Chapter Text
Somewhere in December, decades prior, he had been new to Harold as a son, Harold new to him as a father. It had snowed, lightly, the night prior, and he walked with tremendous anxiety that he'd slip and fall, giving Harold another reason to worry or resent him. He'd made sure Harold would fail to find out about the wheelchair for as long as he could, which hadn't been as long as he had wanted it to be, though he also knew no real amount of time would suffice; and so Harold had found out, anyway. He remembered apologizing, explaining himself (he knew, really knew, that he owed it to Harold) over and over until he was stopped, though no reassurance that followed stopped him from feeling the shift.
Still, the fleeting moments of peace were promising and prevalent that day, downtown Boston promising in a light blue sky and glimmering, frozen thin layers of snow. He thinks, incessantly, of the chill as he is walking down the street, and he can't stop himself from shivering wholly, a sound exerting from him as he bundles up a wool coat further around himself.
“Jesus,” Harold had said, then, hand on his back. “Is that coat doing anything for you?”
The one thing he had learned in his time with his new parents, just as they had begun to identify him, was their love languages, their ways of exerting their care for one another. What was once a ritual purely between Harold and Julia for their birthdays, or a common dare at a sentimental location, was now spread onto him with a sense of excitement, one that left him giddy and overflowing with fulfillment. He knew, too, that Harold — in the tailoring shop, in recent, scattered events, on his birthdays — was a gift-giver, just as much as he had an open sense of comfort with physical touch; his hands finding Jude's shoulders as he walked by him in the kitchen, his arms swarming him as he walked through the door. Both, even if he is less capable of returning one than the other, were an extravaganza of represented love too full and wholly good to simply manage nor comprehend, something he felt both deep guilt and deep fear over; they were too good and in that, as he knew they would be, they were painfully temporary, as all good things had come to be.
He also knew that, in the existence of this, telling Harold his coat was getting older by the second was practically a jibe as to why he didn't have a new one — which wasn't something he was trying to imply at all. He'd shook his head, then, and shrugged.
“I'm fine,” he'd say, smiling and receiving a smile in return. He could sense an argument coming forth, and looked over to their left, eager to change the subject, where the square was both filling and emptying its crowd as the previous residents attempted to cross over patches of ice. “Do you think it's possible that we'll even make it over there?”
“Very possible. Here.”
He watched, admiring Harold's sense of bold courage if it were in the element of entertainment. Had Willem been joking, a ways back, when pronouncing the dinners were for him — or was this a presumptuous and exaggerated version of a possible truth? He shakes this thought away with his head, as if it were an insect, to rid of this way of thinking.
“Harold, come on. We can walk further down and enter from there.”
“Oh, please. I'm not even going to respond to that. Just look at the patch of black ice we'd have if we went that way! We've got a pathway right here.” Harold waved his hand, dismissive.
He furrowed his brows, looking away to scan the area for another possible route, only stopping upon hearing a sigh from beside him as Harold made his way over a stone bench and landed.
From the other side of the flat bench, Harold outstretched his hand, patiently waiting with a flat expression. When he shook his head, his hands stuffed into his coat pockets as he lifted his right leg slightly, Harold's hand moved again, closer to him.
“I'm middle-aged,” he'd argued. Just past them, a little boy grabbing onto his father's hand, and Harold looked back at them and then to him.
“I should hope not.” Harold kept his hand steady. “You don't have to, Jude, by any means. But I'm here, and if being past a certain age revokes me of my rights to grab onto someone's hand in order to get around, Julia and I are beyond saving. I should have asked how your legs were.”
“My legs are fine.”
He didn't know how else he wanted to respond, and his leg ached at the steady thrum of his heart. Instead, he nodded, and grabbed on, feeling Harold embrace his upper back with his arm in order to steady him as he climbed over. It was then he was grateful for his coat, for its ability to conceal the topography of scars just underneath, those that may complicate the dynamic he had with Harold now. How was he to tell him? But he didn't know, and so he didn't bother, allowing his mind to move on to the extent that it could.
“Atta-boy,” Harold said, skidding over the ice as Jude planted his feet. The two slid, and he held himself rigid for a minute before he managed to look to Harold — processing the endearment, foreign to him, and the slide, brief but momentarily frightening — and managed only to laugh, Harold laughing in turn.
