A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  There is no etiquette for such a party, and so their guests have invented their own: Malcolm’s parents have sent a magnum of champagne and a case of super Tuscan from a vineyard they partly own outside of Montalcino. JB’s mother sent him with a burlap sack of heirloom narcissus bulbs for Harold and Julia, and a card for him; his aunts have sent an orchid. The U.S. Attorney sends an enormous crate of fruit, with a card signed by Marshall and Citizen and Rhodes as well. People bring wine and flowers. Allison, who had years ago revealed him to Harold as the creator of the bacteria cookies, brings four dozen decorated with his original designs, which makes him blush and Julia shout with delight. The rest of the day is a binging on all things sweet: everything he does that day is perfect, everything he says comes out right. People reach for him and he doesn’t move or shy away from them; they touch him and he lets them. His face hurts from smiling. Decades of approbation, of affection are stuffed into this one afternoon, and he gorges on it, reeling from the strangeness of it all. He overhears Andy arguing with Dr. Kashen about a massive new proposed landfill project in Gurgaon, watches Willem listen patiently to his old torts professor, eavesdrops on JB explaining to Dr. Li why the New York art scene is irretrievably fucked, spies Malcolm and Carey trying to extract the largest of the crab cakes without toppling the rest of the stack.

  By the early evening, everyone has left, and it is just the six of them sprawled out in the living room: he and Harold and Julia and Malcolm and JB and Willem. The house is once again messy. Julia mentions dinner, but everyone—even he—has eaten too much, and no one, not even JB, wants to think about it. JB has given Harold and Julia a painting of him, saying, before he hands it over to them, “It’s not based on a photo, just from sketches.” The painting, which JB has done in watercolors and ink on a sheet of stiff paper, is of his face and neck, and is in a different style than he associates with JB’s work: sparer and more gestural, in a somber, grayed palette. In it, his right hand is hovering over the base of his throat, as if he’s about to grab it and throttle himself, and his mouth is slightly open, and his pupils are very large, like a cat’s in gloom. It’s undeniably him—he even recognizes the gesture as his own, although he can’t, in the moment, remember what it’s meant to signal, or what emotion it accompanies. The face is slightly larger than life-size, and all of them stare at it in silence.

  “It’s a really good piece,” JB says at last, sounding pleased. “Let me know if you ever want to sell it, Harold,” and finally, everyone laughs.

  “JB, it’s so, so beautiful—thank you so much,” says Julia, and Harold echoes her. He is finding it difficult, as he always does when confronted with JB’s pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn’t want to be ungracious, and so he repeats their praise.

  “Wait, I have something, too,” Willem says, heading for the bedroom, and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra’s hood, surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest, his left by his side.

  “Fuck’s that dude?” asks JB.

  “This dude,” Willem replies, “is Saint Jude, also known as Judas Thaddeus.” He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and Harold. “I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest,” he tells them. “They said it’s late nineteenth-century, but I don’t know—I think he’s probably just a village carving. Still, I liked him. He’s handsome and stately, just like our Jude.”

  “I agree,” says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands. He strokes the figure’s pleated robe, his wreath of fire. “Why’s his head on fire?”

  “It’s to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit,” he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his mind’s cellar. “He was one of the apostles.”

  “How’d you know that?” Malcolm asks, and Willem, who’s sitting next to him, touches his arm. “Of course you know,” Willem says, quietly. “I always forget,” and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for remembering, but for forgetting.

  “The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us—when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it: as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction. And yet it also felt, at times, like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he could have, even should have changed it, he never did. “Willem, thank you,” Julia says. “I love him.”

  “Me too,” says Harold. “Guys, this is all really sweet of you.”

  He, too, has brought a present for Harold and Julia, but as the day has passed, it’s come to seem ever-smaller and more foolish. Years ago, Harold had mentioned that he and Julia had heard a series of Schubert’s early lieder performed in Vienna when they were on their honeymoon. But Harold couldn’t remember which ones they had loved, and so he had made up his own list, and augmented it with a few other songs he liked, mostly Bach and Mozart, and then rented a small sound booth and recorded a disc of himself singing them: every few months or so, Harold asks him to sing for them, but he’s always too shy to do so. Now, though, the gift feels misguided and tinny, as well as shamefully boastful, and he is embarrassed by his own presumption. Yet he can’t bring himself to throw it away. And so, when everyone is standing and stretching and saying their good nights, he slips away and wedges the disc, and the letters he’s written each of them, between two books—a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise—on a low shelf, where they might sit, undiscovered, for decades.

  Normally, Willem stays with JB in the upstairs study, as he’s the only one who can tolerate JB’s snoring, and Malcolm stays with him downstairs. But that evening, as everyone heads off for bed, Malcolm volunteers that he’ll share with JB, so that he and Willem can catch up with each other.

