Chapter 3 #10
They’re back at the house by noon, and soon people start arriving—Gillian and Laurence and James and Carey, and Julia’s colleagues and Harold’s, some of whom he hasn’t seen since he had classes with them in law school.
His old voice teacher comes, as does Dr. Li, his math professor, and Dr. Kashen, his master’s adviser, and Allison, his former boss at Batter, and a friend of all of theirs from Hood Hall, Lionel, who teaches physics at Wellesley.
People come and go all afternoon, going to and from classes, meetings, trials.
He had initially been reluctant to have such a gathering, with so many people—wouldn’t his acquisition of Harold and Julia as parents provoke, even encourage, questions about why he was parentless at all?
—but as the hours pass, and no one asks any questions, no one demands to know why he needs a new set anyway, he finds himself forgetting his fears.
He knows his telling other people about the adoption is a form of bragging, and that bragging has its own consequences, but he cannot help himself.
Just this once , he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior.
Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once .
There is no etiquette for such a party, and so their guests have invented their own: Malcolm’s parents have sent a magnum of champagne and a case of super Tuscan from a vineyard they partly own outside of Montalcino.
JB’s mother sent him with a burlap sack of heirloom narcissus bulbs for Harold and Julia, and a card for him; his aunts have sent an orchid.
The U.S. Attorney sends an enormous crate of fruit, with a card signed by Marshall and Citizen and Rhodes as well.
People bring wine and flowers. Allison, who had years ago revealed him to Harold as the creator of the bacteria cookies, brings four dozen decorated with his original designs, which makes him blush and Julia shout with delight.
The rest of the day is a binging on all things sweet: everything he does that day is perfect, everything he says comes out right.
People reach for him and he doesn’t move or shy away from them; they touch him and he lets them.
His face hurts from smiling. Decades of approbation, of affection are stuffed into this one afternoon, and he gorges on it, reeling from the strangeness of it all.
He overhears Andy arguing with Dr. Kashen about a massive new proposed landfill project in Gurgaon, watches Willem listen patiently to his old torts professor, eavesdrops on JB explaining to Dr. Li why the New York art scene is irretrievably fucked, spies Malcolm and Carey trying to extract the largest of the crab cakes without toppling the rest of the stack.
By the early evening, everyone has left, and it is just the six of them sprawled out in the living room: he and Harold and Julia and Malcolm and JB and Willem.
The house is once again messy. Julia mentions dinner, but everyone—even he—has eaten too much, and no one, not even JB, wants to think about it.
JB has given Harold and Julia a painting of him, saying, before he hands it over to them, “It’s not based on a photo, just from sketches.
” The painting, which JB has done in watercolors and ink on a sheet of stiff paper, is of his face and neck, and is in a different style than he associates with JB’s work: sparer and more gestural, in a somber, grayed palette.
In it, his right hand is hovering over the base of his throat, as if he’s about to grab it and throttle himself, and his mouth is slightly open, and his pupils are very large, like a cat’s in gloom.
It’s undeniably him—he even recognizes the gesture as his own, although he can’t, in the moment, remember what it’s meant to signal, or what emotion it accompanies.
The face is slightly larger than life-size, and all of them stare at it in silence.
“It’s a really good piece,” JB says at last, sounding pleased. “Let me know if you ever want to sell it, Harold,” and finally, everyone laughs.
“JB, it’s so, so beautiful—thank you so much,” says Julia, and Harold echoes her.
He is finding it difficult, as he always does when confronted with JB’s pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn’t want to be ungracious, and so he repeats their praise.
“Wait, I have something, too,” Willem says, heading for the bedroom, and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra’s hood, surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest, his left by his side.
“Fuck’s that dude?” asks JB.
“This dude,” Willem replies, “is Saint Jude, also known as Judas Thaddeus.” He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and Harold.
“I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest,” he tells them.
“They said it’s late nineteenth-century, but I don’t know—I think he’s probably just a village carving.
Still, I liked him. He’s handsome and stately, just like our Jude. ”
“I agree,” says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands. He strokes the figure’s pleated robe, his wreath of fire. “Why’s his head on fire?”
“It’s to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit,” he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his mind’s cellar. “He was one of the apostles.”
“How’d you know that?” Malcolm asks, and Willem, who’s sitting next to him, touches his arm. “Of course you know,” Willem says, quietly. “I always forget,” and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for remembering, but for forgetting.
“The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us —when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it: as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction.
And yet it also felt, at times, like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he could have, even should have changed it, he never did.
“Willem, thank you,” Julia says. “I love him.”
“Me too,” says Harold. “Guys, this is all really sweet of you.”
He, too, has brought a present for Harold and Julia, but as the day has passed, it’s come to seem ever-smaller and more foolish.
Years ago, Harold had mentioned that he and Julia had heard a series of Schubert’s early lieder performed in Vienna when they were on their honeymoon.
But Harold couldn’t remember which ones they had loved, and so he had made up his own list, and augmented it with a few other songs he liked, mostly Bach and Mozart, and then rented a small sound booth and recorded a disc of himself singing them: every few months or so, Harold asks him to sing for them, but he’s always too shy to do so.
Now, though, the gift feels misguided and tinny, as well as shamefully boastful, and he is embarrassed by his own presumption.
Yet he can’t bring himself to throw it away.
And so, when everyone is standing and stretching and saying their good nights, he slips away and wedges the disc, and the letters he’s written each of them, between two books—a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise —on a low shelf, where they might sit, undiscovered, for decades.
Normally, Willem stays with JB in the upstairs study, as he’s the only one who can tolerate JB’s snoring, and Malcolm stays with him downstairs. But that evening, as everyone heads off for bed, Malcolm volunteers that he’ll share with JB, so that he and Willem can catch up with each other.
“’Night, lovers,” JB calls down the staircase at them.
As they get ready for bed, Willem tells him more stories from the set: about the lead actress, who perspired so much that her entire face had to be dusted with powder every two takes; about the lead actor, who played the devil, and who was constantly trying to curry favor with the grips by buying them beers and asking them who wanted to play football, but who then had a tantrum when he couldn’t remember his lines; about the nine-year-old British actor playing the actress’s son, who had approached Willem at the craft services table to tell him that he really shouldn’t be eating crackers because they were empty calories, and wasn’t he afraid of getting fat?
Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.
But when the lights are turned off and they are both lying in the dark, he in the bed, Willem on the sofa (after an argument in which he tried to get Willem to take the bed himself), Willem says, gently, “The apartment’s really fucking clean.”
“I know,” he winces. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Willem says. “But Jude—was it really awful?”
He understands then that Andy did tell Willem at least some of what had happened, and so he decides to answer honestly. “It wasn’t great,” he allows, and then, because he doesn’t want Willem to feel guilty, “but it wasn’t horrible.”
They are both quiet. “I wish I could’ve been there,” Willem says.
“You were,” he assures him. “But Willem—I missed you.”
Very quietly, Willem says, “I missed you, too.”
“Thank you for coming,” he says.
“Of course I was going to come, Judy,” Willem says from across the room. “I would’ve no matter what.”
He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. “Do you think it went all right?” he asks.