A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  “I don’t mean to offend you, Willem,” Kit had said, carefully. “I know you love him. But come on. If he were the love of your life, I’d understand. But this seems extreme to me, to inhibit your career like this.”

  And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real.

  In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. “If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,” his teacher had said.

  He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and harder it was to find your way back. Was it any wonder that so many of his peers were such wrecks? They made their money, their lives, their identities by impersonating others—was it a surprise, then, that they needed one set, one stage after the next, to give their lives shape? Without them, what and who were they? And so they took up religions, and girlfriends, and causes to give them something that could be their own: they never slept, they never stopped, they were terrified to be alone, to have to ask themselves who they were. (“When an actor talks and there’s no one to hear him, is he still an actor?” his friend Roman had once asked. He sometimes wondered.)

  But to Jude, he wasn’t an actor: he was his friend, and that identity supplanted everything else. It was a role he had inhabited for so long that it had become, indelibly, who he was. To Jude, he was no more primarily an actor than Jude was primarily a lawyer—it was never the first or second or third way that either of them would describe the other. It was Jude who remembered who he had been before he had made a life pretending to be other people: someone with a brother, someone with parents, someone to whom everything and everyone seemed so impressive and beguiling. He knew other actors who didn’t want anyone to remember them as they’d been, as someone so determined to be someone else, but he wasn’t that person. He wanted to be reminded of who he was; he wanted to be around someone for whom his career would never be the most interesting thing about him.

  And if he was to be honest, he loved what came with Jude as well: Harold and Julia. Jude’s adoption had been the first time he had ever felt envious of anything Jude had. He admired a lot of what Jude had—his intelligence and thoughtfulness and resourcefulness—but he had never been jealous of him. But watching Harold and Julia with him, watching how they watched him even when he wasn’t looking at them, he had felt a kind of emptiness: he was parentless, and while most of the time he didn’t think about this at all, he felt that, for as remote as his parents had been, they had at least been something that had anchored him to his life. Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust. He and Jude had been united in this.

  Of course, he knew this envy was ridiculous, and beyond mean: he had grown up with parents, and Jude hadn’t. And he knew that Harold and Julia felt an affection for him as well, as much as he did for them. They had both seen every one of his films, and both sent him long and detailed reviews of them, always praising his performance and making intelligent comments about his costars and the cinematography. (The only one they had never seen—or at least never commented on—was The Prince of Cinnamon, which was the film he had been shooting when Jude had tried to kill himself. He had never seen it himself.) They read every article about him—like his reviews, he avoided these articles—and bought a copy of every magazine that featured him. On his birthday, they would call and ask him what he was going to do to celebrate, and Harold would remind him of how old he was getting. At Christmas, they always sent him something—a book, along with a jokey little gift, or a clever toy that he would keep in his pocket to fiddle with as he talked on the phone or sat in the makeup chair. At Thanksgiving, he and Harold would sit in the living room watching the game, while Julia kept Jude company in the kitchen.

  “We’re running low on chips,” Harold would say.

  “I know,” he’d say.

  “Why don’t you go get more?” Harold would say.

  “You’re the host,” he’d remind Harold.

  “You’re the guest.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Call Jude and get him to bring us more.”

  “You call him!”

  “No, you call him.”

  “Fine,” he’d say. “Jude! Harold wants more chips!”

  “You’re such a confabulator, Willem,” Harold would say, as Jude came in to refill the bowl. “Jude, this was completely Willem’s idea.”

  But mostly, he knew that Harold and Julia loved him because he loved Jude; he knew they trusted him to take care of Jude—that was who he was to them, and he didn’t mind it. He was proud of it.

  Lately, however, he had been feeling differently about Jude, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. They had been sitting on the sofa late one Friday night—he just home from the theater, Jude just home from the office—and talking, talking about nothing in particular, when he had almost leaned over and kissed him. But he had stopped himself, and the moment had passed. But since then, he had been revisited by that impulse again: twice, three times, four times.

  It was beginning to worry him. Not because Jude was a man: he’d had sex with men before, everyone he knew had, and in college, he and JB had drunkenly made out one night out of boredom and curiosity (an experience that had been, to their mutual relief, entirely unsatisfying: “It’s really interesting how someone so good-looking can be such a turnoff,” had been JB’s exact words to him). And not because he hadn’t always felt a sort of low-key hum of attraction for Jude, the way he felt for more or less all his friends. It was because he knew that if he tried anything, he would have to be certain about it, because he sensed, powerfully, that Jude, who was casual about nothing, certainly wouldn’t be casual about sex.

  Jude’s sex life, his sexuality, had been a subject of ongoing fascination for everyone who knew him, and certainly for Willem’s girlfriends. Occasionally, it had come up among the three of them—he and Malcolm and JB—when Jude wasn’t around: Was he having sex? Had he ever? With whom? They had all seen people looking at him at parties, or flirting with him, and in every case, Jude had remained oblivious.

