Page 566 - A Little Life: A Novel

in its syrup and sincerity—but in the bathroom it was dampened, as if it was
being piped in from some far-off valley. “Put your arms around me,”
Willem told him, and he did. “Move your right foot back when I move my

left one toward it,” he said next, and he did.
For a while they moved slowly and clumsily, looking at each other, silent.
“See?” Willem said, quietly. “You’re dancing.”
“I’m not good at it,” he mumbled, embarrassed.
“You’re perfect at it,” Willem said, and although his feet were by this
point so sore that he was beginning to perspire from the discipline it was
taking not to scream, he kept moving, but so minimally that toward the end

of the song they were only swaying, their feet not leaving the ground,
Willem holding him so he wouldn’t fall.
When they emerged from the bathroom, there was a whooping from the
groups of people nearest to them, and he blushed—the last, the final, time
he’d had sex with Willem had been almost sixteen months ago—but Willem
grinned and raised his arm as if he was a prizefighter who had just won a

bout.
And then it was April, and his forty-seventh birthday, and then it was
May, and he developed a wound on each calf, and Willem left for Istanbul
to shoot the second installment in his spy trilogy. He had told Willem about
the wounds—he was trying to tell him things as they happened, even things
he didn’t consider that important—and Willem had been upset.
But he hadn’t been concerned. How many of these wounds had he had

over the years? Tens; dozens. The only thing that had changed was the
amount of time he spent trying to resolve them. Now he went to Andy’s
office twice a week—every Tuesday lunchtime and Friday evening—once
for debriding and once for a wound vacuum treatment, which Andy’s nurse
performed. Andy had always thought that his skin was too fragile for that
treatment, in which a piece of sterile foam was fitted above the open sore

and a nozzle moved above it that sucked the dead and dying tissues into the
foam like a sponge, but in recent years he had tolerated it well, and it had
proven more successful than simply debriding alone.
As he had grown older, the wounds—their frequency, their severity, their
size, the level of discomfort that attended them—had grown steadily worse.
Long gone, decades gone, were the days in which he was able to walk any
great distance when he had them. (The memory of strolling from

Chinatown to the Upper East Side—albeit painfully—with one of these