He is unable to stop himself, and he is embarrassed when he wipes his eyes, breathing in deep to calm down. Slowly, they make their way to a clean and exposed segment of the square, and he looks at Harold when they can finally stop and relax, looking around with muted glee, and they both laugh again to a less serious extent, almost chuckling.
“Julia would be so disappointed,” Harold jokes, bumping his shoulder, and he allows himself to laugh once more. He found, some days, he wished he'd continue his tic of covering his laugh-triggered smile, but his hands were too rooted in his pockets; the action would be too conscious and noticeable. He tries to imagine this same sentence in other contexts — a photograph, a film still, a confession or an email — to prepare himself, though he knows anyone in his life had advised him against worrying when it comes to his newfound parents.
“It was … whose idea, now?” He tries, smiling, being greeted with a grunt.
“Nonsense. All of that.” They walk forward, a little more, looking up at the sky, mesmerized by scenes painted blue, soft-yellows, and whites in unison. “You followed along with it.”
“One could say you encouraged me. Pressured me, even. How would she respond to that?”
“I'm a poor influence? My old heart.”
“Yeah, your old heart, alright,” he'd said, and Harold jokingly bumps him across the upcoming patch of ice, gently enough that he knows not to worry, and is thankful he fails to flinch.
This is what he'd miss, he'd later realize, walking the square as they'd wait back home, over a stretch of numerous day-before-Thanksgivings. It was not just the love languages, and the ways theirs’ mingled, but their banter, the way one builds a dynamic over a series of years and the way in which he was capable of seamlessly ruining it in mere seconds. Any building built not in a day but over a course of decades could be at his wrath, with the danger he poses to those he loves, he mourns.
Harold bumps his shoulder, and he is back to himself, blinking.
“Look over there,” Harold whispers, a smile stretched across his face, growing gradually.
He looks, watching as a little boy wrangles free from a masculine figure — a father, an uncle, someone who looked so young, that he could've mistaken them for a significantly older sibling, wrinkled hands reaching for satin-baby skin — and screeches, striding across the square messily. He sometimes felt himself projecting his past, analyzing the vast landscape and plotting faux, delusional similarities like sheep upon the hills. He watches the toddler reel through the square, sees Harold look ahead in bright alarm before he softens, settles into something one only earns in parenthood — something he himself would never experience, but enjoyed seeing in Harold, the way in which it fluttered through his gaze.
He would see older men — fathers, uncles, brothers, even — and worry, deeply, as he had for the imaginary child held between him and Brother Luke, for a short time, anyway. He tries, instead, to think of more reasonable concerns, such as the ice on the square, the capability of this boy to fall with ice or without, and he is grateful to watch his nightmare scenario wrap itself into nothing more than a figment, the older man grabbing the boy and swooping him up in his arms, swinging him around with a joyous smile that tugged at him, painfully. His chest went heavy, then, and he felt his hand be squeezed, allowing himself to look over to the culprit.
“I know, I know, you're middle-aged,” Harold muttered. “But hold on to me on this patch of ice, at least, Jude. I may slip, too. Then what? I was worried that boy may fall, anyway — that could be my primary concern.”
“Me too.” He follows suit, secretly grateful, as he feels his knee snap back at him for his lack of nurturing and care, almost giving out as he crosses. He feels shamefully young, but almost comfortingly nurtured, the watch gifted to him bumping Harold's own wrist through his sweater sleeve. He looks back to the pair — the boy, the man — and looks back to Harold, watching his expression soften as he meets the pair, and then Jude.
This, too, he'd miss.
For a while, as he walks through the square, he is telling himself : this is it. In looking for signs he feels tethered back to the format of religion, one that is unfriendly to him, and he attempts to avoid connecting meaningless dots and clues he feels are sprawled out for him; the conversation, the fact that he just happened to wander by them. It doesn't work.
It is almost afternoon by the time he knows he has to confront the issue one way or another, and the square begins to feel like a trap, his circling of it making him feel dreadful. He knows he could go into the city, but he knows this will be hours more, and he owes Harold the remainders of the grocery list ( though not in acceptance of the explanation being, simply, aging, he was open to exterior ideas as to why he forgot so many ingredients; Willem had, sweetly, suggested he was excited to see them. )
He has already called Andy, has already left Willem a text, and silenced the conversation in anticipation of his response. Too, he has shut down numerous calls from Harold, with the exception of yet another brief text, which then progressed into something detailed; otherwise, he feared, he'd make this worse, and things would escalate severely.
