A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  He had dinner with the Spanish director, Emanuel, who was young but already highly acclaimed and who, despite the complexity and melancholy of his script, was buoyant and bright, and kept repeating his astonishment that he, Willem, was going to be in his film, that it was his dream to work with him. He, in turn, told Emanuel of Santiago Blues (Emanuel had laughed when Willem described the plot. “Not bad!” he said, and Willem had laughed, too. “It’s supposed to be bad!” he corrected Emanuel). He told him about how Jude had always wanted to walk this path; how humbled he was that he would get to do it for him.

  “Ah,” Emanuel said, teasingly. “I think this is the man for whom you ruined your career, am I right?”

  He had smiled back. “Yes,” he said. “That’s him.”

  The days on The Stars Over St. James were very long and, as Jude had promised, there was lots of walking (and a caravan of slow-moving trailers instead of donkeys). The cell-phone reception was patchy in parts, and so he would instead write Jude messages, which seemed more appropriate anyway, more pilgrim-like, and in the morning, he sent him pictures of his breakfast (black bread with caraway seeds, yogurt, cucumbers) and of the stretch of road he would walk that day. Much of the road cut through busy towns, and so in places they were rerouted into the countryside. Each day, he chose a few white pebbles from the side of the road and put them in a jar to take home; at night, he sat in his hotel room with his feet wrapped in hot towels.

  They finished filming two weeks before Christmas, and he flew to London for meetings, and then back to Madrid to meet Jude, where they rented a car and drove south, through Andalusia. In a town on a cliff high above the sea they stopped to meet Asian Henry Young, whom they watched trudging uphill, waving at them with both arms when he saw them, and finishing the last hundred yards in a sprint. “Thank god you’re giving me an excuse to get the fuck out of that house,” he said. Henry had been living for the past month at an artists’ residency down the hill, in a valley filled with orange trees, but unusually for him, he hated the other six people at the colony, and as they ate dishes of orange rounds floating in a liqueur of their own juice and topped with cinnamon and pulverized cloves and almonds, they laughed at Henry’s stories about his fellow artists. Later, after telling him goodbye and that they’d see him next month in New York, they walked slowly together through the medieval town, whose every structure was a glittering white salt cube, and where striped cats lay in the streets and flicked the tips of their tails as people with wheel carts ground slowly around them.

  The next evening, outside Granada, Jude said he had a surprise for him, and they got into the car that was waiting for them in front of the restaurant, Jude with the brown envelope he’d kept by his side all through dinner.

  “Where’re we going?” he asked. “What’s in the envelope?”

  “You’ll see,” Jude said.

  Up and downhill they swooped, until the car stopped before the arched entryway to the Alhambra, where Jude handed the guard a letter, which the guard studied and then nodded at, and the car slid through the doorway and stopped and the two of them got out and stood there in the quiet courtyard.

  “Yours,” Jude said, shyly, nodding at the buildings and gardens below. “For the next three hours, anyway,” and then, when Willem couldn’t say anything, he continued, quietly, “Do you remember?”

  He nodded, barely. “Of course,” he said, just as quietly. This was always how their own trip on the Camino was supposed to end: with a train ride south to visit the Alhambra. And over the years, even as he knew their walk would never happen, he had never gone to the Alhambra, had never taken a day at the end of one shoot or another and come, because he was waiting for Jude to do it with him.

  “One of my clients,” Jude said, before he could ask. “You defend someone, and their godfather turns out to be the Spanish minister of culture, who lets you make a generous donation to the Alhambra’s maintenance fund for the privilege of seeing it alone.” He grinned at Willem. “I told you I’d do something for your fiftieth—albeit a year and a half later.” He placed his hand on Willem’s arm. “Willem, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not going to,” he said. “I can do other things in life besides cry, you know,” although he was no longer sure that was even true.

  He opened the envelope that Jude handed him, and inside there was a package, and he undid the ribbon and tore the paper away and found a handmade book, organized by chapters—“The Alcazaba”; “The Lion Palace”; “The Gardens”; “Generalife”—each with pages of handwritten notes by Malcolm, who had written his thesis on the Alhambra and who had visited it every year since he was nine. Between each chapter was a drawing of one of the complex’s details—a jasmine bush blooming with small white flowers, a stone façade stippled with cobalt tilework—tipped into the pages, each dedicated to him and signed by someone they knew: Richard; JB; India; Asian Henry Young; Ali. Now he really did begin to cry, smiling and crying, until Jude told him that they had better get moving, that they couldn’t spend their entire time at the entryway, crying, and he grabbed him and kissed him, not caring about the silent, black-clad guards behind them. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Off they moved through the silent night, Jude’s flashlight bouncing a line of light before them. Into palaces they walked, where the marble was so old that the structure appeared to be carved from soft white butter, and into reception halls with vaulted ceilings so high that birds arced soundlessly through the space, and with windows so symmetrical and perfectly placed that the room was bright with moonlight. As they walked, they stopped to consult Malcolm’s notes, to examine details they would have missed had they not been alerted to them, to realize that they were standing in the room where, a thousand years ago, more, a sultan would have dictated his correspondence. They studied the illustrations, matching the images to what they saw before them. Facing each of their friends’ drawings was a note each had written explaining when they had first seen the Alhambra, and why they had chosen to draw what they had. They had that feeling, the same one they had often had as young men, that everyone they knew had seen so much of the world and that they hadn’t, and although they knew this was no longer true, they still felt that same sense of awe at their friends’ lives, at how much they had done and experienced, at how well they knew to appreciate it, at how talented they were at recording it. In the gardens of the Generalife section, they walked into a room that had been cut into a labyrinth hedgerow of cypresses, and he began to kiss Jude, more insistently than he had allowed himself to do in a long time, even though they could hear, faintly, one of the guard’s shoes tapping along the stone walkway.

