Page 546 - A Little Life: A Novel

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THE WOMAN’S NAME is Claudine and she is a friend of a friend of an
acquaintance, a jewelry designer, which is something of a deviation for him,
as he usually only sleeps with people in the industry, who are more
accustomed to, more forgiving of, temporary arrangements.
She is thirty-three, with long dark hair that lightens at its tips, and very
small hands, hands like a child’s, on which she wears rings that she has
made, dark with gold and glinting with stones; before they have sex, she

takes them off last, as if these rings, not her underwear, are what conceal the
most private parts of her.
They have been sleeping together—not seeing each other, because he
sees no one—for almost two months, which again is a deviation for him,
and he knows he will have to end it soon. He had told her when they had

begun that it was only sex, that he was in love with someone else, and that
he couldn’t spend the night, not ever, and she had seemed fine with that; she
had said she was fine with it, anyway, and that she was in love with
someone else herself. But he has seen no evidence of another man in her
apartment, and whenever he texts, she is always available. Another warning
sign: he will have to end it.
Now he kisses her on her forehead, sits up. “I have to go,” he says.

“No,” she says. “Stay. Just a little longer.”
“I can’t,” he says.
“Five minutes,” she says.
“Five,” he agrees, and lies back down. But after five minutes he kisses
her again on the side of the face. “I really do have to go,” he tells her, and
she makes a noise, one of protest and resignation, and turns over onto her

side.
He goes to her bathroom, showers and rinses out his mouth, comes back
and kisses her again. “I’ll text you,” he says, disgusted by how he has been
reduced to a vocabulary consisting almost entirely of clichés. “Thank you
for letting me come over.”
At home, he walks silently through the darkened apartment, and in the
bedroom he takes off his clothes, gets into bed with a groan, rolls over and