Page 505 - A Little Life: A Novel

dawn, and then there was the Jude who possessed his friend for a few hours
each night, and that Jude, he sometimes feared, was the real Jude: the one
who haunted their apartment alone, the one whom he had watched draw the

razor so slowly down his arm, his eyes wide with agony, the one whom he
could never reach, no matter how many reassurances he made, no matter
how many threats he levied. It sometimes seemed as if it was that Jude who
truly directed their relationship, and when he was present, no one, not even
Willem, could dispel him. And still, he remained stubborn: he would banish
him, through the intensity and the force and the determination of his love.
He knew this was childish, but all stubborn acts are childish acts. Here,

stubbornness was his only weapon. Patience; stubbornness; love: he had to
believe these would be enough. He had to believe that they would be
stronger than any habit of Jude’s, no matter how long or diligently
practiced.
Sometimes he was given progress reports of sorts from Andy and Harold,
both of whom thanked him whenever they saw him, which he found

unnecessary but reassuring, because it meant that the changes he thought he
saw in Jude—a heightened sense of demonstrativeness; a certain
diminishment of physical self-consciousness—weren’t things he was
imagining after all. But he also felt keenly alone, alone with his new
suspicions about Jude and the depths of his difficulties, alone with the
knowledge that he was unable or unwilling to properly address those
difficulties. A few times he had been very close to contacting Andy and

asking him what to do, asking him whether he was making the right
decisions. But he hadn’t.
Instead, he allowed his native optimism to obscure his fears, to make
their relationship into something essentially joyous and sunny. Often he was
struck by the sensation—which he had experienced at Lispenard Street as
well—that they were playing house, that he was living some boyhood

fantasy of running away from the world and its rules with his best friend
and living in some unsuitable but perfectly commodious structure (a train
car; a tree house) that wasn’t meant to be a home but had become one
because of its occupants’ shared conviction to make it so. Mr. Irvine hadn’t
been entirely wrong, he would think on those days when life felt like an
extended slumber party, one they’d been having for almost three decades,
one that gave him the thrilling feeling that they had gotten away with

something large, something they were meant to have abandoned long ago: