“Willem told me about what happened, you know, when you were trying to get upstairs last year and the elevator broke. It’s not anything to be embarrassed about, Jude. He’s just worried about you. I told him I was going to ask you about this anyway, and he thought—he thinks—it’s someplace you could live for a long time: forever. And the elevator will never break here. And if it does, I’ll be right downstairs. I mean—obviously, you can buy somewhere else, but I hope you’ll consider moving in here.”
In that moment he feels not angry but exposed: not just to Richard but to Willem. He tries to hide as much as he can from Willem, not because he doesn’t trust him but because he doesn’t want Willem to see him as less of a person, as someone who has to be looked after and helped. He wants Willem, wants them all, to think of him as someone reliable and hardy, someone they can come to with their problems, instead of him always having to turn to them. He is embarrassed, thinking of the conversations that have been had about him—between Willem and Andy, and between Willem and Harold (which he is certain happens more often than he fears), and now between Willem and Richard—and saddened as well that Willem is spending so much time worrying about him, that he is having to think of him the way he would have had to think of Hemming, had Hemming lived: as someone who needed care, as someone who needed decisions made for him. He sees the image of himself as an old man again: Is it possible it is also Willem’s vision, that the two of them share the same fear, that his ending seems as inevitable to Willem as it does to himself?
He thinks, then, of a conversation he had once had with Willem and Philippa; Philippa was talking about how someday, when she and Willem were old, they’d take over her parents’ house and orchards in southern Vermont. “I can see it now,” she said. “The kids’ll have moved back in with us, because they won’t be able to make it in the real world, and they’ll have six kids between them with names like Buster and Carrot and Vixen, who’ll run around naked and won’t be sent to school, and whom Willem and I will have to support until the end of time—”
“What will your kids do?” he asked, practical even in play.
“Oberon will make art installations using only food products, and Miranda will play a zither with yarn for strings,” said Philippa, and he had smiled. “They’ll stay in grad school forever, and Willem will have to keep working until he’s so broken down that I have to push him onto the set in a wheelchair”—she stopped, blushing, but carried on after a hitch—“to pay for all their degrees and experiments. I’ll have to give up costume design and start an organic applesauce company to pay all our debts and maintain the house, which’ll be this huge, glorious wreck with termites everywhere, and we’ll have a huge, scarred wooden table big enough to seat all twelve of us.”
“Thirteen,” said Willem, suddenly.
“Why thirteen?”
“Because—Jude’ll be living with us, too.”
“Oh, will I?” he asked lightly, but pleased, and relieved, to be included in Willem’s vision of old age.
“Of course. You’ll have the guest cottage, and every morning Buster will bring you your buckwheat waffles because you’ll be too sick of us to join us at the main table, and then after breakfast I’ll come hang out with you and hide from Oberon and Miranda, who’re going to want me to make intelligent and supportive comments about their latest endeavors.” Willem grinned at him, and he smiled back, though he could see that Philippa herself wasn’t smiling any longer, but staring at the table. Then she looked up, and their eyes met for half a second, and she looked away, quickly.
It was shortly after that, he thought, that Philippa’s attitude toward him changed. It wasn’t obvious to anyone but him—perhaps not even to her—but where he used to come into the apartment and see her sketching at the table and the two of them were able to talk, companionably, as he drank a glass of water and looked at her drawings, she would now just nod at him and say, “Willem’s at the store,” or “He’s coming back soon,” even though he hadn’t asked (she was always welcome at Lispenard Street, whether Willem was there or not), and he would linger a bit until it was clear she didn’t want to speak, and then retreat to his room to work.
He understood why Philippa might resent him: Willem invited him everywhere with them, included him in everything, even in their retirement, even in Philippa’s daydream of their old age. After that, he was careful to always decline Willem’s invitations, even if it was to things that didn’t involve his and Philippa’s couplehood—if they were going to a party at Malcolm’s to which he was also invited, he’d leave separately, and at Thanksgiving, he made sure to ask Philippa to Boston as well, though she hadn’t come in the end. He had even tried to talk to Willem about what he sensed, to awaken him to what he was certain she was feeling.
“Do you not like her?” Willem had asked him, concerned.
“You know I like Philippa,” he’d replied. “But I think—I think you should just hang out with her more alone, Willem, with just the two of you. It must get annoying for her to always have me around.”
“Did she say that to you?”
“No, Willem, of course not. I’m just guessing. From my vast experience with women, you know.”