Page 52 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 52

them,  working  through  the  problems  as  quickly  as  if  he  were  running
                arpeggios. Their first year, Willem had genuinely wanted to understand it,
                and Jude had sat with him for a string of nights, explaining again and again,

                but he had never been able to comprehend it.
                   “I’m just too stupid to get this,” he’d said after what felt like an hours-
                long session, at the end of which he had wanted to go outside and run for
                miles, he was so prickly with impatience and frustration.
                   Jude had looked down. “You’re not stupid,” he said, quietly. “I’m just not
                explaining it well enough.” Jude took seminars in pure math that you had to
                be invited to enroll in; the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom what,

                exactly, he did in it.
                   In retrospect, he was surprised only by his own surprise when his mother
                called three months later to tell him that Hemming was on life support. This
                was in late May, and he was halfway through his final exams. “Don’t come
                back,” she’d told him, commanded him, almost. “Don’t, Willem.” He spoke
                with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later, when a

                Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice
                became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had
                unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents,
                one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.
                   Over  the  next  few  days  he  fretted,  did  poorly  in  his  exams:  French,
                comparative  literature,  Jacobean  drama,  the  Icelandic  sagas,  the  hated
                calculus all slurring into one. He picked a fight with his girlfriend, who was

                a senior and graduating. She cried; he felt guilty but also unable to repair
                the  situation.  He  thought  of  Wyoming,  of  a  machine  coughing  life  into
                Hemming’s lungs. Shouldn’t he go back? He had to go back. He wouldn’t
                be able to stay for long: on June fifteenth, he and Jude were moving into a
                sublet off-campus for the summer—they’d both found jobs in the city, Jude
                working  on  weekdays  as  a  classics  professor’s  amanuensis  and  on

                weekends at the bakery he worked at during the school year, Willem as a
                teacher’s assistant at a program for disabled children—but before then, the
                four of them were going to stay at Malcolm’s parents’ house in Aquinnah,
                on  Martha’s  Vineyard,  after  which  Malcolm  and  JB  would  drive  back  to
                New York. At nights, he called Hemming at the hospital, made his parents
                or one of the nurses hold the phone up to his ear, and spoke to his brother,
                even though he knew he probably couldn’t hear him. But how could he not

                have tried?
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