Page 502 - A Little Life: A Novel

whether he wanted this representation or not was almost incidental. But he
still couldn’t do it.
Jude had told him that he and Caleb had told no one in their lives about

the other, and although Jude’s secretiveness had been motivated by shame
(and Caleb’s, Willem could only hope, by at least some small glint of guilt),
he too felt that his relationship with Jude existed to no one but themselves:
it seemed something sacred, and fought-for, and unique to them. Of course,
this was ridiculous, but it was the way he felt—to be an actor in his position
was to be, in many ways, a possession, to be fought over and argued about
and criticized by anyone who wanted to say something, anything, about his

abilities or appearance or performance. But his relationship was different: in
it, he played a role for one other person, and that person was his only
audience, and no one else ever saw it, no matter how much they thought
they might.
His relationship also felt sacred because he had just recently—in the last
six months or so—felt he had gotten the rhythm of it. The person he thought

he knew had turned out to be, in some ways, not the person before him, and
it had taken him time to figure out how many facets he had yet to see: it was
as if the shape he had all along thought was a pentagram was in reality a
dodecahedron, many sided and many fractaled and much more complicated
to measure. Despite this, he had never considered leaving: he stayed,
unquestioningly, out of love, out of loyalty, out of curiosity. But it hadn’t
been easy. In truth, it had been at times aggressively difficult, and in some

ways remained so. When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to
repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair
them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not
only neglectful but immoral.
The primary issue was sex: their sexual life, and Jude’s attitude about it.
Toward the end of the ten-month period in which he and Jude had been

together and he had been waiting for him to be ready (the longest sustained
period of celibacy he had endured since he was fifteen, and which he had
accomplished as partly a challenge to himself, the way other people stopped
eating bread or pasta because their boyfriends or girlfriends had stopped
eating them as well), he had begun to seriously worry about where this was
all going, and about whether sex was something Jude was simply not
capable of. Somehow he knew, and had always known, that Jude had been

abused, that something awful (maybe several things awful) had happened to