“How was it for you?” Willem asks.
“Okay,” he says, smiling back at him. He thinks these meetings with JB are even harder for Willem than they are for him. “You?”
“Okay,” Willem says. His girlfriend drives up to the curb; they are staying at a hotel. “I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?”
Back in Cambridge, he lets himself into the silent house and walks as softly as he can back to his bathroom, where he prises his bag from beneath the loose tile near the toilet and cuts himself until he feels absolutely empty, holding his arms over the bathtub, watching the porcelain stain itself crimson. As he always does after seeing JB, he wonders if he has made the right decision. He wonders if all of them—he, Willem, JB, Malcolm—will lie awake that night longer than usual, thinking of one another’s faces and of conversations, good and bad, that they have had with one another over what had been more than twenty years of friendship.
Oh, he thinks, if I were a better person. If I were a more generous person. If I were a less self-involved person. If I were a braver person.
Then he stands, gripping the towel bar as he does; he has cut himself too much tonight, and he is faint. He goes over to the full-length mirror that is hung on the back of the bedroom’s closet door. In his apartment on Greene Street, there are no full-length mirrors. “No mirrors,” he told Malcolm. “I don’t like them.” But really, he doesn’t want to be confronted with his image; he doesn’t want to see his body, his face staring back at him.
But here at Harold and Julia’s, there is a mirror, and he stands in front of it for a few seconds, contemplating himself, before adopting the hunched pose JB had that night. JB was right, he thinks. He was right. And that is why I can’t forgive him.
Now he drops his mouth open. Now he hops in a little circle. Now he drags his leg behind him. His moans fill the air in the quiet, still house.
The first Saturday in May, he and Willem have what they’ve been calling the Last Supper at a tiny, very expensive sushi restaurant near his office on Fifty-sixth Street. The restaurant has only six seats, all at a wide, velvety cypress counter, and for the three hours they spend there, they are the only patrons.
Although they both knew how much the meal would cost, they’re both stunned when they look at the check, and then both start laughing, though he’s not sure if it’s the absurdity of spending so much on a single dinner, or the fact that they have, or the fact that they can that is to blame.
“I’ll get it,” Willem says, but as he’s reaching for his wallet, the waiter comes over to him with his credit card, which he’d given to him when Willem was in the bathroom.
“Goddammit, Jude,” Willem says, and he grins.
“It’s the Last Supper, Willem,” he says. “You can get me a taco when you come back.”
“If I come back,” Willem says. It has been their running joke. “Jude, thank you. You weren’t supposed to pay for this.”
It’s the first warm night of the year, and he tells Willem that if he really wants to thank him for dinner, he’ll walk with him. “How far?” asks Willem, warily. “We’re not going to walk all the way down to SoHo, Jude.”
“Not far.”
“It’d better not be,” Willem says, “because I’m really tired.” This is Willem’s new strategy, and he is very fond of it: instead of telling him he can’t do certain things because it’s not good for his legs or back, Willem instead tries to make himself sound incapable in order to dissuade him. These days, Willem is always too tired to walk, or too achey, or too hot, or too cold. But he knows that these things are untrue. One Saturday afternoon after they’d gone to some galleries, Willem had told him he couldn’t walk from Chelsea to Greene Street (“I’m too tired”), and so they had taken a cab instead. But then the next day at lunch, Robin had said, “Wasn’t it a beautiful day yesterday? After Willem got home, we ran for—what, eight miles, right, Willem?—all the way up and down the highway.”
“Oh, did you?” he asked her, looking at Willem, who smiled sheepishly at him.
“What can I say?” he said. “I unexpectedly got a second wind.”
They start walking south, first veering east from Broadway so they won’t have to cross through Times Square. Willem’s hair has been colored dark for his next role, and he has a beard, so he’s not instantly recognizable, but neither of them want to get stuck in a scrum of tourists.
This is the last time he will see Willem for what will likely be more than six months. On Tuesday, he leaves for Cyprus to begin work on The Iliad and The Odyssey; he will play Odysseus in both. The two films will be shot consecutively and released consecutively, but they will have the same cast and the same director, too. The shoot will take him all across southern Europe and northern Africa before moving to Australia, where some of the battle scenes are being shot, and because the pace is so intense and the distances he has to travel so far, it’s unclear whether he’ll have much time, if any, to come home on breaks. It is the most elaborate and ambitious shoot Willem has been on, and he is nervous. “It’s going to be incredible, Willem,” he reassures him.
“Or an incredible disaster,” Willem says. He isn’t glum, he never is, but he can tell Willem is anxious, and eager to do well, and worried that he will somehow disappoint. But he is worried before every film, and yet—as he reminds Willem—every one has turned out fine, better than fine. However, he thinks, this is one of the reasons that Willem will always have work, and good work: because he does take it seriously, because he does feel so responsible.
He, though, is dreading the next six months, especially because Willem has been so present for the last year and a half. First he was shooting a small project, one based in Brooklyn, that lasted just a few weeks. And then he was in a play, a production called The Maldivian Dodo, about two brothers, both ornithologists, one of whom is slowly tipping into an uncategorizable madness. The two of them had a late dinner every Thursday night for the entire run of the play, which he saw—as he has with all of Willem’s plays—multiple times. On his third viewing, he spotted JB with Oliver, just a few rows ahead of him but on the left side of the theater, and throughout the show he kept glancing over at JB to see if he was laughing at or concentrating on the same lines, aware that this was the first of Willem’s productions that the three of them hadn’t seen together, as a group, at least once.
“So, listen,” Willem says as they move down Fifth Avenue, which is empty of people, just bright-lit windows and stray bits of garbage twirling in the light, soft breeze—plastic bags, puffed up with air into jellyfish, and twists of newspaper—“I told Robin I’d talk to you about something.”
He waits. He has been conscious of not making the same mistake with Robin and Willem that he made with Philippa and Willem—when Willem asks him to accompany them anywhere, he makes sure that he’s cleared it with Robin first (finally Willem had told him to stop asking, that Robin knew how much he meant to him and she was fine with it, and if she wasn’t fine with it, she’d have to get fine with it), and he has tried to present himself to Robin as someone independent and not likely to move in with them when he’s old. (He’s not sure exactly how to communicate this message, however, and so is therefore unsure if he’s been successful or not.) But he likes Robin—she’s a classics professor at Columbia who was hired to serve as a consultant on the films two years ago, and she has a spiky sense of humor that reminds him of JB, somehow.