Page 639 - A Little Life: A Novel

actual foot, he happened to know—in a toe shoe, en pointe, shot so close
you could see its veins and hairs, its thin straining muscles and fat bulging
tendons. Opening Thanksgiving Day, the posters read. Oh god, he thought,

and had gone back inside, oh god. He wanted the reminders to stop; he
dreaded the day when they would. In recent weeks he’d had the sense that
Willem was receding from him, even as his grief refused to diminish in
intensity.
The next week they went to the Irvines’. They had decided, in some
unspoken way, that they should go up together, and they met at Richard’s
apartment and he gave Richard the keys to the car and Richard drove them.

They were all silent, even JB, and he was very nervous. He had the sense
that the Irvines were angry at him; he had the sense he deserved their anger.
Dinner was all of Malcolm’s favorite foods, and as they ate, he could feel
Mr. Irvine staring at him and wondered whether he was thinking what he
himself always thought: Why Malcolm? Why not him?
Mrs. Irvine had suggested that they all go around the table and share a

memory of Malcolm, and he had sat, listening to the others—Mrs. Irvine,
who had told a story about how they had been visiting the Pantheon when
Malcolm was six and how, five minutes after they had left, they had
realized that Malcolm was missing and had rushed back to find him sitting
on the ground, gazing and gazing at the oculus; Flora, who told a story
about how as a second-grader Malcolm had appropriated her dollhouse
from the attic, removed all the dolls, and filled it with little objects, dozens

of chairs and tables and sofas and even pieces of furniture that had no name,
that he had made with clay; JB, the story of how they had all returned to
Hood one Thanksgiving a day early and had broken into the dormitory so
they could have it to themselves, and how Malcolm had built a fire in the
living room’s fireplace so they could roast sausages for dinner—and when it
was his turn, he told the story of how back at Lispenard Street, Malcolm

had built them a set of bookcases, which had partitioned their squish of a
living room into such a meager sliver that when you were sitting on the sofa
and stretched your legs out, you stretched them into the bookcase itself. But
he had wanted the shelves, and Willem had said he could. And so over
Malcolm had come with the cheapest wood possible, leftovers from the
lumberyard, and he and Willem had taken the wood to the roof and
assembled the bookcase there, so the neighbors wouldn’t complain about

the banging, and then they had brought it back down and installed it.