Now, though, he kept moving toward Jude, who had at least been released by Marta and her grouchy friend and was talking to their friend Carolina (seeing this, he felt guilty anew, as he hadn’t talked to Carolina in months and he knew she was angry with him), when Francesca blocked his path to reintroduce him to a woman named Rachel with whom he had worked four years ago on a production of Cloud 9, for which she had been the assistant dramaturg. He was happy enough to see her again—he had liked her all those years ago; he had always thought she was pretty—but he knew, even as he was talking to her, that it would go no further than a conversation. After all, he hadn’t been exaggerating: he started filming in five weeks. Now was not the time to get ensnared in something new and complicated, and he didn’t really have the energy for a one-night hookup which, he knew, had a funny way of becoming as exhausting as something longer-term.
Ten minutes or so into his conversation with Rachel, his phone buzzed, and he apologized and checked the message from Jude: Leaving. Don’t want to interrupt your conversation with the future Mrs. Ragnarsson. See you at home.
“Shit,” he said, and then to Rachel, “Sorry.” Suddenly, the spell of the party ended, and he was desperate to leave. Their participation in these parties were a kind of theater that the four of them agreed to stage for themselves, but once one of the actors left the stage, there seemed little point in continuing. He said goodbye to Rachel, whose expression changed from perplexed to hostile once she realized he was truly leaving and she wasn’t being invited to leave with him, and then to a group of other people—Marta, Francesca, JB, Malcolm, Edie, Carolina—at least half of whom seemed deeply annoyed with him. It took him another thirty minutes to extricate himself from the apartment, and on his way downstairs, he texted Jude back, hopefully, You still here? Leaving now, and then, when he didn’t get a reply, Taking train. Picking something up at the apt—see you soon.
He took the L to Eighth Avenue and then walked the few blocks south to his apartment. Late October was his favorite time in the city, and he was always sad to miss it. He lived on the corner of Perry and West Fourth, in a third-floor unit whose windows were just level with the tops of the gingko trees; before he’d moved in, he’d had a vision that he would lie in bed late on the weekends and watch the tornado the yellow leaves made as they were shaken loose from their branches by the wind. But he never had.
He had no special feelings for the apartment, other than it was his and he had bought it, the first and biggest thing he had ever bought after paying off the last of his student loans. When he had begun looking, a year and a half ago, he had known only that he wanted to live downtown and that he needed a building with an elevator, so that Jude would be able to visit him.
“Isn’t that a little codependent?” his girlfriend at the time, Philippa, had asked him, teasing but also not teasing.
“Is it?” he had asked, understanding what she meant but pretending not to.
“Willem,” Philippa had said, laughing to conceal her irritation. “It is.”
He had shrugged, unoffended. “I can’t live somewhere he can’t come visit,” he said.
She sighed. “I know.”
He knew that Philippa had nothing against Jude; she liked him, and Jude liked her as well, and had even one day gently told Willem that he thought he should spend more time with Philippa when he was in town. When he and Philippa had begun dating—she was a costume designer, mostly for theater—she had been amused, charmed even, by his friendships. She had seen them, he knew, as proof of his loyalty, and dependability, and consistency. But as they continued dating, as they got older, something changed, and the amount of time he spent with JB and Malcolm and, especially, Jude became evidence instead of his fundamental immaturity, his unwillingness to leave behind the comfort of one life—the life with them—for the uncertainties of another, with her. She never asked him to abandon them completely—indeed, one of the things he had loved about her was how close she was to her own group of friends, and that the two of them could spend a night with their own people, in their own restaurants, having their own conversations, and then meet at its end, two distinct evenings ending as a single shared one—but she wanted, finally, a kind of surrender from him, a dedication to her and their relationship that superseded the others.
Which he couldn’t bring himself to do. But he felt he had given more to her than she recognized. In their last two years together, he hadn’t gone to Harold and Julia’s for Thanksgiving nor to the Irvines’ at Christmas, so he could instead go to her parents’ in Vermont; he had forgone his annual vacation with Jude; he had accompanied her to her friends’ parties and weddings and dinners and shows, and had stayed with her when he was in town, watching as she sketched designs for a production of The Tempest, sharpening her expensive colored pencils while she slept and he, his mind still stuck in a different time zone, wandered through the apartment, starting and stopping books, opening and closing magazines, idly straightening the containers of pasta and cereal in the pantry. He had done all of this happily and without resentment. But it still hadn’t been enough, and they had broken up, quietly and, he thought, well, the previous year, after almost four years together.
Mr. Irvine, hearing that they had broken up, shook his head (this had been at Flora’s baby shower). “You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans,” he said. “Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I’m not sure what’s going on with you lot. You’re making money. You’ve achieved something. Don’t you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?”
But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.) “Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?” he’d asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past summer, and Harold had laughed. “Look, Willem,” he said, “I think you’re doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm’s dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You’re young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live.”
“And what if this is how I want to live?”
“Well, then, that’s fine,” said Harold. He smiled at Willem. “You boys are living every man’s dream, you know. Probably even John Irvine’s.”
Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
More troubling to him than his possible immaturity, though, were his capabilities as a friend. He had always taken pride in the fact that he was a good friend; friendship had always been important to him. But was he actually any good at it? There was the unresolved JB problem, for example; a good friend would have figured something out. And a good friend would certainly have figured out a better way to deal with Jude, instead of telling himself, chantlike, that there simply was no better way to deal with Jude, and if there was, if someone (Andy? Harold? Anyone?) could figure out a plan, then he’d be happy to follow it. But even as he told himself this, he knew that he was just making excuses for himself.