Page 323 - A Little Life: A Novel

having you committed, to calling Harold or Willem and telling them that we
needed to get together and have you taken to a hospital. I’ve talked to
classmates of mine who are shrinks and told them about you, about this

patient I’m very close to, and asked them what they would do in my
position. I’ve listened to all their advice. I’ve listened to my shrink’s advice.
But no one can ever tell me for certain what the right answer is.
“I’ve tortured myself about this. But I’ve always felt—you’re so high-
functioning in so many ways, and you’ve achieved this weird but
undeniably successful equilibrium in your life, that I felt that, I don’t know,
I just shouldn’t upset it. You know? So I’ve let you go on cutting yourself

year after year, and every year, every time I see you, I wonder if I’m doing
the right thing by letting you do so, and how and if I should be pushing
harder to get you help, to make you stop doing this to yourself.”
“I’m sorry, Andy,” he whispers.
“No, Jude,” Andy says. “It’s not your fault. You’re the patient. I’m
supposed to figure out what’s best for you, and I feel—I don’t know if I

have. So when you came in with bruises, the first thing I thought was that I
had made the wrong decision after all. You know?” Andy looks at him, and
he is surprised once more to see Andy swipe, quickly, at his eyes. “All these
years,” says Andy, after a pause, and they are both quiet again.
“Andy,” he says, wanting to cry himself. “I swear to you I’m not doing
anything else to myself. Just the cutting.”
“Just the cutting!” Andy repeats, and makes a strange squawk of laughter.

“Well, I suppose—given the context—I have to be grateful for that. ‘Just
the cutting.’ You know how messed up that is, right, that that should be
such a relief to me?”
“I know,” he says.
Tuesday turns to Wednesday, and then to Thursday; his face feels worse,
and then better, and then worse again. He had worried that Caleb might call

him or, worse, materialize at his apartment, but the days pass and he
doesn’t: maybe he has stayed out in Bridgehampton. Maybe he has gotten
run over by a car. He finds, oddly, that he feels nothing—not fear, not hate,
not anything. The worst has happened, and now he is free. He has had a
relationship, and it was awful, and now he will never need to have one
again, because he has proven himself incapable of being in one. His time
with Caleb has confirmed everything he feared people would think of him,

of his body, and his next task is to learn to accept that, and to do so without