Page 252 - A Little Life: A Novel

have been bothering him about it nonstop and he’d like to shut them up; he
really does love Sophie, and knows he won’t be able to do better than her;
he’s thirty-eight, and feels he has to do something). As he listens to

Malcolm, he tries not to smile: he has always liked this about Malcolm,
how he can be so decisive on the page and in his designs, and yet in the rest
of his life so in a dither, and so unself-conscious about sharing it. Malcolm
has never been someone who pretended he was cooler, or more confident,
or silkier than he actually is, and as they grow older, he appreciates and
admires more and more his sweet guilelessness, his complete trust in his
friends and their opinions.

“What do you think, Jude?” Malcolm asks at last. “I’ve actually really
wanted to talk to you about this. Should we sit down somewhere? Do you
have time? I know Willem’s on his way back home.”
He could be more like Malcolm, he thinks; he could ask his friends for
help, he could be vulnerable around them. He has been before, after all; it
just hasn’t been by choice. But they have always been kind to him, they

have never tried to make him feel self-conscious—shouldn’t that teach him
something? Maybe, for instance, he will ask Willem if he could help him
with his back: if Willem is disgusted by his appearance, he’ll never say
anything. And Andy was right—it is too difficult to apply the creams by
himself, and eventually he stopped, although he didn’t throw any of them
away, either.
He tries to think how he might begin the conversation with Willem, but

he finds he can’t move beyond the first word—Willem—even in his
imaginings. And in that moment, he knows he won’t be able to ask Willem
after all: Not because I don’t trust you, he says to Willem, with whom he
will never have this conversation. But because I can’t bear to have you see
me as I really am. Now when he imagines himself as an old man, he is still
alone, but on Greene Street, and in these wanderings, he sees Willem in a

house somewhere green and tree-filled—the Adirondacks, the Berkshires—
and Willem is happy, he is surrounded by people who love him, and maybe
a few times a year he comes into the city to visit him on Greene Street, and
they spend the afternoon together. In these dreams, he is always sitting
down, so he’s uncertain if he can still walk or not, but he knows that he is
delighted to see Willem, always, and that at the end of all their meetings, he
is able to tell him not to worry, that he can take care of himself, giving him