Page 87 - A Little Life: A Novel

child.) When he was growing up, thirty had been a far-off, unimaginable
age. He clearly remembered being a very young boy—this was when he
lived in the monastery—and asking Brother Michael, who liked to tell him

of the travels he had taken in his other life, when he too might be able to
travel.
“When you’re older,” Brother Michael had said.
“When?” he’d asked. “Next year?” Then, even a month had seemed as
long as forever.
“Many years,” Brother Michael had said. “When you’re older. When
you’re thirty.” And now, in just a few weeks, he would be.

On those Sundays, when he was readying to leave for his walk, he would
sometimes stand, barefoot, in the kitchen, everything quiet around him, and
the small, ugly apartment would feel like a sort of marvel. Here, time was
his, and space was his, and every door could be shut, every window locked.
He would stand before the tiny hallway closet—an alcove, really, over
which they had strung a length of burlap—and admire the stores within it.

At Lispenard Street, there were no late-night scrambles to the bodega on
West Broadway for a roll of toilet paper, no squinching your nose above a
container of long-spoiled milk found in the back corner of the refrigerator:
here, there was always extra. Here, everything was replaced when it needed
to be. He made sure of it. In their first year at Lispenard Street he had been
self-conscious about his habits, which he knew belonged to someone much
older and probably female, and had hidden his supplies of paper towels

under his bed, had stuffed the fliers for coupons into his briefcase to look
through later, when Willem wasn’t home, as if they were a particularly
exotic form of pornography. But one day, Willem had discovered his stash
while looking for a stray sock he’d kicked under the bed.
He had been embarrassed. “Why?” Willem had asked him. “I think it’s
great. Thank god you’re looking out for this kind of stuff.” But it had still

made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the
overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and
irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe
he was.
And yet—as with so much else—he couldn’t help himself. To whom
could he explain that he found as much contentment and safety in unloved
Lispenard Street, in his bomb-shelter stockpilings, as he did in the facts of

his degrees and his job? Or that those moments alone in the kitchen were