Page 57 - A Little Life: A Novel

And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing
from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around
him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake

he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small
universe in which he might spend years, decades—his life—searching
bumblingly for a way out that didn’t exist, had never existed.
If he had an agent, someone to guide him, she might be able to show him
how to escape, how to find his way downstream. But he didn’t, not yet (he
had to be optimistic enough to think it was still a matter of “yet”), and so he
was left in the company of other seekers, all of them looking for that same

elusive tributary, through which few left the lake and by which no one ever
wanted to return.
He was willing to wait. He had waited. But recently, he could feel his
patience sharpening itself into something splintery and ragged, chipping
into dry little bits.
Still—he was not an anxious person, he was not inclined toward self-pity.

Indeed, there were moments when, returning from Ortolan or from a
rehearsal for a play in which he would be paid almost nothing for a week’s
work, so little that he wouldn’t have been able to afford the prix fixe at the
restaurant, he would enter the apartment with a feeling of accomplishment.
Only to him and Jude would Lispenard Street be considered an achievement
—for as much work as he had done to it, and as much as Jude had cleaned
it, it was still sad, somehow, and furtive, as if the place was embarrassed to

call itself a real apartment—but in those moments he would at times find
himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New
York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other
people’s words!—it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his
brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream
it for himself every day.

But then the feeling would dissipate, and he would be left alone to scan
the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing
the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of
imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large,
and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he
were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where
the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents’ house,

where the porch light washed the night with honey.