Harold sighs. “Jude,” he says, “there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.” They’re quiet again. “You’re so thin,” Harold continues, and when he doesn’t say anything, “What does Andy say?”
“I can’t keep having this conversation,” he says at last, his voice scraped and hoarse. “I can’t, Harold. And you can’t, either. I feel like all I do is disappoint you, and I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry for all of it. But I’m really trying. I’m doing the best I can. I’m sorry if it’s not good enough.” Harold tries to interject, but he talks over him. “This is who I am. This is it, Harold. I’m sorry I’m such a problem for you. I’m sorry I’m ruining your retirement. I’m sorry I’m not happier. I’m sorry I’m not over Willem. I’m sorry I have a job you don’t respect. I’m sorry I’m such a nothing of a person.” He no longer knows what he’s saying; he no longer knows how he feels: he wants to cut himself, to disappear, to lie down and never get up again, to hurl himself into space. He hates himself; he pities himself; he hates himself for pitying himself. “I think you should go,” he says. “I think you should leave.”
“Jude,” Harold says.
“Please go,” he says. “Please. I’m tired. I need to be left alone. Please leave me alone.” And he turns from Harold and stands, waiting, until he hears Harold walk away from him.
After Harold leaves, he takes the elevator to the roof. Here there is a stone wall, chest-high, that lines the perimeter of the building, and he leans against it, swallowing the cool air, placing his palms flat against the top of the wall to try to stop them from shaking. He thinks of Willem, of how he and Willem used to stand on this roof at night, not saying anything, just looking down into other people’s apartments. From the southern end of the roof, they could almost see the roof of their old building on Lispenard Street, and sometimes they would pretend that they could see not just the building, but them within it, their former selves performing a theater of their daily lives.
“There must be a fold in the space-time continuum,” Willem would say in his action-hero voice. “You’re here beside me, and yet—I can see you moving around in that shithole apartment. My god, St. Francis: Do you realize what’s going on here?!” Back then, he would always laugh, but remembering this now, he cannot. These days, his only pleasure is thoughts of Willem, and yet those same thoughts are also his greatest source of sorrow. He wishes he could forget as completely as Lucien has: that Willem ever existed, his life with him.
As he stands on the roof, he considers what he has done: He has been irrational. He has gotten angry at someone who has, once again, offered to help him, someone he is grateful for, someone he owes, someone he loves. Why am I acting like this, he thinks. But there’s no answer.
Let me get better, he asks. Let me get better or let me end it. He feels that he is in a cold cement room, from which prong several exits, and one by one, he is shutting the doors, closing himself in the room, eliminating his chances for escape. But why is he doing this? Why is he trapping himself in this place he hates and fears when there are other places he could go? This, he thinks, is his punishment for depending on others: one by one, they will leave him, and he will be alone again, and this time it will be worse because he will remember it had once been better. He has the sense, once again, that his life is moving backward, that it is becoming smaller and smaller, the cement box shrinking around him until he is left with a space so cramped that he must fold himself into a crouch, because if he lies down, the ceiling will lower itself upon him and he will be smothered.
Before he goes to bed he writes Harold a note apologizing for his behavior. He works through Saturday; he sleeps through Sunday. And a new week begins. On Tuesday, he gets a message from Todd. The first of the lawsuits are being settled, for massive figures, but even Todd knows enough not to ask him to celebrate. His messages, by phone or by e-mail, are clipped and sober: the name of the company that is ready to settle, the proposed amount, a short “congratulations.”
On Wednesday, he is meant to stop by the artists’ nonprofit where he still does pro bono work, but he instead meets JB downtown at the Whitney, where his retrospective is being hung. This show is another souvenir from the ghosted past: it has been in the planning stages for almost two years. When JB had told them about it, the three of them had thrown a small party for him at Greene Street.
“Well, JB, you know what this means, right?” Willem had asked, gesturing toward the two paintings—Willem and the Girl and Willem and Jude, Lispenard Street, II, from JB’s first show, which hung, side by side, in their living room. “As soon as the show comes down, all of these pieces are going straight to Christie’s,” and everyone had laughed, JB hardest of all, proud and delighted and relieved.