Page 467 - A Little Life: A Novel

For a while he waits to see if Willem will say anything else. He wonders
if he will have to have sex; he is still mostly unable to determine when
Willem wants to and when he doesn’t—when an embrace will become

something more invasive and unwanted—but he is always prepared for it to
happen. It is—and he hates admitting this, hates thinking it, would never
say it aloud—one of the very few things he anticipates about Willem’s
departures: for those weeks or months that he is away, there is no sex, and
he can finally relax.
They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has
to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he

is working toward its completion), and Willem had waited for him for
almost ten. During those months, he had been intensely aware that there
was a clock somewhere counting itself down, and that although he didn’t
know how much time he had left, he did know that as patient as Willem
was, he wouldn’t be patient forever. Months before, when he had overheard
Willem lie to JB about how amazing their sex life was, he had vowed to

himself that he would tell Willem he was ready that night. But he had been
too frightened, and had allowed himself to let the moment pass. A little
more than a month after that, when they were on holiday in Southeast Asia,
he once again promised himself he’d try, and once again, he had done
nothing.
And then it was January, and Willem had left for Texas to film Duets, and
he had spent the weeks alone readying himself, and the night after Willem

came home—he was still astonished that Willem had come back to him at
all; astonished and ecstatic, so happy he had wanted to lean his head out the
window and scream for no other reason but the improbability of it all—he
had told Willem that he was ready.
Willem had looked at him. “Are you sure?” he’d asked him.
He wasn’t, of course. But he knew that if he wanted to be with Willem,

he would have to do it eventually. “Yes,” he said.
“Do you want to, really?” Willem asked next, still looking at him.
What was this, he wondered: Was this a challenge? Or was this a real
question? It was better to be safe, he thought. So “Yes,” he said. “Of course
I do,” and he knew by Willem’s smile that he’d chosen the correct answer.
But first he’d had to tell Willem about his diseases. “When you have sex
in the future, you’d better make sure you always disclose beforehand,” one

of the doctors in Philadelphia had told him, years ago. “You don’t want to