“Tell me everything,” Andy had said, sympathetic, calm. “I'm sure we can fix this.”
And he had told him — in great detail, practically paralyzed — everything, which both perplexed him and not, as he knew it was Andy who could help him with this; would help him, he knew. It was even amidst knee-jerk responses and shouting (“You just ran out?” Andy had yelled at a point in time, before retreating with an apology; he could almost see him over the phone, within his imagination, pinching his nose bridge) that he continued to respond, which he was given light approval for, gentle, before Andy had finally settled following his expressing of concerns.
“He could be disowning you, Jude,” Andy had said, voice raised. “Or you could be just fine. But the only way you're going to find out, I guarantee, is by going back and making it through that dinner.”
“Andy.”
“I know. But I'll be there too, you know that, right? Did you remember that? Worst case scenario, I drop a fork if they're being odd. But, really, I doubt it. You know I do.”
He walks through the Pharmacy aisle, grabbing a boxful of gauze and eyeing his shirt sleeve from under his coat. He pivots his arm, recalling his day — the quick leave he'd taken, the way in which he had run out of the door, the bitter chill of Winter — in increments, sighing over the phone. He looks to the men's care segment of the aisle behind him, blinking at razor boxes that glitter and gleam in poor quality pharmacy lighting, rocking on their stands when he disturbs them.
“Anything else you've got for me?”
“No, thank you, Andy.” He hears a sigh sound from his phone, and he shifts the basket on his arm to walk out of the aisle and checkout. “I'll call you back, if necessary.” And he knows he won't.
Andy does, too. “Jude, you have to tell me if something's going on. I know this is high stress for you. I can call you again tonight, myself, if it helps.”
“I'll call,” he says, eyeing the flashing light of the ‘open’ sign at the cash register. “Thank you, again, Andy.”
“Alright. Alright, Jude. Call me later tonight — you better — I'm expecting it. I'll see you at Thanksgiving.”
He hums, and hangs up the phone, slowly walking over and readying a smile as he goes to greet the cashier.
It is that late afternoon that he gets home.
“Harold,” he calls initially, hearing a clattering in the kitchen. “Willem, Julia. I'm home.”
“Jesus!” Harold rushes in. “Jude, did you get my call?” — he had, and he looked down to his coat in mock concern over nothing particular, to conceal this — “I was worried. I yelled for you, and you were out the door.” He eyes his bag. “Did you go to the Pharmacy?”
“I had to get something,” he says, not able to bring his eyes from the ground, but feeling Harold's burn circles into his forehead. “I got some groceries, too. You know, for the duck.” He lets out a laugh that he hopes permits the conversation to be smooth, casual, and it comes out ugly and awkward. There is an awful silence for just a second as his coat is strung upon the rack, before Harold sighs in relief, dragging his hand over his face in a drained manner.
“Judy,” Willem calls from behind Harold, easing his way around the floors.
He is dressed in a t-shirt and comfortable pajama bottoms, his eyes and hair disturbed by sleep, newly purchased reading glasses pushed down on his nose and crooked. He still looks undeniably handsome, and he feels as he had with Caleb; like he is something drenched in obscenity next to pure beauty.
“Willem,” he says, in a tone more shocked than he intends to have, and he meets Willem for a kiss he can feel includes hesitation. He pulls away immediately, hesitation somehow worse than the expected discomfort, and studies worried, frustrated features.
“You're cold,” Willem says, pressing his warm hands to his skin where the temperature dwindles for a moment. “Are you okay?”
“My phone was off, I'm sorry,” he says, allowing the two to sigh as he settles the groceries down a little ways away, taking his separate bag as he itches at his arm. “I can start cooking in a little bit.”
“Why don't you lay down?” Willem says, rubbing his glasses on his shirt.
He looks to Willem and Harold, petrified, for a moment. Oh, Willem, he thinks, how was it easier to tell you I was worried before? Why have you affirmed it for me now? He realizes after a second that he is staring, and tries to act normal, civil.
