Page 130 - A Little Life: A Novel

had to be for them, and would feel proud of Harold, and—though he knew
it was silly—proud of himself for knowing him. The following year,
Harold’s book about the Constitution would be published, and everyone in

the office would read the acknowledgments and see his name and his
affiliation with Harold would be revealed, and many of them would be
suspicious, and he’d see worry in their faces as they tried to remember what
they might have said about Harold in his presence. By that time, however,
he would feel he had established himself in the office on his own, had found
his own place alongside Citizen and Rhodes, had made his own relationship
with Marshall.

But as much as he would have liked to, as much as he craved it, he was
still cautious about claiming Harold as his friend: sometimes he worried
that he was only imagining their closeness, inflating it hopefully in his
mind, and then (to his embarrassment) he would have to retrieve The
Beautiful Promise from his shelf and turn to the acknowledgments, reading
Harold’s words again, as if it were itself a contract, a declaration that what

he felt for Harold was at least in some degree reciprocated. And yet he was
always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at
the end of the month: Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month.
He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare
himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.
And still, the friendship spooled on and on, a long, swift river that had
caught him in its slipstream and was carrying him along, taking him

somewhere he couldn’t see. At every point when he thought that he had
reached the limits of what their relationship would be, Harold or Julia flung
open the doors to another room and invited him in. He met Julia’s father, a
retired pulmonologist, and brother, an art history professor, when they
visited from England one Thanksgiving, and when Harold and Julia came to
New York, they took him and Willem out to dinner, to places they had heard

about but couldn’t afford to visit on their own. They saw the apartment at
Lispenard Street—Julia polite, Harold horrified—and the week that the
radiators mysteriously stopped working, they left him a set of keys to their
apartment uptown, which was so warm that for the first hour after he and
Willem arrived, they simply sat on the sofa like mannequins, too stunned by
the sudden reintroduction of heat into their lives to move. And after Harold
witnessed him in the middle of an episode—this was the Thanksgiving after

he moved to New York, and in his desperation (he knew he wouldn’t be