Page 342 - A Little Life: A Novel

big suit, a major suit—it is on dozens of syllabi now—but he was very, very
calm; I have rarely seen a litigator so calm. On the stand was the whistle-
blower in question, a middle-aged woman, and he was so relentless, so

dogged, so pointed, that the courtroom was silent, watching him. He never
raised his voice, he was never sarcastic, but I could see that he relished it,
that this very act, catching that witness in her inconsistencies—which were
slight, very slight, so slight another lawyer might have missed them—was
nourishing to him, that he found pleasure in it. He was a gentle person
(though not to himself), gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the
courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something

brutal and cold. This was about seven months after the incident with Caleb,
five months before the incident to follow, and as I watched him reciting the
witness’s own statements back to her, never glancing down at the notepad
before him, his face still and handsome and self-assured, I kept seeing him
in the car that terrible night, when he had turned from me and had protected
his head with his hands when I reached out to touch the side of his face, as

if I were another person who would try to hurt him. His very existence was
twinned: there was who he was at work and who he was outside of it; there
was who he was then and who he had been; there was who he was in court
and who he had been in the car, so alone with himself that I had been
frightened.
That night, uptown, I had paced in circles, thinking about what I had
learned about him, what I had seen, how hard I had fought to keep from

howling when I heard him say the things he had—worse than Caleb, worse
than what Caleb had said, was hearing that he believed it, that he was so
wrong about himself. I suppose I had always known he felt this way, but
hearing him say it so baldly was even worse than I could have imagined. I
will never forget him saying “when you look like I do, you have to take
what you can get.” I will never forget the despair and anger and

hopelessness I felt when I heard him say that. I will never forget his face
when he saw Caleb, when Caleb sat down next to him, and I was too slow
to understand what was happening. How can you call yourself a parent if
your child feels this way about himself? That was something I would never
be able to recalibrate. I suppose—having never parented an adult myself—
that I had never known how much was actually involved. I didn’t resent
having to do it: I felt only stupid and inadequate that I hadn’t realized it