Page 633 - A Little Life: A Novel

street; the squeaking wheeled easy chair given them by JB’s aunts. All that
is missing is a paper him, a paper Willem.
He puts Lispenard Street on the floor by his feet. For a long time he sits

very still, his eyes closed, allowing his mind to reach back and wander:
there is much he doesn’t romanticize about those years, not now, but at the
time, when he hadn’t known what to hope for, he hadn’t known that life
could be better than Lispenard Street.
“What if we’d never left?” Willem would occasionally ask him. “What if
I had never made it? What if you’d stayed at the U.S. Attorney’s Office?
What if I was still working at Ortolan? What would our lives be like now?”

“How theoretical do you want to get here, Willem?” he’d ask him,
smiling. “Would we be together?”
“Of course we’d be together,” Willem would say. “That part would be the
same.”
“Well,” he’d say, “then the first thing we’d do is tear down that wall and
reclaim the living room. And the second thing we’d do is get a decent bed.”

Willem would laugh. “And we’d sue the landlord to get a working
elevator, once and for all.”
“Right, that’d be the next step.”
He sits, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. Then he turns on
his phone, checks his missed calls: Andy, JB, Richard, Harold and Julia,
Black Henry Young, Rhodes, Citizen, Andy again, Richard again, Lucien,
Asian Henry Young, Phaedra, Elijah, Harold again, Julia again, Harold,

Richard, JB, JB, JB.
He calls JB. It’s late, but JB stays up late. “Hi,” he says, when JB picks
up, hears the surprise in his voice. “It’s me. Is this a good time to talk?”