Page 133 of A Little Life
“Grow up, Portia,” the younger one had hissed. To him she said, “Jude, thanks for coming. I’m so sorry about Willem.”
“Thank you for coming, Jude,” Meredith says now, kissing him goodbye. “I’ll see you soon?” She always asks this, as if he might someday tell her she won’t.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll e-mail you.”
“Do,” she says, and waves as he walks down the hall toward the elevator. He always has the sense that no one else visits, and yet how can that be? Don’t let that be, he pleads. Meredith and Lucien have always had lots of friends. They threw dinner parties. It wasn’t unusual to see Lucien leaving the offices in black tie, rolling his eyes as he waved goodbye to him. “Benefit,” he’d say as an explanation. “Party.” “Wedding.” “Dinner.”
After these visits he is always exhausted, but still he walks, seven blocks south and a quarter of a block east, to the Irvines’. For months he had avoided the Irvines, and then last month, on the one-year anniversary, they had asked him and Richard and JB to dinner at their house, and he knew he would have to go.
It was the weekend after Labor Day. The previous four weeks—four weeks that had included the day Willem would have turned fifty-three; the day that Willem had died—had been some of the worst he hadever experienced. He had known they would be bad; he had tried to plan accordingly. The firm had needed someone to go to Beijing, and although he knew he should have stayed in New York—he was working on a case that needed him more than the business in Beijing did—he volunteered anyway, and off he went. At first he had hoped he might be safe: the woolly numbness of jet lag was sometimes indistinguishable from the woolly numbness of his grief, and there were other things that were so physically uncomfortable—including the heat, which was woolly itself, woolly and sodden—that he had thought he would be able to distract himself. But then one night near the end of the trip he was being driven back to the hotel from a long day of meetings, and he had looked out of the car window and had seen, glittering over the road, a massive billboard of Willem’s face. It was a beer ad that Willem had shot two years ago, one that was only displayed throughout east Asia. But hanging from the top of the billboard were people on pulleys, and he realized that they were painting over the ad, that they were erasing Willem’s face. Suddenly, his breath left him, and he had almost asked the driver to stop, but he wouldn’t have been able to—they were on a loop of a road, one with no exits or places to pull over, and so he’d had to sit very still, his heart erupting within him, counting the beats it took to reach the hotel, thank the driver, get out, walk through the lobby, ride the elevator, walk down the hallway, and enter his room, where before he could think, he was throwing himself against the cold marble wall of the shower, his mouth open and his eyes shut, tossing and tossing himself until he was in so much pain that his every vertebrae felt as if it had been jolted out of its sockets.
That night he cut himself wildly, uncontrollably, and when he was shaking too badly to continue, he waited, and cleaned the floor, and drank some juice to give himself energy, and then started again. After three rounds of this he crept to the corner of the shower stall and wept, folding his arms over his head, making his hair tacky with blood, and that night he slept there, covered with a towel instead of a blanket. He had done this sometimes when he was a child and had felt like he was exploding, separating from himself like a dying star, and would feel the need to tuck himself into the smallest space he could find so his very bones would stay knit together. Then, he would carefully work himself out from beneath Brother Luke and ball himself on the filthymotel carpet under the bed, which was prickly with burrs and dropped thumbtacks and slimy with used condoms and strange damp spots, or he would sleep in the bathtub or in the closet, beetled up as tight as he was able. “My poor potato bug,” Brother Luke would say when he found him like this. “Why are you doing this, Jude?” He had been gentle, and worried, but he had never been able to explain it.
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 forThe 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 backto 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 abouthow much he respected space,anyspace, 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 thatsame 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.
“I will never forget that thing I said to you,” he’d said.
“Mal, forget it,” he’d told him, although he knew exactly what Malcolm was referring to, “you were upset. It was a long time ago.”
“But it was wrong,” Malcolm had said. “And I was wrong. On every level.”
As he sat with Mr. Irvine, he thought: I wish Malcolm could have had this moment. This moment should have been Malcolm’s.
And so now he visits the Irvines after visiting Lucien, and the visits are not dissimilar. They are both drifts into the past, they are both old men talking at him about memories he doesn’t share, about contexts with which he is unfamiliar. But although these visits depress him, he feels he must fulfill them: both are with people who had always given him time and conversation when he had needed it but hadn’t known how to ask for it. When he was twenty-five and new to the city, he had lived at the Irvines’, and Mr. Irvine would talk to him about the market, and law, and had given him advice: not advice about how to think as much as advice about how to be, about how to be a curiosity in a world in which curiosities weren’t often tolerated. “People are going to think certain things about you because of how you walk,” Mr. Irvine had once said to him, and he had looked down. “No,” he’d said. “Don’t look down, Jude. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re a brilliant man,and you’ll be brilliant, and you’ll be rewarded for your brilliance. But if you act like you don’t belong, if you act like you’re apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too.” He’d taken a deep breath. “Believe me.”Be as steely as you want to be, Mr. Irvine had said.Don’t try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable. Harold had taught him how to think as a litigator, but Mr. Irvine had taught him how to behave as one. And Lucien had recognized both of these abilities, and had appreciated them both as well.
