Page 220 - A Little Life: A Novel

Harold and Julia’s for Thanksgiving nor to the Irvines’ at Christmas, so he
could instead go to her parents’ in Vermont; he had forgone his annual
vacation with Jude; he had accompanied her to her friends’ parties and

weddings and dinners and shows, and had stayed with her when he was in
town, watching as she sketched designs for a production of The Tempest,
sharpening her expensive colored pencils while she slept and he, his mind
still stuck in a different time zone, wandered through the apartment, starting
and stopping books, opening and closing magazines, idly straightening the
containers of pasta and cereal in the pantry. He had done all of this happily
and without resentment. But it still hadn’t been enough, and they had

broken up, quietly and, he thought, well, the previous year, after almost four
years together.
Mr. Irvine, hearing that they had broken up, shook his head (this had
been at Flora’s baby shower). “You boys are really turning into a bunch of
Peter Pans,” he said. “Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I’m not sure
what’s going on with you lot. You’re making money. You’ve achieved

something. Don’t you think you guys should stop clinging to one another
and get serious about adulthood?”
But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only
appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.)
“Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our
only choice?” he’d asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past
summer, and Harold had laughed. “Look, Willem,” he said, “I think you’re

doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I
agree with Malcolm’s dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really
have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your
life. You’re young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to
do and how you want to live.”
“And what if this is how I want to live?”

“Well, then, that’s fine,” said Harold. He smiled at Willem. “You boys are
living every man’s dream, you know. Probably even John Irvine’s.”
Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He
took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it
was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more
codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were
twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t

friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two