Page 665 - A Little Life: A Novel

used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-ended arrowhead, a little more of it
disintegrating with every day.
And then there is what he doesn’t like to admit to himself but is

conscious of thinking. He cannot break his promise to Harold—he won’t.
But if he stops eating, if he stops trying, the end will be the same anyway.
Usually he knows how melodramatic, how narcissistic, how unrealistic
he is being, and at least once a day he scolds himself. The fact is, he finds
himself less and less able to summon Willem’s specifics without depending
on props: He cannot remember what Willem’s voice sounds like without
first playing one of the saved voice messages. He can no longer remember

Willem’s scent without first smelling one of his shirts. And so he fears he is
grieving not so much for Willem but for his own life: its smallness, its
worthlessness.
He has never been concerned with his legacy, or never thought he had
been. And it is a helpful thing that he isn’t, for he will leave nothing behind:
not buildings or paintings or films or sculptures. Not books. Not papers. Not

people: not a spouse, not children, probably not parents, and, if he keeps
behaving the way he is, not friends. Not even new law. He has created
nothing. He has made nothing, nothing but money: the money he has
earned; the money given to him to compensate for Willem being taken from
him. His apartment will revert to Richard. The other properties will be
given away or sold and their proceeds donated to charities. His art will go to
museums, his books to libraries, his furniture to whoever wants it. It will be

as if he has never existed. He has the feeling, unhappy as it is, that he was at
his most valuable in those motel rooms, where he was at least something
singular and meaningful to someone, although what he had to offer was
being taken from him, not given willingly. But there he had at least been
real to another person; what they saw him as was actually what he was.
There, he was at his least deceptive.

He had never been able to truly believe Willem’s interpretation of him, as
someone who was brave, and resourceful, and admirable. Willem would say
those things and he would feel ashamed, as if he’d been swindling him:
Who was this person Willem was describing? Even his confession hadn’t
changed Willem’s perception of him—in fact, Willem seemed to respect
him more, not less, because of it, which he had never understood but in
which he had allowed himself to find solace. But although he hadn’t been