Page 230 - A Little Life: A Novel

but rather scrupulous: when he was a child, the boys from the home would
occasionally play baseball games with the boys from the local school, who
would taunt them, pinching their noses as they walked onto the field. “Take

a bath!” they would shout. “You smell! You smell!” But they did bathe:
they had mandatory showers every morning, pumping the greasy pink soap
into their palms and onto washcloths and sloughing off their skin while one
of the counselors walked back and forth before the row of showerheads,
cracking one of the thin towels at the boys who were misbehaving, or
shouting at the ones who weren’t cleaning themselves with enough vigor.
Even now, he has a horror of repulsing, by being unkempt, or dirty, or

unsightly. “You’ll always be ugly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be neat,”
Father Gabriel used to tell him, and although Father Gabriel was wrong
about many things, he knows he was right about this.
Malcolm arrives and hugs him hello and then begins, as he always does,
surveying the space, telescoping his long neck and rotating in a slow circle
around the room, his gaze like a lighthouse’s beam, making little assessing

noises as he does.
He answers Malcolm’s question before he can ask it: “Next month, Mal.”
“You said that three months ago.”
“I know. But now I really mean it. Now I have the money. Or I will, at
the end of this month.”
“But we discussed this.”
“I know. And Malcolm—it’s so unbelievably generous of you. But I’m

not going to not pay you.”
He has lived in the apartment for more than four years now, and for four
years, he’s been unable to renovate it because he hasn’t had the money, and
he hasn’t had the money because he was paying off the apartment. In the
meantime, Malcolm has drawn up plans, and walled off the bedrooms, and
helped him choose a sofa, which sits, a gray spacecraft, in the center of the

living room, and fixed some minor problems, including the floors. “That’s
crazy,” he had told Malcolm at the time. “You’re going to have to redo it
entirely once the renovation’s done.” But Malcolm had said he’d do it
anyway; the floor dye was a new product he wanted to try, and until he was
ready to begin work, Greene Street would be his laboratory, where he could
do a little experimentation, if he didn’t mind (and he didn’t, of course). But
otherwise the apartment is still very much as it was when he moved in: a

long rectangle on the sixth floor of a building in southern SoHo, with