The past few days have been very difficult, some of the most difficult he can remember, so difficult that one night he even called Andy after their midnight check-in, and when Andy offered to meet him at a diner at two a.m., he accepted the offer and went, desperate to get himself out of the apartment, which suddenly seemed full of irresistible temptations: razors, of course, but also knives and scissors and matches, and staircases to throw himself down. He knows that if he goes to his room now, he won’t be able to stop himself from heading directly to the bathroom, where he has long kept a bag, its contents identical to the one at Lispenard Street, taped to the sink’s undercarriage: his arms ache with yearning, and he is determined not to give in. He has both dough and batter left over, and decides he’ll make a tart with pine nuts and cranberries, and maybe a round flat cake glazed with slices of oranges and honey: by the time both are done baking, it will almost be daylight and he will be past danger and will have sucessfully saved himself.
Malcolm and JB will both be at the courthouse the next day; they’re taking the morning flight. But Willem, who was supposed to be there, won’t; he called the week before to say filming had been delayed, and he’ll now be coming home on the eighteenth, not the fourteenth. He knows there’s nothing to be done about this, but still, he mourns Willem’s absence almost fiercely: a day like this without Willem won’t be a day at all. “Call me the second it’s over,” Willem had said. “It’s killing me I can’t be there.”
He did, however, invite Andy in one of their midnight conversations, which he grew to enjoy: in those talks, they discussed everyday things, calming things, normal things—the new Supreme Court justice nominee; the most recent health-care bill (he approved of it; Andy didn’t); a biography of Rosalind Franklin they’d both read (he liked it; Andy didn’t); the apartment that Andy and Jane were renovating. He liked the novelty of hearing Andy say, with real outrage, “Jude, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me!,” which he was used to hearing when being confronted about his cutting, or his amateurish bandaging skills, instead applied to his opinions about movies, and the mayor, and books, and even paint colors. Once he learned that Andy wouldn’t use their talks as an occasion to reprimand him, or lecture him, he relaxed into them, and even managed to learn some more things about Andy himself: Andy spoke of his twin, Beckett, also a doctor, a heart surgeon, who lived in San Francisco and whose boyfriend Andy hated and was scheming to get Beckett to dump; and how Jane’s parents were giving them their house on Shelter Island; and how Andy had been on the football team in high school, the very Americanness of which had made his parents uneasy; and how he had spent his junior year abroad in Siena, where he dated a girl from Lucca and gained twenty pounds. It wasn’t that he and Andy never spoke of Andy’s personal life—they did to some extent after every appointment—but on the phone he talked more, and he was able to pretend that Andy was only his friend and not his doctor, despite the fact that this illusion was belied by the call’s very premise.
“Obviously, you shouldn’t feel obligated to come,” he added, hastily, after inviting Andy to the court date.
“I’d love to come,” Andy said. “I was wondering when I’d be invited.”
Then he felt bad. “I just didn’t want you to feel you had to spend even more time with your weird patient who already makes your life so difficult,” he said.
“You’re not just my weird patient, Jude,” Andy said. “You’re also my weird friend.” He paused. “Or at least, I hope you are.”
He smiled into the phone. “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m honored to be your weird friend.”
And so Andy was coming as well: he’d fly back that afternoon, but Malcolm and JB would spend the night, and they’d all leave together on Saturday.
Upon arriving, he had been surprised, and then moved, to see how thoroughly Harold and Julia had cleaned the house, and how proud they were of the work they’d done. “Look!” one or the other kept saying, triumphantly pointing at a surface—a table, a chair, a corner of floor—that would normally have been obscured by stacks of books or journals, but which was now clear of all clutter. There were flowers everywhere—winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their sweet, faintly fecal fragrance—and the books in their cases had been straightened and even the nap on the sofa had been repaired.
“And look at this, Jude,” Julia had said, linking her arm through his, and showing him the celadon-glazed dish on the hallway table, which had been broken for as long as he’d known them, the shards that had snapped off its side permanently nested in the bowl and furred with dust. But now it had been fixed, and washed and polished.
“Wow,” he said when presented with each new thing, grinning idiotically, happy because they were so happy. He didn’t care, he never had, whether their place was clean or not—they could’ve lived surrounded by Ionic columns of old New York Times, with colonies of rats squeaking plumply underfoot for all he cared—but he knew they thought he minded, and had mistaken his incessant, tedious cleaning of everything as a rebuke, as much as he’d tried, and tried, to assure them it wasn’t. He cleaned now to stop himself, to distract himself, from doing other things, but when he was in college, he had cleaned for the others to express his gratitude: it was something he could do and had always done, and they gave him so much and he gave them so little. JB, who enjoyed living in squalor, never noticed. Malcolm, who had grown up with a housekeeper, always noticed and always thanked him. Only Willem hadn’t liked it. “Stop it, Jude,” he’d said one day, grabbing his wrist as he picked JB’s dirty shirts off the floor, “you’re not our maid.” But he hadn’t been able to stop, not then, and not now.
By the time he wipes off the countertops a final time, it’s almost four thirty, and he staggers to his room, texts Willem not to call him, and falls into a brief, brutal sleep. When he wakes, he makes the bed and showers and dresses and returns to the kitchen, where Harold is standing at the counter, reading the paper and drinking coffee.
“Well,” Harold says, looking up at him. “Don’t you look handsome.”
He shakes his head, reflexively, but the truth is that he’d bought a new tie, and had his hair cut the day before, and he feels, if not handsome, then at least neat and presentable, which he always tries to be. He rarely sees Harold in a suit, but he’s wearing one as well, and the solemnity of the occasion makes him suddenly shy.
Harold smiles at him. “You were busy last night, clearly. Did you sleep at all?”
He smiles back. “Enough.”