Page 113 - A Little Life: A Novel

was an intern at Tufts Medical Center, and they kept almost entirely
opposite schedules: he would wake and CM’s door would be closed and he
would hear his wet, snuffly snores, and when he returned home in the

evenings at eight, after working with Harold, CM would be gone. What he
saw of CM he liked—he was from Taipei and had gone to boarding school
in Connecticut and had a sleepy, roguish grin that made you want to smile
back at him—and he was a friend of Andy’s friend, which was how they
had met. Despite his perpetual air of stoned languor, CM was tidy as well,
and liked to cook: he’d come home sometimes and find a plate of fried
dumplings in the center of the table, with a note beneath that read EAT ME,

or, occasionally, receive a text instructing him to rotate the chicken in its
marinade before he went to bed, or asking him to pick up a bunch of
cilantro on his way home. He always would, and would return to find the
chicken simmered into a stew, or the cilantro minced and folded into scallop
pancakes. Every few months or so, when their schedules intersected, all six
of them would meet in Santosh and Federico’s apartment—theirs was the

largest—and eat and play poker. Janusz and Isidore would worry aloud that
girls thought they were gay because they were always hanging out with
each other (CM cut his eyes toward him; he had bet him twenty dollars that
they were sleeping together but were trying to pretend they were straight—
at any rate, an impossible thing to prove), and Santosh and Federico would
complain about how stupid their students were, and about how the quality
of MIT undergraduates had really gone downhill since their time there five

years ago.
His and CM’s was the smallest of the apartments, because the landlord
had annexed half of the floor to make a storage room. CM paid significantly
more of the rent, so he had the bedroom. He occupied a corner of the living
room, the part with the bay window. His bed was a floppy foam egg-carton
pallet, and his books were lined up under the windowsill, and he had a

lamp, and a folding paper screen to give him some privacy. He and CM had
bought a large wooden table, which they placed in the dining-room alcove,
and which had two metal folding chairs, one discarded from Janusz, the
other from Federico. One half of the table was his, the other half CM’s, and
both halves were stacked with books and papers and their laptops, both
emitting their chirps and burbles throughout the day and night.
People were always stunned by the apartment’s bleakness, but he had

mostly ceased to notice it—although not entirely. Now, for example, he sat