Page 504 - A Little Life: A Novel

trying to justify his behavior, and reproving himself for it as well. But when
he was being very honest, he knew there was a problem.
Though he couldn’t quite articulate what the problem was: after all, Jude

always seemed to want to have sex whenever he did. (Though wasn’t that
suspicious in itself?) But he had never met anyone who was so opposed to
foreplay, who didn’t want to even discuss sex, who never said the very
word. “This is embarrassing, Willem,” Jude would say whenever he tried.
“Let’s just do it.” He felt, often, as if their sessions together were being
timed, and that his job was to perform as quickly and thoroughly as he
could and then never talk about it. He was less concerned with Jude’s lack

of erections than he was with the curious sensation he sometimes
experienced—too indefinable and contradictory to even name it with
language—that with every encounter they had, he was drawing closer to
Jude, even as Jude pulled further from him. Jude said all the right things; he
made all the right sounds; he was affectionate and willing: but still, Willem
knew something, something was wrong. He found it bewildering; people

had always enjoyed having sex with him—so what was happening here?
Perversely, it made him want to have it more, if only so he could find some
answers, even if he also dreaded them.
And in the same way he knew there was a problem with their sex life, he
also knew—knew without knowing, without ever being told—that Jude’s
cutting was related to the sex. This realization would always make him
shiver, as would his old, careworn way of excusing himself—Willem

Ragnarsson, what do you think you’re doing? You’re too dumb to figure this
out—from further exploration, from plunging an arm into the snake- and
centipede-squirming muck of Jude’s past to find that many-paged book,
sheathed in yellowed plastic, that would explain someone he had thought he
had fundamentally understood. And then he would think how none of them
—not he, not Malcolm, not JB or Richard or even Harold—had been brave

enough to try. They had found other reasons to keep themselves from
having to dirty their hands. Andy was the only person who could say
otherwise.
And yet it was easy for him to pretend, to ignore what he knew, because
most of the time, pretending was easy: because they were friends, because
they liked being around each other, because he loved Jude, because they
had a life together, because he was attracted to him, because he desired him.

But there was the Jude he knew in the daylight, and even in the dusk and