Page 219 - A Little Life: A Novel

third-floor unit whose windows were just level with the tops of the gingko
trees; before he’d moved in, he’d had a vision that he would lie in bed late
on the weekends and watch the tornado the yellow leaves made as they

were shaken loose from their branches by the wind. But he never had.
He had no special feelings for the apartment, other than it was his and he
had bought it, the first and biggest thing he had ever bought after paying off
the last of his student loans. When he had begun looking, a year and a half
ago, he had known only that he wanted to live downtown and that he
needed a building with an elevator, so that Jude would be able to visit him.
“Isn’t that a little codependent?” his girlfriend at the time, Philippa, had

asked him, teasing but also not teasing.
“Is it?” he had asked, understanding what she meant but pretending not
to.
“Willem,” Philippa had said, laughing to conceal her irritation. “It is.”
He had shrugged, unoffended. “I can’t live somewhere he can’t come
visit,” he said.

She sighed. “I know.”
He knew that Philippa had nothing against Jude; she liked him, and Jude
liked her as well, and had even one day gently told Willem that he thought
he should spend more time with Philippa when he was in town. When he
and Philippa had begun dating—she was a costume designer, mostly for
theater—she had been amused, charmed even, by his friendships. She had
seen them, he knew, as proof of his loyalty, and dependability, and

consistency. But as they continued dating, as they got older, something
changed, and the amount of time he spent with JB and Malcolm and,
especially, Jude became evidence instead of his fundamental immaturity, his
unwillingness to leave behind the comfort of one life—the life with them—
for the uncertainties of another, with her. She never asked him to abandon
them completely—indeed, one of the things he had loved about her was

how close she was to her own group of friends, and that the two of them
could spend a night with their own people, in their own restaurants, having
their own conversations, and then meet at its end, two distinct evenings
ending as a single shared one—but she wanted, finally, a kind of surrender
from him, a dedication to her and their relationship that superseded the
others.
Which he couldn’t bring himself to do. But he felt he had given more to

her than she recognized. In their last two years together, he hadn’t gone to