Page 181 - A Little Life: A Novel

unsure where to go next. Finally, Julia clapped her hands together and
stood. “Champagne!” she said, and left the room.
He and Harold stood as well and looked at each other. “Are you sure?”

Harold asked him, quietly.
“I’m as sure as you are,” he answered, just as quietly. There was an
uncreative and obvious joke to be made, about how much like a marriage
proposal the event seemed, but he didn’t have the heart to make it.
“You realize you’re going to be bound to us for life,” Harold smiled, and
put his hand on his shoulder, and he nodded. He hoped Harold wouldn’t say
one more word, because if he did, he would cry, or vomit, or pass out, or

scream, or combust. He was aware, suddenly, of how exhausted, how
utterly depleted he was, as much by the past few weeks of anxiety as well
as the past thirty years of craving, of wanting, of wishing so intensely even
as he told himself he didn’t care, that by the time they had toasted one
another and first Julia and then Harold had hugged him—the sensation of
being held by Harold so unfamiliar and intimate that he had nearly

squirmed—he was relieved when Harold told him to leave the damn dishes
and go to bed.
When he reached his room, he had to lie on the bed for half an hour
before he could even think of retrieving his phone. He needed to feel the
solidity of the bed beneath him, the silk of the cotton blanket against his
cheek, the familiar yield of the mattress as he moved against it. He needed
to assure himself that this was his world, and he was still in it, and that what

had happened had really happened. He thought, suddenly, of a conversation
he’d once had with Brother Peter, in which he’d asked the brother if he
thought he’d ever be adopted, and the brother had laughed. “No,” he’d said,
so decisively that he had never asked again. And although he must have
been very young, he remembered, very clearly, that the brother’s dismissal
had only hardened his resolve, although of course it wasn’t an outcome that

was his to control in the slightest.
He was so discombobulated that he forgot that Willem was already
onstage when he called, but when Willem called him back at intermission,
he was still in the same place on the bed, in the same comma-like shape, the
phone still cupped beneath his palm.
“Jude,” Willem breathed when he told him, and he could hear how purely
happy Willem was for him. Only Willem—and Andy, and to some extent

Harold—knew the outlines of how he had grown up: the monastery, the