Page 359 - A Little Life: A Novel

chopping the carrots before him in the same steady rhythm. It had taken
twenty years for that to happen. But after Caleb, he regressed. At
Thanksgiving, I had gone toward him to embrace him, but he had quickly

stepped to the left—just a bit, just enough so that my arms closed around
air, and there had been a second in which we looked at each other, and I
knew that whatever I had been allowed just a few months ago I would be no
longer: I knew I would have to start all over. I knew that he had decided that
Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved
what had happened to him. And that was the worst thing, the most
reprehensible thing. He had decided to believe Caleb, to believe him over

us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought and always been
taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try
to change your mind.
Later, when things got bad, I would wonder what I could have said or
done. Sometimes I would think that there was nothing I could have said—
there was something that might have helped, but none of us saying it could

have convinced him. I still had those fantasies: the gun, the posse, Fifty
West Twenty-ninth Street, apartment 17J. But this time we wouldn’t shoot.
We would take Caleb Porter by each arm, lead him down to the car, drive
him to Greene Street, drag him upstairs. We would tell him what to say, and
warn him that we would be just outside the door, waiting in the elevator, the
pistol cocked and pointed at his back. And from behind the door, we’d
listen to what he said: I didn’t mean any of it. I was completely wrong. The

things I did, but more than that, the things I said, they were meant for
someone else. Believe me, because you believed me before: you are
beautiful and perfect, and I never meant what I said. I was wrong, I was
mistaken, no one could ever have been more wrong than I was.