Page 397 - A Little Life: A Novel

had eaten at least half of what was on his plate, and he wasn’t allowed to
serve himself, either. He was too tired to fight this; he did the best he could.
He was always cold, and sometimes he woke in the middle of the night,

shivering despite the covers heaped on top of him, and he would lie there,
watching Willem, who was sharing his room, breathing on the couch
opposite him, watching clouds drift across the slice of moon he could see
between the edge of the window frame and the blind, until he was able to
sleep again.
Sometimes he thought about what he had done and felt that same sorrow
he had felt in the hospital: the sorrow that he had failed, that he was still

alive. And sometimes he thought about it and felt dread: now everyone
really would treat him differently. Now he really was a freak, a bigger freak
than he’d been before. Now he would have to begin anew in his attempts to
convince people he was normal. He thought of the office, the one place
where what he had been hadn’t mattered. But now there would always be
another, competing story about him. Now he wouldn’t just be the youngest

equity partner in the firm’s history (as Tremain sometimes introduced him);
now he would be the partner who had tried to kill himself. They must be
furious with him, he thought. He thought of his work there, and wondered
who was handling it. They probably didn’t even need him to come back.
Who would want to work with him again? Who would trust him again?
And it wasn’t just Rosen Pritchard who would see him differently—it
was everyone. All the autonomy he had spent years accumulating, trying to

prove to everyone that he deserved: now it was gone. Now he couldn’t even
cut his own food. The day before, Willem had had to help him tie his shoes.
“It’ll get better, Judy,” he said to him, “it’ll get better. The doctor said it’s
just going to take time.” In the mornings, Harold or Willem had to shave
him because his hands were still too unsteady; he looked at his unfamiliar
face in the mirror as they dragged the razor down his cheeks and under his

chin. He had taught himself to shave in Philadelphia when he was living
with the Douglasses, but Willem had retaught him their freshman year,
alarmed, he later told him, by his tentative, hacking movements, as if he
was clearing brush with a scythe. “Good at calculus, bad at shaving,” he’d
said then, and had smiled at him so he wouldn’t feel more self-conscious.
Then he would tell himself, You can always try again, and just thinking
that made him feel stronger, although perversely, he was somehow less

inclined to try again. He was too exhausted. Trying again meant