He joined Jude in the kitchen and began making a salad, and JB slumped to the dining-room table and started flipping through a novel Jude had left there. "I read this," he called over to him. "Do you...
He sits at the table and reads novels, old favorites of his, the words and plots and characters comforting and lived-in and unchanged.
He placed his hand on Willem's arm. 'Willem, don't cry.''I'm not going to,' he said. 'I can do other things in life besides cry, you know,' although he was no longer sure that was even true.
In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by da...
. . .the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.
He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.
His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so...
That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.
Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.
He didn't really care if they felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream o...
He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem's heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his s...
He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.
It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.''Please,' I said.And then he did.
My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.
He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.
That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined...
This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.
But mostly, I missed watching you two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly, sincerely affectionate y...
But then, once you agree, it is necessary that you, the cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don't want to be here, yo...
...he lacked the sort of ambition that JB and Jude had, that grim, trudging determination that kept them at the studio or office longer than anyone else, that gave them that slightly faraway look in t...
