Page 408 - A Little Life: A Novel

bathroom, and until he heard the brother telling him it was time to come to
bed, his body was his to do with what he chose.
He was so dependent on Luke: for his food, for his protection, and now

for his razors. When he needed to be taken to the doctor because he was
sick—he got infections from the clients, no matter how hard Brother Luke
tried, and sometimes he didn’t properly clean his cuts and they became
infected as well—Brother Luke took him, and got him the antibiotics he
needed. He grew accustomed to Brother Luke’s body, his mouth, his hands:
he didn’t like them, but he no longer jolted when Luke began to kiss him,
and when the brother put his arms around him, he obediently returned the

embrace. He knew there was no one else who would ever treat him as well
as Luke did: even when he did something wrong, Luke never yelled at him,
and even after all these years, he had still never hit him. Earlier, he had
thought he might someday have a client who would be better, who might
want to take him away, but now he knew that would never be the case.
Once, he had started getting undressed before the client was ready, and the

man had slapped his face and snapped at him. “Jesus,” he’d said, “slow
down, you little slut. How many times have you done this, anyway?” And
as he always did whenever the clients hit him, Luke had come out of the
bathroom to yell at the man, and had made the man promise to behave
better if he was going to stay. The clients called him names: he was a slut, a
whore, filthy, disgusting, a nympho (he had to look that one up), a slave,
garbage, trash, dirty, worthless, a nothing. But Luke never said any of those

things to him. He was perfect, said Luke, he was smart, he was good at
what he did and there was nothing wrong with what he did.
The brother still talked of their being together, although now he talked of
a house on the sea, somewhere in central California, and would describe the
stony beaches, the noisy birds, the storm-colored water. They would be
together, the two of them, like a married couple. No longer were they father

and son; now they were equals. When he turned sixteen, they would get
married. They would go on a honeymoon to France and Germany, where he
could finally use his languages around real French and Germans, and to
Italy and Spain, where Brother Luke had lived for two years: once as a
student, once the year after he graduated college. They would buy him a
piano so he could play and sing. “Other people won’t want you if they knew
how many clients you’d been with,” the Brother said. “And they’d be silly

to not want you. But I’ll always want you, even if you’ve been with ten