Page 444 - A Little Life: A Novel

naked before Willem in the daytime, or even in light, or to do any of the
things that he knows from movies and eavesdropping on other people that
couples are supposed to do around each other: he cannot get dressed in front

of Willem, or shower with him, which he’d had to do with Brother Luke,
and which he had hated.
His own self-consciousness has not, however, proven contagious, and he
is fascinated by how often, and how matter-of-factly, Willem is naked. In
the morning, he pulls back Willem’s side of the blanket and studies
Willem’s sleeping form with a clinical rigor, noting how perfect it is, and
then remembers, with a strange queasy giddiness, that he is the one seeing

it, that it is being bestowed upon him.
Sometimes, the improbability of what has happened wallops him, and he
is stilled. His first relationship (can it be called a relationship?): Brother
Luke. His second: Caleb Porter. And his third: Willem Ragnarsson, his
dearest friend, the best person he knows, a person who could have virtually
anyone he wanted, man or woman, and yet for some bizarre set of reasons

—a warped curiosity? madness? pity? idiocy?—has settled on him. He has
a dream one night of Willem and Harold sitting together at a table, their
heads bent over a piece of paper, Harold adding up figures on a calculator,
and he knows, without being told, that Harold is paying Willem to be with
him. In the dream, he feels humiliation along with a kind of gratitude: that
Harold should be so generous, that Willem should play along. When he
wakes, he is about to say something to Willem when logic reasserts itself,

and he has to remind himself that Willem certainly doesn’t need the money,
that he has plenty of his own, that however perplexing and unknowable
Willem’s reasons are for being with him, for choosing him, that he has not
been coerced, that he has made the decision freely.
That night he reads in bed as he waits for Willem to come home, but falls
asleep anyway and wakes to Willem’s hand on the side of his face.

“You’re home,” he says, and smiles at him, and Willem smiles back.
They lie awake in the dark talking about Willem’s dinner with the
director, and the shoot, which begins in late January in Texas. The film,
Duets, is based on a novel he likes, and follows a closeted lesbian and a
closeted gay man, both music teachers at a small-town high school, through
a twenty-five-year marriage that spans the nineteen-sixties through the
nineteen-eighties. “I’m going to need your help,” Willem tells him. “I

really, really have to brush up on my piano playing. And I am going to be