But they were all full of surprises, he had come to learn. When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency, and divulgences were a form of intimacy. Withholding the details of your life from your friends was considered first a sort of mystery and then a kind of stinginess, one that it was understood would preclude true friendship. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Willem,” JB would occasionally accuse him, and, “Are you keeping secrets from me? Don’t you trust me? I thought we were close.”
“We are, JB,” he’d said. “And I’m not keeping anything from you.” And he hadn’t been: there was nothing to keep. Of all of them, only Jude had secrets, real secrets, and while Willem had in the past been frustrated by what had seemed his unwillingness to reveal them, he had never felt that they weren’t close because of that; it had never impaired his ability to love him. It had been a difficult lesson for him to accept, this idea that he would never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways.
And yet Jude was still being discovered by him, even thirty-four years after they had met, and he was still fascinated by what he saw. That July, for the first time, he invited him to Rosen Pritchard’s annual summer barbeque. “You don’t have to come, Willem,” Jude had added immediately after asking him. “It’s going to be really, really boring.”
“I doubt that,” he said. “And I’m coming.”
The picnic was held on the grounds of a large old mansion on the Hudson, a more polished cousin of the house in which he had shot Uncle Vanya, and the entire firm—partners, associates, staff, and their families—had been invited. As they walked down the clover-thick back lawn toward the gathering, he had felt abruptly and unusually shy, keenly aware that he was an interloper, and when Jude was just minutes later plucked away from him by the firm’s chairman, who said he had some business he needed to discuss, quickly but urgently, he had to resist actually reaching out for Jude, who turned and gave him an apologetic smile and held up his hand—Five minutes—as he left.
So he was grateful for the sudden presence of Sanjay, one of the very few colleagues of Jude’s he had met, and who had the year before joined him as co-chair of his department so Jude could concentrate on bringing in new business while Sanjay handled the administrative and managerial details. He and Sanjay remained at the top of the hill, looking at the crowd beneath them, Sanjay pointing out to him various associates and young partners whom he and Jude hated. (Some of these doomed lawyers would turn and see Sanjay looking in their direction and Sanjay would wave back at them, cheerfully, muttering dark things about their lack of competence and resourcefulness to Willem as he did.) He began noticing that people were glancing up at him and then looking away, and one woman, who had been walking uphill, had ungracefully veered off in the opposite direction after noticing him standing there.
“I can see I’m a big hit here,” he joked to Sanjay, who smiled back at him.
“They’re not intimidated by you, Willem,” he said. “They’re intimidated by Jude.” He grinned. “Okay, and by you as well.”
Finally, Jude was returned to him, and they stood talking to the chairman (“I’m a big fan”) and Sanjay for a while before moving down the hill, where Jude introduced him to some of the people he’d heard about over the years. One of the paralegals asked to take a picture with him, and after he had, other people asked as well, and when Jude was pulled away from him again, he found himself listening to one of the partners in the tax department, who began describing to him his own stunt sequences from the second of his spy movies. At one point during Isaac’s monologue he had looked across the lawn and had caught Jude’s eye, who mouthed his apologies, and he had shaken his head and grinned back at him, but then had tugged on his left ear—their old signal—and although he hadn’t expected it, when he had looked over again, it was to see Jude marching toward him.
“Sorry, Isaac,” he’d said, firmly, “I’ve got to borrow Willem for a while,” and off he had pulled him. “I’m really sorry, Willem,” he whispered as they moved away, “the social ineptitude on display is particularly bad today; are you feeling like a panda at the zoo? On the other hand, I did tell you it was going to be awful. We can go in ten minutes, I promise.”
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m enjoying myself.” He always found it revealing to witness Jude in this other life of his, around the people who owned him for more hours a day than Willem himself did. Earlier, he had watched as Jude walked toward a group of young associates who were braying loudly over something on one of their phones. But when they saw Jude approaching them, they had nudged one another and grown silent and polite, greeting him with a heartiness so robust and obvious that Willem had cringed, and only once Jude had passed them did they huddle over the phone again, but more quietly this time.
By the time Jude was taken away from him a third time, he was feeling confident enough to begin introducing himself to the small pack of people who orbited him in a loose ring, smiling in his direction. He met a tall Asian woman named Clarissa whom he remembered Jude speaking about approvingly. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” he said, and Clarissa’s face changed into a radiant, relieved smile. “Jude’s talked about me?” she asked. He met an associate whose name he couldn’t remember who told him that Black Mercury 3081 had been the first R-rated movie he had ever seen, which made him feel tremendously old. He met another associate in Jude’s department who said that he’d taken two classes with Harold in law school and wondered what Harold was like, really. He met Jude’s secretaries’ children, and Sanjay’s son, and dozens of other people, a few of whom he had heard about by name but most of whom he hadn’t.