Page 624 - A Little Life: A Novel

tried to distill Willem’s very body chemistry. He would have taken him,
just-woken, to the perfumer in Florence. “Here,” he would’ve said. “This.
This scent. I want you to bottle this.” Jane had once told him that as a girl

she had been terrified her father would die, and she had secretly made
digital copies of her father’s dictation (he had been a doctor as well) and
stored them on flash drives. And when her father finally did die, four years
ago, she had rediscovered them, and had sat in a room playing them,
listening to her father dictating orders in his calm, patient voice. How he
envied Jane this; how he wished he had thought to do the same.
At least he had Willem’s films, and his e-mails, and letters he had written

him over the years, all of which he had saved. At least he had Willem’s
clothes, and articles about Willem, all of which he had kept. At least he had
JB’s paintings of Willem; at least he had photographs of Willem: hundreds
of them, though he only allotted himself a certain number. He decided he
would allow himself to look at ten of them every week, and he would look
and look at them for hours. It was his decision whether he wanted to review

one a day or look at all ten in a single sitting. He was terrified his computer
would be destroyed and he would lose these images; he made multiple
copies of the photographs and stored the discs in various places: in his safe
at Greene Street, in his safe at Lantern House, in his desk at Rosen
Pritchard, in his safe-deposit box at the bank.
He had never considered Willem a thorough cataloger of his own life—
he isn’t either—but one Sunday in early March he skips his drugged

slumber and instead drives to Garrison. He has only been to the house twice
since that September day, but the gardeners still come, and the bulbs are
beginning to bud around the driveway, and when he steps inside, there is a
vase of cut plum branches on the kitchen counter and he stops, staring at
them: Had he texted the housekeeper to tell her he was coming? He must
have. But for a moment he fancies that at the beginning of every week

someone comes and places a new arrangement of flowers on the counter,
and at the end of every week, another week in which no one comes to see
them, they are thrown away.
He goes to his study, where they had installed extra cabinetry so Willem
could store his files and paperwork there as well. He sits on the floor,
shrugging off his coat, then takes a breath and opens the first drawer. Here
are file folders, each labeled with the name of a play or movie, and inside

each folder is the shooting version of the script, with Willem’s notes on