Page 544 - A Little Life: A Novel

year, things would get better. And she had been right: things did get better.
And Brother Luke had been right as well, because when he was sixteen, his
life changed. A year after Dr. Traylor, he was in the college he had dreamed

of; with every day he didn’t have sex, he was becoming cleaner and cleaner.
His life became more improbable by the year. Every year, his own good
fortunes multiplied and intensified, and he was astonished again and again
by the things and generosities that were bequeathed to him, by the people
who entered his life, people so different from the people he had known that
they seemed to be another species altogether: How, after all, could Dr.
Traylor and Willem both be named the same sort of being? How could

Father Gabriel and Andy? How could Brother Luke and Harold? Did what
existed in the first group also exist in the second, and if so, how had that
second group chosen otherwise, how had they chosen what to become?
Things had not just corrected themselves; they had reversed themselves, to
an almost absurd degree. He had gone from nothing to an embarrassing
bounty. He would remember, then, Harold’s claim that life compensated for

its losses, and he would realize the truth of that, although sometimes it
would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so
extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were
piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and
wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it, so he would allow it to
keep moving him forward. And so, as the years went by, he broke his
promises to himself again and again. He did end up following people who

were kind to him. He did trust people again. He did have sex again. He did
hope to be saved. And he was right to do so: not every time, of course, but
most of the time. He ignored what the past had taught him and more often
than he should have been, he was rewarded for it. He regretted none of it,
not even the sex, because he had had it with hope, and to make someone
else happy, someone who had given him everything.

One night shortly after he and Willem had become a couple, they had
been at a dinner party at Richard’s, a raucous, casual affair of just people
they loved and people they liked—JB and Malcolm and Black Henry Young
and Asian Henry Young and Phaedra and Ali and all of their boyfriends and
girlfriends, their husbands and wives. He was in the kitchen helping
Richard prepare dessert, and JB came in—he was a little drunk—and put
his arm around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. “Well, Judy,” he said,

“you really ended up with it all in the end, didn’t you? The career, the