Page 340 - A Little Life: A Novel

first time you were all up in Truro, I came down to the kitchen late one
night and found JB sitting at the table, drawing. I always thought JB was a
different person when he was alone, when he was certain he didn’t have to

perform, and I sat and looked at what he was sketching—pictures of all of
you—and asked him about what he was studying in grad school, and he told
me about people whose work he admired, three-fourths of whom were
unknown to me.
As I was leaving to go upstairs, JB called my name, and I came back.
“Listen,” he said. He sounded embarrassed. “I don’t want to be rude or
anything, but you should lay off asking him so many questions.”

I sat down again. “Why?”
He was uncomfortable, but determined. “He doesn’t have any parents,”
he said. “I don’t know the circumstances, but he won’t even discuss it with
us. Not with me, anyway.” He stopped. “I think something terrible
happened to him when he was a kid.”
“What kind of terrible?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We’re not really certain, but we think it must be
really bad physical abuse. Haven’t you noticed he never takes off his
clothes, or how he never lets anyone touch him? I think someone must have
beat him, or—” He stopped. He was loved, he was protected; he didn’t have
the courage to conjure what might have followed that or, and neither did I.
But I had noticed, of course—I hadn’t been asking to make him
uncomfortable, but even when I saw that it did make him uncomfortable, I

hadn’t been able to stop.
“Harold,” Julia would say after he left at night, “you’re making him
uneasy.”
“I know, I know,” I’d say. I knew nothing good lay behind his silence,
and as much as I didn’t want to hear what the story was, I wanted to hear it
as well.

About a month before the adoption went through, he turned up at the
house one weekend, very unexpectedly: I came in from my tennis game,
and there he was on the couch, asleep. He had come to talk to me, he had
come to try to confess something to me. But in the end, he couldn’t.
That night Andy called me in a panic looking for him, and when I asked
Andy why he was calling him at midnight anyway, he quickly turned vague.
“He’s been having a really hard time,” he said.

“Because of the adoption?” I asked.