  Back in the hotel room they continued, and he heard himself thinking that in the movie version of this night, they would be having sex now, and he was almost, almost about to say this out loud, when he remembered himself, and stopped, pulling back from Jude as he did. But it was as if he had spoken anyway, because for a while they were silent, staring at each other, and then Jude said, quietly, “Willem, we can if you want to.”

  “Do you want to?” he asked, finally.

  “Sure,” Jude said, but Willem could tell, by the way he had looked down and the slight catch in his voice, that he was lying.

  For a second he thought he would pretend, that he would allow himself to be convinced that Jude was telling him the truth. But he couldn’t. And so “No,” he said, and rolled off of him. “I think this has been enough excitement for one evening.” Next to him, he heard Jude exhale, and as he fell asleep, heard him whisper, “I’m sorry, Willem,” and he tried to tell Jude that he understood, but by this time he was more unconscious than not and couldn’t speak the words.

  But that was that period’s only sadness, and the source of their sadnesses were different: For Jude, he knew, the sadness rose from a sense of failure, a certainty—one Willem was never able to displace—that he wasn’t fulfilling his obligations. For him, the sadness was for Jude himself. Occasionally W
illem allowed himself to wonder what Jude’s life would have been like if sex had been something he had been left to discover, rather than forced to learn—but it was not a helpful line of thought, and it made him too upset. And so he tried not to consider it. But it was always there, running through their friendship, their lives, like a vein of turquoise forking through stone.

  In the meantime, though, there was normalcy, routine, both of which were better than sex or excitement. There was the realization that Jude had walked—slowly, but assuredly—for almost three straight hours that night. There was, back in New York, their lives, the things they used to do, resuming because Jude now had the energy to do so, because he could now stay awake through a play or an opera or a dinner, because he could climb the stairs to reach Malcolm’s front door in Cobble Hill, could walk down the pitched sidewalk to reach JB’s building in Vinegar Hill. There was the comfort of hearing Jude’s alarm blip at five thirty, of hearing him set off for his morning swim, the relief of looking into a box on the kitchen counter and seeing it was full of medical supplies—extra packets of catheter tubing and sterile gauze patches and leftover high-calorie protein drinks that Andy had only recently said Jude could stop ingesting—that Jude would return to Andy, who would donate them to the hospital. In moments he would remember how two years ago from this very date, he would come home from the theater to find Jude in bed asleep, so fragile that it seemed at times that the catheter under his shirt was actually an artery, that he was being steadily and irreversibly whittled down to only nerves and vessels and bone. Sometimes he would think of those moments and feel a sort of disorientation: Was that them, really, those people back then? Where had those people gone? Would they reappear? Or were they now other people entirely? And then he would imagine that those people weren’t so much gone as they were within them, waiting to bob back up to the surface, to reclaim their bodies and minds; they were identities now in remission, but they would always be with them.

  Sickness had visited them recently enough so that they still remembered to be grateful for every day that passed so uneventfully, even as they grew to expect them. The first time Willem saw Jude in his wheelchair in months, saw him leave the sofa when they were watching a movie because he was having an episode and wanted to be alone, he had been disquieted, and he’d had to make himself remember that this, too, was who Jude was: he was someone whose body betrayed him, and he always would be. The surgery hadn’t changed this after all—it had changed Willem’s reaction to it. And when he realized that Jude was cutting himself again—not frequently, but regularly—he had to remind himself that, once again, this was who Jude was, and that the surgery hadn’t changed this, either.

  Still, “Maybe we should call these The Happy Years,” he told Jude one morning. It was February, it was snowing, and they were lying in bed, which they now did until late every Sunday morning.

  “I don’t know,” Jude said, and although he could only see the edge of his face, Willem could tell he was smiling. “Isn’t that tempting fate a little? We’ll call it that and then both of my arms will fall off. Also, that name’s taken already.”

  And it was—it was the title of Willem’s next project, in fact, the one he would be leaving for in just a week: six weeks of rehearsals, followed by eleven weeks of filming. But it wasn’t the original title. The original title had been The Dancer on the Stage, but Kit had just told him that the producers had changed it to The Happy Years.

