A Little Life

Jude is consumed with dread about his sexual relationship with Willem. After delaying sex for months, he finally consents to introducing sex to the relationship. He does this not because he wants to, however, but because he feels any adult romantic relationship is supposed to include sex and he is failing Willem by not agreeing to it. Inside, he hates it as much as ever. He had hoped that his anxieties around sex would disappear in the context of a loving relationship, but he finds that his trauma is too profound for such a magical disappearance. Willem asks him directly if he likes the sex they have, but Jude lies and says he does.

Complicating the relationship even further, Willem begins an aggressive campaign to get Jude to stop cutting. He first tries removing Jude’s razors, then tries laying on top of him when he tries to get up in the middle of the night to cut. Finally, at his wit’s end, Willem cuts himself in an effort to force Jude to see what it feels like to watch a loved one engage in self-harm. Jude hates disappointing Willem and would stop cutting if he could—if the addiction were not so engrained. In an effort to make Willem happy, he tries distracting himself with other tasks in the middle of the night when the urge to cut comes: He cleans obsessively, swims laps in the building’s pool, and bakes desserts.

When Willem leaves for a months-long film shoot, however, Jude finds himself particularly longing to cut. Desperate not to let Willem down, he devises a plan: If he burns himself instead of cutting, he can experience the same feeling of release he gets from self-inflicted pain and can honestly tell Willem he did not cut during his absence. When he puts this plan into action, however, he burns himself more severely than he intended and needs Andy’s medical attention. Though he thinks he can fool Andy with a story about an accident with cooking oil, Andy immediately accuses Jude of lying and trying to hide a new level of self-harm. Furious, Andy tells Jude that he has a limited time to tell Willem about this or he, Andy, will tell Willem himself.

Willem returns to New York City for Thanksgiving, and he and Jude ride to Truro for their annual holiday meal with Harold and Julia. When Jude goes into a convenience store on a stop to refill the gas tank, he leaves his phone in the car, and Andy calls. When Willem answers, Andy asks Jude if he has told Willem yet, thinking Jude has answered the phone. Willem confronts Jude as soon as he returns to the car, and Jude is forced to admit the truth. Although the two try to act normal at Truro, Willem is beside himself with anger, and the atmosphere is strained. That night, Willem wakes up to find Jude cutting in the bathroom. Incensed, he attacks Jude and forcibly removes his clothes to see where he has just cut himself. He calls him sick and crazy and tells him, “You love the cutting more than you love me” (529). The next morning, they make up a lie to explain why they need to return to New York City suddenly and leave Truro.

Willem spends the day walking the city. By the time he returns, he realizes he went too far the night before and apologizes to Jude, who is sure that Willem is going to leave him now. Willem tries to explain that he still loves him but because he is afraid that Jude interprets his continued presence in the relationship as tacit approval of his actions, Jude must finally see a therapist twice a week or have himself committed to a psychiatric institution. Failing this, Willem will leave. Desperate to show Willem that he can participate in the relationship the way Willem wants, Jude finally begins telling Willem the full story of his past, which ends up taking an entire day and leaves Willem more shocked and disturbed than he imagined was possible.

In the final flashback of the novel, Jude, still at the home for parentless children as a teenager, tries to dodge intermittent rape at the hands of counselors as often as he can. One failed attempt to run away results in a beating so bad that he requires hospitalization. One night after his return to the home, a counselor takes Jude to a barn to rape him but falls asleep immediately after, leaving Jude free to take his clothes and run away from the home.

Luke once told Jude about the college he attended in Boston, and Jude often dreams of going there and attending the same college himself. He plans to hitch rides across the country to get there. He quickly realizes, however, that most truck drivers will not give him rides for free, and he has to trade sex work for rides. As a result, he contracts a sexually transmitted infection that leaves him so sick he passes out outside a gas station. He awakes in the passenger’s seat of a stranger’s car. The driver introduced himself as Dr. Traylor, and he takes Jude to his home and feeds him. He says nothing about his future plans for Jude; in fact, he says very little about anything. He does explain, however, that Jude needs to take a round of antibiotics for 10 days for his infection and that he will stay in a makeshift bedroom in the basement.

At first, Traylor lets Jude come upstairs for meals, but eventually he keeps him locked in the basement at all times. After the 10 days elapse, Traylor comes down to the basement with a fire poker and rapes Jude, keeping the poker in hand the whole time to prevent Jude from trying to protect himself or run away. At Dr. Traylor’s hands, Jude experiences the worst forced sex of his life; Luke at least protected him from clients who wanted to do anything violent or painful, but he has no such protection with Dr. Traylor.

One day, Jude takes advantage of a split second when Dr. Traylor’s guard is down to hit him in the head with a book and run out of the house. Because Traylor fed him very little, however, he is extremely weak, and Traylor catches him and drags him back easily, giving him a violent beating. The beatings go on for days, as do the tiny meals, rendering Jude constantly weak and dizzy. Eventually, Traylor talks about getting tired of Jude, until one day he marches him upstairs, puts him in the trunk of his car, and drives him to an open field. There, he tells Jude to get out of the trunk and start running. As Jude does, Traylor follows him in his car at a slow pace, constantly bumping into him with his front bumper. Each time this happens, Jude falls, and Traylor forces him to get up and keep running. Finally, Jude falls down, and Traylor, instead of ordering him back up, runs him over with the car and drives away. This is, of course, the famous “car injury” the reader first learned about in Part 1 that has damaged Jude’s legs and spine irreparably and that led to the hospital stay during which he met Ana. He later learns that he was at Dr. Traylor’s house for 12 weeks.

In the present, Jude reflects on how bizarrely wonderful his new life feels in comparison to his childhood; the people who populate it “seemed to be another species altogether” than the monsters who haunted his young years (560). He feels as if the universe is trying to pay him back for the horror of his childhood with an embarrassment of riches, from wealth to professional success to steadfast friends to adoptive family.