“I like your famous stir-fry,” he says, although he can’t remember what it is, and if he likes it or not. “Thank you, Richard.”
Richard pours them both a glass of wine, and then holds his up. “Happy birthday, Jude,” he says, solemnly, and he realizes that Richard is right: today is his birthday. Harold has been calling and e-mailing him all this week with a frequency that is unusual even for him, and except for the most cursory of replies, he has not spoken to him at all. He knows Harold will be worried about him. There have been more texts from Andy as well, and from some other people, and now he knows why, and he begins to cry: from everyone’s kindness, which he has repaid so poorly, from his loneliness, from the proof that life has, despite his efforts to let it, gone on after all. He is fifty-one, and Willem has been dead for eight months.
Richard doesn’t say anything, just sits next to him on the bench and holds him. “I know this isn’t going to help,” he says at last, “but I love you too, Jude.”
He shakes his head, unable to speak. In recent years he has gone from being embarrassed about crying at all to crying constantly to himself to crying around Willem to now, in the final falling away of his dignity, crying in front of anyone, at any time, over anything.
He leans against Richard’s chest and sobs into his shirt. Richard is another person whose unstinting, unwavering friendship and compassion for him has always perplexed him. He knows that some of Richard’s feelings for him are twined with his feelings for Willem, and this he understands: he had made Willem a promise, and Richard is serious about his obligations. But there is something about Richard’s steadiness, his complete reliability, that—coupled with his height, his very size—makes him think of him as some sort of massive tree-god, an oak come into human form, something solid and ancient and indestructible. Theirs is not a chatty relationship, but it is Richard who has become the friend of his adulthood, who has become, in a way, not just a friend but a parent, although he is only four years older. A brother, then: someone whose dependability and sense of decency are inviolable.
Finally, he is able to stop, and apologize, and after he cleans himself up in the bathroom, they eat, slowly, drinking the wine, talking about Richard’s work. At the end of the meal, Richard returns from the kitchen with a lumpy little cake, into which he has thrust six candles. “Five plus one,” Richard explains. He makes himself smile, then; he blows out the candles; Richard cuts them both slices. The cake is crumbly and figgy, more scone than cake, and they both eat their pieces in silence.
He stands to help Richard with the dishes, but when Richard tells him to go upstairs, he is relieved, because he’s exhausted; this is the most socializing he has done since Thanksgiving. At the door, Richard hands him something, a package wrapped in brown paper, and then hugs him. “He wouldn’t want you to be unhappy, Judy,” he says, and he nods against Richard’s cheek. “He would hate seeing you like this.”
“I know,” he says.
“And do me a favor,” Richard says, still holding him. “Call JB, okay? I know it’s difficult for you, but—he loved Willem too, you know. Not like you, I know, but still. And Malcolm. He misses him.”
“I know,” he repeats, tears coming to his eyes once more. “I know.”
“Come back next Sunday,” Richard says, and kisses him. “Or any day, really. I miss seeing you.”
“I will,” he says. “Richard—thank you.”
“Happy birthday, Jude.”
He takes the elevator upstairs. It’s suddenly grown late. Back in his apartment, he goes to his study, sits on the sofa. There is a box that he hasn’t opened that was messengered over to him from Flora weeks ago; inside it are Malcolm’s bequests to him, and to Willem—which are now also his. The only thing Willem’s death has helped with is blunting the shock, the horror of Malcolm’s, and still, he has been unable to open the box.
But now he will. First, though, he unwraps Richard’s present and sees that it is a small bust, carved from wood and mounted on a heavy black-iron cube, of Willem, and he gasps as if slugged. Richard has always claimed that he’s terrible with figurative sculpture, but he knows he’s not, and this piece is proof of it. He glides his fingers over Willem’s sightless eyes, across Willem’s crest of hair, and after doing so, lifts them to his nose and smells sandalwood. On the bottom of the base is etched “To J on his 51st. With love. R.”
He starts to cry again; stops. He places the bust on the cushion next to him and opens the box. At first he sees nothing but wads of newspaper, and he gropes carefully inside until his hands close on something solid, which he lifts out: it is the scale model of Lantern House, its walls rendered from boxwood, that had once sat in Bellcast’s offices, alongside the scale models of every other project the firm had ever built, in form or in reality. The model is about two feet square, and he settles it on his lap before holding it to his face, looking through its thin Plexiglas windows, hoisting the roof up and walking his fingers through its rooms.
He wipes his eyes and reaches into the box again. The next thing he retrieves is an envelope fat with pictures of them, the four of them, or just of him and Willem: from college, from New York, from Truro, from Cambridge, from Garrison, from India, from France, from Iceland, from Ethiopia—places they’d lived, trips they’d taken.