Page 635 - A Little Life: A Novel

moved them back from their house in Connecticut to their apartment in the
city, where they can be closer to the hospital and their daughters.
He thinks Lucien likes, or at least doesn’t mind, his visits, but he doesn’t

know this for sure. Certainly Lucien doesn’t know who he is: he is someone
who appears in his life and then disappears, and every time he must
reintroduce himself.
“Who are you?” Lucien asks.
“Jude,” he says.
“Now, remind me,” Lucien says, pleasantly, as if they’re meeting at a
cocktail party, “how do I know you?”

“You were my mentor,” he tells him.
“Ah,” says Lucien. And then there is a silence.
In the first weeks, he tried to make Lucien remember his own life: he
talked about Rosen Pritchard, and about people they knew, and cases they
used to argue about. But then he realized that the expression he had
mistaken—in his own stupid hopefulness—for thoughtfulness was in reality

fear. And so now he discusses nothing from the past, or nothing from their
past together, at least. He lets Lucien direct the conversation, and although
he doesn’t understand the references Lucien makes, he smiles and tries to
pretend he does.
“Who are you?” Lucien asks.
“Jude,” he says.
“Now, tell me, how do I know you?”

“You were my mentor.”
“Oh, at Groton!”
“Yes,” he says, trying to smile back. “At Groton.”
Sometimes, though, Lucien looks at him. “Mentor?” he says. “I’m too
young to be your mentor!” Or sometimes he doesn’t ask at all, simply
begins a conversation in its middle, and he has to wait until he has enough

clues and can determine what role he has been assigned—one of his
daughters’ long-ago boyfriends, or a college classmate, or a friend at the
country club—before he can respond appropriately.
In these hours he learns more about Lucien’s earlier life than Lucien had
ever revealed to him before. Although Lucien is no longer Lucien, at least
not the Lucien he knew. This Lucien is vague and featureless; he is as
smooth and cornerless as an egg. Even his voice, that droll croaking roll

with which Lucien used to deliver his sentences, each one a statement, the