Chapter 3
I T WAS JB who decided that Willem and Jude should host a New Year’s Eve party at their apartment.
This was resolved at Christmas, which was a three-part affair: Christmas Eve was held at JB’s mother’s place in Fort Greene, and Christmas dinner itself (a formal, organized event, at which suits and ties were required) was at Malcolm’s house, and succeeded a casual lunch at JB’s aunts’ house.
They had always followed this ritual—four years ago, they had added Thanksgiving at Jude’s friends Harold and Julia’s house in Cambridge to the lineup—but New Year’s Eve had never been assigned.
The previous year, the first post-school-life New Year’s that they had all been in the same city at the same time, they had all ended up separate and miserable—JB lodged at some lame party at Ezra’s, Malcolm stuck at his parents’ friends’ dinner uptown, Willem trapped by Findlay into a holiday shift at Ortolan, Jude mired in bed with the flu at Lispenard Street—and had resolved to actually make plans for the next year.
But they hadn’t, and hadn’t, and then it was December and they still hadn’t done anything.
So they didn’t mind JB deciding for them, not in this case.
They figured they could accommodate twenty-five people comfortably, or forty uncomfortably.
“So make it forty,” said JB, promptly, as they’d known he would, but later, back at their apartment, they wrote up a list of just twenty, and only their and Malcolm’s friends, knowing that JB would invite more people than were allotted him, extending invitations to friends and friends of friends and not-even friends and colleagues and bartenders and shop clerks, until the place grew so dense with bodies that they could open all the windows to the night air and still not dispel the fog of heat and smoke that would inevitably accumulate.
“Don’t make this complicated,” was the other thing JB had said, but Willem and Malcolm knew that was a caution meant solely for Jude, who had a tendency to make things more elaborate than was necessary, to spend nights making batches of gougères when everyone would have been content with pizza, to actually clean the place beforehand, as if anyone would care if the floors were crunchy with grit and the sink was scummed with dried soap stains and flecks of previous days’ breakfasts.
The night before the party was unseasonably warm, warm enough that Willem walked the two miles from Ortolan to the apartment, which was so thick with its rich butter scents of cheese and dough and fennel that it made him feel he had never left work at all.
He stood in the kitchen for a while, pinching the little tumoric blobs of pastry off their cooling racks to keep them from sticking, looking at the stack of plastic containers with their herbed shortbreads and cornmeal gingersnaps and feeling slightly sad—the same sadness he felt when he noticed that Jude had cleaned after all—because he knew they would be devoured mindlessly, swallowed whole with beer, and that they would begin the New Year finding crumbs of those beautiful cookies everywhere, trampled and stamped into the tiles.
In the bedroom, Jude was already asleep, and the window was cracked open, and the heavy air made Willem dream of spring, and trees afuzz with yellow flowers, and a flock of blackbirds, their wings lacquered as if with oil, gliding soundlessly across a sea-colored sky.
When he woke, though, the weather had turned again, and it took him a moment to realize that he had been shivering, and that the sounds in his dream had been of wind, and that he was being shaken awake, and that his name was being repeated, not by birds but by a human voice: “Willem, Willem.”
He turned over and propped himself up on his elbows, but was able to register Jude only in segments: his face first, and then the fact that he was holding his left arm before him with his right hand, and that he had cocooned it with something—his towel, he realized—which was so white in the gloom that it seemed a source of light itself, and he stared at it, transfixed.
“Willem, I’m sorry,” said Jude, and his voice was so calm that for a few seconds, he thought it was a dream, and stopped listening, and Jude had to repeat himself. “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry. I need you to take me to Andy’s.”
Finally he woke. “What kind of accident?”
“I cut myself. It was an accident.” He paused. “Will you take me?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said, but he was still confused, still asleep, and it was without understanding that he fumblingly dressed, and joined Jude in the hallway, where he was waiting, and then walked with him up to Canal, where he turned for the subway before Jude pulled him back: “I think we need a cab.”
In the taxi—Jude giving the driver the address in that same crushed, muted voice—he at last gave in to consciousness, and saw that Jude was still holding the towel. “Why did you bring your towel?” he asked.
