A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  “I couldn’t remember how you felt about my famous seitan stir-fry, so I actually got scallops,” Richard says, and places a dish before him.

  “I like your famous stir-fry,” he says, although he can’t remember what it is, and if he likes it or not. “Thank you, Richard.”

  Richard pours them both a glass of wine, and then holds his up. “Happy birthday, Jude,” he says, solemnly, and he realizes that Richard is right: today is his birthday. Harold has been calling and e-mailing him all this week with a frequency that is unusual even for him, and except for the most cursory of replies, he has not spoken to him at all. He knows Harold will be worried about him. There have been more texts from Andy as well, and from some other people, and now he knows why, and he begins to cry: from everyone’s kindness, which he has repaid so poorly, from his loneliness, from the proof that life has, despite his efforts to let it, gone on after all. He is fifty-one, and Willem has been dead for eight months.

  Richard doesn’t say anything, just sits next to him on the bench and holds him. “I know this isn’t going to help,” he says at last, “but I love you too, Jude.”

  He shakes his head, unable to speak. In recent years he has gone from being embarrassed about crying at all to crying constantly to himself to crying around Willem to now, in the final falling away of his dignity, crying in front of anyone, at any time, over anything.

  He leans against Richard’s chest and sobs into his shirt. Richard is another person whose unstinting, unwavering friendship and compassion for him has always perplexed him. He knows that some of Richard’s feelings for him are twined with his feelings for Willem, and this he understands: he had made Willem a promise, and Richard is serious about his obligations. But there is something about Richard’s steadiness, his complete reliability, that—coupled with his height, his very size—makes him think of him as some sort of massive tree-god, an oak come into human form, something solid and ancient and indestructible. Theirs is not a chatty relationship, but it is Richard who has become the friend of his adulthood, who has become, in a way, not just a friend but a parent, although he is only four years older. A brother, then: someone whose dependability and sense of decency are inviolable.

  Finally, he is able to stop, and apologize, and after he cleans himself up in the bathroom, they eat, slowly, drinking the wine, talking about Richard’s work. At the end of the meal, Richard returns from the kitchen with a lumpy little cake, into which he has thrust six candles. “Five plus one,” Richard explains. He makes himself smile, then; he blows out the candles; Richard cuts them both slices. The cake is crumbly and figgy, more scone than cake, and they both eat their pieces in silence.

  He stands to help Richard with the dishes, but when Richard tells him to go upstairs, he is relieved, because he’s exhausted; this is the most socializing he has done since Thanksgiving. At the door, Richard hands him something, a package wrapped in brown paper, and then hugs him. “He wouldn’t want you to be unhappy, Judy,” he says, and he nods against Richard’s cheek. “He would hate seeing you like this.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “And do me a favor,” Richard says, still holding him. “Call JB, okay? I know it’s difficult for you, but—he loved Willem too, you know. Not like you, I know, but still. And Malcolm. He misses him.”

  “I know,” he repeats, tears coming to his eyes once more. “I know.”

  “Come back next Sunday,” Richard says, and kisses him. “Or any day, really. I miss seeing you.”

  “I will,” he says. “Richard—thank you.”

  “Happy birthday, Jude.”

  He takes the elevator upstairs. It’s suddenly grown late. Back in his apartment, he goes to his study, sits on the sofa. There is a box that he hasn’t opened that was messengered over to him from Flora weeks ago; inside it are Malcolm’s bequests to him, and to Willem—which are now also his. The only thing Willem’s death has helped with is blunting the shock, the horror of Malcolm’s, and still, he has been unable to open the box.

  But now he will. First, though, he unwraps Richard’s present and sees that it is a small bust, carved from wood and mounted on a heavy black-iron cube, of Willem, and he gasps as if slugged. Richard has always claimed that he’s terrible with figurative sculpture, but he knows he’s not, and this piece is proof of it. He glides his fingers over Willem’s sightless eyes, across Willem’s crest of hair, and after doing so, lifts them to his nose and smells sandalwood. On the bottom of the base is etched “To J on his 51st. With love. R.”

