Page 693 - A Little Life: A Novel

tiered on the dining-room table, like place cards at a wedding. Richard, JB,
Andy, all of your and his old friends: they were all around, constantly, all of
us moving about and around one another, shocked but not shocked,

surprised only that we were so surprised, devastated and beaten and mostly,
helpless. Had we missed something? Could we have done something
different? After his service—which was crowded, with his friends and your
friends and their parents and families, with his law school classmates, with
his clients, with the staff and patrons of the arts nonprofit, with the board of
the food kitchen, with a huge population of Rosen Pritchard employees,
past and present, including Meredith, who came with an almost completely

discombobulated Lucien (who lives, cruelly, to this day, although in a
nursing home in Connecticut), with our friends, with people I wouldn’t
have expected: Kit and Emil and Philippa and Robin—Andy came to me,
crying, and confessed that he thought things had started really going wrong
for him after he’d told him he was leaving his practice, and that it was his
fault. I hadn’t even known Andy was leaving—he had never mentioned it to

me—but I comforted him, and told him it wasn’t his fault, not at all, that he
had always been good to him, that I had always trusted him.
“At least Willem isn’t here,” we said to one another. “At least Willem
isn’t here to see this.”
Though, of course—if you were here, wouldn’t he still be as well?
But if I cannot say that I didn’t know how he would die, I can say that
there was much I didn’t know, not at all, not after all. I didn’t know that

Andy would be dead three years later of a heart attack, or Richard two years
after that of brain cancer. You all died so young: you, Malcolm, him. Elijah,
of a stroke, when he was sixty; Citizen, when he was sixty as well, of
pneumonia. In the end there was, and is, only JB, to whom he left the house
in Garrison, and whom we see often—there, or in the city, or in Cambridge.
JB has a serious boyfriend now, a very good man named Tomasz, a

specialist in Japanese medieval art at Sotheby’s, whom we like very much; I
know both you and he would have as well. And although I feel bad for
myself, for us—of course—I feel most bad most often for JB, deprived of
you all, left to live the beginnings of old age by himself, with new friends,
certainly, but without most of his friends who had known him since he was
a child. At least I have known him since he was twenty-two; off and on,
perhaps, but neither of us count the off years.