Page 280 - A Little Life: A Novel

experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they
cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but
we cannot prove it. But it must exist. So I prefer to think that Walter has not

died but has instead proven for himself the axiom of the empty set, that he
has proven the concept of zero. I know nothing else would have made him
happier. An elegant mind wants elegant endings, and Walter had the most
elegant mind. So I wish him goodbye; I wish him the answer to the axiom
he so loved.”
They are all quiet for a while, contemplating this. “Please tell me that
isn’t your favorite axiom,” Harold says suddenly, and he laughs. “No,” he

says. “It’s not.”
He sleeps in the next day, and that night he goes to the wedding, where
because both of the grooms lived in Hood, he knows almost everyone. The
non-Hood guests—Lionel’s colleagues from Wellesley, and Sinclair’s from
Harvard, where he teaches European history—stand near one another as if
for protection, looking bored and bemused. The wedding is loose-limbed

and slightly chaotic—Lionel starts assigning his guests tasks as soon as they
arrive, which most of them neglect: he is supposed to be making sure
everyone signs the guest book; Willem is supposed to be helping people
find their tables—and people walk around saying how, thanks to Lionel and
Sinclair, thanks to this wedding, they won’t have to go to their twentieth
reunion this year. They are all here: Willem and his girlfriend, Robin;
Malcolm and Sophie; and JB and his new boyfriend, whom he hasn’t met,

and he knows, even before checking their place cards, that they will all be
assigned to the same table. “Jude!” people he hasn’t seen in years say to
him. “How are you? Where’s JB? I just spoke to Willem! I just saw
Malcolm!” And then, “Are you four all still as close as you were?”
“We all still talk,” he says, “and they’re doing great,” which is the answer
he and Willem had decided they’d give. He wonders what JB is saying,

whether he is skimming over the truth, as he and Willem are, or whether he
is lying outright, or whether, in a fit of JBish forthrightness, he is telling the
truth: “No. We hardly ever speak anymore. I only really talk to Malcolm
these days.”
He hasn’t seen JB in months and months. He hears of him, of course:
through Malcolm, through Richard, through Black Henry Young. But he
doesn’t see him any longer, because even nearly three years later, he is

unable to forgive him. He has tried and tried. He knows how intractable,