He’d made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with lots of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn’t have an appetite for any of it. He served me, and then himself, and sat.
“This looks wonderful,” I told him. “Thank you for making it.” He nodded. We both looked at our plates, at his lovely meal that neither of us would eat.
“Jude,” I said, “I have to apologize. I’m really sorry—I never should have run out on you like that.”
“It’s all right,” he said, “I understand.”
“No,” I told him. “It was wrong of me. I was just so upset.”
He looked back down. “Do you know why I was upset?” I asked him.
“Because,” he began, “because I brought that into your house.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not why. Jude, this house isn’t just my house, or Julia’s: it’s yours, too. I want you to feel you can bring anything you’d have at home here.
“I’m upset because you’re doing this terrible thing to yourself.” He didn’t look up. “Do your friends know you do this? Does Andy?”
He nodded, slightly. “Willem knows,” he said, in a low voice. “And Andy.”
“And what does Andy say about this?” I asked, thinking, Goddammit, Andy.
“He says—he says I should see a therapist.”
“And have you?” He shook his head, and I felt rage build up in me again. “Why not?” I asked him, but he didn’t say anything. “Is there a bag like this in Cambridge?” I said, and after a silence, he looked up at me and nodded again.
“Jude,” I said, “why do you do this to yourself?”
For a long time, he was quiet, and I was quiet too. I listened to the sea. Finally, he said, “A few reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes it’s because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel,” he began, and glanced at me before looking down again. “And sometimes it’s because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all—it helps clear them away. And sometimes it’s because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”
“Why?” I asked him once I could speak again, but he only shook his head and didn’t answer, and I too went silent.
He took a breath. “Look,” he said, suddenly, decisively, looking at me directly, “if you want to dissolve the adoption, I’ll understand.”
I was so stunned that I was angry—that hadn’t even occurred to me. I was about to bark something back when I looked at him, at how he was trying to be brave, and saw that he was terrified: He really did think this was something I might want to do. He really would understand if I said I did. He was expecting it. Later, I realized that in those years just after the adoption, he was always wondering how permanent it was, always wondering what he would eventually do that would make me disown him.
“I would never,” I said, as firmly as I could.
That night, I tried to talk to him. He was ashamed of what he did, I could see that, but he genuinely couldn’t understand why I cared so much, why it so upset you and me and Andy. “It’s not fatal,” he kept saying, as if that were the concern, “I know how to control it.” He wouldn’t see a shrink, but he couldn’t tell me why. He hated doing it, I could tell, but he also couldn’t conceive of a life without it. “I need it,” he kept saying. “I need it. It makes things right.” But surely, I told him, there was a time in your life when you didn’t have it?, and he shook his head. “I need it,” he repeated. “It helps me, Harold, you have to believe me on this one.”
“Why do you need it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It helps me control my life,” he said, finally.
At the end, there was nothing more I could say. “I’m keeping this,” I said, holding the bag up, and he winced, and nodded. “Jude,” I said, and he looked back at me. “If I throw this away, are you going to make another one?”
He was very quiet, then, looking at his plate. “Yes,” he said.
I threw it out anyway, of course, stuffing it deep into a garbage bag that I carried to the Dumpster at the end of the road. We cleaned the kitchen in silence—we were both exhausted, and neither of us had eaten anything—and then he went to bed, and I did as well. In those days I was still trying to be respectful of his personal space, or I’d have grabbed him and held him, but I didn’t.
But as I was lying awake in bed, I thought of him, his long fingers craving the slice of the razor between them, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I got the big mixing bowl from the drawer beneath the oven, and began loading it with everything sharp I could find: knives and scissors and corkscrews and lobster picks. And then I took it with me to the living room, where I sat in my chair, the one facing the sea, clasping the bowl in my arms.