Page 243 - A Little Life: A Novel

someplace you could live for a long time: forever. And the elevator will
never break here. And if it does, I’ll be right downstairs. I mean—
obviously, you can buy somewhere else, but I hope you’ll consider moving

in here.”
In that moment he feels not angry but exposed: not just to Richard but to
Willem. He tries to hide as much as he can from Willem, not because he
doesn’t trust him but because he doesn’t want Willem to see him as less of a
person, as someone who has to be looked after and helped. He wants
Willem, wants them all, to think of him as someone reliable and hardy,
someone they can come to with their problems, instead of him always

having to turn to them. He is embarrassed, thinking of the conversations
that have been had about him—between Willem and Andy, and between
Willem and Harold (which he is certain happens more often than he fears),
and now between Willem and Richard—and saddened as well that Willem
is spending so much time worrying about him, that he is having to think of
him the way he would have had to think of Hemming, had Hemming lived:

as someone who needed care, as someone who needed decisions made for
him. He sees the image of himself as an old man again: Is it possible it is
also Willem’s vision, that the two of them share the same fear, that his
ending seems as inevitable to Willem as it does to himself?
He thinks, then, of a conversation he had once had with Willem and
Philippa; Philippa was talking about how someday, when she and Willem
were old, they’d take over her parents’ house and orchards in southern

Vermont. “I can see it now,” she said. “The kids’ll have moved back in with
us, because they won’t be able to make it in the real world, and they’ll have
six kids between them with names like Buster and Carrot and Vixen, who’ll
run around naked and won’t be sent to school, and whom Willem and I will
have to support until the end of time—”
“What will your kids do?” he asked, practical even in play.

“Oberon will make art installations using only food products, and
Miranda will play a zither with yarn for strings,” said Philippa, and he had
smiled. “They’ll stay in grad school forever, and Willem will have to keep
working until he’s so broken down that I have to push him onto the set in a
wheelchair”—she stopped, blushing, but carried on after a hitch—“to pay
for all their degrees and experiments. I’ll have to give up costume design
and start an organic applesauce company to pay all our debts and maintain

the house, which’ll be this huge, glorious wreck with termites everywhere,