Chapter 3 #11
“If you say no, we’ll keep pushing forward with everything we’ve been doing and hope it works eventually,” Andy says.
“But Jude, it’s always better to have an amputation when you get to decide to have it, not when you’re forced to have it.
” He pauses. “If you get a blood infection, if you develop sepsis, then we will have to amputate, and I won’t be able to guarantee that you’ll keep the knees.
I won’t be able to guarantee that you won’t lose some other extremity—a finger; a hand—that the infection won’t spread far beyond your lower legs. ”
“But you can’t guarantee me that I’ll even keep the knees this time,” he says, petulant. “You can’t guarantee I won’t develop sepsis in the future.”
“No,” Andy admits. “But as I said, I think there’s a very good chance you will keep them. And I think if we remove this part of your body that’s so gravely infected that it’ll help prevent further disease.”
They are all quiet again. “This sounds like a choice that isn’t a choice,” he mutters.
Andy sighs. “As I said, Jude,” he says, “it is a choice. It’s your choice. You don’t have to make it tomorrow, or even this week. But I want you to think about it, carefully.”
He leaves, and he and Willem are left alone.
“Do we have to talk about it now?” he asks, when he can finally look at Willem, and Willem shakes his head.
Outside the sky is turning rose-colored; the sunset will be long and beautiful.
But he doesn’t want beauty. He wishes, suddenly, that he could swim, but he hasn’t swum since the first bone infection.
He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t gone anywhere.
He has had to turn his London clients over to a colleague, because his IV has tethered him to New York.
His muscles have disappeared: he is soft flesh on bone; he moves like an old man.
“I’m going to bed,” he tells Willem, and when Willem says, quietly, “Yasmin’s coming in a couple of hours,” he wants to cry.
“Right,” he says, to the floor. “Well. I’m going to take a nap, then. I’ll wake up for Yasmin.”
That night, after Yasmin has left, he cuts himself for the first time in a long time; he watches the blood weep across the marble and into the drain.
He knows how irrational it seems, his desire to keep his legs, his legs that have caused him so many problems, that have cost him how many hours, how much money, how much pain to maintain?
But still: They are his. They are his legs.
They are him. How can he willingly cut away a part of himself?
He knows that he has already cut away so much of himself over the years: flesh, skin, scars.
But somehow this is different. If he sacrifices his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won; he will be surrendering to him, to that night in the field with the car.
And it is also different because he knows that once he loses them, he will no longer be able to pretend.
He will no longer be able to pretend that someday he will walk again, that someday he will be better.
He will no longer be able to pretend that he isn’t disabled.
Up, once more, will go his freak-show factor.
He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.
And he is tired. He doesn’t want to have to learn how to walk again.
He doesn’t want to work at regaining weight he knows he will lose, weight on top of the weight he has struggled to replace from the first bone infection, weight that he has re-lost with the second.
He doesn’t want to go back into the hospital, he doesn’t want to wake disoriented and confused, he doesn’t want to be visited by night terrors, he doesn’t want to explain to his colleagues that he is sick yet again, he doesn’t want the months and months of being weak, of fighting to regain his equilibrium.
He doesn’t want Willem to see him without his legs, he doesn’t want to give him one more challenge, one more grotesquerie to overcome.
He wants to be normal, he has only ever wanted to be normal, and yet with each year, he moves further and further from normalcy.
He knows it is fallacious to think of the mind and the body as two separate, competing entities, but he cannot help it.
He doesn’t want his body to win one more battle, to make the decision for him, to make him feel so helpless.
He doesn’t want to be dependent on Willem, to have to ask him to lift him in and out of bed because his arms will be too useless and watery, to help him use the bathroom, to see the remains of his legs rounded into stumps.
He had always assumed that there would be some sort of warning before this point, that his body would alert him before it became seriously worse.
