And that was the end. After that, he became an adult. As he lay in the hospital, Ana sitting by his side, he made promises to himself. He evaluated the mistakes he had made. He never had known whom to trust: he had followed anyone who had shown him any kindness. After, though, he decided that he would change this. No longer would he trust people so quickly. No longer would he have sex. No longer would he expect to be saved.
“It’ll never be this bad,” Ana used to say to him in the hospital. “Things’ll never be this bad again,” and although he knew she meant the pain, he also liked to think she meant his life in general: that with every year, things would get better. And she had been right: things did get better. And Brother Luke had been right as well, because when he was sixteen, his life changed. A year after Dr. Traylor, he was in the college he had dreamed of; with every day he didn’t have sex, he was becoming cleaner and cleaner. His life became more improbable by the year. Every year, his own good fortunes multiplied and intensified, and he was astonished again and again by the things and generosities that were bequeathed to him, by the people who entered his life, people so different from the people he had known that they seemed to be another species altogether: How, after all, could Dr. Traylor and Willem both be named the same sort of being? How could Father Gabriel and Andy? How could Brother Luke and Harold? Did what existed in the first group also exist in the second, and if so, how had that second group chosen otherwise, how had they chosen what to become? Things had not just corrected themselves; they had reversed themselves, to an almost absurd degree. He had gone from nothing to an embarrassing bounty. He would remember, then, Harold’s claim that life compensated for its losses, and he would realize the truth of that, although sometimes it would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it, so he would allow it to keep moving him forward. And so, as the years went by, he broke his promises to himself again and again. He did end up following people who were kind to him. He did trust people again. He did have sex again. He did hope to be saved. And he was right to do so: not every time, of course, but most of the time. He ignored what the past had taught him and more often than he should have been, he was rewarded for it. He regretted none of it, not even the sex, because he had had it with hope, and to make someone else happy, someone who had given him everything.
One night shortly after he and Willem had become a couple, they had been at a dinner party at Richard’s, a raucous, casual affair of just people they loved and people they liked—JB and Malcolm and Black Henry Young and Asian Henry Young and Phaedra and Ali and all of their boyfriends and girlfriends, their husbands and wives. He was in the kitchen helping Richard prepare dessert, and JB came in—he was a little drunk—and put his arm around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. “Well, Judy,” he said, “you really ended up with it all in the end, didn’t you? The career, the money, the apartment, the man. How’d you get so lucky?” JB had grinned at him, and he had grinned back. He was glad Willem wasn’t there to overhear that comment, because he knew Willem would get testy at what he saw as JB’s jealousy, at his conviction that everyone else had, and had had, life easier than he did, that he, Jude, was blessed in a way that no one else was.
But he didn’t see it like this. He knew it was in part JB’s way of being ironic, of congratulating him for fortune that they both knew was, yes, excessive but also deeply appreciated. And if he was to be honest, he was also flattered by JB’s jealousy: to JB, he wasn’t a cripple who was being cosmically repaid for a lousy run; he was JB’s equal, someone in whom JB saw only the things to envy and never the things to pity. And besides, JB was right: How did he get so lucky? How did he end up with everything he had? He was never to know; he was always to wonder.
“I don’t know, JB,” he said, handing him the first slice of cake and smiling at him, as from the dining room, he could hear Willem’s voice saying something, and then a blast of laughter from everyone else, a sound of pure delight. “But you know, I’ve been lucky all my life.”
3
THE WOMAN’S NAME is Claudine and she is a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, a jewelry designer, which is something of a deviation for him, as he usually only sleeps with people in the industry, who are more accustomed to, more forgiving of, temporary arrangements.
She is thirty-three, with long dark hair that lightens at its tips, and very small hands, hands like a child’s, on which she wears rings that she has made, dark with gold and glinting with stones; before they have sex, she takes them off last, as if these rings, not her underwear, are what conceal the most private parts of her.
They have been sleeping together—not seeing each other, because he sees no one—for almost two months, which again is a deviation for him, and he knows he will have to end it soon. He had told her when they had begun that it was only sex, that he was in love with someone else, and that he couldn’t spend the night, not ever, and she had seemed fine with that; she had said she was fine with it, anyway, and that she was in love with someone else herself. But he has seen no evidence of another man in her apartment, and whenever he texts, she is always available. Another warning sign: he will have to end it.
Now he kisses her on her forehead, sits up. “I have to go,” he says.
“No,” she says. “Stay. Just a little longer.”
“I can’t,” he says.
“Five minutes,” she says.
“Five,” he agrees, and lies back down. But after five minutes he kisses her again on the side of the face. “I really do have to go,” he tells her, and she makes a noise, one of protest and resignation, and turns over onto her side.