Page 637 - A Little Life: A Novel

hospital, the older of them, the one who lives in New York, had looked at
him with such hatred that he had almost stepped back, and then had said to
her sister, “Oh, and look who it is: Daddy’s pet. What a surprise.”

“Grow up, Portia,” the younger one had hissed. To him she said, “Jude,
thanks for coming. I’m so sorry about Willem.”
“Thank you for coming, Jude,” Meredith says now, kissing him goodbye.
“I’ll see you soon?” She always asks this, as if he might someday tell her
she won’t.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll e-mail you.”
“Do,” she says, and waves as he walks down the hall toward the elevator.

He always has the sense that no one else visits, and yet how can that be?
Don’t let that be, he pleads. Meredith and Lucien have always had lots of
friends. They threw dinner parties. It wasn’t unusual to see Lucien leaving
the offices in black tie, rolling his eyes as he waved goodbye to him.
“Benefit,” he’d say as an explanation. “Party.” “Wedding.” “Dinner.”
After these visits he is always exhausted, but still he walks, seven blocks

south and a quarter of a block east, to the Irvines’. For months he had
avoided the Irvines, and then last month, on the one-year anniversary, they
had asked him and Richard and JB to dinner at their house, and he knew he
would have to go.
It was the weekend after Labor Day. The previous four weeks—four
weeks that had included the day Willem would have turned fifty-three; the
day that Willem had died—had been some of the worst he had ever

experienced. He had known they would be bad; he had tried to plan
accordingly. The firm had needed someone to go to Beijing, and although
he knew he should have stayed in New York—he was working on a case
that needed him more than the business in Beijing did—he volunteered
anyway, and off he went. At first he had hoped he might be safe: the woolly
numbness of jet lag was sometimes indistinguishable from the woolly

numbness of his grief, and there were other things that were so physically
uncomfortable—including the heat, which was woolly itself, woolly and
sodden—that he had thought he would be able to distract himself. But then
one night near the end of the trip he was being driven back to the hotel from
a long day of meetings, and he had looked out of the car window and had
seen, glittering over the road, a massive billboard of Willem’s face. It was a
beer ad that Willem had shot two years ago, one that was only displayed

throughout east Asia. But hanging from the top of the billboard were people