  He starts to cry again; stops. He places the bust on the cushion next to him and opens the box. At first he sees nothing but wads of newspaper, and he gropes carefully inside until his hands close on something solid, which he lifts out: it is the scale model of Lantern House, its walls rendered from boxwood, that had once sat in Bellcast’s offices, alongside the scale models of every other project the firm had ever built, in form or in reality. The model is about two feet square, and he settles it on his lap before holding it to his face, looking through its thin Plexiglas windows, hoisting the roof up and walking his fingers through its rooms.

  He wipes his eyes and reaches into the box again. The next thing he retrieves is an envelope fat with pictures of them, the four of them, or just of him and Willem: from college, from New York, from Truro, from Cambridge, from Garrison, from India, from France, from Iceland, from Ethiopia—places they’d lived, trips they’d taken.

  The box isn’t very large, and still he removes things: two delicate, rare books of drawings of Japanese houses by a French illustrator; a small abstract painting by a young British artist he’d always admired; a larger drawing of a man’s face by a well-known American painter that Willem had always liked; two of Malcolm’s earliest sketchbooks, filled with page after page of his imaginary structures. And finally, he lifts the last thing from the box, something wrapped in layers of newspaper, which he removes, slowly.

  Here, in his hands, is Lispenard Street: their apartment, with its odd proportions and slapdash second bedroom; its narrow hallways and miniature kitchen. He can tell that this is an early piece of Malcolm’s because the windows are made of glassine, not vellum or Plexiglas, and the walls are made of cardboard, not wood. And in this apartment Malcolm has placed furniture, cut and folded from stiff paper: his lumpy twin futon bed on its cinder-block base; the broken-springed couch they had found on the street; the squeaking wheeled easy chair given them by JB’s aunts. All that is missing is a paper him, a paper Willem.

  He puts Lispenard Street on the floor by his feet. For a long time he sits very still, his eyes closed, allowing his mind to reach back and wander: there is much he doesn’t romanticize about those years, not now, but at the time, when he hadn’t known what to hope for, he hadn’t known that life could be better than Lispenard Street.

  “What if we’d never left?” Willem would occasionally ask him. “What if I had never made it? What if you’d stayed at the U.S. Attorney’s Office? What if I was still working at Ortolan? What would our lives be like now?”

  “How theoretical do you want to get here, Willem?” he’d ask him, smiling. “Would we be together?”

  “Of course we’d be together,” Willem would say. “That part would be the same.”

  “Well,” he’d say, “then the first thing we’d do is tear down that wall and reclaim the living room. And the second thing we’d do is get a decent bed.”

  Willem would laugh. “And we’d sue the landlord to get a working elevator, once and for all.”

  “Right, that’d be the next step.”

  He sits, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. Then he turns on his phone, checks his missed calls: Andy, JB, Richard, Harold and Julia, Black Henry Young, Rhodes, Citizen, Andy again, Richard again, Lucien, Asian Henry Young, Phaedra, Elijah, Harold again, Julia again, Harold, Richard, JB, JB, JB.

  He calls JB. It’s late, but JB stays up late. “Hi,” he says, when JB picks up, hears the surprise in his voice. “It’s me. Is t
his a good time to talk?”

  2

  AT LEAST ONE Saturday a month now he takes half a day off from work and goes to the Upper East Side. When he leaves Greene Street, the neighborhood’s boutiques and stores haven’t yet opened for the day; when he returns, they are closed for the night. On these days, he can imagine the SoHo Harold knew as a child: a place shuttered and unpeopled, a place without life.

  His first stop is the building on Park and Seventy-eighth, where he takes the elevator to the sixth floor. The maid lets him into the apartment and he follows her to the back study, which is sunny and large, and where Lucien is waiting—not waiting for him, necessarily, but waiting.

