Somehow he made it through that trip; somehow he had made it through a year. The night of Willem’s death he dreamed of glass vases imploding, of Willem’s body being projected through the air, of his face shattering against the tree. He woke missing Willem so profoundly that he felt he was going blind. The day after he returned home, he saw the first of the posters for The Happy Years, which had reverted to its original title: The Dancer and the Stage. Some of these posters were of Willem’s face, his hair longish like Nureyev’s and his top scooped low on his chest, his neck long and powerful. And some were of just monumental images of a foot—Willem’s actual foot, he happened to know—in a toe shoe, en pointe, shot so close you could see its veins and hairs, its thin straining muscles and fat bulging tendons. Opening Thanksgiving Day, the posters read. Oh god, he thought, and had gone back inside, oh god. He wanted the reminders to stop; he dreaded the day when they would. In recent weeks he’d had the sense that Willem was receding from him, even as his grief refused to diminish in intensity.
The next week they went to the Irvines’. They had decided, in some unspoken way, that they should go up together, and they met at Richard’s apartment and he gave Richard the keys to the car and Richard drove them. They were all silent, even JB, and he was very nervous. He had the sense that the Irvines were angry at him; he had the sense he deserved their anger.
Dinner was all of Malcolm’s favorite foods, and as they ate, he could feel Mr. Irvine staring at him and wondered whether he was thinking what he himself always thought: Why Malcolm? Why not him?
Mrs. Irvine had suggested that they all go around the table and share a memory of Malcolm, and he had sat, listening to the others—Mrs. Irvine, who had told a story about how they had been visiting the Pantheon when Malcolm was six and how, five minutes after they had left, they had realized that Malcolm was missing and had rushed back to find him sitting on the ground, gazing and gazing at the oculus; Flora, who told a story about how as a second-grader Malcolm had appropriated her dollhouse from the attic, removed all the dolls, and filled it with little objects, dozens of chairs and tables and sofas and even pieces of furniture that had no name, that he had made with clay; JB, the story of how they had all returned to Hood one Thanksgiving a day early and had broken into the dormitory so they could have it to themselves, and how Malcolm had built a fire in the living room’s fireplace so they could roast sausages for dinner—and when it was his turn, he told the story of how back at Lispenard Street, Malcolm had built them a set of bookcases, which had partitioned their squish of a living room into such a meager sliver that when you were sitting on the sofa and stretched your legs out, you stretched them into the bookcase itself. But he had wanted the shelves, and Willem had said he could. And so over Malcolm had come with the cheapest wood possible, leftovers from the lumberyard, and he and Willem had taken the wood to the roof and assembled the bookcase there, so the neighbors wouldn’t complain about the banging, and then they had brought it back down and installed it.
But when they did, Malcolm had realized that he’d mismeasured, and the bookcases were three inches too wide, which caused the edge of the unit to jut into the hallway. He hadn’t minded, and neither had Willem, but Malcolm had wanted to fix it.
“Don’t, Mal,” they had both told him. “It’s great, it’s fine.”
“It’s not great,” Malcolm had said, mopily. “It’s not fine.”
Finally they had managed to convince him, and Malcolm had left. He and Willem painted the case a bright vermilion and loaded it with their books. And then early the next Sunday, Malcolm appeared again, looking determined. “I can’t stop thinking about this,” he said. And he’d set his bag down on the floor and drawn out a hacksaw and had started gnawing away at the structure, the two of them shouting at him until they realized that he was going to alter it whether they helped him or not. So back up to the roof went the bookcase; back down, once again, it came, and this time, it was perfect.
“I always think of that incident,” he said, as the others listened. “Because it says so much about how seriously Malcolm took his work, and how he always strove to be perfect in it, to respect the material, whether it was marble or plywood. But I also think it says so much about how much he respected space, any space, even a horrible, unfixable, depressing apartment in Chinatown: even that space deserved respect.
“And it says so much about how much he respected his friends, how much he wanted us all to live somewhere he imagined for us: someplace as beautiful and vivid as his imaginary houses were to him.”
He stopped. What he wanted to say—but what he didn’t think he could get through—was what he had overheard Malcolm say as Willem was complaining about hefting the bookcase back into place and he was in the bathroom gathering the brushes and paint from beneath the sink. “If I had left it like it was, he could’ve tripped against it and fallen, Willem,” Malcolm had whispered. “Would you want that?”
“No,” Willem had said, after a pause, sounding ashamed. “No, of course not. You’re right, Mal.” Malcolm, he realized, had been the first among them to recognize that he was disabled; Malcolm had known this even before he did. He had always been conscious of it, but he had never made him feel self-conscious. Malcolm had sought, only, to make his life easier, and he had once resented him for this.
As they were leaving for the night, Mr. Irvine put his hand on his shoulder. “Jude, will you stay behind for a bit?” he asked. “I’ll have Monroe drive you home.”
He had to agree and so he did, telling Richard he could take the car back to Greene Street. For a while they sat in the living room, just he and Mr. Irvine—Malcolm’s mother remained in the dining room with Flora and her husband and children—talking about his health, and Mr. Irvine’s health, and Harold, and his work, when Mr. Irvine began to cry. He had stood then, and had sat down again next to Mr. Irvine, and placed his hand hesitantly on his back, feeling awkward and shy, feeling the decades slip away from beneath him.
Mr. Irvine had always been such an intimidating figure to all of them throughout their adulthoods. His height, his self-possession, his large, hard features—he looked like something from an Edward Curtis photograph, and that was what they all called him: “The Chief.” “What’s the Chief gonna say about this, Mal?” JB had asked when Malcolm told them he was going to quit Ratstar, and they were all trying to urge temperance. Or (JB again): “Mal, can you ask the Chief if I can use the apartment when I’m passing through Paris next month?”
But Mr. Irvine was no longer the Chief: although he was still logical and upright, he was eighty-nine, and his dark eyes had turned that same unnamable gray that only the very young or the very old possess: the color of the sea from which one comes, the color of the sea to which one returns.
“I loved him,” Mr. Irvine told him. “You know that, Jude, right? You know I did.”
“I do,” he said. It was what he had always told Malcolm: “Of course your dad loves you, Mal. Of course he does. Parents love their kids.” And once, when Malcolm was very upset (he could no longer remember why), he had snapped at him, “Like you’d know anything about that, Jude,” and there had been a silence, and then Malcolm, horrified, had begun apologizing to him. “I’m sorry, Jude,” he’d said, “I’m so sorry.” And he’d had nothing to say, because Malcolm was right: he didn’t know anything about that. What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier. It had been the worst thing Malcolm had ever said to him, and although he had never mentioned it to Malcolm again, Malcolm had mentioned it to him, once, shortly after the adoption.