Page 576 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Come on, Harold,” he says. “Just to the first bench.” Malcolm has
placed three benches along the path he has hacked through the forest to the
house’s rear; one is located about a third of a way around the lake; the

second at the halfway point; and the third at the two-thirds point. “We’ll go
slowly, and I’ll take my cane.” It has been years since he has had to use a
cane—not since he was a teenager—but now he needs it for any distance
longer than fifty yards or so. Finally, Harold agrees, and he grabs his scarf
and coat before Harold can change his mind.
Once they are outdoors, his euphoria increases. He loves this house: he
loves how it looks, he loves its quiet, and most of all, he loves that it is his

and Willem’s, as far from Lispenard Street as imaginable, but as much
theirs as that place was, something they made together and share. The
house, which faces a second, different forest, is a series of glass cubes, and
preceding it is a long driveway that switchbacks through the woods, so at
certain angles you can see only swatches of it, and at other angles it
disappears completely. At night, when it is lit, it glows like a lantern, which

was what Malcolm had named it in his monograph: Lantern House. The
back of the house looks out onto a wide lawn and beyond it, a lake. At the
bottom of the lawn is a pool, which is lined with slabs of slate so that the
water is always cold and clear, even on the hottest days, and in the barn
there is an indoor pool and a living room; every wall of the barn can be
lifted up and away from the structure, so that the entire interior is exposed
to the outdoors, to the tree peonies and lilac bushes that bloom around it in

the early spring; to the panicles of wisteria that drip from its roof in the
early summer. To the right of the house is a field that paints itself red with
poppies in July; to the left is another through which he and Willem scattered
thousands of wildflower seeds: cosmos and daisies and foxglove and Queen
Anne’s lace. One weekend shortly after they had moved in, they spent two
days making their way through the forests before and behind the house,

planting lilies of the valley near the mossy hillocks around the oak and elm
trees, and sowing mint seeds throughout. They knew Malcolm didn’t
approve of their landscaping efforts—he thought them sentimental and trite
—and although they knew Malcolm was probably right, they also didn’t
really care. In spring and summer, when the air was fragrant, they often
thought of Lispenard Street, its aggressive ugliness, and of how then they
wouldn’t even have had the visual imagination to conjure a place like this,