Page 604 - A Little Life: A Novel

Jude had smiled at him. “Oh, dying,” he said dismissively. “We’re all
dying. He just knew his death would come sooner than he had planned. But
that doesn’t mean they weren’t happy years, that it wasn’t a happy life.”

He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he
sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life
had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn’t a pitying sadness;
it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving
people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that
mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to
live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their

circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those
moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search
for something to give us solace.
But he didn’t say this, of course, just sat up and grabbed Jude’s face and
kissed him and then fell back against the pillows. “How’d you get so
smart?” he asked Jude, and Jude grinned at him.

“Too hard?” he asked in response, still kneading Willem’s foot.
“Not hard enough.”
Now he turned Jude around to face him in bed. “I think we have to stick
with The Happy Years,” he told him. “We’ll just have to risk your arms
falling off,” and Jude laughed.
The next week, he left for Paris. It was one of the most difficult shoots
he’d ever done; he had a double, an actual dancer, for the more elaborate

sequences, but he did some of his own dancing as well, and there were days
—days spent lifting real ballerinas into the air, marveling at how dense,
how ropy with muscle they were—that were so exhausting that by the
evening he had only the energy to drop himself into the bathtub and then lift
himself out of it. In the past few years, he had found himself subconsciously
drawn to ever-more physical roles, and he was always astonished by, and

appreciative of, how heroically his body met its every demand. He had been
given a new awareness of it, and now, as he stretched his arms behind him
as he leaped, he could feel how every sore muscle came alive for him, how
it allowed him to do whatever he wanted, how nothing within him ever
broke, how it indulged him every time. He knew he wasn’t alone in feeling
this, this gratitude: when they visited Cambridge, he and Harold would play
tennis every day, and he knew without them ever discussing it how grateful

they had both become for their own bodies, how much the act of smacking