Page 589 - A Little Life: A Novel

brother in San Francisco. He starts to give a toast, thanking everyone for
everything they have given him and done for him, but before he gets to the
person he wants to thank most—Willem, sitting to his right—he finds he

cannot continue, and he looks up from his paper at his friends and sees that
they are all going to cry, and so he stops.
He is enjoying the dinner, amused even by how people keep adding
scoops of different food to his plate, even though he hasn’t eaten much of
his first serving, but he is so sleepy, and eventually he burrows back into the
chair and closes his eyes, smiling as he listens to the familiar conversation,
the familiar voices, fill the air around him.

Eventually Willem notices that he is falling asleep, and he hears him
stand. “Okay,” he says, “time for your diva exit,” and turns the chair from
the table and begins pushing it away toward their bedroom, and he uses the
last of his strength to answer everyone’s laughter, their song of goodbyes, to
peek out around the wing of the chair and smile at them, letting his fingers
trail behind him in an airy, theatrical wave. “Stay,” he calls out as he is

taken from them. “Please stay. Please stay and give Willem some decent
conversation,” and they agree they will; it isn’t even seven, after all—they
have hours and hours. “I love you,” he calls to them, and they shout it back
at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still
distinguish each individual voice.
At the doorway to their bedroom, Willem lifts him—he has lost so much
weight, and without his prostheses is so less storklike a form, that now even

Julia can lift him—and carries him to their bed, helps him undress, helps
him remove his temporary prostheses, folds the covers back over him. He
pours him a glass of water, hands him his pills: an antibiotic, a fistful of
vitamins. He swallows them all as Willem watches, and then for a while
Willem sits on the bed next to him, not touching him, but simply near.
“Promise me you’ll go out there and stay up late,” he tells Willem, and

Willem shrugs.
“Maybe I’ll just stay here with you,” he says. “They seem to be having a
fine time without me.” And sure enough, there is a burst of laughter from
the dining room, and they look at each other and smile.
“No,” he says, “promise me,” and finally, Willem does. “Thank you,
Willem,” he says, inadequately, his eyes closing. “This was a good day.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” he hears Willem say, and then he begins to say

something else, but he doesn’t hear it because he has fallen asleep.