Chapter 2 #11
But you will also know—as he knows—that part of your constant leaving is reactive.
After his relationship with Jude was made public, while he and Kit and Emil were waiting to see what would happen next, he had experienced that same insecurity that had visited him as a younger man: What if he never worked again?
What if this was it? And although things had, he could now see, continued with almost no discernible hitch at all, it had taken him a year to be reassured that his circumstances hadn’t changed, that he was still as he had been, desirable to some directors and not to others (“Bullshit,” Kit had said, and he was grateful for him; “anyone would want to work with you”), and at any rate, the same actor, no better or worse, that he had been before.
But if he was allowed to be the same actor, he was not allowed to be the same person, and in the months after he was declared gay—and never refuted it; he didn’t have a publicist to issue these sorts of denials and avowals—he found himself in possession of more identities than he’d had in a very long time.
For much of his adult life, he had been placed in circumstances that required the shedding of selves: no longer was he a brother; no longer was he a son.
But with a single revelation, he had now become a gay man; a gay actor; a high-profile gay actor; a high-profile, nonparticipating gay actor; and, finally, a high-profile traitorous gay actor.
A year or so ago he had gone to dinner with a director named Max whom he’d known for many years, and over dinner Max had tried to get him to give a speech at a gala dinner benefiting a gay-rights organization at which he would announce himself as gay.
Willem had always supported this organization, and he told Max that although he would be pleased to present an award or sponsor a table—as he had every year for the past decade—he wouldn’t come out, because he didn’t believe there was anything to come out of: he wasn’t gay.
“Willem,” Max said, “you’re in a relationship, a serious relationship, with a man. That is the very definition of gay.”
“I’m not in a relationship with a man,” he said, hearing how absurd the words were, “I’m in a relationship with Jude.”
“Oh my god,” Max muttered.
He’d sighed. Max was sixteen years older than he; he had come of age in a time when identity politics were your very identity, and he understood Max’s—and the other people who pecked at and pleaded with him to come out, and then accused him of self-loathing, and cowardice, and hypocrisy, and denial, when he didn’t—arguments; he understood that he had come to represent something he had never asked to represent; he understood that 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 him, but to his shame, he was unable to find the words to discuss it with him.
He told himself that even if he could find the words, Jude wouldn’t talk about it until he was ready, but the truth, Willem knew, was that he was too much of a coward, and that cowardice was really the only reason for his inaction.
But then he had come home from Texas, and they’d had sex after all, and he had been relieved, and relieved too that he had enjoyed it as much as he had, that there had been nothing strained or unnatural about it, and when it turned out that Jude was much more sexually dextrous than he had assumed he would be, he allowed himself to be relieved a third time.
He couldn’t bring himself, however, to determine why Jude was so experienced: Had Richard been right, and had Jude been leading some sort of double life all this time?
It seemed too tidy an explanation. And yet the alternative—that this was knowledge Jude had accumulated before they had met, which meant these would have been lessons learned in childhood—was overwhelming to him.
And so, to his great guilt, he said nothing.
He chose to believe the theory that made his life less complicated.
One night, though, he’d had a dream that he and Jude had just had sex (which they had) and that Jude was next to him and crying, trying to stay silent and failing, and he knew, even in the dream, why he was crying: because he hated what he was doing; he hated what Willem was making him do.
The next night he had asked Jude, outright: Do you like this?
And he had waited, not knowing what the answer would be, until Jude had said yes, and then he had been relieved yet again: that the fiction could continue, that their equilibrium would remain unchanged, that he wouldn’t have to have a conversation that he didn’t know how to begin, much less lead.
He had an image of a little boat, a dinghy, rocking wildly on the waves, but then righting itself again and sailing placidly on, even though the waters beneath it were black and filled with monsters and floes of seaweed that threatened with every current to pull the poor small boat beneath the ocean’s surface, where it would glug out of sight and be lost.
But every so often, too sporadically and randomly to track, there would be moments when he would see Jude’s face as he pushed into him, or, after, would feel his silence, so black and total that it was almost gaseous, and he would know that Jude had lied to him: that he had asked him a question to which only one answer was acceptable, and Jude had given him that answer, but that he hadn’t meant it.
And then he would argue with himself, trying to justify his behavior, and reproving himself for it as well.
But when he was being very honest, he knew there was a problem.
Though he couldn’t quite articulate what the problem was: after all, Jude always seemed to want to have sex whenever he did.
(Though wasn’t that suspicious in itself?) But he had never met anyone who was so opposed to foreplay, who didn’t want to even discuss sex, who never said the very word.
“This is embarrassing, Willem,” Jude would say whenever he tried.
“Let’s just do it.” He felt, often, as if their sessions together were being timed, and that his job was to perform as quickly and thoroughly as he could and then never talk about it.
He was less concerned with Jude’s lack of erections than he was with the curious sensation he sometimes experienced—too indefinable and contradictory to even name it with language—that with every encounter they had, he was drawing closer to Jude, even as Jude pulled further from him.
Jude said all the right things; he made all the right sounds; he was affectionate and willing: but still, Willem knew something, something was wrong.
He found it bewildering; people had always enjoyed having sex with him—so what was happening here?
Perversely, it made him want to have it more, if only so he could find some answers, even if he also dreaded them.