Page 506 - A Little Life: A Novel

you went to parties and when someone said something ridiculous, you’d
look across the table, and he’d look back at you, expressionless, with just
the barest hint of a raised eyebrow, and you’d have to hurriedly drink some

water to keep from spewing out your mouthful of food with laughter, and
then back at your apartment—your ridiculously beautiful apartment, which
you both appreciated an almost embarrassing amount, for reasons you never
had to explain to the other—you would recap the entire awful dinner,
laughing so much that you began to equate happiness with pain. Or you got
to discuss your problems every night with someone smarter and more
thoughtful than you, or talk about the continued awe and discomfort you

both felt, all these years later, about having money, absurd, comic-book-
villain money, or drive up to his parents’ house, one of you plugging into
the car’s stereo an outlandish playlist, with which you would both sing
along, loudly, being extravagantly silly as adults the way you never were as
children. As you got older, you realized that really, there were very few
people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time,

and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years,
even when he was at his most opaque and confusing. So: happy. Yes, he
was happy. He didn’t have to think about it, not really. He was, he knew, a
simple person, the simplest of people, and yet he had ended up with the
most complicated of people.
“All I want,” he’d said to Jude one night, trying to explain the
satisfaction that at that moment was burbling inside him, like water in a

bright blue kettle, “is work I enjoy, and a place to live, and someone who
loves me. See? Simple.”
Jude had laughed, sadly. “Willem,” he said, “that’s all I want, too.”
“But you have that,” he’d said, quietly, and Jude was quiet, too.
“Yes,” he said, at last. “You’re right.” But he hadn’t sounded convinced.
That Tuesday night, they are lying next to each other, half talking and

half not in one of the meandering almost-conversations they have when
they both want to stay awake but are both falling asleep, when Jude says his
name with a sort of seriousness that makes him open his eyes. “What is it?”
he asks him, and Jude’s face is so still, so sober, that he is frightened.
“Jude?” he says. “Tell me.”
“Willem, you know I’ve been trying not to cut myself,” he says, and
Willem nods at him and waits. “And I’m going to keep trying,” Jude