Page 596 - A Little Life: A Novel

he had also grown more and more self-conscious about his body, and
Willem knew, from how withdrawn Jude would become at times, from how
carefully he shielded himself when he was taking off or putting on his legs,

how much he struggled with accepting how he now appeared. When he had
been weaker, he had let Willem help undress him, but now that he was
stronger, Willem saw him unclothed only in glimpses, only by accident. But
he had decided to view Jude’s self-consciousness as a certain kind of
healthiness, for it was at least proof of his physical strength, proof that he
was able to get in and out of the shower by himself, to climb in and out of
bed by himself—things he’d had to relearn how to do, things he once hadn’t

had the energy to do on his own.
Now they drifted through the lake, swimming or clinging to each other in
silence, and after Willem got out, Jude did as well, heaving himself onto the
deck with his arms, and they sat there for a while in the soft summer air,
both of them naked, both of them staring at the tapered ends of Jude’s legs.
It was the first time he had seen Jude naked in months, and he hadn’t known

what to say, and in the end had simply put his arm around him and pulled
him close, and that had (he thought) been the right thing to say after all.
He was still frightened, intermittently. In September, a few weeks before
he left for his first project in more than a year, Jude had woken again with a
fever, and this time, he didn’t ask Willem not to call Andy, and Willem
didn’t ask him for permission to do so. They had gone directly to Andy’s
office, and Andy had ordered X-rays, blood work, everything, and they had

waited there, each of them lying on the bed in a different examining room,
until the radiologist had called and said that there was no sign of any bone
infection, and the lab had called and said that there was nothing wrong.
“Rhinopharyngitis,” Andy had said to them, smiling. “The common
cold.” But he had rested his hand on the back of Jude’s head, and they had
all been relieved. How fast, how distressingly fast, had their instinct for fear

been reawakened, the fear itself a virus that lay dormant but that they would
never be able to permanently dispel. Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to
relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to
relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a
shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.
And so off he went to Spain, to Galicia, to film. For as long as he had
known him, Jude had wanted to someday walk the Camino de Santiago, the

medieval pilgrimage route that ended in Galicia. “We’ll start at the Aspe