Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can’t see the man’s features, but he is tall and thin, and he’s helping another, older man hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he’s in Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and which feels somehow purer than cold he’s felt anywhere else.

He still can’t see the man’s features, but he thinks he knows who he is, recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him as he listens to the other man. “Cody,” he calls out in his dream, and the man turns, but he’s too far away, and so he can’t quite tell if, under the brim of the man’s baseball cap, they share the same face.

The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court appointment is at ten, and after it’s over, everyone will come back to the house to eat.

Harold had wanted to call a caterer, but he insisted he’d cook, and he spends the remains of Thursday evening in the kitchen. He does the baking that night — the chocolate-walnut cake Harold likes; the tarte tatin Julia likes; the sourdough bread they both like — and picks through ten pounds of crab and mixes the meat with egg and onion and parsley and bread crumbs and forms them into patties. He cleans the potatoes and gives the carrots a quick scrub, and chops the ends off the brussels sprouts, so that the next day all he’ll have to do is toss them in oil and shove them into the oven. He shakes the cartons of figs into a bowl, which he’ll roast and serve over ice cream topped with honey and balsamic vinaigrette. They are all of Harold and Julia’s favorite dishes, and he is glad to make them, glad to have something to give them, however small. Throughout the evening, Harold and Julia wander in and out, and although he tells them not to, they wash dishes and pans as he dirties them, pour him glasses of water and wine, and ask if they can help him, even though he tells them they should relax. Finally they leave for bed, and although he promises them that he will as well, he instead stays up, the kitchen bright and silent around him, singing quietly, his hands moving to keep the mania at bay.

The past few days have been very difficult, some of the most difficult he can remember, so difficult that one night he even called Andy after their midnight check-in, and when Andy offered to meet him at a diner at two a.m., he accepted the offer and went, desperate to get himself out of the apartment, which suddenly seemed full of irresistible temptations: razors, of course, but also knives and scissors and matches, and staircases to throw himself down. He knows that if he goes to his room now, he won’t be able to stop himself from heading directly to the bathroom, where he has long kept a bag, its contents identical to the one at Lispenard Street, taped to the sink’s undercarriage: his arms ache with yearning, and he is determined not to give in. He has both dough and batter left over, and decides he’ll make a tart with pine nuts and cranberries, and maybe a round flat cake glazed with slices of oranges and honey: by the time both are done baking, it will almost be daylight and he will be past danger and will have sucessfully saved himself.

Malcolm and JB will both be at the courthouse the next day; they’re taking the morning flight. But Willem, who was supposed to be there, won’t; he called the week before to say filming had been delayed, and he’ll now be coming home on the eighteenth, not the fourteenth. He knows there’s nothing to be done about this, but still, he mourns Willem’s absence almost fiercely: a day like this without Willem won’t be a day at all. “Call me the second it’s over,” Willem had said. “It’s killing me I can’t be there.”

He did, however, invite Andy in one of their midnight conversations, which he grew to enjoy: in those talks, they discussed everyday things, calming things, normal things — the new Supreme Court justice nominee; the most recent health-care bill (he approved of it; Andy didn’t); a biography of Rosalind Franklin they’d both read (he liked it; Andy didn’t); the apartment that Andy and Jane were renovating. He liked the novelty of hearing Andy say, with real outrage, “Jude, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” which he was used to hearing when being confronted about his cutting, or his amateurish bandaging skills, instead applied to his opinions about movies, and the mayor, and books, and even paint colors. Once he learned that Andy wouldn’t use their talks as an occasion to reprimand him, or lecture him, he relaxed into them, and even managed to learn some more things about Andy himself: Andy spoke of his twin, Beckett, also a doctor, a heart surgeon, who lived in San Francisco and whose boyfriend Andy hated and was scheming to get Beckett to dump; and how Jane’s parents were giving them their house on Shelter Island; and how Andy had been on the football team in high school, the very Americanness of which had made his parents uneasy; and how he had spent his junior year abroad in Siena, where he dated a girl from Lucca and gained twenty pounds. It wasn’t that he and Andy never spoke of Andy’s personal life — they did to some extent after every appointment — but on the phone he talked more, and he was able to pretend that Andy was only his friend and not his doctor, despite the fact that this illusion was belied by the call’s very premise.

“Obviously, you shouldn’t feel obligated to come,” he added, hastily, after inviting Andy to the court date.

“I’d love to come,” Andy said. “I was wondering when I’d be invited.”

Then he felt bad. “I just didn’t want you to feel you had to spend even more time with your weird patient who already makes your life so difficult,” he said.

“You’re not just my weird patient, Jude,” Andy said. “You’re also my weird friend.” He paused. “Or at least, I hope you are.”

He smiled into the phone. “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m honored to be your weird friend.”

And so Andy was coming as well: he’d fly back that afternoon, but Malcolm and JB would spend the night, and they’d all leave together on Saturday.

Upon arriving, he had been surprised, and then moved, to see how thoroughly Harold and Julia had cleaned the house, and how proud they were of the work they’d done. “Look!” one or the other kept saying, triumphantly pointing at a surface — a table, a chair, a corner of floor — that would normally have been obscured by stacks of books or journals, but which was now clear of all clutter. There were flowers everywhere — winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their sweet, faintly fecal fragrance — and the books in their cases had been straightened and even the nap on the sofa had been repaired.

“And look at this , Jude,” Julia had said, linking her arm through his, and showing him the celadon-glazed dish on the hallway table, which had been broken for as long as he’d known them, the shards that had snapped off its side permanently nested in the bowl and furred with dust. But now it had been fixed, and washed and polished.

“Wow,” he said when presented with each new thing, grinning idiotically, happy because they were so happy. He didn’t care, he never had, whether their place was clean or not — they could’ve lived surrounded by Ionic columns of old New York Times , with colonies of rats squeaking plumply underfoot for all he cared — but he knew they thought he minded, and had mistaken his incessant, tedious cleaning of everything as a rebuke, as much as he’d tried, and tried, to assure them it wasn’t. He cleaned now to stop himself, to distract himself, from doing other things, but when he was in college, he had cleaned for the others to express his gratitude: it was something he could do and had always done, and they gave him so much and he gave them so little. JB, who enjoyed living in squalor, never noticed. Malcolm, who had grown up with a housekeeper, always noticed and always thanked him. Only Willem hadn’t liked it. “Stop it, Jude,” he’d said one day, grabbing his wrist as he picked JB’s dirty shirts off the floor, “you’re not our maid.” But he hadn’t been able to stop, not then, and not now.