  “ ’Night, lovers,” JB calls down the staircase at them.

  As they get ready for bed, Willem tells him more stories from the set: about the lead actress, who perspired so much that her entire face had to be dusted with powder every two takes; about the lead actor, who played the devil, and who was constantly trying to curry favor with the grips by buying them beers and asking them who wanted to play football, but who then had a tantrum when he couldn’t remember his lines; about the nine-year-old British actor playing the actress’s son, who had approached Willem at the craft services table to tell him that he really shouldn’t be eating crackers because they were empty calories, and wasn’t he afraid of getting fat? Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.

  But when the lights are turned off and they are both lying in the dark, he in the bed, Willem on the sofa (after an argument in which he tried to get Willem to take the bed himself), Willem says, gently, “The apartment’s really fucking clean.”

  “I know,” he winces. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Willem says. “But Jude—was it really awful?”

  He understands then that Andy did tell Willem at least some of what had happened, and so he decides to answer honestly. “It wasn’t great,” he allows, and then, because he doesn’t want Willem to feel guilty, “but it wasn’t horrible.”

  They are both quiet. “I wish I could’ve been there,” Willem says.

  “You were,” he assures him. “But Willem—I missed you.”

  Very quietly, Willem says, “I missed you, too.”

  “Thank you for coming,” he says.

  “Of course I was going to come, Judy,” Willem says from across the room. “I would’ve no matter what.”

  He is silent, savoring this promise and commit
ting it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. “Do you think it went all right?” he asks.

  “Are you serious?” Willem says, and he can hear him sit up. “Did you see Harold’s face? He looked like the Green Party just elected its first president and the Second Amendment was eliminated and the Red Sox were canonized, all in the same day.”

  He laughs. “You really think so?”

  “I know so. He was really, really happy, Jude. He loves you.”

  He smiles into the dark. He wants to hear Willem say such things over and over, an endless loop of promises and avowals, but he knows such wishes are self-indulgent, and so he changes the subject, and they talk of little things, nothings, until first Willem, and then he, fall asleep.

  A week later, his giddiness has mellowed into something else: a contentment, a stillness. For the past week, his nights have been unbroken stretches of sleep in which he dreams not of the past but of the present: silly dreams about work, sunnily absurd dreams about his friends. It is the first complete week in the now almost two decades since he began cutting himself that he hasn’t woken in the middle of the night, since he’s felt no need for the razor. Maybe he is cured, he dares to think. Maybe this is what he needed all along, and now that it’s happened, he is better. He feels wonderful, like a different person: whole and healthy and calm. He is someone’s son, and at times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagines it is manifesting itself physically, as if it’s been written in something shining and gold across his chest.

  He is back in their apartment. Willem is with him. He has brought back with him a second statue of Saint Jude, which they keep in the kitchen, but this Saint Jude is bigger and hollow and ceramic, with a slot chiseled into the back of his head, and they feed their change through it at the end of the day; when it’s full, they decide, they’ll go buy a really good bottle of wine and drink it, and then they’ll begin again.

  He doesn’t know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold’s claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won’t even be conscious that he’s doing this. But he will do it anyway, because part of him will never believe Harold and Julia; as much as he wants to, as much as he thinks he does, he won’t, and he will always be convinced that they will eventually tire of him, that they will one day regret their involvement with him. And so he will challenge them, because when their relationship inevitably ends, he will be able to look back and know for certain that he caused it, and not only that, but the specific incident that caused it, and he will never have to wonder, or worry, about what he did wrong, or what he could have done better. But that is in the future. For now, his happiness is flawless.

  That first Saturday after he returns from Boston, he goes up to Felix’s house as usual, where Mr. Baker has requested he come a few minutes early. They talk, briefly, and then he goes downstairs to find Felix, who is waiting for him in the music room, plinking at the piano keys.

  “So, Felix,” he says, in the break they take after piano and Latin but before German and math, “your father tells me you’re going away to school next year.”

  “Yeah,” says Felix, looking down at his feet. “In September. Dad went there, too.”

  “I heard,” he says. “How do you feel about it?”

  Felix shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, at last. “Dad says you’re going to catch me up this spring and summer.”

  “I will,” he promises. “You’re going to be so ready for that school that they won’t know what hit them.” Felix’s head is still bent, but he sees the tops of his cheeks fatten a little and knows he’s smiling, just a bit.

  He doesn’t know what makes him say what he does next: Is it empathy, as he hopes, or is it a boast, an alluding aloud to the improbable and wondrous turns his life has taken over the past month? “You know, Felix,” he begins, “I never had friends, either, not for a very long time, not until I was much older than you.” He can sense, rather than see, Felix become alert, can feel him listening. “I wanted them, too,” he continues, going slowly now, because he wants to make sure his words come out right. “And I always wondered if I would ever find any, and how, and when.” He traces his index finger across the dark walnut tabletop, up the spine of Felix’s math textbook, down his cold glass of water. “And then I went to college, and I met people who, for whatever reason, decided to be my friends, and they taught me—everything, really. They made me, and make me, into someone better than I really am.

