Page 312 - A Little Life: A Novel

first canes, then walkers, then wheelchairs, then scooters, and vials of pills
and tissues and the perpetual scent of pain creams and gels and who knows
what else.”

He stopped. “I want to keep seeing you,” he said, at last. “But—but I
can’t be around these accessories to weakness, to disease. I just can’t. I hate
it. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel—not depressed, but furious, like I
need to fight against it.” He paused again. “I just didn’t know that’s who
you were when I met you,” he said at last. “I thought I could be okay with
it. But I’m not sure I can. Can you understand that?”
He swallowed; he wanted to cry. But he could understand it; he felt

exactly as Caleb did. “I can,” he said.
And yet improbably, they had continued after all. He is astonished, still,
by the speed and thoroughness with which Caleb insinuated himself into his
life. It was like something out of a fairy tale: a woman living on the edge of
a dark forest hears a knock and opens the door of her cottage. And although
it is just for a moment, and although she sees no one, in those seconds,

dozens of demons and wraiths have slipped past her and into her house, and
she will never be able to rid herself of them, ever. Sometimes this was how
it felt. Was this the way it was for other people? He doesn’t know; he is too
afraid to ask. He finds himself replaying old conversations he has had or
overheard with people talking about their relationships, trying to gauge the
normalcy of his against theirs, looking for clues about how he should
conduct himself.

And then there is the sex, which is worse than he had imagined: he had
forgotten just how painful it was, how debasing, how repulsive, how much
he disliked it. He hates the postures, the positions it demands, each of them
degrading because they leave him so helpless and weak; he hates the tastes
of it and the smells of it. But mostly, he hates the sounds of it: the meaty
smack of flesh hitting flesh, the wounded-animal moans and grunts, the

things said to him that were perhaps meant to be arousing but he can only
interpret as diminishing. Part of him, he realizes, had always thought it
would be better as an adult, as if somehow the mere fact of age would
transform the experience into something glorious and enjoyable. In college,
in his twenties, in his thirties, he would listen to people talk about it with
such pleasure, such delight, and he would think: That’s what you’re so
excited about? Really? That’s not how I remember it at all. And yet he

cannot be the one who’s correct, and everyone else—millennia of people—