Page 515 - A Little Life: A Novel

“You don’t look great,” Harold tells him.
“I’m not,” he says. “Harold, I’m really sorry. Kit texted late last night,
and this director I thought I was going to meet up with this week is leaving

town tonight; I have to get back to the city today.”
“Oh no, Willem, really?” Harold begins, and then Jude walks in, and
Harold says, “Willem says you guys have to go back to the city this
morning.”
“You can stay,” he says to Jude, but doesn’t lift his eyes from the toast
he’s buttering. “Keep the car. But I need to get back.”
“No,” says Jude, after a short silence. “I should get back, too.”

“What the hell kind of Thanksgiving is this? You guys just eat and run?
What am I going to do with all that turkey?” Harold says, but his theatrical
outrage is muted, and Willem can feel him looking at both of them in turn,
trying to figure out what’s happening, what’s gone wrong.
He waits for Jude to get ready, trying to make small talk with Julia and
ignore Harold’s unspoken questions. He goes to the car first to make it clear

he’s driving, and as he’s saying goodbye, Harold looks at him and opens his
mouth, and then shuts it, and hugs him instead. “Drive safely,” he says.
In the car he seethes, keeps accelerating and then reminding himself to
slow down. It’s not even eight in the morning, and it’s Thanksgiving Day,
and the highway is empty. Next to him, Jude is turned away from him, his
face against the glass: Willem still hasn’t looked at him, doesn’t know what
expression he wears, can’t see the smudges under his eyes that Andy had

told him in the hospital were a telltale sign that Jude has been cutting
himself too much. His anger quickens and recedes by the mile: sometimes
he sees Jude lying to him—he is always lying to him, he realizes—and the
fury fills him like hot oil. And sometimes he thinks of what he said, and the
way he behaved, and the entire situation, that the person he loves is so
terrible to himself, and feels such a sense of remorse that he has to grip the

steering wheel to make himself focus. He thinks: Is he right? Do I see him
as Hemming? And then he thinks: No. That’s Jude’s delusion, because he
can’t understand why anyone would want to be with him. It’s not the truth.
But the explanation doesn’t comfort him, and indeed makes him more
wretched.
Just past New Haven, he stops. Normally, the passage through New
Haven is the opportunity for him to recount their favorite stories from when

he and JB were roommates in grad school: The time he was made to help