Page 269 - A Little Life: A Novel

sad salamander-like creature, so pale he was almost translucent, licking
blood from himself in what had to be the least-erotic gesture in the world.
But of all the questions he was able to answer, there was one he was not:

How was he to get out? How was he to stop? Here he was, literally trapped
in his studio, literally peeking down the hallway to make sure Jackson
wasn’t approaching. How was he to escape Jackson? How was he to
recover his life?
The night after he had made Jude get rid of his stash, he had finally
called him back, and Jude had asked him over, and he had refused, and so
Jude had come to him. He had sat and stared at the wall as Jude made him

dinner, a shrimp risotto, handing him the plate and then leaning on the
counter to watch him eat.
“Can I have more?” he asked when he was done with the first serving,
and Jude gave it to him. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was, and his
hand shook as he brought the spoon to his mouth. He thought of Sunday-
night dinners at his mother’s, which he hadn’t gone to since his

grandmother died.
“Aren’t you going to lecture me?” he finally asked, but Jude shook his
head.
After he ate, he sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound
turned off, not really seeing anything but comforted by the flash and blur of
images, and Jude had washed the dishes and then sat on the sofa near him,
working on a brief.

One of Willem’s movies was on television—the one in which he played a
con man in a small Irish town, whose entire left cheek was webbed with
scars—and he stopped on the channel, not watching it, but looking at
Willem’s face, his mouth moving silently. “I miss Willem,” he’d said, and
then realized how ungrateful he sounded. But Jude had put down his pen
and looked at the screen. “I miss him, too,” he said, and the two of them

stared at their friend, so far away from them.
“Don’t go,” he’d said to Jude as he was falling asleep. “Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” Jude had said, and he knew Jude wouldn’t.
When he woke early the next morning, he was still on the sofa, and the
television was turned off, and he was under his duvet. And there was Jude,
huddled into the cushions on the other end of the sectional, still asleep.
Some part of him had always been insulted by Jude’s unwillingness to

divulge anything of himself to them, by his furtiveness and secretiveness,