Page 132 of A Little Life
“Of course we’d be together,” Willem would say. “That part would be the same.”
“Well,” he’d say, “then the first thing we’d do is tear down that wall and reclaim the living room. And the second thing we’d do is get a decent bed.”
Willem would laugh. “And we’d sue the landlord to get a working elevator, once and for all.”
“Right, that’d be the next step.”
He sits, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. Then he turns on his phone, checks his missed calls: Andy, JB, Richard, Harold and Julia, Black Henry Young, Rhodes, Citizen, Andy again, Richard again, Lucien, Asian Henry Young, Phaedra, Elijah, Harold again, Julia again, Harold, Richard, JB, JB, JB.
He calls JB. It’s late, but JB stays up late. “Hi,” he says, when JB picks up, hears the surprise in his voice. “It’s me. Is this a good time to talk?”
2
AT LEAST ONESaturday a month now he takes half a day off from work and goes to the Upper East Side. When he leaves Greene Street, the neighborhood’s boutiques and stores haven’t yet opened for the day; when he returns, they are closed for the night. On these days, he can imagine the SoHo Harold knew as a child: a place shuttered and unpeopled, a place without life.
His first stop is the building on Park and Seventy-eighth, where he takes the elevator to the sixth floor. The maid lets him into the apartment and he follows her to the back study, which is sunny and large, and where Lucien is waiting—not waiting for him, necessarily, but waiting.
There is always a late breakfast laid out for him: thin wedges of smoked salmon and tiny buckwheat pancakes one time; a cake glazed white with lemon icing the next. He can never bring himself to eat anything, although sometimes when he is feeling especially helpless he accepts a slice of cake from the maid and holds the plate in his lap for the entire visit. But although he doesn’t eat anything, he does drink cup after cup of tea, which is always steeped exactly how he likes it. Lucien eats nothing either—he has been fed earlier—nor does he drink.
Now he goes to Lucien and takes his hand. “Hi, Lucien,” he tells him.
He had been in London when Lucien’s wife, Meredith, called him: it was the week of Bergesson’s retrospective at MoMA, and he had arranged to be out of the city on business. Lucien had had a massivestroke, Meredith said; he would live, but the doctors didn’t yet know how great the damage would be.
Lucien was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he was released, it was clear that his impairment was severe. And although it is not yet five months later, it has remained so: the features on the left side of his face seem to be melting off of him, and he cannot use his left arm or leg, either. He can still speak, remarkably well, but his memory has vanished, the past twenty years deserting him completely. In early July, he fell and hit his head and was in a coma; now, he is too unsteady to even walk, and Meredith has moved them back from their house in Connecticut to their apartment in the city, where they can be closer to the hospital and their daughters.
He thinks Lucien likes, or at least doesn’t mind, his visits, but he doesn’t know this for sure. Certainly Lucien doesn’t know who he is: he is someone who appears in his life and then disappears, and every time he must reintroduce himself.
“Who are you?” Lucien asks.
“Jude,” he says.
“Now, remind me,” Lucien says, pleasantly, as if they’re meeting at a cocktail party, “how do I know you?”
“You were my mentor,” he tells him.
“Ah,” says Lucien. And then there is a silence.
In the first weeks, he tried to make Lucien remember his own life: he talked about Rosen Pritchard, and about people they knew, and cases they used to argue about. But then he realized that the expression he had mistaken—in his own stupid hopefulness—for thoughtfulness was in reality fear. And so now he discusses nothing from the past, or nothing from their past together, at least. He lets Lucien direct the conversation, and although he doesn’t understand the references Lucien makes, he smiles and tries to pretend he does.
“Who are you?” Lucien asks.
“Jude,” he says.
“Now, tell me, how do I know you?”
“You were my mentor.”
“Oh, at Groton!”
“Yes,” he says, trying to smile back. “At Groton.”
Sometimes, though, Lucien looks at him. “Mentor?” he says. “I’mtoo young to be your mentor!” Or sometimes he doesn’t ask at all, simply begins a conversation in its middle, and he has to wait until he has enough clues and can determine what role he has been assigned—one of his daughters’ long-ago boyfriends, or a college classmate, or a friend at the country club—before he can respond appropriately.
In these hours he learns more about Lucien’s earlier life than Lucien had ever revealed to him before. Although Lucien is no longer Lucien, at least not the Lucien he knew. This Lucien is vague and featureless; he is as smooth and cornerless as an egg. Even his voice, that droll croaking roll with which Lucien used to deliver his sentences, each one a statement, the pause he used to leave between them because he had grown so used to people’s laughter; 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, is different. Even when they were working together, he knew that the Lucien of the office was not the Lucien of the country club, but he never saw that other Lucien. And now, finally, he has, he does; it is the only person he sees. This Lucien talks about the weather, and golf, and sailing, and taxes, but the tax laws he discusses are from twenty years ago. He never asks him anything about himself: who he is, what he does, why he is sometimes in a wheelchair. Lucien talks, and he smiles and nods back at him, wrapping his hands around his cooling cup of tea. When Lucien’s hands tremble, he takes them in his own, which he knows helps him when his hands shake: Willem used to do this, and breathe with him, and it would always calm him. When Lucien drools, he takes the edge of his napkin and blots the saliva away. Unlike him, however, Lucien doesn’t seem embarrassed by his own shaking and drooling, and he is relieved that he doesn’t. He’s not embarrassed for Lucien, either, but he is embarrassed by his inability to do more for him.
“He loves seeing you, Jude,” Meredith always says, but he doesn’t think this is true, really. He sometimes thinks he continues to come more for Meredith’s sake than for Lucien’s, and he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost. Lucien is not conscious of this, but he can remember being so when he was sick, both the first time and the second, and Willem was taking care of him. How grateful he was when he would wake and find someone other than Willem sitting next tohim. “Roman’s with him,” Richard or Malcolm would say, or “He and JB went out for lunch,” and he’d relax. In the weeks after his amputations, when all he wanted to do was give up, those moments in which he could imagine that Willem might be being comforted were his only moments of happiness. And so he sits with Meredith after sitting with Lucien and they talk, although she too asks him nothing about his life, and this is fine with him. She is lonely; he is lonely, too. She and Lucien have two daughters, one of whom lives in New York but is forever going in and out of rehab; the other lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children and is a lawyer herself.
He has met both of these daughters, who are a decade or so younger than he is, although Lucien is Harold’s age. When he went to visit Lucien in the hospital, the older of them, the one who lives in New York, had looked at him with such hatred that he had almost stepped back, and then had said to her sister, “Oh, and look who it is: Daddy’s pet. What a surprise.”