  He hadn’t liked this new title. “It’s so cynical,” he told Jude, after complaining first to Kit and then to the director. “There’s something so curdled and ironic about it.” This had been a few nights ago; they had been lying on the sofa after his daily, thoroughly draining ballet class, and Jude was massaging his feet. He would be playing Rudolf Nureyev in the final years of his life, from his appointment as the ballet director of the Paris Opéra in nineteen-eighty-three, through his HIV diagnosis, and until he first noticed the symptoms of his disease, a year before he actually died.

  “I know what you mean,” Jude had said after he had finally finished ranting. “But maybe they really were the happy years for him. He was free; he had a job he loved; he was mentoring young dancers; he had turned around an entire company. He was doing some of his greatest choreography. He and that Danish dancer—”

  “Erik Bruhn.”

  “Right. He and Bruhn were still together, at least for a little while longer. He had experienced everything he had probably never dreamed he would have as a younger man, and he was still young enough to enjoy it all: money and renown and artistic freedom. Love. Friendship.” He dug his knuckles into Willem’s sole, and Willem winced. “That sounds like a happy life to me.”

  They were both quiet for a while. “But he was sick,” Willem said, at last.

  “Not then,” Jude reminded him. “Not actively, at least.”

  “No, maybe not,” he said. “But he was dying.”

  Jude had smiled at him. “Oh, dying,” he said dismissively. “We’re all dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t happy years, that it wasn’t a happy life.”

  He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn’t a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

  But he didn’t say this, of course, just sat up and grabbed Jude’s face and kissed him and then fell back against the pillows. “How’d you get so smart?” he asked Jude, and Jude grinned at him.

  “Too hard?” he asked in response, still kneading Willem’s foot.

  “Not hard enough.”

  Now he turned Jude around to face him in bed. “I think we have to stick with The Happy Years,” he told him. “We’ll just have to risk your arms falling off,” and Jude laughed.

  The next week, he left for Paris. It was one of the most difficult shoots he’d ever done; he had a double, an actual dancer, for the more elaborate sequences, but he did some of his own dancing as well, and there were days—days spent lifting real ballerinas into the air, marveling at how dense, how ropy with muscle they were—that were so exhausting that by the evening he had only the energy to drop himself into the bathtub and then lift himself out of it. In the past few years, he had found himself subconsciously drawn to ever-more physical roles, and he was always astonished by, and appreciative of, how heroically his body met its every demand. He had been given a new awareness of it, and now, as he stretched his arms behind him as he leaped, he could feel how every sore muscle came alive for him, how it allowed him to do whatever he wanted, how nothing within him ever broke, how it indulged him every time. He knew he wasn’t alone in feeling this, this gratitude: when they visited Cambridge, he and Harold would play tennis every day, and he knew without them ever discussing it how grateful they had both become for their own bodies, how much the act of smacking heavily, unthinkingly across the court to lunge for a ball had come to mean to them both.

  Jude came to visit him in Paris at the end of April, and although Willem had promised him that he wouldn’t do anything elaborate for his fiftieth birthday, he had arranged a surprise dinner anyway, and in addition to JB and Malcolm and Sophie, Richard and Elijah and Rhodes and Andy and Black Henry Young and Harold and Julia had all come over, along with Phaedra and Citizen, who had helped him with the planning. The next day Jude had come to watch him on set, one of the very few times he had ever done so. The scene they were working on that morning was one in which Nureyev was trying to correct a young dancer’s cabrio
le, and after instructing him again and again, finally demonstrates how to do it; but in an earlier scene, one they hadn’t yet shot but that would directly precede this one, he has just been diagnosed with HIV, and as he jumps, scissoring his legs, he falls, and the studio goes quiet around him. The scene ended on his face, a moment in which he had to convey Nureyev’s sudden recognition that he understood how he would die and then, just a second later, his decision to ignore that understanding.

  They shot take after take of this scene, and after each take, Willem would have to step away and wait until he could breathe normally again, and hair and makeup would flutter around him, blotting the sweat from his face and neck, and when he was ready, back to his mark he would step. By the time the director was satisfied, he was panting but satisfied as well.

  “Sorry,” he apologized, going over to Jude at last. “The tedium of filmmaking.”

  “No, Willem,” Jude said. “It was amazing. You were so beautiful out there.” He looked tentative for a moment. “I almost couldn’t believe it was you.”

  He took Jude’s hand and clasped it in his, which he knew was the most affection Jude would tolerate in public. But he never knew how Jude felt about witnessing such displays of physicality. The previous spring, during one of his breakups with Fredrik, JB had dated a principal in a well-known modern dance company, and they had all gone to see his performance. During Josiah’s solo, he had glanced over at Jude and had seen that he was leaning forward slightly, resting his chin in his hand, and watching the stage so intently that when Willem put his hand on his back, he startled. “Sorry,” Willem had whispered. Later, in bed, Jude had been very quiet, and he had wondered what he was thinking: Was he upset? Wistful? Sorrowful? But it had seemed unkind to ask Jude to say aloud what he might not have been able to articulate to himself, and so he hadn’t.