Page 74 - A Little Life: A Novel

with him, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to, or what that conversation
would be. It wasn’t hard to do: in the daytime, they were together as a
group, and at night, they were each in their own rooms. But one evening,

Malcolm and JB left together to pick up the lobsters, and he and Jude were
left on their own in the kitchen, slicing tomatoes and washing lettuce. It had
been a long, sunny, sleepy day, and Jude was in one of his light moods,
when he was almost carefree, and even as he asked, Willem experienced a
predictive melancholy at ruining such a perfect moment, one in which
everything—the pink-bled sky above them and the way the knife sliced so
cleanly through the vegetables beneath them—had conspired to work so

well, only to have him upset it.
“Don’t you want to borrow one of my T-shirts?” he asked Jude.
He didn’t answer until he had finished coring the tomato before him, and
then gave Willem a steady, blank gaze. “No.”
“Aren’t you hot?”
Jude smiled at him, faintly, warningly. “It’s going to be cold any minute

now.” And it was true. When the last daub of sun vanished, it would be
chilly, and Willem himself would have to go back to his room for a sweater.
“But”—and he heard in advance how absurd he would sound, how the
confrontation had wriggled out of his control, catlike, as soon as he had
initiated it—“you’re going to get lobster all over your sleeves.”
At this, Jude made a noise, a funny kind of squawk, too loud and too
barky to be a real laugh, and turned back to the cutting board. “I think I can

handle it, Willem,” he said, and although his voice was mild, Willem saw
how tightly he was holding the knife’s handle, almost squeezing it, so that
the bunch of his knuckles tinged a suety yellow.
They were lucky then, both of them, that Malcolm and JB returned
before they had to continue talking, but not before Willem heard Jude begin
to ask “Why are—” And although he never finished his sentence (and

indeed, didn’t speak to Willem once throughout dinner, through which he
kept his sleeves perfectly neat), Willem knew that his question would not
have been “Why are you asking me this?” but “Why are you asking me
this?” because Willem had always been careful not to express too much
interest in exploring the many cupboarded cabinet in which Jude had
secreted himself.
If it had been anyone else, he told himself, he wouldn’t have hesitated.

He would have demanded answers, he would have called mutual friends, he