Page 324 - A Little Life: A Novel

sorrow. He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he
has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that
loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was—terror, shame, disgust,

dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing—he felt with Caleb.
That Friday he sees Harold, who is in town for a conference at Columbia.
He had already written Harold to warn him of his injury, but it doesn’t stop
Harold from overreacting, exclaiming and fussing over him and asking him
dozens of times if he is actually all right.
They have met at one of Harold’s favorite restaurants, where the beef
comes from cows that the chef has named and raised himself on a farm

upstate, and the vegetables are grown on the roof of the building, and they
are talking and eating their entrées—he is careful to only chew on the right
side of his mouth, and to avoid letting any food come in contact with his
new tooth—when he senses someone standing near their table, and when he
looks up, it is Caleb, and although he had convinced himself he feels
nothing, he is immediately, overwhelmingly terrified.

He had never seen Caleb drunk in their time together, but he can tell
instantly that he is, and in a dangerous mood. “Your secretary told me
where you were,” Caleb says to him. “You must be Harold,” he says, and
extends his hand to Harold, who shakes it, looking bewildered.
“Jude?” Harold asks him, but he can’t speak.
“Caleb Porter,” says Caleb, and slides into the semicircular booth,
pressing against his side. “Your son and I are dating.”

Harold looks at Caleb, and then at him, and opens his mouth, speechless
for the first time since he has known him.
“Let me ask you something,” Caleb says to Harold, leaning in as if
delivering a confidence, and he stares at Caleb’s face, his vulpine
handsomeness, his dark, glinting eyes. “Be honest. Don’t you ever wish you
had a normal son, not a cripple?”

For a moment, no one says anything, and he can feel something, a
current, sizzle in the air. “Who the fuck are you?” hisses Harold, and then
he watches Harold’s face change, his features contorting so quickly and
violently from shock to disgust to anger that he looks, for an instant,
inhuman, a ghoul in Harold’s clothing. And then his expression changes
again, and he watches something harden in Harold’s face, as if his very
muscles are ossifying before him.