Page 632 - A Little Life: A Novel

But now he will. First, though, he unwraps Richard’s present and sees
that it is a small bust, carved from wood and mounted on a heavy black-iron
cube, of Willem, and he gasps as if slugged. Richard has always claimed

that he’s terrible with figurative sculpture, but he knows he’s not, and this
piece is proof of it. He glides his fingers over Willem’s sightless eyes,
across Willem’s crest of hair, and after doing so, lifts them to his nose and
smells sandalwood. On the bottom of the base is etched “To J on his 51st.
With love. R.”
He starts to cry again; stops. He places the bust on the cushion next to
him and opens the box. At first he sees nothing but wads of newspaper, and

he gropes carefully inside until his hands close on something solid, which
he lifts out: it is the scale model of Lantern House, its walls rendered from
boxwood, that had once sat in Bellcast’s offices, alongside the scale models
of every other project the firm had ever built, in form or in reality. The
model is about two feet square, and he settles it on his lap before holding it
to his face, looking through its thin Plexiglas windows, hoisting the roof up

and walking his fingers through its rooms.
He wipes his eyes and reaches into the box again. The next thing he
retrieves is an envelope fat with pictures of them, the four of them, or just
of him and Willem: from college, from New York, from Truro, from
Cambridge, from Garrison, from India, from France, from Iceland, from
Ethiopia—places they’d lived, trips they’d taken.
The box isn’t very large, and still he removes things: two delicate, rare

books of drawings of Japanese houses by a French illustrator; a small
abstract painting by a young British artist he’d always admired; a larger
drawing of a man’s face by a well-known American painter that Willem had
always liked; two of Malcolm’s earliest sketchbooks, filled with page after
page of his imaginary structures. And finally, he lifts the last thing from the
box, something wrapped in layers of newspaper, which he removes, slowly.

Here, in his hands, is Lispenard Street: their apartment, with its odd
proportions and slapdash second bedroom; its narrow hallways and
miniature kitchen. He can tell that this is an early piece of Malcolm’s
because the windows are made of glassine, not vellum or Plexiglas, and the
walls are made of cardboard, not wood. And in this apartment Malcolm has
placed furniture, cut and folded from stiff paper: his lumpy twin futon bed
on its cinder-block base; the broken-springed couch they had found on the