Chapter 1
T HEIR NEXT-DOOR SUITEMATES their second year in Hood had been a trio of lesbians, all seniors, who had been in a band called Backfat and had for some reason taken a liking to JB (and, eventually, Jude, and then Willem, and finally, reluctantly, Malcolm).
Now, fifteen years after the four of them had graduated, two of the lesbians had coupled up and were living in Brooklyn.
Of the four of them, only JB talked to them regularly: Marta was a nonprofit labor lawyer, and Francesca was a set designer.
“Exciting news!” JB told them one Friday in October over dinner.
“The Bitches of Bushwick called—Edie is in town!” Edie was the third in the lesbians’ trio, a beefy, emotional Korean American who shuttled back and forth between San Francisco and New York, and seemed always to be preparing for one improbable job or another: the last time they had seen her, she was about to leave for Grasse to begin training to become a professional nose, and just eight months before that, she had finished a cooking course in Afghani cuisine.
“And why is this exciting news?” asked Malcolm, who had never quite forgiven the three of them for their inexplicable dislike of him.
“Well,” said JB, and paused, grinning. “She’s transitioning!”
“To a man ?” asked Malcolm. “Give me a break, JB. She’s never exhibited any gender dysphoric ideations for as long as we’ve known her!
” A former coworker of Malcolm’s had transitioned the year before and Malcolm had become a self-anointed expert on the subject, lecturing them about their intolerance and ignorance until JB had finally shouted at him, “Jesus, Malcolm, I’m far more trans than Dominic’ll ever be! ”
“Well, anyway, she is,” JB continued, “and the Bitches are throwing her a party at their house, and we’re all invited.”
They groaned. “JB, I only have five weeks before I leave for London, and I have so much shit to get done,” Willem protested. “I can’t spend a night listening to Edie Kim complaining out in Bushwick.”
“You can’t not go!” shrieked JB. “They specifically asked for you! Francesca’s inviting some girl who knows you from something or other and wants to see you again.
If you don’t go, they’re all going to think you think you’re too good for them now.
And there’s going to be a ton of other people we haven’t seen in forever—”
“Yeah, and maybe there’s a reason we haven’t seen them,” Jude said.
“—and besides, Willem, the pussy will be waiting for you whether you spend an hour in Brooklyn or not. And it’s not like it’s the end of the world. It’s Bushwick . Judy’ll drive us.” Jude had bought a car the year before, and although it wasn’t particularly fancy, JB loved to ride around in it.
“What? I’m not going,” Jude said.
“Why not?”
“I’m in a wheelchair, JB, remember? And as I recall, Marta and Francesca’s place doesn’t have an elevator.”
“Wrong place,” JB replied triumphantly. “See how long it’s been? They moved. Their new place definitely has one. A freight elevator, actually.” He leaned back, drumming his fist on the table as the rest of them sat in a resigned silence. “And off we go!”
So the following Saturday they met at Jude’s loft on Greene Street and he drove them to Bushwick, where he circled Marta and Francesca’s block, looking for a parking space.
“There was a spot right back there,” JB said after ten minutes.
“It was a loading zone,” Jude told him.
“If you just put that handicapped sign up, we can park wherever we want,” JB said.
“I don’t like using it—you know that.”
“If you’re not going to use it, then what’s the point of having a car?”
“Jude, I think that’s a space,” said Willem, ignoring JB.
“Seven blocks from the apartment,” muttered JB.
“Shut up, JB,” said Malcolm.
Once inside the party, they were each tugged by a different person to a separate corner of the room.
Willem watched as Jude was pulled firmly away by Marta: Help me , Jude mouthed to him, and he smiled and gave him a little wave.
Courage , he mouthed back, and Jude rolled his eyes.
He knew how much Jude hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t wanted to explain again and again why he was in a wheelchair, and yet Willem had begged him: “Don’t make me go alone. ”
“You won’t be alone. You’ll be with JB and Malcolm.”
“You know what I mean. Forty-five minutes and we’re out of there. JB and Malcolm can find their own way back to the city if they want to stay longer.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Thirty.”
“Fine.”
Willem, meanwhile, had been ensnared by Edie Kim, who looked basically the same as she had when they were in college: a little rounder, maybe, but that was it. He hugged her. “Edie,” he said, “congratulations.”