“I'm okay,” he says. “Thank you, though.”
And so he leaves it there, thinking of Willem's sets and scenes, his many works and the pauses they leave as, in the final production, music will play, closing an episode, a movie, an advertisement for the media itself. He imagines that he himself is standing in one of these scenes, the scene with Harold and Willem closing as a tune begins to play, and his movement and actions are chopped up into intervals that are mere seconds each, devaluing the hours in which they took place in. He thinks of this exact tune becoming dreary and slow, as his bag is being tucked somewhere hidden, rustling noisily as if with irritation; the camera paneling up to his face, his features, as he stares blankly on and on, to the closet and then to the window, the bathroom a one-second flicker in the corner of his eye as if he is giving the audience a warning.
He imagines this further as he works in the kitchen, where his consciousness is somewhere above him, behind him, watching him cook and fading away in a shimmer of gentle, almost silent, cymbals as the scene once playing in his head fades away. He notices Harold behind him for a second, noting his worried gaze as he leaned on the counter in a way that was not smooth, relaxed, but tense, as if guarding him. For a second this is relieving, welcome, and then he is assessing the danger this welcomes, the prompts forming their way out of Harold's mouth like a storm, and he knows has to get away, somehow. Maybe this is it, he thinks, maybe this is when he's going to tell me he doesn't want me, and despite his promise to himself over the years — that he'd listen, that he'd apologize, that he'd state that he understands — he knows he has no control over what else will erupt, if an event such as this is to plant itself into his life first; he knows, too, that he has to prevent it from happening as a whole.
He is never one to use his sickness as an out, a way to shift past a moment uncomfortable; he almost always prided himself, a pat on the back, for enduring if it meant his loved ones weren't to endure him. However, this time, he knows it may encourage Harold to get this over with, though this is something that makes his stomach flip at first thought. If his sickness reminds Harold of the circumstances of the present moment, he realizes, he may not have to dig through responses upon responses, promising absolution and satisfaction, and will instead be delivered with the very news he was supposed to the night before. He is sick with himself for not noticing, even irrationally upset at Julia for her almost blind kindness towards him, he is sick with himself for jumping to this as a last resort, highlighting something so detrimental and disgusting in order to complete something that he should've motivated himself years ago.
“I'm tired,” he croaks. “And I'm so sick, Harold. I think Willem was right, I think I need to go lay down.” He hears how he himself is breaking up, and he needs to leave, heavy in the chest with guilt as he fathoms leaving Harold and Julia alone with all of the dishes, the cooking; then again, he knows his lack of presence altogether will be more welcome than not. He knows a majority of what he has prepared can be stored overnight, or continued in the morning, and he knows that on the day itself he can reserve himself away with this excuse, his departing of this home forever ending with the lack of his presence wholly.
“Okay,” Harold whispers, already meeting him at his spot by the stovetop, taking the silverware from his hands, loosening his grip on a knife and the vegetables lined upon the cutting board. “Okay. Do you want me to send your sole company to you? I can have him check on you, while I do this.”
“No,” he says. “No, it's alright.”
He crosses his arms over his stomach, retreating to the room they'd rearranged decades ago to accommodate him — him! — and he imagines what it will transform into in his absence, and he is almost sick in actuality, wishing to double over and regurgitate until he can only release stomach acid and stringy saliva. He meets his mattress, lays across the blankets, tugging them over him as he shrugs off his cardigan and allows his thin long sleeve shirt to press against the sheets, shivering from both fear and cold as he burrows into the array of blankets and pillows. He imagines Willem, whom he knew he may lose next, with his strong arms around him, his gentle thumb and the motions and patterns he'd trace over his textured arms, and he presses his face to his hands in what could almost be tears; it is for the first time, in months, that he has done this.
He'd considered himself composed the night prior, on the call with Andy this morning, in the many years prior in which he considered this a reality soon to come; preparing his many speeches and altering them as he drifted amongst a work day, tired, high-strung. He knew he'd encountered situations like this before, such as threats of admission from Andy, wounds he'd planned but hadn't actually considered, where the moments during and the aftermath were treacherous, merciless, and unwilling to release him into his right mind and conscience. He was suddenly dancing upon possible reactions, outcomes, panicked and fear-based ways of behaving that were all inappropriate and ludicrous, picking out only the worst ways to show who he was, who he'd become.
