Page 636 - A Little Life: A Novel

pause he used to leave between them because he had grown so used to
people’s laughter; the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs,
beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn’t really a joke, but an

insult cloaked in a silken cape, is different. Even when they were working
together, he knew that the Lucien of the office was not the Lucien of the
country club, but he never saw that other Lucien. And now, finally, he has,
he does; it is the only person he sees. This Lucien talks about the weather,
and golf, and sailing, and taxes, but the tax laws he discusses are from
twenty years ago. He never asks him anything about himself: who he is,
what he does, why he is sometimes in a wheelchair. Lucien talks, and he

smiles and nods back at him, wrapping his hands around his cooling cup of
tea. When Lucien’s hands tremble, he takes them in his own, which he
knows helps him when his hands shake: Willem used to do this, and breathe
with him, and it would always calm him. When Lucien drools, he takes the
edge of his napkin and blots the saliva away. Unlike him, however, Lucien
doesn’t seem embarrassed by his own shaking and drooling, and he is

relieved that he doesn’t. He’s not embarrassed for Lucien, either, but he is
embarrassed by his inability to do more for him.
“He loves seeing you, Jude,” Meredith always says, but he doesn’t think
this is true, really. He sometimes thinks he continues to come more for
Meredith’s sake than for Lucien’s, and he realizes that this is the way it is,
the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search
for the lost. Lucien is not conscious of this, but he can remember being so

when he was sick, both the first time and the second, and Willem was
taking care of him. How grateful he was when he would wake and find
someone other than Willem sitting next to him. “Roman’s with him,”
Richard or Malcolm would say, or “He and JB went out for lunch,” and
he’d relax. In the weeks after his amputations, when all he wanted to do
was give up, those moments in which he could imagine that Willem might

be being comforted were his only moments of happiness. And so he sits
with Meredith after sitting with Lucien and they talk, although she too asks
him nothing about his life, and this is fine with him. She is lonely; he is
lonely, too. She and Lucien have two daughters, one of whom lives in New
York but is forever going in and out of rehab; the other lives in Philadelphia
with her husband and three children and is a lawyer herself.
He has met both of these daughters, who are a decade or so younger than

he is, although Lucien is Harold’s age. When he went to visit Lucien in the