“Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’ll wait until after we eat.” He took a breath. He could feel his anxiety fade; he could feel himself returning to who he was. “But would you sing with me?” Every morning for the past two months, they had been singing with each other in preparation for Duets. In the film, his character and the character’s wife led an annual Christmas pageant, and both he and the actress playing his wife would be performing their own vocals. The director had sent him a list of songs to work on, and Jude had been practicing with him: Jude took the melody, and he took the harmony.
“Sure,” Jude said. “Our usual?” For the past week, they’d been working on “Adeste Fideles,” which he would have to sing a cappella, and for the past week, he’d been pitching sharp at the exact same point, at “Venite adoremus,” right in the first stanza. He’d wince every time he did it, hearing the error, and Jude would shake his head at him and keep going, and he’d follow him until the end. “You’re overthinking it,” Jude would say. “When you go sharp, it’s because you’re concentrating too hard on staying on key; just don’t think about it, Willem, and you’ll get it.”
That morning, though, he felt certain he’d get it right. He gave Jude the bunch of herbs, which he was still holding, and Jude thanked him, pinching its little purple flowers between his fingers to release its perfume. “I think it’s a kind of perilla,” he said, and held his fingers up for Willem to smell.
“Nice,” he said, and they smiled at each other.
And so Jude began, and he followed, and he made it through without going sharp. And at the end of the song, just after the last note, Jude immediately began singing the next song on the list, “For Unto Us a Child Is Born,” and after that, “Good King Wenceslas,” and again and again, Willem followed. His voice wasn’t as full as Jude’s, but he could tell in those moments that it was good enough, that it was maybe better than good enough: he could tell it sounded better with Jude’s, and he closed his eyes and let himself appreciate it.
They were still singing when the doorbell chimed with their breakfast, but as he was standing, Jude put his hand on his wrist, and they remained there, Jude sitting, he standing, until they had sung the last words of the song, and only after they had finished did he go to answer the door. Around him, the room was redolent of the unknown herb he’d found, green and fresh and yet somehow familiar, like something he hadn’t known he had liked until it had appeared, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his life.
2
THE FIRST TIME Willem left him—this was some twenty months ago, two Januarys ago—everything went wrong. Within two weeks of Willem’s departure to Texas to begin filming Duets, he’d had three episodes with his back (including one at the office, and another, this one at home, that had lasted a full two hours). The pain in his feet returned. A cut (from what, he had no idea) opened up on his right calf. And yet it had all been fine. “You’re so damn cheerful about all of this,” Andy had said, when he was forced to make his second appointment with him in a week. “I’m suspicious.”
“Oh, well,” he’d said, even though he could hardly speak because the pain was so intense. “It happens, right?” That night, though, as he lay in bed, he thanked his body for keeping itself in check, for controlling itself for so long. For those months he secretly thought of as his and Willem’s courtship, he hadn’t used his wheelchair once. His episodes had been seldom, and brief, and never in Willem’s presence. He knew it was silly—Willem knew what was wrong with him, he had seen him at his worst—but he was grateful that as the two of them were beginning to view each other in a different way, he had been allowed a period of reinvention, a spell of being able to impersonate an able-bodied person. So when he was returned to his normal state, he didn’t tell Willem about what had been happening to him—he was so bored by the subject that he couldn’t imagine anyone else wouldn’t be as well—and by the time Willem came home in March, he was more or less better, walking again, the wound once again mostly under control.
Since that first time, Willem has been gone for extended periods four additional times—twice for shooting, twice for publicity tours—and each time, sometimes the very day Willem left, his body had broken itself somehow. But he had appreciated its sense of timing, its courtesy: it was as if his body, before his mind, had decided for him that he should pursue this relationship, and had done its part by removing as many obstacles and embarrassments as possible.
Now it is mid-September, and Willem is preparing to leave again. As has become their ritual—ever since the Last Supper, a lifetime ago—they spend the Saturday before Willem’s departure having dinner somewhere extravagant and then the rest of the night talking. Sunday they sleep late into the morning, and Sunday afternoon, they review practicalities: things to be done while Willem is away, outstanding matters to be resolved, decisions to be made. Ever since their relationship has changed from what it had been into what it now is, their conversations have become both more intimate and more mundane, and that final weekend is always a perfect, condensed reflection of that: Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps their life together inching along.