Page 686 - A Little Life: A Novel

So I tried, of course. I tried and tried. But every month I could feel him
receding. It wasn’t so much a physical disappearance: by November, he was
back at his weight, the low side of it anyway, and looked better than he had

perhaps ever. But he was quieter, much quieter, and he had always been
quiet anyway. But now he spoke very little, and when we were together, I
would sometimes see him looking at something I couldn’t see, and then he
would twitch his head, very slightly, like a horse does its ears, and come
back to himself.
Once I saw him for our Thursday dinner and he had bruises on his face
and neck, just on one side, as if he was standing near a building in the late

afternoon and the sun had cast a shadow against him. The bruises were a
dark rusty brown, like dried blood, and I had gasped. “What happened?” I
asked. “I fell,” he said, shortly. “Don’t worry,” he said, although of course I
did. And when I saw him with bruises again, I tried to hold him. “Tell me,”
I said, and he worked himself free. “There’s nothing to tell,” he said. I still
don’t know what had happened: Had he done something to himself? Had he

let someone do something to him? I didn’t know which was worse. I didn’t
know what to do.
He missed you. I missed you, too. We all did. I think you should know
that, that I didn’t just miss you because you made him better: I missed you
for you. I missed watching the pleasure you took in doing the things you
enjoyed, whether it was eating or running after a tennis ball or flinging
yourself into the pool. I missed talking with you, missed watching you

move through a room, missed watching you fall to the lawn under a passel
of Laurence’s grandchildren, pretending that you couldn’t get up from
under their weight. (That same day, Laurence’s youngest grandchild, the
one who had a crush on you, had made you a bracelet of knotted-together
dandelion flowers, and you had thanked her and worn it all day, and every
time she had spotted it on your wrist, she had run over and buried her face

in her father’s back: I missed that, too.) But mostly, I missed watching you
two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I
missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly,
sincerely affectionate you were with him; missed watching you listen to
each other, the way you both did so intently. That painting JB did—Willem
Listening to Jude Tell a Story—was so true, the expression so right: I knew
what was happening in the painting even before I read its title.