Page 55 - A Little Life: A Novel

precarious skyscrapers on every surface and spackled a section of wall that
had gone puddingy with water damage; Willem tightened doorknobs,
replaced a leaky washer, changed the ballcock in the toilet. He started

hanging out with another of the teacher’s aides, a girl who went to Harvard,
and some nights she would come over to the house and the three of them
would make large pots of spaghetti alle vongole and Jude would tell them
about his days with the professor, who had decided to communicate with
Jude in only Latin or ancient Greek, even when his instructions were things
like, “I need more binder clips,” or “Make sure you get an extra shot of soy
milk in my cappuccino tomorrow morning.” In August, their friends and

acquaintances from college (and from Harvard, and MIT, and Wellesley,
and Tufts) started drifting back to the city, and stayed with them for a night
or two until they could move into their own apartments and dorm rooms.
One evening toward the end of their stay, they invited fifty people up to the
roof and helped Malcolm make a sort of clambake on the grill, blanketing
ears of corn and mussels and clams under heaps of dampened banana

leaves; the next morning the four of them scooped up the shells from the
floor, enjoying the castanety clatter they made as they were tossed into trash
bags.
But it was also that summer that he realized he wouldn’t go home again,
that somehow, without Hemming, there was no point in him and his parents
pretending they needed to stay together. He suspected they felt the same
way; there was never any conversation about this, but he never felt any

particular need to see them again, and they never asked him. They spoke
every now and again, and their conversations were, as always, polite and
factual and dutiful. He asked them about the ranch, they asked him about
school. His senior year, he got a role in the school’s production of The
Glass Menagerie (he was cast as the gentleman caller, of course), but he
never mentioned it to them, and when he told them that they shouldn’t

bother to come east for graduation, they didn’t argue with him: it was
nearing the end of foal season anyway, and he wasn’t sure they would have
been able to come even if he hadn’t excused them. He and Jude had been
adopted by Malcolm’s and JB’s families for the weekend, and when they
weren’t around, there were plenty of other people to invite them to their
celebratory lunches and dinners and outings.
“But they’re your parents,” Malcolm said to him once a year or so. “You

can’t just stop talking to them.” But you could, you did: he was proof of