Page 487 - A Little Life: A Novel

business he secured, by the work he did: there, he had no past, he had no
deficiencies. His life there began with where he had gone to law school and
what he had done there; it ended with each day’s accomplishments, with

each year’s tallies of billable hours, with each new client he could attract.
At Rosen Pritchard, there was no room for Brother Luke, or Caleb, or Dr.
Traylor, or the monastery, or the home; they were irrelevant, they were
extraneous details, they had nothing to do with the person he had created
for himself. There, he wasn’t someone who cowered in the bathroom,
cutting himself, but instead a series of numbers: one number to signify how
much money he brought in, and another for the number of hours he billed; a

third representing how many people he oversaw, a fourth for how much he
rewarded them. It was something he had never been able to explain to his
friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he worked; he could
never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he
knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human,
his most dignified and invulnerable.

Willem comes home twice during the course of the shoot for long
weekends; but one weekend he is sick with a stomach flu, and the next
Willem is sick with bronchitis. But both times—as he feels every time he
hears Willem walk into the apartment, calling his name—he must remind
himself that this is his life, and that in this life, Willem is coming home to
him. In those moments, he feels that his dislike of sex is miserly, that he
must be misremembering how bad it is, and that even if he isn’t, he has

simply to try harder, that he has to pity himself less. Toughen up, he scolds
himself as he kisses Willem goodbye at the end of these weekends. Don’t
you dare ruin this. Don’t you dare complain about what you don’t even
deserve.
And then one night, less than a month before Willem is due to come
home for good, he wakes and believes he is in the trailer of a massive

semitruck, and that the bed beneath him is a dirtied blue quilt folded in half,
and that his every bone is being jounced as the truck trundles its way down
the highway. Oh no, he thinks, oh no, and he gets up and hurries to the
piano and begins playing as many Bach partitas as he can remember, out of
sequence and too loud and too fast. He is reminded of a fable Brother Luke
had once told him during one of their piano lessons of an old woman in a
house who played her lute faster and faster so the imps outside her door

would dance themselves into a sludge. Brother Luke had told him this story