Page 112 - A Little Life: A Novel

“I think maybe half an inch more,” Marco said, pinching the back of the
jacket in around the waist. He swatted some threads off his sleeve. “Now all
you need’s a good haircut.”

He found Harold waiting for him in the tie area, reading a magazine.
“Are you done?” he asked, as if the entire trip had been his idea and Harold
had been the one indulging his whimsy.
Over their early dinner, he tried to thank Harold again, but every time he
tried, Harold stopped him with increasing impatience. “Has anyone ever
told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?” he finally
asked.

“You said to never just accept anything,” he reminded Harold.
“That’s in the classroom and in the courtroom,” Harold said. “Not in life.
You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You
don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when
they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and
maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out

of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the
person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or
isn’t worthy of it.”
He shut up then, and after dinner he let Harold drive him back to his
apartment on Hereford Street. “Besides,” Harold said as he was getting out
of the car, “you looked really, really nice. You’re a great-looking kid; I hope
someone’s told you that before.” And then, before he could protest,

“Acceptance, Jude.”
So he swallowed what he was going to say. “Thank you, Harold. For
everything.”
“You’re very welcome, Jude,” said Harold. “I’ll see you Monday.”
He stood on the sidewalk and watched Harold’s car drive away, and then
went up to his apartment, which was on the second floor of a brownstone

adjacent to an MIT fraternity house. The brownstone’s owner, a retired
sociology professor, lived on the ground floor and leased out the remaining
three floors to graduate students: on the top floor were Santosh and
Federico, who were getting their doctorates in electrical engineering at MIT,
and on the third floor were Janusz and Isidore, who were both Ph.D.
candidates at Harvard—Janusz in biochemistry and Isidore in Near Eastern
religions—and directly below them were he and his roommate, Charlie Ma,

whose real name was Chien-Ming Ma and whom everyone called CM. CM