“No,” he says, finally. A couple walks by, laughing, and he thinks of the beginning of their walk, when they too were laughing. How has he managed to ruin this night, the last time he will see Willem for months? “You don’t need to worry about me, Willem. I’ll always be fine. I’ll always be able to take care of myself.”
And then Willem sighs, and sags, and looks so defeated that he feels a twist of guilt. But he is also relieved, because he senses that Willem doesn’t know how to continue the conversation, and he will soon be able to redirect him, and end the evening pleasantly, and escape. “You always say that.”
“Because it’s always true.”
There is a long, long silence. They are standing in front of a Korean barbeque restaurant, and the air is dense and fragrant with steam and smoke and roasting meat. “Can I go?” he asks finally, and Willem nods. He goes to the curb and raises his arm, and a cab glides to his side.
Willem opens the door for him and then, as he’s getting in, puts his arms around him and holds him, and he finally does the same. “I’m going to miss you,” Willem says into the back of his neck. “Are you going to take care of yourself while I’m gone?”
“Yes,” he says. “I promise.” He steps back and looks at him. “Until November, then.”
Willem makes a face that’s not quite a smile. “November,” he echoes.
In the cab, he finds he really is tired, and he leans his forehead against the greased window and closes his eyes. By the time he reaches home, he feels as leaden as a corpse, and in the apartment, he starts taking off his clothes—shoes, sweater, shirt, undershirt, pants—as soon as he’s locked the door behind him, leaving them littering the floor in a trail as he makes his way to the bathroom. His hands tremor as he unsticks the bag from beneath the sink, and although he hadn’t thought he’d need to cut himself that night—nothing that day or early evening had indicated he might—he is almost ravenous for it now. He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself. Lately he has begun using the cream that Andy gave him for his back on his arms, and he thinks it helps, a bit: the skin feels looser, the scars a little softer and more supple.
The shower area Malcolm has created in this bathroom is enormous, so large he now sits within it when he’s cutting, his legs stretched out before him, and after he’s done, he’s careful to wash away the blood because the floor is a great plain of marble, and as Malcolm has told him again and again, once you stain marble, there’s nothing that can be done. And then he is in bed, light-headed but not quite sleepy, staring at the dark, mercury-like gleam the chandelier makes in the shadowy room.
“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.
This loneliness is a recent discovery, and is different from the other lonelinesses he has experienced: it is not the childhood loneliness of not having parents; or of lying awake in a motel room with Brother Luke, trying not to move, not to rouse him, while the moon threw hard white stripes of light across the bed; or of the time he ran away from the home, the successful time, and spent the night wedged into the cleft of an oak tree’s buckling roots that spread open like a pair of legs, making himself as small as he could. He had thought he was lonely then, but now he realizes that what he was feeling was not loneliness but fear. But now he has nothing to fear. Now he has protected himself: he has this apartment with its triple-locked doors, and he has money. He has parents, he has friends. He will never again have to do anything he doesn’t want to for food, or transportation, or shelter, or escape.
He hadn’t been lying to Willem: he is not meant for a relationship and has never thought he was. He has never envied his friends theirs—to do so would be akin to a cat coveting a dog’s bark: it is something that would never occur to him to envy, because it is impossible, something that is simply alien to his very species. But recently, people have been behaving as if it is something he could have, or should want to have, and although he knows they mean it in part as a kindness, it feels like a taunt: they could be telling him he could be a decathlete and it would be as obtuse and as cruel.
He expects it from Malcolm and Harold; Malcolm because he is happy and sees a single path—his path—to happiness, and so therefore occasionally asks him if he can set him up with someone, or if he wants to find someone, and then is bewildered when he declines; Harold because he knows that the part of the parental role Harold most enjoys is inserting himself into his life and rooting about in it as best as he can. He has grown to enjoy this too, sometimes—he is touched that someone is interested enough in him to order him around, to be disappointed by the decisions he makes, to have expectations for him, to assume the responsibility of ownership of him. Two years ago, he and Harold were at a restaurant and Harold was giving him a lecture about how his job at Rosen Pritchard had made him essentially an accessory to corporate malfeasance, when they both realized that their waiter was standing above them, holding his pad before him.
“Pardon me,” said the waiter. “Should I come back?”
“No, don’t worry,” Harold said, picking up his menu. “I’m just yelling at my son, but I can do that after we order.” The waiter had given him a commiserating smile, and he had smiled back, thrilled to have been claimed as another’s in public, to finally be a member of the tribe of sons and daughters. Later, Harold had resumed his rant, and he had pretended to be upset, but really, he had been happy the entire night, contentment saturating his every cell, smiling so much that Harold had finally asked him if he was drunk.
But now Harold too has started to ask him questions. “This is a terrific place,” he said when he was in town the previous month for the birthday dinner he’d commanded Willem not to throw for him and which Willem had done anyway. Harold had stopped by the apartment the next day, and as he always did, rambled about it admiringly, saying the same things he always did: “This is a terrific place”; “It’s so clean in here”; “Malcolm did such a good job”; and, lately, “It’s massive, though, Jude. Don’t you get lonely in here by yourself?”
“No, Harold,” he said. “I like being alone.”
Harold had grunted. “Willem seems happy,” he said. “Robin seems like a nice girl.”
“She is,” he said, making Harold a cup of tea. “And I think he is happy.”
“Jude, don’t you want that for yourself?” Harold asked.
He sighed. “No, Harold, I’m fine.”
“Well, what about me and Julia?” asked Harold. “We’d like to see you with someone.”
“You know I want to make you and Julia happy,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you on this front. Here.” He gave Harold his tea.
Sometimes he wonders whether this very idea of loneliness is something he would feel at all had he not been awakened to the fact that he should be feeling lonely, that there is something strange and unacceptable about the life he has. Always, there are people asking him if he misses what it had never occurred to him to want, never occurred to him he might have: Harold and Malcolm, of course, but also Richard, whose girlfriend, a fellow artist named India, has all but moved in with him, and people he sees less frequently as well—Citizen and Elijah and Phaedra and even Kerrigan, his old colleague from Judge Sullivan’s chambers, who had looked him up a few months ago when he was in town with his husband. Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feels sorry for him because they assume his singlehood is not his decision but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.