In every apology he prepared, he was highlighting the very acceptance of his wrong behavior, his entirety and who he had been exposed to Harold and Julia as, and now he was fighting against it — they would never know he knew, he realized, which would just make it worse as they begged him to leave them. What moods had he never seen Harold in? He'd think, reaching his hand over his heart as it began to pound harder, uncontrollably — Julia? And he is thinking of shifting beef to one side of his mouth at dinner, Caleb's tall figure sliding into the booth, and Julia's fingers tentatively reaching beneath one of his sleeves as she gasped and withdrew, staring out to the sea in paralyzed shock and hurt, unable to look at him as she broke down.
What if it went wrong, severely wrong? He remembered Andy's joke about the fork, but what if his expression was tight, what if he actually heard it clatter upon noticing? What if Harold snapped in front of everyone? Had Harold found something, too, or would he, and had Willem told him everything when they (presumably) considered this decision the night prior? Was that just the beginning?
He thinks again, now, as to how this would go — they'd tell him they'd need to speak to him, and with the timing of this, it'd possibly be an emergency.
Unless, of course, they wanted to do this sometime before or after Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner this year. In this scenario, things would end how they had started, where they would sit in the same positions, and this time he would endure the profanities expected, the anger and the yelling and the grief he had brought upon them. He had considered these scenarios with everybody — Willem, before he knew, JB, Malcolm, even Richard — and had observed their way of speech, a comment made idly suddenly becoming the highlight of the scenes that played through his head.
“She's just a whore,” JB had scoffed one night, when they were in their dorms back in Hood Hall. “It's been, what, three terms into our sophomore year?” Willem had expressed he'd kissed a girl who had three ex-boyfriends, Willem now becoming the fourth.
“JB!” Malcolm cried, and he himself stirred, trying to make a grunt to feign some sort of annoyance as opposed to discomfort.
“What!”
“I lost mine at fifteen,” Willem said, shrugging. “She's not a whore, it's just messy.”
JB had scoffed — he was a little more drawn to Willem in those years and the ones that followed, joking and not about him walking around shirtless, and so he was relieved the conversation would end here so JB could refuse an argument that would risk the two of them cutting contact. Still, he thought, and as he observed the semi-silence, he imagined hurtful, razor-sharp comments and reactions to what he'd done as the few argued and pitched ideas for slide projects and active drama.
“Just a whore.” JB had told him in his brain, sometimes falling short upon a client's insult. "A nympho." It was something said amongst many others, sometimes offering a set of jokes that would then set him off further, complicating the humiliation he'd live with for the rest of his shorter life.
He knew JB may react differently, now, as Willem had, with something that would eventually break them in two permanently following faux kindness. Maybe he would walk into the gallery and find numerous pictures of him, some a nude imagining from a flashback he'd frequently have, that would make him sick on the spot. Others were a daunting image-still that continued to play in his head in the years following its discovery, a set of frames from a video he hadn't known had passed around the country, now drawing eyes to him as he walked to each of them perplexed with his jaw agape, humiliated.
In other moments, he'd witness himself walking through and watching the walls go vacant, cold, work of him abandoned so helplessly that useless, odd photos and messy works of the other, significantly better, people in his life took their place. He imagined odd brush strokes of Harold, his face contorted to something joyful and almost agonized, he imagined pictures of Lucien, of Sanjay, of Mr. Irvine, or anyone who seemed almost obscure enough to fit the picture. None ever had a theme, a captivating viewpoint, a background in full. Rather, they had evidence of something that needed to be hidden, something that was now destroyed, mocked over or sold off when they'd eventually cut ties.
He is thinking of this, he is worrying, and he looks to the bathroom — he is alone, he can do this if he wants to. It is midday, and so he knows that he would be injuring himself throughout the day, ceasing sometime later to rest. But as he is thinking of this, turned now to face the door in his smear of blankets and pillows, he feels like he is being drifted by a tide and lifted from his body. He is almost wholly asleep before he can even comprehend it. Outside, beyond him, the clattering of dishes, the soft padding of footsteps on wooden floors.