The last time in his life he would walk on his own—really walk: not just edging along the wall from one room to the next; not shuffling down the hallways of Rosen Pritchard; not inching his way through the lobby to the garage, sinking into the car seat with a groan of relief—had been their Christmas vacation. He was forty-six. They were in Bhutan: a good choice, he would later realize, for his final sustained spell of walking (although of course he hadn’t known that at the time), because it was a country in which everyone walked. The people they met there, including an old acquaintance of theirs from college, Karma, who was now the minister of forestry, spoke of walking not in terms of kilometers but in terms of hours. “Oh yes,” Karma had said, “when my father was growing up, he used to walk four hours to visit his aunt on the weekends. And then he would walk four hours back home.” He and Willem had marveled at this, although later, they had also agreed: the countryside was so pretty, a series of swooping, treed parabolas, the sky above a thin clear blue, that time spent walking here must move more quickly and pleasantly than time spent walking anywhere else.
He hadn’t felt at his best on that trip, although at least he was mobile. In the months before, he had been feeling weaker, but not in any truly specifiable way, not in any way that seemed to suggest some greater problem. He simply lost energy faster; he was achey instead of sore, a dull, constant thud of pain that followed him into sleep and was there to greet him when he woke. It was the difference, he told Andy, between a month speckled by thundershowers and a month in which it rained daily: not heavily but ceaselessly, a kind of dreary, enervating discomfort. In October, he’d had to use his wheelchair every day, which had been the most consecutive days he had ever been dependent on it. In November, although he had been well enough to make Thanksgiving dinner at Harold’s, he had been in too much pain to actually sit at the table to eat it, and he had spent the evening in his bedroom, lying as still as he could, semi-aware of Harold and Willem and Julia coming in to check on him, semi-aware of his apologizing for ruining the holiday for them, semi-aware of the muted conversation among the three of them and Laurence and Gillian, James and Carey, that he half heard coming from the dining room. After that, Willem had wanted to cancel their trip, but he had insisted, and he was glad he had—for he felt there was something restorative about the beauty of the landscape, about the cleanliness and quiet of the mountains, about getting to see Willem surrounded by streams and trees, which was always where he looked most comfortable.
It was a good vacation, but by the end, he was ready to leave. One of the reasons he had been able to convince Willem that they could go on this trip at all was because his friend Elijah, who now ran a hedge fund that he represented, was going on holiday to Nepal with his family, and they caught flights both from and back to New York on his plane. He had worried that Elijah might be in a talkative mood, but he hadn’t been, and he had slept, gratefully, almost the entire way home, his feet and back blazing with pain.
The day after they returned to Greene Street he couldn’t lift himself out of bed. He was in such distress that his body seemed to be one long exposed nerve, frayed at either end; he had the sense that if he were to be touched with a drop of water, his entire being would sizzle and hiss in response. He was rarely so exhausted, so sore that he couldn’t even sit up, and he could tell that Willem—around whom he made a particular effort, so he wouldn’t worry—was alarmed, and he had to plead with him not to call Andy. “All right,” Willem had said, reluctantly, “but if you’re not better by tomorrow, I’m calling him.” He nodded, and Willem sighed. “Dammit, Jude,” he said, “I knew we shouldn’t’ve gone.”
But the next day, he was better: better enough to get out of bed, at least. He couldn’t walk; all day, his legs and feet and back felt as if they were being driven through with iron bolts, but he made himself smile and talk and move about, though when Willem left the room or turned away from him, he could feel his face drooping with fatigue.
And then that was how it was, and they both grew used to it: although he now needed his wheelchair daily, he tried to walk every day for as much as he could, even if it was just to the bathroom, and he was careful about conserving his energy. When he was cooking, he made certain he had everything assembled on the counter in front of him before he started so he wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth to the refrigerator; he turned down invitations to dinners, parties, openings, fund-raisers, telling people, telling Willem that he had too much work to attend them, but really he came home and wheeled his way slowly across the apartment, the punishingly large apartment, stopping to rest when he needed to, dozing in bed so he’d have enough life in him to talk to Willem when he returned.
At the end of January he finally went to see Andy, who listened to him and then examined him, carefully. “There’s nothing wrong with you, as such,” he said when he was finished. “You’re just getting older.”
“Oh,” he said, and they were both quiet, for what was there for them to say? “Well,” he said, at last, “maybe I’ll get so weak that I’ll be able to convince Willem I don’t have the energy to go to Loehmann any longer,” because one night that fall he had—stupidly, drunkenly, romantically even—promised Willem he’d see Dr. Loehmann for another nine months.
Andy had sighed but had smiled, too. “You’re such a brat,” he said.