When he reached his room, he had to lie on the bed for half an hour before he could even think of retrieving his phone. He needed to feel the solidity of the bed beneath him, the silk of the cotton blanket against his cheek, the familiar yield of the mattress as he moved against it. He needed to assure himself that this was his world, and he was still in it, and that what had happened had really happened. He thought, suddenly, of a conversation he’d once had with Brother Peter, in which he’d asked the brother if he thought he’d ever be adopted, and the brother had laughed. “No,” he’d said, so decisively that he had never asked again. And although he must have been very young, he remembered, very clearly, that the brother’s dismissal had only hardened his resolve, although of course it wasn’t an outcome that was his to control in the slightest.
He was so discombobulated that he forgot that Willem was already onstage when he called, but when Willem called him back at intermission, he was still in the same place on the bed, in the same comma-like shape, the phone still cupped beneath his palm.
“Jude,” Willem breathed when he told him, and he could hear how purely happy Willem was for him. Only Willem—and Andy, and to some extent Harold—knew the outlines of how he had grown up: the monastery, the home, his time with the Douglasses. With everyone else, he tried to be evasive for as long as he could, until finally he would say that his parents had died when he was little, and that he had grown up in foster care, which usually stopped their questions. But Willem knew more of the truth, and he knew Willem knew that this was his most impossible, his most fervent desire. “Jude, that’s amazing. How do you feel?”
He tried to laugh. “Like I’m going to mess it up.”
“You won’t.” They were both quiet. “I didn’t even know you could adopt someone who’s a legal adult.”
“I mean, it’s not common, but you can. As long as both parties consent. It’s mostly done for purposes of inheritance.” He made another attempt at a laugh. (Stop trying to laugh, he scolded himself.) “I don’t remember much from when I studied this in family law, but I do know that I get a new birth certificate with their names on it.”
“Wow,” said Willem.
“I know,” he said.
He heard someone calling Willem’s name, commandingly, in the background. “You have to go,” he told Willem.
“Shit,” said Willem. “But Jude? Congratulations. No one deserves it more.” He called back at whoever was yelling for him. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Do you mind if I write Harold and Julia?”
“Sure,” he said. “But Willem, don’t tell the others, okay? I just want to sit with it for a while.”
“I won’t say a word. I’ll see you tomorrow. And Jude—” But he didn’t, or couldn’t, say anything else.
“I know,” he said. “I know, Willem. I feel the same way.”
“I love you,” said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it. It was a night of impossible things, and he fought to stay awake, to be conscious and alert for as long as possible, to enjoy and repeat to himself everything that had happened to him, a lifetime’s worth of wishes coming true in a few brief hours.
Back in the apartment the next day, there was a note from Willem telling him to wait up, and when Willem came home, he had ice cream and a carrot cake, which the two of them ate even though neither of them particularly liked sweets, and champagne, which they drank even though he had to wake up early the following morning. The next few weeks slid by: Harold was handling the paperwork, and sent him forms to sign—the petition for adoption, an affidavit to change his birth certificate, a request for information about his potential criminal record—which he took to the bank at lunch to have notarized; he didn’t want anyone at work to know beyond the few people he told: Marshall, and Citizen, and Rhodes. He told JB and Malcolm, who on the one hand reacted exactly as he’d anticipated—JB making a lot of unfunny jokes at an almost tic-like pace, as if he might eventually land on one that worked; Malcolm asking increasingly granular questions about various hypotheticals that he couldn’t answer—and on the other had been genuinely thrilled for him. He told Black Henry Young, who had taken two classes with Harold when he was in law school and had admired him, and JB’s friend Richard, to whom he’d grown close after one particularly long and tedious party at Ezra’s a year ago when the two of them had had a conversation that had begun with the French welfare state and then had moved on to various other topics, the only two semi-sober people in the room. He told Phaedra, who had started screaming, and another old college friend, Elijah, who had screamed as well.
And, of course, he told Andy, who at first had just stared at him and then nodded, as if he had asked if Andy had an extra bandage he could give him before he left for the night. But then he began making a series of bizarre seal-like sounds, half bark, half sneeze, and he realized that Andy was crying. The sight of it made him both horrified and slightly hysterical, unsure of what to do. “Get out of here,” Andy commanded him between sounds. “I mean it, Jude, get the fuck out,” and so he did. The next day at work, he received an arrangement of roses the size of a gardenia bush, with a note in Andy’s angry blocky handwriting that read:
JUDE—I’M SO FUCKING EMBARRASSED I CAN BARELY WRITE THIS NOTE. PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR YESTERDAY. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU’LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD’S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE’S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE’S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY
It was, he and Willem agreed, one of the best letters they’d ever read.
But then the ecstatic month passed, and it was January, and Willem left for Bulgaria to film, and the old fears returned, accompanied now by new fears. They had a court date for February fifteenth, Harold told him, and with a little rescheduling, Laurence would be presiding. Now that the date was so close, he was sharply, inescapably aware that he might ruin it for himself, and he began, at first unconsciously and then assiduously, avoiding Harold and Julia, convinced that if they were reminded too much, too actively of what they were in fact getting that they would change their minds. And so when they came into town for a play the second week in January, he pretended he was in Washington on business, and on their weekly phone calls, he tried to say very little, and to keep the conversations brief. Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his ugly zombie’s hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened: Who, really, would ever want this? The idea that he could become someone else’s seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more, how could he too not come to the same conclusion? He knew it shouldn’t matter so much to him—he was, after all, an adult; he knew the adoption was more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant—but he wanted it with a steady fervor that defied logic, and he couldn’t bear it being taken away from him now, not when everyone he cared about was so happy for him, not when he was so close.