Page 485 - A Little Life: A Novel

it after all: a house in the woods, with water nearby, and someone who
loved him. And then he shuddered, a tremor that rippled its way through his
body, and Willem looked at him. “Are you cold?” he asked. “No,” he said,

“but let’s keep walking,” and so they had.
Since then, he has avoided the woods, but he loves coming up to the site,
and is enjoying working with Malcolm again. He or Willem go up every
other weekend, though he knows Malcolm prefers it when he goes, because
Willem is largely uninterested in the details of the project. He trusts
Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn’t want trust: he wants someone to show the
silvery, stripey marble he’s found from a small quarry outside Izmir and

argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress
from Gifu that he’s sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the
objects—hammers; wrenches; pliers—he’s embedded like trilobites in the
poured concrete floors. Aside from the house and the garage, there is an
outdoor pool and, in the barn, an indoor pool: the house will be done in a
little more than three months, the pool and barn by the following spring.

Now he walks through the house with Malcolm, running his hands over
its surfaces, listening to Malcolm instruct the contractor on everything that
needs fixing. As always, he is impressed watching Malcolm at work: he
never tires of watching any of his friends at work, but Malcolm’s
transformation has been the most gratifying to witness, more so than even
Willem’s. In these moments, he remembers how carefully and meticulously
Malcolm built his imaginary houses, and with such seriousness; once, when

they were sophomores, JB had (accidentally, he claimed later) set one on
fire when he was high, and Malcolm had been so angry and hurt that he had
almost started crying. He had followed Malcolm as he ran out of Hood, and
had sat with him on the library steps in the cold. “I know it’s silly,”
Malcolm had said after he’d calmed down. “But they mean something to
me.”

“I know,” he’d said. He had always loved Malcolm’s houses; he still has
the first one Malcolm ever made him all those years ago, for his
seventeenth birthday. “It’s not silly.” He knew what the houses meant to
Malcolm: they were an assertion of control, a reminder that for all the
uncertainties of his life, there was one thing that he could manipulate
perfectly, that would always express what he was unable to in words. “What
does Malcolm have to worry about?” JB would ask them when Malcolm

was anxious about something, but he knew: he was worried because to be