Page 572 - A Little Life: A Novel

He sleeps. He had thought he might be able to work from the hospital,
but he is more exhausted than he thought he would be, cloudier, and after
talking to the chairs of the various committees and some of his colleagues,

he doesn’t have the strength to do anything else.
Harold and Julia leave—they have classes and office hours—but except
for Richard and a few people from work, they don’t tell anyone he’s
hospitalized; he won’t be there for long, and Willem has decided he needs
sleep more than he needs visitors. He is still febrile, but less so, and there
have been no further episodes of delirium. And strangely, for all that is
happening, he feels, if not optimistic, then at least calm. Everyone around

him is so sober, so thin-lipped, that he feels determined to defy them
somehow, to defy the severity of the situation they keep telling him he’s in.
He can’t remember when he and Willem started referring to the hospital
as the Hotel Contractor, in honor of Andy, but it seems they always have.
“Watch out,” Willem would say to him even back at Lispenard Street, when
he was hacking at a piece of steak some enraptured sous-chef at Ortolan had

sneaked Willem at the end of his shift, “that cleaver’s really sharp, and if
you chop off a thumb, we’ll have to go to the Hotel Contractor.” Or once,
when he was hospitalized for a skin infection, he had sent Willem (away
somewhere, shooting) a text reading “At Hotel Contractor. Not a big deal,
but didn’t want you to hear through M or JB.” Now, though, when he tries
to make Hotel Contractor jokes—complaining about the Hotel’s
increasingly poor food and beverage services; about its poor quality of

linens—Willem doesn’t respond.
“This isn’t funny, Jude,” he snaps on Friday evening, as they wait for
Harold and Julia to arrive with dinner. “I wish you’d fucking stop kidding
around.” He is quiet then, and they look at each other. “I was so scared,”
Willem says, in a low voice. “You were so sick and I didn’t know what was
going to happen, and I was so scared.”

“Willem,” he says, gently, “I know. I’m so grateful for you.” He hurries
on before Willem can tell him he doesn’t need him to be grateful, he needs
him to take the situation seriously. “I’m going to listen to Andy, I promise. I
promise you I’m taking this seriously. And I promise you I’m not in any
discomfort. I feel fine. It’s going to be fine.”
After ten days, Andy is satisfied that the fever has been eliminated, and
he is discharged and sent home for two days to rest; he is back at the office

on Friday. He had always resisted having a driver—he liked to drive