  “That girl was all over you,” he’d say to Jude as they walked home from one party or another.

  “What girl?” Jude would say.

  They talked about it with one another because Jude had made it clear he wouldn’t discuss it with any of them: when the topic was raised, he would give them one of his stares and then change the subject with a declarativeness that was impossible to misinterpret.

  “Has he ever spent the night away from home?” asked JB (this was when he and Jude were living on Lispenard Street).

  “Guys,” he’d say (the conversation made him uncomfortable), “I don’t think we should be talking about this.”

  “Willem!” JB would say. “Don’t be such a pussy! You’re not betraying any confidences. Just tell us: yes or no. Has he ever?”

  He’d sigh. “No,”
he’d say.

  There would be a silence. “Maybe he’s asexual,” Malcolm would say, after a while.

  “No, that’s you, Mal.”

  “Fuck off, JB.”

  “Do you think he’s a virgin?” JB would ask.

  “No,” he’d say. He didn’t know why he knew this, but he was certain he wasn’t.

  “It’s such a waste,” JB would say, and he and Malcolm would look at each other, knowing what was coming next. “His looks’ve been wasted on him. I should’ve gotten his looks. I would’ve had a good time with them, at least.”

  After a while, they grew to accept it as part of who Jude was; they added the subject to the list of things they knew not to discuss. Year after year passed and he dated no one, they saw him with no one. “Maybe he’s living some hot double life,” Richard once suggested, and Willem had shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. But really, although he had no proof of this, he knew that Jude wasn’t. It was in this same, proof-less way that he assumed Jude was probably gay (though maybe not), and probably hadn’t ever had a relationship (though he really hoped he was wrong about this). And as much as Jude claimed otherwise, Willem wasn’t ever convinced that he wasn’t lonely, that he didn’t, in some small dark part of himself, want to be with someone. He remembered Lionel and Sinclair’s wedding, where it had been Malcolm with Sophie and he with Robin and JB—though they hadn’t been speaking then—with Oliver, and Jude with no one. And although Jude hadn’t seemed bothered by this, Willem had looked at him across the table and had felt sad for him. He didn’t want Jude to get old alone; he wanted him to be with someone who would take care of him and be attracted to him. JB was right: it was a waste.

  And so was this what this was, this attraction? Was it fear and sympathy that had morphed itself into a more palatable shape? Was he convincing himself he was attracted to Jude because he couldn’t stand to see him alone? He didn’t think so. But he didn’t know.

  The person he would’ve once discussed this with was JB, but he couldn’t speak to JB about this, even though they were friends again, or at least working toward friendship. After they had returned from Morocco, Jude had called JB and the two of them had gone out for dinner, and a month later, Willem and JB had gone out on their own. Oddly, though, he found it much more difficult to forgive JB than Jude had, and their first meeting had been a disaster—JB showily, exaggeratedly blithe; he seething—until they had left the restaurant and started yelling at each other. There they had stood on deserted Pell Street—it had been snowing, lightly, and no one else was out—accusing each other of condescension and cruelty; irrationality and self-absorption; self-righteousness and narcissism; martyrdom and cluelessness.

  “You think anyone hates themselves as much as I do?” JB had shouted at him. (His fourth show, the one that documented his time on drugs and with Jackson, had been titled “The Narcissist’s Guide to Self-Hatred,” and JB had referenced it several times during their dinner as proof that he had punished himself mightily and publicly and had now been reformed.)

  “Yeah, JB, I do,” he’d shouted back at him. “I think Jude hates himself far more than you could ever hate yourself, and I think you knew that and you made him hate himself even more.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” JB had yelled. “You think I don’t fucking hate myself for that?”

  “I don’t think you hate yourself enough for it, no,” he’d yelled back. “Why did you do that, JB? Why did you do that to him, of all people?” And then, to his surprise, JB had sunk, defeated, to the curb. “Why didn’t you ever love me the way you love him, Willem?” he asked.

  He sighed. “Oh, JB,” he said, and sat down next to him on the chilled pavement. “You never needed me as much as he did.” It wasn’t the only reason, he knew, but it was part of it. No one else in his life needed him. People wanted him—for sex, for their projects, for his friendship, even—but only Jude needed him. Only to Jude was he essential.

  “You know, Willem,” said JB, after a silence, “maybe he doesn’t need you as much as you think he does.”

  He had thought about this for a while. “No,” he said, finally, “I think he does.”

  Now JB sighed. “Actually,” he had said, “I think you’re right.”

  After that, things had, strangely, improved. But as much as he was—cautiously—learning to enjoy JB again, he wasn’t sure he was ready to discuss this particular topic with him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear JB’s jokes about how he had already fucked everything with two X chromosomes and so was now moving on to the Ys, or about his abandonment of heteronormative standards, or, worst of all, about how this attraction he thought he was feeling for Jude was really something else: a misplaced guilt for the suicide attempt, or a form of patronization, or simple, misdirected boredom.

