Page 498 - A Little Life: A Novel

what he has done so he can keep having sex, because if he stops having sex,
he knows Willem will leave him anyway.
“Not this time, Jude,” says Andy, and although he isn’t yelling any

longer, his voice is grim and determined. “I’m not covering for you this
time. You have one week.”
“It’s not his business, though,” he says, desperately. “It’s my own.”
“That’s the thing, though, Jude,” Andy says. “It is his business. That’s
what being in a goddamned relationship is—don’t you understand that yet?
Don’t you get that you just can’t do what you want? Don’t you get that
when you hurt yourself, you’re hurting him as well?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, gripping the side of the examining table
with his right hand to try to remain upright. “No. I do this to myself so I
won’t hurt him. I’m doing it to spare him.”
“No,” Andy says. “If you ruin this, Jude—if you keep lying to someone
who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you
exactly as you are—then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be

your fault. And it’ll be your fault not because of who you are or what’s been
done to you or the diseases you have or what you think you look like, but
because of how you behave, because you won’t trust Willem enough to talk
to him honestly, to extend to him the same sort of generosity and faith that
he has always, always extended to you. I know you think you’re sparing
him, but you’re not. You’re selfish. You’re selfish and you’re stubborn and
you’re proud and you’re going to ruin the best thing that has happened to

you. Don’t you understand that?”
He is speechless for the second time that evening, and it is only when he
begins, finally, to fall, so tired is he, that Andy reaches out and grabs him
around his waist and the conversation ends.
He spends the next three nights in the hospital, at Andy’s insistence.
During the day, he goes to work, and then he comes back in the evening and

Andy readmits him. There are two plastic bags dangling above him, one for
each arm. One, he knows, has only glucose in it. The second has something
else, something that makes the pain furry and gentle and that makes sleep
something inky and still, like the dark blue skies in a Japanese woodblock
print of winter, all snow and a silent traveler wearing a woven-straw hat
beneath.
It is Friday. He returns home. Willem will be arriving at around ten that

night, and although Mrs. Zhou has already cleaned, he wants to make