  There is always a late breakfast laid out for him: thin wedges of smoked salmon and tiny buckwheat pancakes one time; a cake glazed white with lemon icing the next. He can never bring himself to eat anything, although sometimes when he is feeling especially helpless he accepts a slice of cake from the maid and holds the plate in his lap for the entire visit. But although he doesn’t eat anything, he does drink cup after cup of tea, which is always steeped exactly how he likes it. Lucien eats nothing either—he has been fed earlier—nor does he drink.

  Now he goes to Lucien and takes his hand. “Hi, Lucien,” he tells him.

  He had been in London when Lucien’s wife, Meredith, called him: it was the week of Bergesson’s retrospective at MoMA, and he had arranged to be out of the city on business. Lucien had had a massive stroke, Meredith said; he would live, but the doctors didn’t yet know how great the damage would be.

  Lucien was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he was released, it was clear that his impairment was severe. And although it is not yet five months later, it has remained so: the features on the left side of his face seem to be melting off of him, and he cannot use his left arm or leg, either. He can still speak, remarkably well, but his memory has vanished, the past twenty years deserting him completely. In early July, he fell and hit his head and was in a coma; now, he is too unsteady to even walk, and Meredith has moved them back from their house in Connecticut to their apartment in the city, where they can be closer to the hospital and their daughters.

  He thinks Lucien likes, or at least doesn’t mind, his visits, but he doesn’t know this for sure. Certainly Lucien doesn’t know who he is: he is someone who appears in his life and then disappears, and every time he must reintroduce himself.

  “Who are you?” Lucien asks.

  “Jude,” he says.

  “Now, remind me,” Lucien says, pleasantly, as if they’re meeting at a cocktail party, “how do I know you?”

  “You were my mentor,” he tells him.

  “Ah,” says Lucien. And then there is a silence.

  In the first weeks, he tried to make Lucien remember his own life: he talked about Rosen Pritchard, and about people they knew, and cases they used to argue about. But then he realized that the expression he had mistaken—in his own stupid hopefulness—for thoughtfulness was in reality fear. And so now he discusses nothing from the past, or nothing from their past together, at least. He lets Lucien direct the conversation, and although he doesn’t understand the references Lucien makes, he smiles and tries to pretend he does.

  “Who are you?” Lucien asks.

  “Jude,” he says.

  “Now, tell me, how do I know you?”

  “You were my mentor.”

  “Oh, at Groton!”

  “Yes,” he says, trying to smile back. “At Groton.”

  Sometimes, though, Lucien looks at him. “Mentor?” he says. “I’m too young to be your mentor!” Or sometimes he doesn’t ask at all, simply begins a conversation in its middle, and he has to wait until he has enough clues and can determine what role he has been assigned—one of his daughters’ long-ago boyfriends, or a college classmate, or a friend at the country club—before he can respond appropriately.

  In these hours he learns more about Lucien’s earlier life than Lucien had ever revealed to him before. Although Lucien is no longer Lucien, at least not the Lucien he knew. This Lucien is vague and featureless; he is as smooth and cornerless as an egg. Even his voice, that droll croaking roll with which Lucien used to deliver his sentences, each one a statement, the pause he used to leave between them because he had grown so used to people’s laughter; the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn’t really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape, is different. Even when they were working together, he knew that the Lucien of the office was not the Lucien of the country club, but he never saw that other Lucien. And now, finally, he has, he does; it is the only person he sees. This Lucien talks about the weather, and golf, and sailing, and taxes, but the tax laws he discusses are from twenty years ago. He never asks him anything about himself: who he is, what he does, why he is sometimes in a wheelchair. Lucien talks, and he smiles and nods back at him, wrapping his hands around his cooling cup of tea. When Lucien’s hands tremble, he takes them in his own, which he knows helps him when his hands shake: Willem used to do this, and breathe with him, and it would always calm him. When Lucien drools, he takes the edge of his napkin and blots the saliva away. Unlike him, however, Lucien doesn’t seem embarrassed by his own shaking and drooling, and he is relieved that he doesn’t. He’s not embarrassed for Lucien, either, but he is embarrassed by his inability to do more for him.

