He swallowed, counted to three. “Yes,” he said, quietly, furious at himself and relieved as well. He had won himself more time: of Willem’s presence, but also of sex. What, he wonders, if he had said no?
And so on they went. But in compensation for the sex, there is the cutting, which he has been doing more and more: to help ease the feelings of shame, and to rebuke himself for his feelings of resentment. For so long, he had been so disciplined: once a week, two cuts each time, no more. But in the past six months, he has broken his rules again and again, and now he is cutting himself as much as he had when he was with Caleb, as much as he had in the weeks before the adoption.
His accelerated cutting was the topic of their first truly awful fight, not only as a couple but ever, in their entire twenty-nine years of friendship. Sometimes the cutting has no place in their relationship. And sometimes it is their relationship, their every conversation, the thing they are discussing even when they’re not saying anything. He never knows when he’ll come to bed in his long-sleeved T-shirt and Willem will say nothing, or when Willem will begin interrogating him. He has explained to Willem so many times that he needs it, that it helps him, that he is unable to stop, but Willem cannot or will not comprehend him.
“Don’t you understand why this upsets me so much?” Willem asks him.
“No, Willem,” he says. “I know what I’m doing. You have to trust me.”
“I do trust you, Jude,” Willem says. “But trust is not the issue here. The issue is you hurting yourself.” And then the conversation deadends itself.
Or there is the conversation that leads to Willem saying, “Jude, how would you feel if I did this to myself?” and him saying, “It’s not the same thing, Willem,” and Willem saying, “Why?” and him saying, “Because, Willem—it’s you. You don’t deserve it,” and Willem saying, “And you do?” and him being unable to answer, or at least not able to provide an answer that Willem would find adequate.
About a month before the fight, they’d had a different fight. Willem had, of course, noticed that he was cutting himself more, but he hadn’t known why, only that he was, and one night, after he was certain Willem was asleep, he was creeping toward the bathroom, when suddenly, Willem had grabbed him hard around the wrist, and he had gasped from fright. “Jesus, Willem,” he’d said. “You scared me.”
“Where are you going, Jude?” Willem had asked, his voice tense.
He’d tried to pull his arm free, but Willem’s grip was too strong. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said. “Let go, Willem, I’m serious.” They had stared at each other in the dark until finally Willem had released him, and then had gotten out of bed as well.
“Let’s go, then,” he’d said. “I’m going to watch you.”
They had quarreled, then, hissing at each other, each of them furious at the other, each of them feeling betrayed, he accusing Willem of treating him like a child, Willem accusing him of keeping secrets from him, each as close as they had ever been to yelling at the other. It had ended with him wrenching out of Willem’s grasp and trying to run toward his study so he could lock himself in and cut himself with a pair of scissors, but in his panic he had stumbled and fallen and split his lip, and Willem had hurried over with a bag of ice and they had sat there on the living-room floor, halfway between their bedroom and his study, their arms around each other, apologizing.
“I can’t have you doing this to yourself,” Willem had said the next day.
“I can’t not,” he said, after a long silence. You don’t want to see me without it, he wanted to tell Willem, as well as: I don’t know how I’d make my way through life without it. But he didn’t. He was never able to explain to Willem what the cutting did for him in a way he’d understand: how it was a form of punishment and also of cleansing, how it allowed him to drain everything toxic and spoiled from himself, how it kept him from being irrationally angry at others, at everyone, how it kept him from shouting, from violence, how it made him feel like his body, his life, was truly his and no one else’s. Certainly he could never have sex without it. Sometimes he wondered: If Brother Luke hadn’t given it to him as a solution, who would he have become? Someone who hurt other people, he thought; someone who tried to make everyone feel as terrible as he did; someone even worse than the person he was.
Willem had been silent for even longer. “Try,” he said. “For me, Judy. Try.”
And he did. For the next few weeks, when he woke in the night, or after they’d had sex and he was waiting for Willem to fall asleep so he could go to the bathroom, he instead made himself lie still, his hands in fists, counting his breaths, the back of his neck perspiring, his mouth dry. He pictured one of the motels’ stairwells, and throwing himself against it, the thud he would make, how satisfyingly tiring it would be, how much it would hurt. He both wished Willem knew how hard he was trying and was grateful that he didn’t.
But sometimes this wasn’t enough, and on those nights, he would skulk down to the ground floor, where he would swim, trying to exhaust himself. In the mornings, Willem demanded to look at his arms, and they had fought over that as well, but in the end it had been easier to just let Willem look. “Happy?” he barked at him, jerking his arms back from Willem’s hands, rolling his sleeves back down and buttoning the cuffs, unable to look at him.