Page 346 - A Little Life: A Novel

I went back to Greene Street with his keys. For a long time, many
minutes, I just stood there in the doorway, looking at the space. Some of the
cloud cover had parted, but it didn’t take much sun—even with the shades

drawn—to make that apartment feel light. I had always thought it a hopeful
place, with its high ceilings, its cleanliness, its visibility, its promise of
transparency.
This was his apartment, and so of course there were lots of cleaning
products, and I started cleaning. I mopped the floors; the sticky areas were
dried blood. It was difficult to distinguish because the floors were so dark,
but I could smell it, a dense, wild scent that the nose instantly recognizes.

He had clearly tried to clean the bathroom, but here too there were swipes
of blood on the marble, dried into the rusty pinks of sunsets; these were
difficult to remove, but I did the best I could. I looked in the trash cans—for
evidence, I suppose, but there was nothing: they had all been cleaned and
emptied. His clothes from the night before were scattered near the living-
room sofa. The shirt was so ripped, clawed at almost, that I threw it away;

the suit I took to be dry-cleaned. Otherwise, the apartment was very tidy. I
had entered the bedroom with dread, expecting to find lamps broken,
clothes strewn about, but it was so unruffled that you might have thought
that no one lived there at all, that it was a model house, an advertisement for
an enviable life. The person who lived here would have parties, and would
be carefree and sure of himself, and at night he would raise the shades and
he and his friends would dance, and people passing by on Greene Street, on

Mercer, would look up at that box of light floating in the sky, and imagine
its inhabitants above unhappiness, or fear, or any concerns at all.
I e-mailed Lucien, whom I’d met once, and who was a friend of a friend
of Laurence’s, actually, and said there had been a terrible car accident, and
that Jude was in the hospital. I went to the grocery store and bought things
that would be easy for him to eat: soups, puddings, juices. I looked up

Caleb Porter’s address, and repeated it to myself—Fifty West Twenty-ninth
Street, apartment 17J—until I had it memorized. I called the locksmith and
said it was an emergency and that I needed to have all the locks changed:
front door, elevator, apartment door. I opened the windows to let the damp
air carry away the fragrance of blood, of disinfectant. I left a message with
the law school secretary saying there was a family emergency and I
wouldn’t be able to teach that week. I left messages for a couple of my

colleagues asking if they could cover for me. I thought about calling my old