Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“It’s a really good piece,” JB says at last, sounding pleased. “Let me know if you ever want to sell it, Harold,” and finally, everyone laughs.

“JB, it’s so, so beautiful — thank you so much,” says Julia, and Harold echoes her. He is finding it difficult, as he always does when confronted with JB’s pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn’t want to be ungracious, and so he repeats their praise.

“Wait, I have something, too,” Willem says, heading for the bedroom, and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra’s hood, surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest, his left by his side.

“Fuck’s that dude?” asks JB.

“This dude,” Willem replies, “is Saint Jude, also known as Judas Thaddeus.” He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and Harold. “I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest,” he tells them. “They said it’s late nineteenth-century, but I don’t know — I think he’s probably just a village carving. Still, I liked him. He’s handsome and stately, just like our Jude.”

“I agree,” says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands. He strokes the figure’s pleated robe, his wreath of fire. “Why’s his head on fire?”

“It’s to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit,” he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his mind’s cellar. “He was one of the apostles.”

“How’d you know that?” Malcolm asks, and Willem, who’s sitting next to him, touches his arm. “Of course you know,” Willem says, quietly. “I always forget,” and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for remembering, but for forgetting.

“The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us —when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it: as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction. And yet it also felt, at times, like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he could have, even should have changed it, he never did. “Willem, thank you,” Julia says. “I love him.”

“Me too,” says Harold. “Guys, this is all really sweet of you.”

He, too, has brought a present for Harold and Julia, but as the day has passed, it’s come to seem ever-smaller and more foolish. Years ago, Harold had mentioned that he and Julia had heard a series of Schubert’s early lieder performed in Vienna when they were on their honeymoon. But Harold couldn’t remember which ones they had loved, and so he had made up his own list, and augmented it with a few other songs he liked, mostly Bach and Mozart, and then rented a small sound booth and recorded a disc of himself singing them: every few months or so, Harold asks him to sing for them, but he’s always too shy to do so. Now, though, the gift feels misguided and tinny, as well as shamefully boastful, and he is embarrassed by his own presumption. Yet he can’t bring himself to throw it away. And so, when everyone is standing and stretching and saying their good nights, he slips away and wedges the disc, and the letters he’s written each of them, between two books — a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise —on a low shelf, where they might sit, undiscovered, for decades.

Normally, Willem stays with JB in the upstairs study, as he’s the only one who can tolerate JB’s snoring, and Malcolm stays with him downstairs. But that evening, as everyone heads off for bed, Malcolm volunteers that he’ll share with JB, so that he and Willem can catch up with each other.

“ ’Night, lovers,” JB calls down the staircase at them.

As they get ready for bed, Willem tells him more stories from the set: about the lead actress, who perspired so much that her entire face had to be dusted with powder every two takes; about the lead actor, who played the devil, and who was constantly trying to curry favor with the grips by buying them beers and asking them who wanted to play football, but who then had a tantrum when he couldn’t remember his lines; about the nine-year-old British actor playing the actress’s son, who had approached Willem at the craft services table to tell him that he really shouldn’t be eating crackers because they were empty calories, and wasn’t he afraid of getting fat? Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.

But when the lights are turned off and they are both lying in the dark, he in the bed, Willem on the sofa (after an argument in which he tried to get Willem to take the bed himself), Willem says, gently, “The apartment’s really fucking clean.”

“I know,” he winces. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Willem says. “But Jude — was it really awful?”

He understands then that Andy did tell Willem at least some of what had happened, and so he decides to answer honestly. “It wasn’t great,” he allows, and then, because he doesn’t want Willem to feel guilty, “but it wasn’t horrible.”

They are both quiet. “I wish I could’ve been there,” Willem says.

“You were,” he assures him. “But Willem — I missed you.”

Very quietly, Willem says, “I missed you, too.”

“Thank you for coming,” he says.

“Of course I was going to come, Judy,” Willem says from across the room. “I would’ve no matter what.”

He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. “Do you think it went all right?” he asks.

“Are you serious?” Willem says, and he can hear him sit up. “Did you see Harold’s face? He looked like the Green Party just elected its first president and the Second Amendment was eliminated and the Red Sox were canonized, all in the same day.”

He laughs. “You really think so?”

“I know so. He was really, really happy, Jude. He loves you.”

He smiles into the dark. He wants to hear Willem say such things over and over, an endless loop of promises and avowals, but he knows such wishes are self-indulgent, and so he changes the subject, and they talk of little things, nothings, until first Willem, and then he, fall asleep.

A week later, his giddiness has mellowed into something else: a contentment, a stillness. For the past week, his nights have been unbroken stretches of sleep in which he dreams not of the past but of the present: silly dreams about work, sunnily absurd dreams about his friends. It is the first complete week in the now almost two decades since he began cutting himself that he hasn’t woken in the middle of the night, since he’s felt no need for the razor. Maybe he is cured, he dares to think. Maybe this is what he needed all along, and now that it’s happened, he is better. He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.

He is back in their apartment. Willem is with him. He has brought back with him a second statue of Saint Jude, which they keep in the kitchen, but this Saint Jude is bigger and hollow and ceramic, with a slot chiseled into the back of his head, and they feed their change through it at the end of the day; when it’s full, they decide, they’ll go buy a really good bottle of wine and drink it, and then they’ll begin again.