The next morning he woke very early, creeping past Willem sleeping on the sofa at the far end of his bedroom, and walked through the apartment. Someone had put flowers in every room, or branches of maple leaves, or bowls of squashes. The space smelled delicious, like apples and cedar. He went to his study, where someone had stacked his mail on his desk, and where Malcolm’s little paper house sat atop a stack of books. He saw unopened envelopes from JB, from Asian Henry Young, from India, from Ali, and knew they had made drawings for him. He walked past the dining-room table, letting his fingers skim along the spines of the books lined up on their shelves; he wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and saw that it was filled with things he liked. Richard had started working more with ceramics, and at the center of the dining table was a large, amorphous piece, the glaze rough and pleasant under his palms, painted with white threadlike veins. Next to it stood his and Willem’s Saint Jude statue, which Willem had taken with him when he moved to Perry Street, but which had now found its way back to him.
The days slipped by and he let them. In the morning he swam, and he and Willem ate breakfast. The physical therapist came and had him practice squeezing rubber balls, short lengths of rope, toothpicks, pens. Sometimes he had to pick up multiple objects with one hand, holding them between his fingers, which was difficult. His hands shook more than ever, and he felt sharp prickles vibrating through his fingers, but she told him not to worry, that it was his muscles repairing themselves, his nerves resetting themselves. He had lunch, he napped. While he napped, Richard came to watch him and Willem went out to run errands and go downstairs to the gym and, he hoped, do something interesting and indulgent that didn’t involve him and his problems. People came to see him in the afternoon: all the same people, and new people, too. They stayed an hour and then Willem made them leave. Malcolm came with JB and the four of them had an awkward, polite conversation about things they had done when they were in college, but he was glad to see JB, and thought he might like to see him again when he was less cloudy-headed, so he could apologize to him and tell him he forgave him. As he was leaving, JB told him, quietly, “It’ll get better, Judy. Trust me, I know,” and then added, “At least you didn’t hurt anyone in the process,” and he felt guilty, because he knew he had. Andy came at the end of the day and examined him; he unwrapped his bandages and cleaned the area around his stitches. He still hadn’t looked at his stitches—he couldn’t bring himself to—and when Andy was cleaning them, he looked elsewhere or closed his eyes. After Andy left, they ate dinner, and after dinner, after the boutiques and few remaining galleries had shuttered for the night and the neighborhood was deserted, they walked, making a neat square around SoHo—east to Lafayette, north to Houston, west to Sixth, south to Grand, east to Greene—before returning home. It was a short walk, but it left him exhausted, and he once fell on the way to the bedroom, his legs simply sliding out from beneath him. Julia and Harold took the train down on Thursdays and spent all day Friday and Saturday with him, and part of Sunday as well.
Every morning, Willem asked him, “Do you want to talk to Dr. Loehmann today?” And every morning he answered, “Not yet, Willem. Soon, I promise.”
By the end of October, he was feeling stronger, less shaky. He was managing to stay awake for longer stretches at a time. He could lie on his back and hold a book up without it trembling so badly that he had to roll over onto his stomach so he could prop it against a pillow. He could butter his own bread, and he could wear shirts with buttons again because he was able to slip the button into its hole.
“What’re you reading?” he asked Willem one afternoon, sitting next to him on the living-room couch.
“A play I’m thinking of doing,” Willem said, putting the pages down.
He looked at a point beyond Willem’s head. “Are you going away again?” It was monstrously selfish to ask, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“No,” said Willem, after a silence. “I thought I’d stick around New York for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
He smiled at the couch’s cushions. “It’s fine with me,” he said, and looked up to see Willem smiling at him. “It’s nice to see you smile again,” was all he said, and went back to reading.
In November he realized that he had done nothing to celebrate Willem’s forty-third birthday in late August, and mentioned it to him. “Well, technically, you get a pass, because I wasn’t here,” said Willem. “But sure, I’ll let you make it up to me. Let’s see.” He thought. “Are you ready to go out into the world? Do you want to have dinner? An early dinner?”
“Sure,” he said, and they went the next week to a little Japanese place in the East Village that served pressed sushi and where they’d been going for years. He ordered his own food, although he had been nervous, worried that he was somehow choosing incorrectly, but Willem was patient and waited as he deliberated, and when he had decided, he’d nodded at him. “Good choice,” he said. As they ate, they spoke of their friends, and the play Willem had decided he was going to do, and the novel he was reading: anything but him.
“I think we should go to Morocco,” he said as they walked slowly home, and Willem looked at him.
“I’ll look into it,” Willem said, and took his arm to move him out of the path of a bicyclist who was zooming down the street.
“I want to get you something for your birthday,” he said, a few blocks later. Really, he wanted to get Willem something to thank him, and to try to express what he couldn’t say to him: a gift that would properly convey years of gratitude and love. After their earlier conversation about the play, he had remembered that Willem had, in fact, committed the previous year to a project that would be shooting in Russia in early January. But when he mentioned this to him, Willem had shrugged. “Oh, that?” he’d asked. “Didn’t work out. It’s fine. I didn’t really want to do it anyway.” He had been suspicious, though, and when he had looked online, there were reports that Willem had pulled out of the film for personal reasons; another actor had been cast instead. He had stared at the screen then, the story blurring before him, but when he had asked Willem about it, Willem had shrugged again. “That’s what you say when you realize you and the director really aren’t on the same page and no one wants to lose face,” he said. But he knew that Willem wasn’t telling him the truth.