Page 670 - A Little Life: A Novel

the men in the motel rooms coming in, fitting their sheets over the bed,
having sex with him, leaving. And then the next one, and the next one. And
the next day: the same. His life is a series of dreary patterns: sex, cutting,

this, that. Visits to Andy, visits to the hospital. Not this time, he thinks. This
is when he does something different; this is when he escapes.
“You’re right, Andy,” he says, in as calm and unemotive a voice as he
can summon, the voice he uses in the courtroom. “I’ve lost weight. And I’m
sorry I haven’t come in earlier. I didn’t because I knew you’d get upset. But
I’ve had a really bad intestinal flu, one I just can’t shake, but it’s ended. I’m
eating, I promise. I know I look terrible. But I promise I’m working on it.”

Ironically, he has been eating more in the past two weeks; he needs to get
through the trial. He doesn’t want to faint while he’s in court.
And after that, what can Andy say? He is suspicious, still. But there is
nothing for him to do. “If you don’t come see me next week, I’m coming
back,” Andy tells him before his secretary sees him out.
“Fine,” he says, still pleasantly. “The Tuesday after next. The trial’ll be

over by then.”
After Andy leaves, he feels momentarily triumphant, as if he is a hero in
a fairy tale and has just vanquished a dangerous enemy. But of course Andy
isn’t his enemy, and he is being ridiculous, and his sense of victory is
followed by despair. He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is
something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any
role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be;

even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t
able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had
believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he
would become. But his friends, Ana, Lucien, Harold and Julia: They had
imagined his life for him. They had seen him as something different than he
had ever seen himself as; they had allowed him to believe in possibilities

that he would never have conceived. He saw his life as the axiom of
equality, but they saw it as another riddle, one with no name—Jude = x—
and they had filled in the x in ways Brother Luke, the counselors at the
home, Dr. Traylor had never written for him or encouraged him to write for
himself. He wishes he could believe their proofs the way they do; he wishes
they had shown him how they had arrived at their solutions. If he knew how
they had solved the proof, he thinks, he would know why to keep living. All