Page 400 - A Little Life: A Novel

By the end of October, he was feeling stronger, less shaky. He was
managing to stay awake for longer stretches at a time. He could lie on his
back and hold a book up without it trembling so badly that he had to roll

over onto his stomach so he could prop it against a pillow. He could butter
his own bread, and he could wear shirts with buttons again because he was
able to slip the button into its hole.
“What’re you reading?” he asked Willem one afternoon, sitting next to
him on the living-room couch.
“A play I’m thinking of doing,” Willem said, putting the pages down.
He looked at a point beyond Willem’s head. “Are you going away

again?” It was monstrously selfish to ask, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“No,” said Willem, after a silence. “I thought I’d stick around New York
for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
He smiled at the couch’s cushions. “It’s fine with me,” he said, and
looked up to see Willem smiling at him. “It’s nice to see you smile again,”
was all he said, and went back to reading.

In November he realized that he had done nothing to celebrate Willem’s
forty-third birthday in late August, and mentioned it to him. “Well,
technically, you get a pass, because I wasn’t here,” said Willem. “But sure,
I’ll let you make it up to me. Let’s see.” He thought. “Are you ready to go
out into the world? Do you want to have dinner? An early dinner?”
“Sure,” he said, and they went the next week to a little Japanese place in
the East Village that served pressed sushi and where they’d been going for

years. He ordered his own food, although he had been nervous, worried that
he was somehow choosing incorrectly, but Willem was patient and waited
as he deliberated, and when he had decided, he’d nodded at him. “Good
choice,” he said. As they ate, they spoke of their friends, and the play
Willem had decided he was going to do, and the novel he was reading:
anything but him.

“I think we should go to Morocco,” he said as they walked slowly home,
and Willem looked at him.
“I’ll look into it,” Willem said, and took his arm to move him out of the
path of a bicyclist who was zooming down the street.
“I want to get you something for your birthday,” he said, a few blocks
later. Really, he wanted to get Willem something to thank him, and to try to
express what he couldn’t say to him: a gift that would properly convey

years of gratitude and love. After their earlier conversation about the play,