Page 606 - A Little Life: A Novel

wondered what he was thinking: Was he upset? Wistful? Sorrowful? But it
had seemed unkind to ask Jude to say aloud what he might not have been
able to articulate to himself, and so he hadn’t.

It was the middle of June by the time he returned to New York, and in
bed Jude had looked at him, closely. “You have a ballet dancer’s body
now,” he said, and the next day, he’d examined himself in the mirror and
realized that Jude was correct. Later that week, they had dinner on the roof,
which they and Richard and India had finally renovated, and which Richard
and Jude had planted with grasses and fruit trees, and he had shown them
some of what he’d learned, feeling his self-consciousness change to

giddiness as he jetéed across the decked surface, his friends applauding
behind him, the sun bleeding into nighttime above them.
“Another hidden talent,” Richard had said afterward, and had smiled at
him.
“I know,” Jude had said, smiling at him, too. “Willem is full of surprises,
even all these years later.”

But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were
young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were
currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details
of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and
then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true
friendship. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Willem,” JB would
occasionally accuse him, and, “Are you keeping secrets from me? Don’t

you trust me? I thought we were close.”
“We are, JB,” he’d said. “And I’m not keeping anything from you.” And
he hadn’t been: there was nothing to keep. Of all of them, only Jude had
secrets, real secrets, and while Willem had in the past been frustrated by
what had seemed his unwillingness to reveal them, he had never felt that
they weren’t close because of that; it had never impaired his ability to love

him. It had been a difficult lesson for him to accept, this idea that he would
never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain
unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways.
And yet Jude was still being discovered by him, even thirty-four years
after they had met, and he was still fascinated by what he saw. That July, for
the first time, he invited him to Rosen Pritchard’s annual summer barbeque.
“You don’t have to come, Willem,” Jude had added immediately after

asking him. “It’s going to be really, really boring.”