Page 470 - A Little Life: A Novel

He tried to focus on what had improved about the experience since
Caleb. Although it was still painful, it was less painful than it had been with
anyone else, and surely that was a good thing. It was still uncomfortable,

although again, less so. And it was still shameful, although with Willem, he
was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was giving at least
a small bit of pleasure to the person he cared about most, and that
knowledge helped sustain him every time.
He told Willem that he had lost the ability to have erections because of
the car injury, but that wasn’t true. According to Andy (this was years ago),
there was no physical reason why he couldn’t have them. But at any rate, he

couldn’t, and hadn’t for years, not since he was in college, and even then,
they had been rare and uncontrollable. Willem asked if there was something
he could do—a shot, a pill—but he told him that he was allergic to one of
the ingredients in those shots and pills, and that it didn’t make a difference
to him.
Caleb hadn’t been so bothered by this inability of his, but Willem was.

“Isn’t there something we can do to help you?” he asked, again and again.
“Have you talked to Andy? Should we try something different?” until
finally he snapped at Willem to stop asking him, that he was making him
feel like a freak.
“I’m sorry, Jude; I didn’t mean to,” Willem said after a silence. “I just
want you to enjoy this.”
“I am,” he said. He hated lying so much to Willem, but what was the

alternative? The alternative meant losing him, meant being alone forever.
Sometimes, often, he cursed himself, and how limited he was, but at
other times, he was kinder: he recognized how much his mind had protected
his body, how it had shut down his sexual drive in order to shelter him, how
it had calcified every part of him that had caused him such pain. But
usually, he knew he was wrong. He knew his resentment of Willem was

wrong. He knew his impatience with Willem’s affection for foreplay—that
long, embarrassing period of throat-clearing that preceded every interaction,
the small physical gestures of intimacy that he knew were Willem’s way of
experimenting with the depths of his own ability for arousal—was wrong.
But sex in his experience was something to be gotten through as quickly as
possible, with an efficiency and brusqueness that bordered on the brutal,
and when he sensed Willem was trying to prolong their encounters he began

offering direction with a sort of decisiveness that he later realized Willem