Page 137 - A Little Life: A Novel

what I’d do without you. But I’m an adult and you can’t dictate what I do or
don’t do.”
“You know what, Jude?” Andy had asked (now he was yelling again).

“You’re right. I can’t dictate your decisions. But I don’t have to accept
them, either. Go find some other asshole to be your doctor. I’m not going to
do it any longer.”
“Fine,” he’d snapped, and left.
He couldn’t remember when he had been angrier on his own behalf. Lots
of things made him angry—general injustice, incompetence, directors who
didn’t give Willem a part he wanted—but he rarely got angry about things

that happened or had happened to him: his pains, past and present, were
things he tried not to brood about, were not questions to which he spent his
days searching for meaning. He already knew why they had happened: they
had happened because he had deserved them.
But he knew too that his anger was unjustified. And as much as he
resented his dependence upon Andy, he was grateful for him as well, and he

knew Andy found his behavior illogical. But Andy’s job was to make
people better: Andy saw him the way he saw a mangled tax law, as
something to be untangled and repaired—whether he thought he could be
repaired was almost incidental. The thing he was trying to fix—the scars
that raised his back into an awful, unnatural topography, the skin stretched
as glossy and taut as a roasted duck’s: the reason he was trying to save
money—was not, he knew, something Andy would approve of. “Jude,”

Andy would say if he ever heard what he was planning, “I promise you it’s
not going to work, and you’re going to have wasted all that money. Don’t
do it.”
“But they’re hideous,” he would mumble.
“They’re not, Jude,” Andy would say. “I swear to god they’re not.”
(But he wasn’t going to tell Andy anyway, so he would never have to

have that particular conversation.)
The days passed and he didn’t call Andy and Andy didn’t call him. As if
in punishment, his wrist throbbed at night when he was trying to sleep, and
at work he forgot and banged it rhythmically against the side of his desk as
he read, a longtime bad tic he’d not managed to erase. The stitches had
seeped blood then, and he’d had to clean them, clumsily, in the bathroom
sink.

“What’s wrong?” Willem asked him one night.