“I told you—I cut myself.”
“But—is it bad?”
Jude shrugged, and Willem noticed for the first time that his lips had gone a strange color, a not-color, although maybe that was the streetlights, which slapped and slid across his face, bruising it yellow and ocher and a sickly larval white as the cab pushed north.
Jude leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, and it was then that Willem felt the beginnings of nausea, of fear, although he was unable to articulate why, only that he was in a cab heading uptown and something had happened, and he didn’t know what but that it was something bad, that he wasn’t comprehending something important and vital, and that the damp warmth of a few hours ago had vanished and the world had reverted to its icy harshness, its raw end-of-year cruelty.
Andy’s office was on Seventy-eighth and Park, near Malcolm’s parents’ house, and it was only once they were inside, in the true light, that Willem saw that the dark pattern on Jude’s shirt was blood, and that the towel had become sticky with it, almost varnished, its tiny loops of cotton matted down like wet fur.
“I’m sorry,” Jude said to Andy, who had opened the door to let them in, and when Andy unwrapped the towel, all Willem saw was what looked like a choking of blood, as if Jude’s arm had grown a mouth and was vomiting blood from it, and with such avidity that it was forming little frothy bubbles that popped and spat as if in excitement.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Jude,” said Andy, and steered him back to the examining room, and Willem sat down to wait.
Oh god, he thought, oh god. But it was as if his mind was a bit of machinery caught uselessly in a groove, and he couldn’t think beyond those two words.
It was too bright in the waiting room, and he tried to relax, but he couldn’t for the phrase beating its rhythm like a heartbeat, thudding through his body like a second pulse: Oh god. Oh god. Oh god .
He waited a long hour before Andy called his name.
Andy was eight years older than he, and they had known him since their sophomore year, when Jude had had an episode so sustained that the three of them had finally decided to take him to the hospital connected with the university, where Andy had been the resident on call.
He had been the only doctor Jude agreed to see again, and now, even though Andy was an orthopedic surgeon, he still treated Jude for anything that went wrong, from his back to his legs to flu and colds.
They all liked Andy, and trusted him, too.
“You can take him home,” Andy said. He was angry.
With a snap, he peeled off his gloves, which were crusty with blood, and pushed back his stool.
On the floor was a long, messy paint-swipe streak of red, as if someone had tried to clean up something sloshed and had given up in exasperation.
The walls had red on them as well, and Andy’s sweater was stiff with it.
Jude sat on the table, looking slumped and miserable and holding a glass bottle of orange juice.
His hair was glued together in clumps, and his shirt appeared hard and shellacked, as if it was made not from cloth but from metal.
“Jude, go to the waiting room,” Andy instructed, and Jude did, meekly.
Once he was gone, Andy shut the door and looked at Willem. “Has he seemed suicidal to you?”
“What? No.” He felt himself grow very still. “Is that what he was trying to do?”
Andy sighed. “He says he wasn’t. But—I don’t know.
No. I don’t know; I can’t tell.” He went over to the sink and began to scrub violently at his hands.
“On the other hand, if he had gone to the ER—which you guys really should’ve fucking done, you know—they most likely would’ve hospitalized him.
Which is why he probably didn’t.” Now he was speaking aloud to himself.
He pumped a small lake of soap onto his hands and washed them again. “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”
For a while, he couldn’t answer. “No,” he said.
Andy turned back around and stared at Willem, wiping each finger dry slowly. “He hasn’t seemed depressed?” he asked. “Is he eating regularly, sleeping? Does he seem listless, out of sorts?”
“He’s seemed fine,” Willem said, although the truth was that he didn’t know. Had Jude been eating? Had he been sleeping? Should he have noticed? Should he have been paying more attention? “I mean, he’s seemed the same as he always is.”
“Well,” said Andy. He looked deflated for a moment, and the two of them stood quietly, facing but not looking at each other.
“I’m going to take his word for it this time,” he said.
“I just saw him a week ago, and I agree, nothing seemed unusual. But if he starts behaving strangely at all—I mean it, Willem—you call me right away.”