Page 549 - A Little Life: A Novel

for him that Jude was better: now he knew it to be true. The only difficulty
was that he did still desire Jude, and at times he had to remind himself not
to go any further, that he was getting close to the boundaries of what Jude

could tolerate, and he would make himself stop. In those moments he would
be angry, not at Jude or even at himself—he had never felt guilty about
wanting to have sex, and he didn’t feel guilty about wanting to have it now
—but at life, at how it had conspired to make Jude afraid of something that
he had always associated with nothing but pleasure.
He was careful about who he chose to sleep with: he picked people
(women, really: they had almost all been women) who he either sensed or

knew, from previous experience, were truly only interested in him for sex
and were going to be discreet. Often, they were confused, and he didn’t
blame them. “Aren’t you in a relationship with a man?” they would ask, and
he would tell them that he was, but that they had an open relationship. “So
are you not really gay?” they would ask, and he would say, “No, not
fundamentally.” The younger women were more accepting of this: they’d

had boyfriends (or had boyfriends) who had slept with other men as well;
they had slept with other women. “Oh,” they’d say, and that would usually
be it—if they had other concerns, other questions, they didn’t ask. These
younger women—actresses, makeup assistants, costume assistants—also
didn’t want a relationship with him; often, they didn’t want a relationship at
all. Sometimes the women asked him questions about Jude—how they had
met, what he was like—and he answered them, and felt wistful, and missed

him.
But he was vigilant about not letting this life intrude on his life at home.
Once there had been a blind item in a gossip column—forwarded to him by
Kit—that was clearly about him, and after debating whether to say
something to Jude or not, he had in the end decided not to; Jude would
never see the story, and there was no reason to make what Jude knew was

happening in theory something he was forced to confront in reality.
JB, however, had seen the item (he supposed other people he knew had
seen it as well, but JB was the only one to actually mention it to him), and
had asked him if it was true. “I didn’t know you guys had an open
relationship,” he said, more curious than accusatory.
“Oh yeah,” he said, casually. “Right from the start.”
It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have

to be two distinct realms, but he was old enough now to know that within