Page 554 - A Little Life: A Novel

office.”
He was quiet, and so was Jude, and then they both started laughing.
“What’re you reading?” he asked when he could finally speak again.

“On Narcissism,” Jude admitted, and they both started laughing again, so
hard that Willem had to sit down.
“Jude—” he began at last, and Jude interrupted him. “I know, Willem,”
he said, “I know. I’ll go back. It was stupid. I just couldn’t bring myself to
go in these past few times; I’m not sure why.”
When he hung up, he was still smiling, and when he heard Idriss’s voice
in his head—“And Willem, what do you think about the fact that Jude isn’t

going when he said he would?”—he waved his hand before his face, as if
fanning the words away. Jude’s lying; his own self-deceptions—both, he
realized, were forms of self-protection, practiced since childhood, habits
that had helped them make the world into something more digestible than it
sometimes was. But now Jude was trying to lie less, and he was trying to
accept that there were certain things that would never conform to his idea of

how life should be, no matter how intensely he hoped or pretended they
might. And so really, he knew that therapy would be of limited use to Jude.
He knew Jude would keep cutting himself. He knew he would never be able
to cure him. The person he loved was sick, and would always be sick, and
his responsibility was not to make him better but to make him less sick. He
was never to make Idriss understand this shift in perspective; sometimes, he
could hardly understand it himself.

That night he’d had a woman over, the deputy production designer, and
as they lay there, he answered all the same questions: he explained how he
had met Jude; he explained who he was, or at least the version of who he
was that he had created for answers such as these.
“This is a lovely space,” said Isabel, and he glanced at her, a little
suspiciously; JB, upon seeing the flat, had said it looked like it had been

raped by the Grand Bazaar, and Isabel, he had heard the director of
photography proclaim, had excellent taste. “Really,” she said, seeing his
face. “It’s pretty.”
“Thanks,” he said. He owned the flat—he and Jude. They had bought it
only two months ago, when it had become evident that both of them would
be doing more work in London. He had been in charge of finding
something, and because it had been his responsibility, he had deliberately

chosen quiet, deeply dull Marylebone—not for its sober prettiness or