Page 223 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 223

would  be  troubling  reminders  that  what  he  knew  of  Jude  was  only  what
                Jude  allowed  him  to  know:  he  called  Jude  daily  when  he  was  away
                shooting, usually at a prearranged time, and one day last year he had called

                and they’d had a normal conversation, Jude sounding no different than he
                always did, and the two of them laughing at one of Willem’s stories, when
                he  heard  in  the  background  the  clear  and  unmistakable  intercom
                announcement of the sort one only hears at hospitals: “Paging Dr. Nesarian,
                Dr. Nesarian to OR Three.”
                   “Jude?” he’d asked.
                   “Don’t worry, Willem,” he’d said. “I’m fine. I just have a slight infection;

                I think Andy’s gone a little crazy.”
                   “What kind of infection? Jesus, Jude!”
                   “A blood infection, but it’s nothing. Honestly, Willem, if it was serious, I
                would’ve told you.”
                   “No, you fucking wouldn’t have, Jude. A blood infection is serious.”
                   He was silent. “I would’ve, Willem.”

                   “Does Harold know?”
                   “No,” he said, sharply. “And you’re not to tell him.”
                   Exchanges like this left him stunned and bothered, and he spent the rest
                of  the  evening  trying  to  remember  the  previous  week’s  conversations,
                picking through them for clues that something might have been amiss and
                he might have simply, stupidly overlooked it. In more generous, wondering
                moments,  he  imagined  Jude  as  a  magician  whose  sole  trick  was

                concealment, but every year, he got better and better at it, so that now he
                had only to bring one wing of the silken cape he wore before his eyes and
                he would become instantly invisible, even to those who knew him best. But
                at other times, he bitterly resented this trick, the year-after-year exhaustion
                of keeping Jude’s secrets and yet never being given anything in return but
                the meanest smidges of information, of not being allowed the opportunity to

                even try to help him, to publicly worry about him. This isn’t fair, he would
                think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not
                friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he
                never intended to play. Everything Jude communicated to them indicated
                that  he  didn’t  want  to  be  helped.  And  yet  he  couldn’t  accept  that.  The
                question was how you ignored someone’s request to be left alone—even if
                it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can

                you help someone who won’t be helped while realizing that if you don’t try
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