Page 643 - A Little Life: A Novel

on a dinner back then—that he and Willem would eat with butter and salt.
The bakery is still there, and now he veers west off Park to go buy a loaf,
which somehow seems to have remained fixed in price, at least in his

memory, while everything else has grown so much more expensive. Until
he began his Saturday visits to Lucien and the Irvines, he couldn’t
remember the last time he was in this neighborhood in daytime—his
appointments with Andy are in the evenings—and now he lingers, looking
at the pretty children running down the wide clean sidewalks, their pretty
mothers strolling behind them, the linden trees above him shading their
leaves into a pale, reluctant yellow. He passes Seventy-fifth Street, where he

once tutored Felix, Felix who is now, unbelievably, thirty-three, and no
longer a singer in a punk band but, even more unbelievably, a hedge fund
manager as his father once was.
At the apartment he cuts the bread, slices some cheese, brings the plate to
the table and stares at it. He is making a real effort to eat real meals, to
resume the habits and practices of the living. But eating has become

somehow difficult for him. His appetite has disappeared, and everything
tastes like paste, or like the powdered mashed potatoes they had served at
the home. He tries, though. Eating is easier when he has to perform for an
audience, and so he has dinner every Friday with Andy, and every Saturday
with JB. And he has started appearing every Sunday evening at Richard’s—
together the two of them cook one of Richard’s kaley vegetarian meals, and
then India joins them at the table.

He has also resumed reading the paper, and now he pushes aside the
bread and cheese and opens the arts section cautiously, as if it might bite
him. Two Sundays ago he had been feeling confident and had snapped open
the first page and been confronted with a story about the film that Willem
was to have begun shooting the previous September. The piece was about
how the movie had been recast, and how there was strong early critical

support for it, and how the main character had been renamed for Willem,
and he had shut the paper and had gone to his bed and had held a pillow
over his head until he was able to stand again. He knows that for the next
two years he will be confronted by articles, posters, signs, commercials, for
films Willem was to have been shooting in these past twelve months. But
today there is nothing in the paper other than a full-page advertisement for
The Dancer and the Stage, and he stares at Willem’s almost life-size face

for a long, long time, holding his hand over its eyes and then lifting it off. If