Page 433 - A Little Life: A Novel

along as it always had. He worked; he came home to Greene Street; he
thought about what Andy had said.
And then one Saturday morning he woke very early, just as the sky was

brightening. It was late May, and the weather was unpredictable: some days
it felt like March, other days, like July. Ninety feet away from him lay Jude.
And suddenly his timidity, his confusion, his dithering seemed silly. He was
home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he
would never hurt him—he trusted himself with that much. And so what was
there to fear?
He remembered a conversation he’d had with Robin when he had been

preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad, neither
of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college. This was
when they had first begun dating, and were both still trying to impress each
other, when a sort of giddiness was derived from deferring to the other’s
expertise. “What’re the most overrated lines from the poem?” he’d asked,
and Robin had rolled her eyes and recited: “ ‘We have still not reached the

end of our trials. One more labor lies in store—boundless, laden with
danger, great and long, and I must brave it out from start to finish.’ ” She
made some retching noises. “So obvious. And somehow, that’s been co-
opted by every losing football team in the country as their pregame rallying
cry,” she added, and he’d laughed. She looked at him, slyly. “You played
football,” she said. “I’ll bet those’re your favorite lines as well.”
“Absolutely not,” he’d said, in mock outrage. This was part of their game

that wasn’t always a game: he was the dumb actor, the dumber jock, and
she was the smart girl who went out with him and taught him what he didn’t
know.
“Then tell me what they are,” she’d challenged him, and after he did,
she’d looked at him, intently. “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting.”
Now he got out of bed and wrapped his blanket around himself, yawning.

That evening, he’d talk to Jude. He didn’t know where he was going, but he
knew he would be safe; he would keep them both safe. He went to the
kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back
to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home,
coming back to Greene Street after a long time away—“And tell me this: I
must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”—as all
around him, the apartment filled with light.