his relationship. “Ah, well,” he had once said to Willem, unprompted, “if I want good conversation, I can talk to my friends, right?” Roman had been among the first of his friends to get married, and at the time, he had been fascinated by and disbelieving of his choice. But now he knew: you always sacrificed something. The question was what you sacrificed. He knew that to some people — JB; Roman, probably — his own sacrifice would be unthinkable. It would have been once to him as well.

He thought frequently these days of a play he had done in graduate school, by a beetley, plodding woman in the playwriting division who had gone on to have great success as a writer of spy movies but who in graduate school had tried to write Pinteresque dramas about unhappy married couples. If This Were a Movie was about an unhappy married couple — he was a professor of classical music; she was a librettist — who lived in New York. Because the couple was in their forties (at the time, a gray-colored land, impossibly far and unimaginably grim), they were devoid of humor and in a constant state of yearning for their younger selves, back when life had actually seemed so full of promise and hope, back when they had been romantic, back when life itself had been a romance. He had played the husband, and while he had long ago realized that it had been, really, an awful play (it had included lines like “This isn’t Tosca , you know! This is life !”), he had never forgotten the final monologue he had delivered in the second act, when the wife announces that she wants to leave, that she doesn’t feel fulfilled in their marriage, that she’s convinced that someone better awaits her:

SETH: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 qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That’s real life. Don’t you see it’s a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you’ll wind up with nothing.

AMY:[crying] So what did you pick?

SETH:I don’t know. [beat] I don’t know.

At the time, he hadn’t believed these words, because at the time, everything really did seem possible: he was twenty-three, and everyone was young and attractive and smart and glamorous. Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. 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. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic. They all chose differently: Roman had chosen beauty, sweetness, pliability; Malcolm, he thought, had chosen reliability, and competence (Sophie was intimidatingly efficient), and aesthetic compatibility. And he? He had chosen friendship. Conversation. Kindness. Intelligence. When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people’s relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel countless dinner-party conversations: What’s going on there? 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. Now he looked at couples — in restaurants, on the street, at parties — and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide? 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.