“No, Andy,” he says. “No. I’m not doing this to myself. I swear to you. I swear on—on Harold and Julia. I swear on Willem.”
“Okay,” Andy says, exhaling. “I mean, that’s a relief. It’s a relief to know you’re just being a bonehead and not following doctor’s orders, which, of course, is nothing new. And, apparently, that you’re a terrible tennis player.” He smiles, and he makes himself smile back.
Andy orders them more beers, and for a while, they are quiet. “Do you know, Jude,” Andy says, slowly, “that over the years I have wondered and wondered what to do about you? No, don’t say anything—let me finish. I would—I do—lie awake at night asking myself if I’m making the right decisions about you: there’ve been so many times when I was so close to having you committed, to calling Harold or Willem and telling them that we needed to get together and have you taken to a hospital. I’ve talked to classmates of mine who are shrinks and told them about you, about this patient I’m very close to, and asked them what they would do in my position. I’ve listened to all their advice. I’ve listened to my shrink’s advice. But no one can ever tell me for certain what the right answer is.
“I’ve tortured myself about this. But I’ve always felt—you’re so high-functioning in so many ways, and you’ve achieved this weird but undeniably successful equilibrium in your life, that I felt that, I don’t know, I just shouldn’t upset it. You know? So I’ve let you go on cutting yourself year after year, and every year, every time I see you, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by letting you do so, and how and if I should be pushing harder to get you help, to make you stop doing this to yourself.”
“I’m sorry, Andy,” he whispers.
“No, Jude,” Andy says. “It’s not your fault. You’re the patient. I’m supposed to figure out what’s best for you, and I feel—I don’t know if I have. So when you came in with bruises, the first thing I thought was that I had made the wrong decision after all. You know?” Andy looks at him, and he is surprised once more to see Andy swipe, quickly, at his eyes. “All these years,” says Andy, after a pause, and they are both quiet again.
“Andy,” he says, wanting to cry himself. “I swear to you I’m not doing anything else to myself. Just the cutting.”
“Just the cutting!” Andy repeats, and makes a strange squawk of laughter. “Well, I suppose—given the context—I have to be grateful for that. ‘Just the cutting.’ You know how messed up that is, right, that that should be such a relief to me?”
“I know,” he says.
Tuesday turns to Wednesday, and then to Thursday; his face feels worse, and then better, and then worse again. He had worried that Caleb might call him or, worse, materialize at his apartment, but the days pass and he doesn’t: maybe he has stayed out in Bridgehampton. Maybe he has gotten run over by a car. He finds, oddly, that he feels nothing—not fear, not hate, not anything. The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a relationship, and it was awful, and now he will never need to have one again, because he has proven himself incapable of being in one. His time with Caleb has confirmed everything he feared people would think of him, of his body, and his next task is to learn to accept that, and to do so without sorrow. He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was—terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing—he felt with Caleb.
That Friday he sees Harold, who is in town for a conference at Columbia. He had already written Harold to warn him of his injury, but it doesn’t stop Harold from overreacting, exclaiming and fussing over him and asking him dozens of times if he is actually all right.
They have met at one of Harold’s favorite restaurants, where the beef comes from cows that the chef has named and raised himself on a farm upstate, and the vegetables are grown on the roof of the building, and they are talking and eating their entrées—he is careful to only chew on the right side of his mouth, and to avoid letting any food come in contact with his new tooth—when he senses someone standing near their table, and when he looks up, it is Caleb, and although he had convinced himself he feels nothing, he is immediately, overwhelmingly terrified.
He had never seen Caleb drunk in their time together, but he can tell instantly that he is, and in a dangerous mood. “Your secretary told me where you were,” Caleb says to him. “You must be Harold,” he says, and extends his hand to Harold, who shakes it, looking bewildered.
“Jude?” Harold asks him, but he can’t speak.
“Caleb Porter,” says Caleb, and slides into the semicircular booth, pressing against his side. “Your son and I are dating.”
Harold looks at Caleb, and then at him, and opens his mouth, speechless for the first time since he has known him.
“Let me ask you something,” Caleb says to Harold, leaning in as if delivering a confidence, and he stares at Caleb’s face, his vulpine handsomeness, his dark, glinting eyes. “Be honest. Don’t you ever wish you had a normal son, not a cripple?”
For a moment, no one says anything, and he can feel something, a current, sizzle in the air. “Who the fuck are you?” hisses Harold, and then he watches Harold’s face change, his features contorting so quickly and violently from shock to disgust to anger that he looks, for an instant, inhuman, a ghoul in Harold’s clothing. And then his expression changes again, and he watches something harden in Harold’s face, as if his very muscles are ossifying before him.