Page 75 - A Little Life: A Novel

would have sat him down and yelled and pleaded and threatened until a
confession was extracted. But this was part of the deal when you were
friends with Jude: he knew it, Andy knew it, they all knew it. You let things

slide that your instincts told you not to, you scooted around the edges of
your suspicions. You understood that proof of your friendship lay in
keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and
walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force
it open again. The war-room discussions the four of them had had about
other people—about Black Henry Young, when they thought the girl he was
dating was cheating on him and were trying to decide how to tell him; about

Ezra, when they knew the girl he was dating was cheating on him and were
trying to decide how to tell him—they would never have about Jude. He
would consider it a betrayal, and it wouldn’t help, anyway.
For the rest of the night, they avoided each other, but on his way to bed,
he found himself standing outside Jude’s room, his hand hovering above the
door, ready to knock, before he returned to himself: What would he say?

What did he want to hear? And so he left, continued on, and the next day,
when Jude made no mention of the previous evening’s almost-conversation,
he didn’t either, and soon that day turned to night, and then another, and
another, and they moved further and further from his ever trying, however
ineffectively, to make Jude answer a question he couldn’t bring himself to
ask.
But it was always there, that question, and in unexpected moments it

would muscle its way into his consciousness, positioning itself stubbornly
at the forefront of his mind, as immovable as a troll. Four years ago, he and
JB were sharing an apartment and attending graduate school, and Jude, who
had remained in Boston for law school, had come down to visit them. It had
been night then, too, and there had been a locked bathroom door, and him
banging on it, abruptly, inexplicably terrified, and Jude answering it,

looking irritated but also (or was he imagining this?) strangely guilty, and
asking him “What, Willem?” and he once again being unable to answer, but
knowing that something was amiss. Inside the room had smelled sharply
tannic, the rusted-metal scent of blood, and he had even picked through the
trash can and found a curl of a bandage wrapper, but was that from dinner,
when JB had cut himself with a knife while trying to chop a carrot in his
hand (Willem suspected he exaggerated his incompetency in the kitchen in

order to avoid having to do any prep work), or was it from Jude’s nighttime