  “He loves seeing you, Jude,” Meredith always says, but he doesn’t think this is true, really. He sometimes thinks he continues to come more for Meredith’s sake than for Lucien’s, and he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost. Lucien is not conscious of this, but he can remember being so when he was sick, both the first time and the second, and Willem was taking care of him. How grateful he was when he would wake and find someone other than Willem sitting next to him. “Roman’s with him,” Richard or Malcolm would say, or “He and JB went out for lunch,” and he’d relax. In the weeks after his amputations, when all he wanted to do was give up, those moments in which he could imagine that Willem might be being comforted were his only moments of happiness. And so he sits with Meredith after sitting with Lucien and they talk, although she too asks him nothing about his life, and this is fine with him. She is lonely; he is lonely, too. She and Lucien have two daughters, one of whom lives in New York but is forever going in and out of rehab; the other lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children and is a lawyer herself.

  He has met both of these daughters, who are a decade or so younger than he is, although Lucien is Harold’s age. When he went to visit Lucien in the hospital, the older of them, the one who lives in New York, had looked at him with such hatred that he had almost stepped back, and then had said to her sister, “Oh, and look who it is: Daddy’s pet. What a surprise.”

  “Grow up, Portia,” the younger one had hissed. To him she said, “Jude, thanks for coming. I’m so sorry about Willem.”

  “Thank you for coming, Jude,” Meredith says now, kissing him goodbye. “I’ll see you soon?” She always asks this, as if he might someday tell her she won’t.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ll e-mail you.”

  “Do,” she says, and waves as he walks down the hall toward the elevator. He always has the sense that no one else visits, and yet how can that be? Don’t let that be, he pleads. Meredith and Lucien have always had lots of friends. They threw dinner parties. It wasn’t unusual to see Lucien leaving the offices in black tie, rolling his eyes as he waved goodbye to him. “Benefit,” he’d say as an explanation. “Party.” “Wedding.” “Dinner.”

  After these visits he is always exhausted, but still he walks, seven blocks south and a quarter of a block east, to the Irvines’. For months he had avoided the Irvines, and then last month, on the one-year anniversary, they had asked him and Richard and JB to dinner at their house, and he knew he would have to go.

  It was the weekend after Labor Day. The previo
us four weeks—four weeks that had included the day Willem would have turned fifty-three; the day that Willem had died—had been some of the worst he had ever experienced. He had known they would be bad; he had tried to plan accordingly. The firm had needed someone to go to Beijing, and although he knew he should have stayed in New York—he was working on a case that needed him more than the business in Beijing did—he volunteered anyway, and off he went. At first he had hoped he might be safe: the woolly numbness of jet lag was sometimes indistinguishable from the woolly numbness of his grief, and there were other things that were so physically uncomfortable—including the heat, which was woolly itself, woolly and sodden—that he had thought he would be able to distract himself. But then one night near the end of the trip he was being driven back to the hotel from a long day of meetings, and he had looked out of the car window and had seen, glittering over the road, a massive billboard of Willem’s face. It was a beer ad that Willem had shot two years ago, one that was only displayed throughout east Asia. But hanging from the top of the billboard were people on pulleys, and he realized that they were painting over the ad, that they were erasing Willem’s face. Suddenly, his breath left him, and he had almost asked the driver to stop, but he wouldn’t have been able to—they were on a loop of a road, one with no exits or places to pull over, and so he’d had to sit very still, his heart erupting within him, counting the beats it took to reach the hotel, thank the driver, get out, walk through the lobby, ride the elevator, walk down the hallway, and enter his room, where before he could think, he was throwing himself against the cold marble wall of the shower, his mouth open and his eyes shut, tossing and tossing himself until he was in so much pain that his every vertebrae felt as if it had been jolted out of its sockets.