Page 614 - A Little Life: A Novel

had extended the offer before—would be thrilled if he might join the panel
too and speak about Willem’s experiences during shooting. This stops him:
Had they invited him earlier? He supposes they had. But he can’t

remember. He can remember very little from the past six months. He looks
now at the dates of the festival: June third through June eleventh. He will
make plans to be out of town then; he has to be. Willem had shot two other
films with Bergesson—they had been friendly. He doesn’t want to have to
see more posters with Willem’s face, to read his name in the paper again.
He doesn’t want to have to see Bergesson.
That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem’s side of the closet, which

he still has not emptied. Here are Willem’s shirts on their hangers, and his
sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down
the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow,
which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs
it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he
ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a

straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem’s
arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses
and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he
really needs it.
He lies awake. Occasionally he brings his nose down to the collar so he
can try to smell what remains of Willem on the shirt, but with every wear,
the fragrance grows fainter. This is the fourth shirt of Willem’s he has used,

and he is very careful about preserving its scent. The first three shirts, ones
he wore almost nightly for months, no longer smell like Willem; they smell
like him. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself with the fact that his very
scent is something given to him by Willem, but he is never comforted for
long.
Even before they became a couple, Willem would always bring him

something from wherever he’d been working, and when he came back from
The Odyssey, it was with two bottles of cologne that he’d had made at a
famous perfumer’s atelier in Florence. “I know this might seem kind of
strange,” he’d said. “But someone”—he had smiled to himself, then,
knowing Willem meant some girl—“told me about this and I thought it
sounded interesting.” Willem explained how he’d had to describe him to the
nose—what colors he liked, what tastes, what parts of the world—and that

the perfumer had created this fragrance for him.