He knows, he does, that this past year and a half was his warning—a long, slow, consistent, unignorable warning—but he has chosen, in his arrogance and stupid hope, not to see it for what it is.
He has chosen to believe that because he had always recovered, that he would once again, one more time.
He has given himself the privilege of assuming that his chances are limitless.
Three nights later he wakes again with a fever; again he goes into the hospital; again he is discharged.
This fever has been caused by an infection around his catheter, which is removed.
A new one is inserted into his internal jugular vein, where it forms a bulge that not even his shirt collars can wholly camouflage.
His first night back home, he is coasting through his dreams when he opens his eyes and sees that Willem isn’t in bed next to him, and he works himself into his wheelchair and glides out of the room.
He sees Willem before Willem sees him; he is sitting at the dining table, the light on above him, his back to the bookcases, staring out into the room.
There is a glass of water before him, and his elbow is resting on the table, his hand supporting his chin.
He looks at Willem and sees how exhausted he is, how old, his bright hair gone whitish.
He has known Willem for so long, has looked at his face so many times, that he is never able to see him anew: his face is better known to him than his own.
He knows its every expression. He knows what Willem’s different smiles mean; when he is watching him being interviewed on television, he can always tell when he is smiling because he’s truly amused and when he is smiling to be polite.
He knows which of his teeth are capped, and he knows which ones Kit made him straighten when it was clear that he was going to be a star, when it was clear that he wouldn’t just be in plays and independent films but would have a different kind of career, a different kind of life.
But now he looks at Willem, at his face that is still so handsome but also so tired, the kind of tiredness he thought only he was feeling, and realizes that Willem is feeling it as well, that his life—Willem’s life with him—has become a sort of drudgery, a slog of illnesses and hospital visits and fear, and he knows what he will do, what he has to do.
“Willem,” he says, and watches Willem jerk out of his trance and look at him.
“Jude,” Willem says. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling sick? Why are you out of bed?”
“I’m going to do it,” he says, and he thinks that they are like two actors on a stage, talking to each other across a great distance, and he wheels himself close to him.
“I’m going to do it,” he repeats, and Willem nods, and then they lean their foreheads into each other’s, and both of them start crying.
“I’m sorry,” he tells Willem, and Willem shakes his head, his forehead rubbing against his.
“I’m sorry,” Willem tells him back. “I’m sorry, Jude. I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” he says, and he does.
The next day he calls Andy, who is relieved but also muted, as if out of respect to him.
Things move briskly after that. They pick a date: the first date Andy proposes is Willem’s birthday, and even though he and Willem have agreed that they’ll celebrate Willem’s fiftieth birthday once he’s better, he doesn’t want to have the surgery on the actual day.
So instead he’ll have it at the end of August, the week before Labor Day, the week before they usually go to Truro.
In the next management committee meeting, he makes a brief announcement, explaining that this is a voluntary operation, that he’ll only be out of the office for a week, ten days at the most, that it isn’t a big deal, that he’ll be fine.
Then he announces it to his department; he normally wouldn’t, he tells them, but he doesn’t want their clients to worry, he doesn’t want them to think that it’s something more serious than it is, he doesn’t want to be the subject of rumors and chatter (although he knows he will be).
He reveals so little about himself at work that whenever he does, he can see people sit up and lean forward in their seats, can almost see their ears lift a little higher.
He has met all of their wives and husbands and girlfriends and boyfriends, but they have never met Willem.
He has never invited Willem to one of the company’s retreats, to their annual holiday parties, to their annual summer picnics.
“You’d hate them,” he tells Willem, although he knows that isn’t really the case: Willem can have a good time anywhere.
“Believe me.” And Willem has always shrugged.
“I’d love to come,” he has always said, but he has never let him.
He has always told himself that he is protecting Willem from a series of events that he would surely find tedious, but he has never considered that Willem might be hurt by his refusal to include him, might actually want to be a part of his life beyond Greene Street and their friends. He flushes now, realizing this.