It was a hot, breezeless, brilliant day, and although he had drunk steadily all afternoon—limonata, water, prosecco, iced tea—it had been such a busy gathering that by the time they left, two hours later, neither of them had actually had the opportunity to eat anything, and they stopped at a farm stand to buy corn so they could grill it with zucchini and tomatoes from their garden up at the house.
“I learned a lot about you today,” he told Jude as they ate their dinner under the dark blue sky. “I learned that most of the firm is terrified of you and think that if they kiss up to me, I might put in a good word with you. I learned that I’m even older than I had realized. I learned that you’re right: you do work with a bunch of nerds.”
Jude had been smiling, but now he laughed. “See?” he asked. “I told you, Willem.”
“But I had a great time,” he said. “I did! I want to come again. But next time I think we should invite JB, and blow Rosen Pritchard’s collective mind,” and Jude had laughed again.
That had been almost two months ago, and since then, he has spent most of his time at Lantern House. As an early fifty-second birthday present, he’d asked Jude to take off every Saturday for the rest of the summer, and Jude has: every Friday he drives up to the house; every Monday morning, he drives back to the city. Because Jude would have the car during the week, he’d rented—partly as a joke, though he was secretly enjoying driving around in it—a convertible, in an alarming color that Jude referred to as “harlot red.” During the weekdays, he reads and swims and cooks and sleeps; he has a very busy autumn coming up, and he knows from how replenished and calm he feels that he’ll be ready.
At the grocery store he fills a paper bag with limes, and then a second one with lemons, buys some extra seltzer water, and drives to the train station, where he waits, leaning his head on the seat and closing his eyes until he hears Malcolm calling his name and sits up.
“JB didn’t come,” Malcolm says, sounding annoyed, as Willem kisses him and Sophie hello. “He and Fredrik broke up—maybe—this morning. But maybe they didn’t, because he said he was going to come up tomorrow. I couldn’t really figure out what was going on.”
He groans. “I’ll call him from the house,” he says. “Hi, Soph. Have you guys eaten lunch yet? We can start cooking as soon as we get back.”
They haven’t, so he calls Jude to tell him he can start boiling the water for the pasta, but Jude’s already begun. “I got the limes,” he tells him. “And JB’s not coming until tomorrow; some difficulty with Fredrik that Mal couldn’t quite follow. Do you want to call him and find out what’s happening?”
He loads his friends’ bags into the backseat, and Malcolm gets in, glancing at the car’s trunk as he does. “Interesting color,” he says.
“Thanks,” he says. “It’s called ‘harlot red.’ ”
“Really?”
Malcolm’s persistent credulity makes him grin. “Yes,” he says. “Ready, guys?”
As he drives, they talk about how long it’s been since they’ve seen one another, about how glad Sophie and Malcolm are to be home, about Malcolm’s disastrous driving lessons, about how perfect the weather is, how sweet and haylike the air smells. The best summer, he thinks again.
It is a thirty-minute drive back to the house from the station, a little faster if he hurries, but he doesn’t hurry, because the drive itself is pretty. And when he crosses the final large intersection, he doesn’t even see the truck coming toward him, barreling into traffic against the light, and by the time he feels it, a tremendous crush crumpling the passenger-seat side of the car, where Sophie is sitting next to him, he is already aloft, being ejected into the air. “No!” he shouts, or thinks he does, and then, in an instant, he sees a flash of Jude’s face: just his face, his expression still unresolved, torn from his body and suspended against a black sky. His ears, his head, fill with the roar of pleating metal, of exploding glass, of his own useless howls.
But his final thoughts are not of Jude, but of Hemming. He sees the house he lived in as a child and, sitting in his wheelchair in the center of the lawn, just before it slopes down toward the stables, Hemming, staring at him with a steady, constant gaze, the kind he was never able to give him in life.
He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. “Hemming!” he shouts, and then, nonsensically, “Wait for me!” And he begins to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet strike the ground beneath him.
[ VI ]
Dear Comrade
1
ONE OF THE first movies Willem ever starred in was a project called Life After Death. The film was a take on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and was told from alternating perspectives and shot by two different, highly regarded directors. Willem played O., a young musician in Stockholm whose girlfriend had just died, and who had begun having delusions that when he played certain melodies, she would appear beside him. An Italian actress, Fausta, played E., O.’s deceased girlfriend.