Page 601 - A Little Life: A Novel

correspondence. They studied the illustrations, matching the images to what
they saw before them. Facing each of their friends’ drawings was a note
each had written explaining when they had first seen the Alhambra, and

why they had chosen to draw what they had. They had that feeling, the
same one they had often had as young men, that everyone they knew had
seen so much of the world and that they hadn’t, and although they knew this
was no longer true, they still felt that same sense of awe at their friends’
lives, at how much they had done and experienced, at how well they knew
to appreciate it, at how talented they were at recording it. In the gardens of
the Generalife section, they walked into a room that had been cut into a

labyrinth hedgerow of cypresses, and he began to kiss Jude, more
insistently than he had allowed himself to do in a long time, even though
they could hear, faintly, one of the guard’s shoes tapping along the stone
walkway.
Back in the hotel room they continued, and he heard himself thinking that
in the movie version of this night, they would be having sex now, and he

was almost, almost about to say this out loud, when he remembered
himself, and stopped, pulling back from Jude as he did. But it was as if he
had spoken anyway, because for a while they were silent, staring at each
other, and then Jude said, quietly, “Willem, we can if you want to.”
“Do you want to?” he asked, finally.
“Sure,” Jude said, but Willem could tell, by the way he had looked down
and the slight catch in his voice, that he was lying.

For a second he thought he would pretend, that he would allow himself to
be convinced that Jude was telling him the truth. But he couldn’t. And so
“No,” he said, and rolled off of him. “I think this has been enough
excitement for one evening.” Next to him, he heard Jude exhale, and as he
fell asleep, heard him whisper, “I’m sorry, Willem,” and he tried to tell Jude
that he understood, but by this time he was more unconscious than not and

couldn’t speak the words.
But that was that period’s only sadness, and the source of their sadnesses
were different: For Jude, he knew, the sadness rose from a sense of failure,
a certainty—one Willem was never able to displace—that he wasn’t
fulfilling his obligations. For him, the sadness was for Jude himself.
Occasionally Willem allowed himself to wonder what Jude’s life would
have been like if sex had been something he had been left to discover, rather

than forced to learn—but it was not a helpful line of thought, and it made