Page 349 - A Little Life: A Novel

He was moving backward now, toward the sink, as if I might lunge at
him and he wanted some distance. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry,
Harold.”

“How often is sometimes?” I asked.
He too was panicking now, I could see. “I don’t know,” he said. “It
varies.”
“Well, estimate. Give me a ballpark.”
“I don’t know,” he said, desperate, “I don’t know. A few times a week, I
guess.”
“A few times a week!” I said, and then stopped. Suddenly I had to get out

of there. I took my coat from the chair and crammed the bag into its inside
pocket. “You’d better be here when I get back,” I told him, and left. (He
was a bolter: whenever he thought Julia or I were displeased with him, he
would try as quickly as he could to get out of our sight, as if he were an
offending object that needed to be removed.)
I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes,

feeling the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one’s gross
inadequacy, of knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time
I realized that as much as he was two people around us, so were we two
people around him: we saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves
not to see anything else. We were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy:
their unhappinesses are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are
understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable.

But his were not. We didn’t know how to help him because we lacked the
imagination needed to diagnose the problems. But this is making excuses.
By the time I returned to the house it was almost dark, and I could see,
through the window, his outline moving about in the kitchen. I sat on a
chair on the porch and wished Julia were there, that she wasn’t in England
with her father.

The back door opened. “Dinner,” he said, quietly, and I got up to go
inside.
He’d made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day
before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with
lots of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the
mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn’t have an appetite for any of it. He
served me, and then himself, and sat.