Page 688 - A Little Life: A Novel

a sticky glop, or I’d forget to turn the carrots in their puddle of olive oil and
come back to find them seared to the bottom of the pan. (So much of
cooking, it seemed, was petting and bathing and monitoring and flipping

and turning and soothing: demands I associated with human infancy.) My
other problem, I was told, was my insistence on innovating, which is
apparently a guarantee of failure in baking. “It’s chemistry, Harold, not
philosophy,” he kept saying, with that same half smile. “You can’t cheat the
specifed amounts and hope it’s going to come out the way it should.”
“Maybe it’ll come out better,” I said, mostly to entertain him—I was
always happy to play the fool if I thought it might give him some pleasure

—and now he smiled, really smiled. “It won’t,” he said.
But finally, I actually did learn how to make some things: I learned how
to roast a chicken and poach an egg and broil halibut. I learned how to
make carrot cake, and a bread with lots of different nuts that I had liked to
buy at the bakery he used to work at in Cambridge: his version was
uncanny, and for weeks I made loaf after loaf. “Excellent, Harold,” he said

one day, after tasting a slice. “See? Now you’ll be able to cook for yourself
when you’re a hundred.”
“What do you mean, cook for myself?” I asked him. “You’ll have to cook
for me,” and he smiled back at me, a sad, strange smile, and didn’t say
anything, and I quickly changed the subject before he said something that I
would have to pretend he didn’t. I was always trying to allude to the future,
to make plans for years away, so that he’d commit to them and I could

make him honor his commitment. But he was careful: he never promised.
“We should take a music class, you and I,” I told him, not really knowing
what I meant by that.
He smiled, a little. “Maybe,” he said. “Sure. We’ll discuss it.” But that
was the most he’d allow.
After our cooking lesson, we walked. When we were at the house

upstate, we walked the path Malcolm had made: past the spot in the woods
where I had once had to leave him propped against a tree, jolting with pain,
past the first bench, past the second, past the third. At the second bench
we’d always sit and rest. He didn’t need to rest, not like he used to, and we
walked so slowly that I didn’t need to, either. But we always made a
ceremonial stop, because it was from here that you had the clearest view of
the back of the house, do you remember? Malcolm had cut away some of

the trees here so that from the bench, you were facing the house straight on,