Page 120 - A Little Life: A Novel

and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape, until it reached its
inevitable end.
“So, Jude,” Julia asked, “where did you grow up?”

“South Dakota and Montana, mostly,” he said, and he could feel the
creature inside of him sit up, aware of danger but unable to escape it.
“So are your parents ranchers?” asked Harold.
He had learned over the years to anticipate this sequence of questioning,
and how to deflect it as well. “No,” he said, “but a lot of people were,
obviously. It’s beautiful countryside out there; have you spent any time in
the West?”

Usually, this was enough, but it wasn’t for Harold. “Ha!” he said. “That’s
the silkiest pivot I’ve heard in a long time.” Harold looked at him, closely
enough so that he eventually looked down at his plate. “I suppose that’s
your way of saying you’re not going to tell us what they do?”
“Oh, Harold, leave him alone,” said Julia, but he could feel Harold
staring at him, and was relieved when dinner ended.

After that first night at Harold’s, their relationship became both deeper
and more difficult. He felt he had awakened Harold’s curiosity, which he
imagined as a perked, bright-eyed dog—a terrier, something relentless and
keen—and wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. He wanted to know
Harold better, but over dinner he had been reminded that that process—
getting to know someone—was always so much more challenging than he
remembered. He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He

wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence—the divulging of
intimacies, the exploring of pasts—could be sped past, and that he could
simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was
something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties’ limits were
understood and respected.
Other people might have made a few more attempts at questioning him

and then left him alone—other people had left him alone: his friends, his
classmates, his other professors—but Harold was not as easily dissuaded.
Even his usual strategies—among them, telling his interlocutors that he
wanted to hear about their lives, not talk about his: a tactic that had the
benefit of being true as well as effective—didn’t work with Harold. He
never knew when Harold would pounce next, but whenever he did, he was
unprepared, and he felt himself becoming more self-conscious, not less, the

more time they spent with each other.