Around him, the others are silent. “Yes,” he says, at last.
A nurse comes to prep him so Andy can administer the central venous catheter, which will be inserted into the subclavian vein, directly beneath his right collarbone. “This is a tricky vein to access because it’s so deep,” the nurse says, pulling down the neck of his gown and cleaning a square of his skin. “But you’re lucky to have Dr. Contractor. He’s very good with needles; he never misses.” He isn’t worried, but he knows Willem is, and he holds Willem’s hand as Andy first pierces his skin with the cold metal needle and then threads the coil of guide wire into him. “Don’t look,” he tells Willem. “It’s okay.” And so Willem stares instead at his face, which he tries to keep still and composed until Andy is finished and is taping the catheter’s length of slender plastic tubing to his chest.
He sleeps. He had thought he might be able to work from the hospital, but he is more exhausted than he thought he would be, cloudier, and after talking to the chairs of the various committees and some of his colleagues, he doesn’t have the strength to do anything else.
Harold and Julia leave—they have classes and office hours—but except for Richard and a few people from work, they don’t tell anyone he’s hospitalized; he won’t be there for long, and Willem has decided he needs sleep more than he needs visitors. He is still febrile, but less so, and there have been no further episodes of delirium. And strangely, for all that is happening, he feels, if not optimistic, then at least calm. Everyone around him is so sober, so thin-lipped, that he feels determined to defy them somehow, to defy the severity of the situation they keep telling him he’s in.
He can’t remember when he and Willem started referring to the hospital as the Hotel Contractor, in honor of Andy, but it seems they always have. “Watch out,” Willem would say to him even back at Lispenard Street, when he was hacking at a piece of steak some enraptured sous-chef at Ortolan had sneaked Willem at the end of his shift, “that cleaver’s really sharp, and if you chop off a thumb, we’ll have to go to the Hotel Contractor.” Or once, when he was hospitalized for a skin infection, he had sent Willem (away somewhere, shooting) a text reading “At Hotel Contractor. Not a big deal, but didn’t want you to hear through M or JB.” Now, though, when he tries to make Hotel Contractor jokes—complaining about the Hotel’s increasingly poor food and beverage services; about its poor quality of linens—Willem doesn’t respond.
“This isn’t funny, Jude,” he snaps on Friday evening, as they wait for Harold and Julia to arrive with dinner. “I wish you’d fucking stop kidding around.” He is quiet then, and they look at each other. “I was so scared,” Willem says, in a low voice. “You were so sick and I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I was so scared.”
“Willem,” he says, gently, “I know. I’m so grateful for you.” He hurries on before Willem can tell him he doesn’t need him to be grateful, he needs him to take the situation seriously. “I’m going to listen to Andy, I promise. I promise you I’m taking this seriously. And I promise you I’m not in any discomfort. I feel fine. It’s going to be fine.”
After ten days, Andy is satisfied that the fever has been eliminated, and he is discharged and sent home for two days to rest; he is back at the office on Friday. He had always resisted having a driver—he liked to drive himself; he liked the independence, the solitude—but now Willem’s assistant has hired a driver for him, a small, serious man named Mr. Ahmed, and on his way to and from the office, he sleeps. Mr. Ahmed also picks up his nurse, a woman named Patrizia who rarely speaks but is very gentle, and every day at one p.m., she meets him at Rosen Pritchard. His office there is all glass and looks out onto the floor, and he lowers the shades for privacy and takes off his jacket and tie and shirt, and lies down on the sofa in his undershirt and covers himself with a blanket, and Patrizia cleans the catheter and checks the skin around it to make sure there are no signs of infection—no swelling, no redness—and then inserts the IV and waits as the medicine drips into the catheter and slides into his veins. As they wait, he works and she reads a nursing journal or knits. Soon this too becomes normal: every Friday he sees Andy, who debrides his wounds and then examines him, sending him to the hospital after their session for X-rays so he can track the infection and make sure it isn’t spreading.
They cannot go away on the weekends because he needs to have his treatment, but in early October, after four weeks of antibiotics, Andy announces that he’s been talking to Willem, and if he doesn’t mind, he and Jane are going to come up to stay with them in Garrison for the weekend, and he’ll administer the drip himself.
It is wonderful, and rare, being out of the city, being back at their house, and the four of them enjoy one another’s company. He even feels well enough to give Andy an abbreviated tour of the property, which Andy has visited only in springtime or summer, but which is different in autumn: raw, sad, lovely, the barn’s roof plastered with fallen yellow gingko leaves that make it look as if it’s been laid with sheets of gold leaf.
Over dinner that Saturday night, Andy asks him, “You do realize we’ve now known each other for thirty years, right?”
“I do,” he smiles. He has in fact bought Andy something—a safari vacation for him and his family, to go on whenever he wants—for their anniversary, although he hasn’t told him about it yet.