“Thanks, Willem,” said Edie. She smiled at him. “You look great. Really, really great.” JB had always had a theory that Edie had a crush on him, but he’d never believed it. “I really loved The Lacuna Detectives . You were really great in it.”
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” He had hated The Lacuna Detectives .
He had despised the production of it so much—the story, which was fantastic, had concerned a pair of metaphysical detectives who entered the unconscious minds of amnesiacs, but the director had been so tyrannical that Willem’s costar had quit two weeks into the shoot and had to be recast, and once a day, someone had run off the set crying—that he had never actually seen the film itself.
“So,” he said, trying to redirect the conversation, “when—”
“Why’s Jude in a wheelchair?” Edie asked.
He sighed. When Jude had begun using the wheelchair regularly two months ago, the first time he’d had to in four years, since he was thirty-one, he had prepped them all on how to respond to this question.
“It’s not permanent,” he said. “He just has an infection in his leg and it makes it painful for him to walk long distances.”
“God, poor guy,” said Edie. “Marta says he left the U.S. Attorney’s and has a huge job at some corporate firm.” JB had also always suspected Edie had a crush on Jude, which Willem thought was fairly plausible.
“Yeah, for a few years now,” he said, eager to move the subject away from Jude, for whom he never liked to answer; he would have loved to talk about Jude, and he knew what he could and couldn’t say about him, or on his behalf, but he didn’t like the sly, confiding tone people took when asking about him, as if he might be cajoled or tricked into revealing what Jude himself wouldn’t.
(As if he ever would.) “Anyway, Edie, this is really exciting for you.” He stopped.
“I’m sorry—I should’ve asked—do you still want to be called Edie? ”
Edie frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well—” He paused. “I didn’t know how far into the process you were, and—”
“What process?”
“Um, the transition process?” He should’ve stopped when he saw Edie’s befuddlement, but he didn’t. “JB said you were transitioning?”
“Yeah, to Hong Kong,” said Edie, still frowning. “I’m going to be a freelance vegan consultant for medium-size hospitality businesses. Wait a minute—you thought I was transitioning genders?”
“Oh god,” he said, and two thoughts, separate but equally resonant, filled his mind: I am going to kill JB . And: I can’t wait to tell Jude about this conversation . “Edie, I’m so, so sorry.”
He remembered from college that Edie was tricky: little, little-kid things upset her (he once saw her sobbing because the top scoop of her ice cream cone had tumbled onto her new shoes), but big things (the death of her sister; her screaming, snowball-throwing breakup with her girlfriend, which had taken place in the Quad, and which everyone at Hood had leaned out of their windows to witness) seemed to leave her unfazed.
He wasn’t sure into which category his gaffe fell, and Edie herself appeared equally uncertain, her small mouth convoluting itself into shapes in confusion.
Finally, though, she started laughing, and called across the room at someone—“Hannah! Hannah! Come here! You’ve got to hear this!
”—and he exhaled, apologized to and congratulated her again, and made his escape.
He started across the room toward Jude. After years—decades, almost—of these parties, the two of them had worked out their own sign language, a pantomime whose every gesture meant the same thing— save me—albeit with varying levels of intensity.
Usually, they were able to simply catch each other’s eye across the room and telegraph their desperation, but at parties like this, where the loft was lit only by candles and the guests seemed to have multiplied themselves in the space of his short conversation with Edie, more expressive body language was often necessary.
Grabbing the back of one’s neck meant the other person should call him on his phone right away; fiddling with one’s watch-band meant “Come over here and replace me in this conversation, or at least join in”; and yanking down on the left earlobe meant “Get me out of this right now .” He had seen, from the edge of his eye, that Jude had been pulling steadily on his earlobe for the past ten minutes, and he could now see that Marta had been joined by a grim-looking woman he vaguely remembered meeting (and disliking) at a previous party.
The two of them were looming interrogatively over Jude in a way that made them appear proprietary and, in the candlelight, fierce, as if Jude were a child who had just been caught breaking a licorice-edged corner off their gingerbread house, and they were deciding whether to broil him with prunes or bake him with turnips.