Chapter 3 #9
Late November. Willem finishes Desperate Characters .
They have Thanksgiving at Harold and Julia’s uptown, and although they have been coming into the city every other weekend to see him, he can sense them both trying very hard not to say anything about his appearance, not to bother him about how little he’s eating at dinner.
Thanksgiving week also marks his final week of antibiotic treatments, and he submits to another round of blood work and X-rays before Andy tells him he can stop.
He says goodbye to Patrizia for what he hopes is the last time; he gives her a gift to thank her for her care.
Although his wounds have shrunk, they haven’t shrunk as much as Andy had hoped, and on his recommendation, they stay in Garrison for Christmas. They promise Andy it will be a quiet week; everyone else will be out of town anyway, so it will be only the two of them and Harold and Julia.
“Your two goals are: sleeping and eating,” says Andy, who is going to visit Beckett in San Francisco for the holidays. “I want to see you five pounds heavier by the first Friday in January.”
“Five pounds is a lot,” he says.
“Five,” Andy repeats. “And then ideally, fifteen more after that.”
On Christmas itself, a year to the day he and Willem had walked along the spine of a low, wavy mountainside in Punakha, one that took them behind the king’s hunting lodge, a simple wooden structure that looked like it might be full of Chaucerian pilgrims, not the royal family, he tells Harold he wants to take a walk.
Julia and Willem have gone horseback riding at an acquaintance’s nearby ranch, and he is feeling stronger than he has in a long time.
“I don’t know, Jude,” says Harold, warily.
“Come on, Harold,” he says. “Just to the first bench.” Malcolm has placed three benches along the path he has hacked through the forest to the house’s rear; one is located about a third of a way around the lake; the second at the halfway point; and the third at the two-thirds point.
“We’ll go slowly, and I’ll take my cane.
” It has been years since he has had to use a cane—not since he was a teenager—but now he needs it for any distance longer than fifty yards or so.
Finally, Harold agrees, and he grabs his scarf and coat before Harold can change his mind.
Once they are outdoors, his euphoria increases.
He loves this house: he loves how it looks, he loves its quiet, and most of all, he loves that it is his and Willem’s, as far from Lispenard Street as imaginable, but as much theirs as that place was, something they made together and share.
The house, which faces a second, different forest, is a series of glass cubes, and preceding it is a long driveway that switchbacks through the woods, so at certain angles you can see only swatches of it, and at other angles it disappears completely.
At night, when it is lit, it glows like a lantern, which was what Malcolm had named it in his monograph: Lantern House.
The back of the house looks out onto a wide lawn and beyond it, a lake.
At the bottom of the lawn is a pool, which is lined with slabs of slate so that the water is always cold and clear, even on the hottest days, and in the barn there is an indoor pool and a living room; every wall of the barn can be lifted up and away from the structure, so that the entire interior is exposed to the outdoors, to the tree peonies and lilac bushes that bloom around it in the early spring; to the panicles of wisteria that drip from its roof in the early summer.
To the right of the house is a field that paints itself red with poppies in July; to the left is another through which he and Willem scattered thousands of wildflower seeds: cosmos and daisies and foxglove and Queen Anne’s lace.
One weekend shortly after they had moved in, they spent two days making their way through the forests before and behind the house, planting lilies of the valley near the mossy hillocks around the oak and elm trees, and sowing mint seeds throughout.
They knew Malcolm didn’t approve of their landscaping efforts—he thought them sentimental and trite—and although they knew Malcolm was probably right, they also didn’t really care.
In spring and summer, when the air was fragrant, they often thought of Lispenard Street, its aggressive ugliness, and of how then they wouldn’t even have had the visual imagination to conjure a place like this, where the beauty was so uncomplicated, so undeniable that it seemed at times an illusion.
He and Harold set off toward the forest, where the rough walkway means that it is easier for him to navigate than it had been when construction began.
Even so, he has to concentrate, for the path is only cleared once a season, and in the months between it becomes cluttered with saplings and ferns and twigs and tree matter.
They aren’t quite halfway to the first bench when he knows he has made a mistake.
His legs began throbbing as soon as they finished walking down the lawn, and now his feet are throbbing as well, and each step is agonizing.
But he doesn’t say anything, just grips his cane more tightly, trying to re-center the discomfort, and pushes forward, clenching his teeth and squaring his jaw.
By the time they reach the bench—really, a dark-gray limestone boulder—he is dizzy, and they sit for a long time, talking and looking out onto the lake, which is silvery in the cold air.
“It’s chilly,” Harold says eventually, and it is; he can feel the cool of the stone through his pants. “We should get you back to the house.”
“Okay,” he swallows, and stands, and immediately, he feels a hot stake of pain being thrust upward through his feet and gasps, but Harold doesn’t notice.
They are only thirty steps into the forest when he stops Harold. “Harold,” he says, “I need—I need—” But he can’t finish.
“Jude,” Harold says, and he can tell Harold is worried. He takes his left arm, slings it around his neck, and holds his hand in his own. “Lean on me as much as you can,” Harold says, putting his other arm around his waist, and he nods. “Ready?” He nods again.
He’s able to take twenty more steps—such slow steps, his feet tangling in the mulch—before he simply can’t move any more.
“I can’t, Harold,” he says, and by this time he can barely speak, the pain is so extreme, so unlike anything he has felt in such a long time.
Not since he was in the hospital in Philadelphia have his legs, his back, his feet hurt so profoundly, and he lets go of Harold and falls to the forest floor.
“Oh god, Jude,” Harold says, and bends over him, helping him to sit up against a tree, and he thinks how stupid, how selfish, he is.
Harold is seventy-two. He should not be asking a seventy-two-year-old man, even an admirably healthy seventy-two-year-old man, for physical assistance.
He cannot open his eyes because the world is torquing itself around him, but he hears Harold take out his phone, hears him try to call Willem, but the forest is so dense that the reception is poor, and Harold curses.
“Jude,” he hears Harold say, but his voice is very faint, “I’m going to have to go back to the house and get your wheelchair.
I’m so sorry. I’m going to be right back.
” He nods, barely, and feels Harold button his coat closed, feels him push his hands into his coat’s pockets, feels him wrap something around his legs—Harold’s own coat, he realizes.
“I’ll be right back,” Harold says. “I’ll be right back.
” He hears Harold’s feet running away from him, the crunch of the sticks and leaves as they snap and crumple beneath him.
He turns his head to the side and the ground beneath him shifts, dangerously, and he vomits, coughing up everything he has eaten that day, feels it slide off of his lips and drool down his cheek.
Then he feels a bit better, and he leans his head against the tree again.
He is reminded of his time in the forest when he was running away from the home, how he had hoped the trees might protect him, and now he hopes for it again.
He takes his hand out of his pocket, feels for his cane, and squeezes it as hard as he can.
Behind his eyelids, bright spangled drops of light burst into confetti, and then blink out into oily smears.
He concentrates on the sound of his breath, and on his legs, which he imagines as large lumpen shards of wood into which have been drilled dozens of long metal screws, each as thick as a thumb.
He pictures the screws being drawn out in reverse, each one rotating slowly out of him and landing with a ringing clang on a cement floor.
He vomits again. He is so cold. He can feel himself begin to spasm.