Page 158 - A Little Life: A Novel

always give me something, although he no longer had his store then, which
meant he must have bought them somewhere. But where? I always
imagined there might be a secret shop full of toys that went out of fashion

generations ago, and yet was patronized, faithfully, by old immigrant men
and women, who kept them in business by buying their stocks of whorl-
painted wooden tops and little metal soldiers and sets of jacks, their rubber
balls sticky with grime even before their plastic wrap had been torn.
I had always had a theory—born of nothing—that men who had been old
enough to witness their father’s second marriage (and, therefore, old enough
to make a judgment) married their stepmother, not their mother. But I didn’t

marry someone like Adele. My wife, my first wife, was cool and self-
contained. Unlike the other girls I knew, who were always minimizing
themselves—their intelligence, of course, but also their desires and anger
and fears and composure—Liesl never did. On our third date, we were
walking out of a café on MacDougal Street, and a man stumbled from a
shadowed doorway and vomited on her. Her sweater was chunky with it,

that pumpkin-bright splatter, and I remember in particular the way a large
globule clung to the little diamond ring she wore on her right hand, as if the
stone itself had grown a tumor. The people around us gasped, or shrieked,
but Liesl only closed her eyes. Another woman would have screeched, or
squealed (I would have screeched or squealed), but I remember she only
gave a great shudder, as if her body were acknowledging the disgust but
also removing itself from it, and when she opened her eyes, she was

recovered. She peeled off her cardigan, chucked it into the nearest garbage
can. “Let’s go,” she told me. I had been mute, shocked, throughout the
entire episode, but in that moment, I wanted her, and I followed her where
she led me, which turned out to be her apartment, a hellhole on Sullivan
Street. The entire time, she kept her right hand slightly aloft from her body,
the blob of vomit still clinging to her ring.

Neither my father nor Adele particularly liked her, although they never
told me so; they were polite, and respectful of my wishes. In exchange, I
never asked them, never made them lie. I don’t think it was because she
wasn’t Jewish—neither of my parents were religious—but, I think, because
they thought I was too much in awe of her. Or maybe this is what I’ve
decided, late in life. Maybe it was because what I admired as competence,
they saw as frigidity, or coldness. Goodness knows they wouldn’t have been

the first to think that. They were always polite to her, and she reasonably so