Page 592 - A Little Life: A Novel

eating but drinking—pitchers of iced mint tea for breakfast, liters of
lemonade for lunch, bottles of Aligoté for dinner—and they leave the
house’s every window, every door open, the ceiling fans spinning, so that at

night, when they finally seal it shut, they trap within it the fragrance of
meadows and trees.
It is the Saturday before Labor Day, and they would normally be in
Truro, but this year they have rented Harold and Julia a house outside Aix-
en-Provence for the entire summer, and the two of them are spending the
holiday in Garrison instead. Harold and Julia will arrive—maybe with
Laurence and Gillian, maybe not—tomorrow, but today Willem is picking

up Malcolm and Sophie and JB and his on-again, off-again boyfriend
Fredrik from the train station. They’ve seen very little of their friends for
months now: JB has been on a fellowship in Italy for the past six months,
and Malcolm and Sophie have been so busy with the construction of a new
ceramics museum in Shanghai that the last time they saw them all was in
April, in Paris—he was filming there, and Jude had come in from London,

where he was working, and JB in from Rome, and Malcolm and Sophie had
laid over for a couple of days on their way back to New York.
Almost every summer he thinks: This is the best summer. But this
summer, he knows, really is the best. And not just the summer: the spring,
the winter, the fall. As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of
his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if
it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The

Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional
Years. The Hopeful Years.
Jude had smiled when he told him this. “And what era are we in now?”
he asked, and Willem had smiled back at him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I
haven’t come up with a name for it yet.”
But they both agreed that they had at least exited The Awful Years. Two

years ago, he had spent this very weekend—Labor Day weekend—in a
hospital on the Upper East Side, staring out the window with a hatred so
intense it nauseated him at the orderlies and nurses and doctors in their
jade-green pajamas congregating outside the building, eating and smoking
and talking on their phones as if nothing were wrong, as if above them
weren’t people in various stages of dying, including his own person, who
was at that moment in a medically induced coma, his skin prickling with