  “You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

  They’re both quiet for a long time, listening to the click of the metronome, which is faulty and sometimes starts ticking spontaneously, even after he’s stopped it. “You’re going to make friends, Felix,” he says, finally. “You will. You won’t have to work as hard at finding them as you will at keeping them, but I promise, it’ll be work worth doing. Far more worth doing than, say, Latin.” And now Felix looks up at him and smiles, and he smiles back. “Okay?” he asks him.

  “Okay,” Felix says, still smiling.

  “What do you want to do next, German or math?”

  “Math,” says Felix.

  “Good choice,” he says, and pulls Felix’s math book over to him. “Let’s pick up where we left off last time.” And Felix turns to the page and they begin.

  [ III ]

  Vanities

  1

  THEIR NEXT-DOOR SUITEMATES their second year in Hood had been a trio of lesbians, all seniors, who had been in a band called Backfat and had for some reason taken a liking to JB (and, eventually, Jude, and then Willem, and finally, reluctantly, Malcolm). Now, fifteen years after the four of them had graduated, two of the lesbians had coupled up and were living in Brooklyn. Of the four of them, only JB talked to them regularly: Marta was a nonprofit labor lawyer, and Francesca was a set designer.

  “Exciting news!” JB told them one Friday in October over dinner. “The Bitches of Bushwick called—Edie is in town!” Edie was the third in the lesbians’ trio, a beefy, emotional Korean American who shuttled back and forth between San Francisco and New York, and seemed always to be preparing for one improbable job or another: the last time they had seen her, she was about to leave for Grasse to begin training to become a professional nose, and just eight months before that, she had finished a cooking course in Afghani cuisine.

  “And why is this exciting news?” asked Malcolm, who had never quite forgiven the three of them for their inexplicable dislike of him.

  “Well,” said JB, and paused, grinning. “She’s transitioning!”

  “To a man?” asked Malcolm. “Give me a break, JB. She’s never exhibited any gender dysphoric ideations for as long as we’ve known her!” A former coworker of Malcolm’s had transitioned the year before and Malcolm had become a self-anointed expert on the subject, lecturing them about their intolerance and ignorance until JB had finally shouted at him, “Jesus, Malcolm, I’m far more trans than Dominic’ll ever be!”

  “Well, anyway, she is,” JB continued, “and the Bitches are throwing her a party at their house, and we’re all invited.”

  They groaned. “JB, I only have five weeks before I leave for London, and I have so much shit to get done,” Willem protested. “I can’t spend a night listening to Edie Kim complaining out in Bushwick.”

  “You can’t not go!” shrieked JB. “They specifically asked for you! Francesca’s inviting some girl who knows you from something or other and wants to see you again. If you don’t go, they’re all going to think you think you’re too good for them now. And
there’s going to be a ton of other people we haven’t seen in forever—”

  “Yeah, and maybe there’s a reason we haven’t seen them,” Jude said.

  “—and besides, Willem, the pussy will be waiting for you whether you spend an hour in Brooklyn or not. And it’s not like it’s the end of the world. It’s Bushwick. Judy’ll drive us.” Jude had bought a car the year before, and although it wasn’t particularly fancy, JB loved to ride around in it.

  “What? I’m not going,” Jude said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m in a wheelchair, JB, remember? And as I recall, Marta and Francesca’s place doesn’t have an elevator.”

  “Wrong place,” JB replied triumphantly. “See how long it’s been? They moved. Their new place definitely has one. A freight elevator, actually.” He leaned back, drumming his fist on the table as the rest of them sat in a resigned silence. “And off we go!”

  So the following Saturday they met at Jude’s loft on Greene Street and he drove them to Bushwick, where he circled Marta and Francesca’s block, looking for a parking space.

  “There was a spot right back there,” JB said after ten minutes.

  “It was a loading zone,” Jude told him.

  “If you just put that handicapped sign up, we can park wherever we want,” JB said.

  “I don’t like using it—you know that.”

  “If you’re not going to use it, then what’s the point of having a car?”

  “Jude, I think that’s a space,” said Willem, ignoring JB.

  “Seven blocks from the apartment,” muttered JB.

  “Shut up, JB,” said Malcolm.

  Once inside the party, they were each tugged by a different person to a separate corner of the room. Willem watched as Jude was pulled firmly away by Marta: Help me, Jude mouthed to him, and he smiled and gave him a little wave. Courage, he mouthed back, and Jude rolled his eyes. He knew how much Jude hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t wanted to explain again and again why he was in a wheelchair, and yet Willem had begged him: “Don’t make me go alone.”