  So he did nothing and said nothing. As the months passed, he dated, casually, and he examined his feelings as he did. This is crazy, he told himself. This is not a good idea. Both were true. It would be so much easier if he didn’t have these feelings at all. And so what if he did? he argued with himself. Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated. He had whole pages of dialogue with himself, imagining the lines—his and JB’s, both spoken by him—typeset on white paper.

  But still, the feelings persisted. They went to Cambridge for Thanksgiving, the first time in two years that they’d done so. He and Jude shared his room because Julia’s brother was visiting from Oxford and had the upstairs bedroom. That night, he lay awake on the bedroom sofa, watching Jude sleep. How easy would it be, he thought, to simply climb into bed next to him and fall asleep himself? There was something about it that seemed almost preordained, and the absurdity was not in the fact of it but in his resistance to the fact of it.

  They had taken the car to Cambridge, and Jude drove them home so he could sleep. “Willem,” Jude said as they were about to enter the city, “I want to ask you about something.” He looked at him. “Are you okay? Is something on your mind?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “You’ve seemed really—pensive, I guess,” Jude said. He was quiet. “You know, it’s been a huge gift having you live with me. And not just live with me, but—everything. I don’t know what I would have done without you. But I know it must be draining for you. And I just want you to know: if you want to move back home, I’ll be fine. I promise. I’m not going to hurt myself.” He had been staring at the road as he spoke, but now he turned to him. “I don’t know how I got so lucky,” he said.

  He didn’t know what to say for a while. “Do you want me to move home?” he asked.

  Jude was silent. “Of course not,” he said, very quietly. “But I want you to be happy, and you haven’t seemed very happy recently.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been distracted, you’re right. But it’s certainly not because I’m living with you. I love living with you.” He tried to think of the right, the perfect next thing to add, but he couldn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Don’t be,” Jude said. “But if you want to talk about any of it, ever, you always can.”

  “I know,” he said. “Thanks.” They were quiet the rest of the way home.

  And then it was December. His run finished. They went to India on holiday, the four of them: the first trip they’d taken as a unit in years. In February, he began filming Uncle Vanya. The set was the kind he treasured and sought but only rarely found—he had worked with everyone before, and they all liked and respected one another, and the director was shaggy and mild and gentle, and the adaptation, which had been done by a novelist Jude admired, was beautiful and simple, and the dialogue was a pleasure to get to speak.

  When Willem was young, he had been in a play called The House on Thistle Lane, which had been about a family that was packing up and leaving a house in St. Louis that had been owned by the father’s family for generations, but which they could no long
er afford to maintain. But instead of a set, they had staged the play on one floor of a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem, and the audience had been allowed to wander between the rooms as long as they remained outside a roped-off area; depending on where you stood to watch, you saw the actors, and the space itself, from different perspectives. He had played the eldest, most damaged son, and had spent most of the first act mute and in the dining room, wrapping dishes in pieces of newspaper. He had developed a nervous tic for the son, who couldn’t imagine leaving his childhood house, and as the character’s parents fought in the living room, he would put down the plates and press himself into the far corner of the dining room near the kitchen and peel off the wallpaper in shreds. Although most of that act took place in the living room, there would always be a few audience members who would remain in his room, watching him, watching him scraping off the paper—a blue so dark it was almost black, and printed with pale pink cabbage roses—and rolling it between his fingers and dropping it to the floor, so that every night, one corner would become littered with little cigars of wallpaper, as if he were a mouse inexpertly building its tiny nest. It had been an exhausting play, but he had loved it: the intimacy of the audience, the unlikeliness of the stage, the small, detailed physicality of the role.

  This production felt very much like that play. The house, a Gilded Age mansion on the Hudson, was grand but creaky and shabby—the kind of house his ex-girlfriend Philippa had once imagined they’d live in when they were married and ancient—and the director used only three rooms: the dining room, the living room, and the sunporch. Instead of an audience, they had the crew, who followed them as they moved through the space. But although he relished the work, part of him also recognized that Uncle Vanya was not exactly the most helpful thing he could be doing at the moment. On set, he was Dr. Astrov, but once he was back at Greene Street, he was Sonya, and Sonya—as much as he loved the play and always had, as much as he loved and pitied poor Sonya herself—was not a role he had ever thought he might perform, under any circumstance. When he had told the others about the film, JB had said, “So it’s a gender-blind cast, then,” and he’d said, “What do you mean?” and JB had said, “Well, you’re obviously Elena, right?” and everyone had laughed, especially him. This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew. “He’s far too old to play Elena,” Jude had added, affectionately, and everyone had laughed again.