A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  “It wasn’t that bad, Harold,” he smiled. “I have very fond memories of this place, actually.” And then the mood turned again, and we both stood there staring at the building and thinking of you, and him, and all the years between this moment and the one in which I had met him, so young, so terribly young, and at that time just another student, terrifically smart and intellectually nimble, but nothing more, not the person I could have ever imagined him becoming for me.

  And then he said—he was trying to make me feel better, too; we were each performing for the other—“Did I ever tell you about the time we jumped off the roof to the fire escape outside our bedroom?”

  “What?” I asked, genuinely appalled. “No, you never did. I think I would have remembered that.”

  But although I could never have imagined the person he would become for me, I knew how he would leave me: despite all my hopes, and pleas, and insinuations, and threats, and magical thoughts, I knew. And five months later—June twelfth, a day with no significant anniversaries associated with it, a nothing day—he did. My phone rang, and although it wasn’t a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew. And on the other end was JB, and he was breathing oddly, in rapid bursts, and even before he spoke, I knew. He was fifty-three, fifty-three for not even two months. He had injected an artery with air, and had given himself a stroke, and although Andy had told me his death would have been quick, and painless, I later looked it up online and found he had lied to me: it would have meant sticking himself at least twice, with a needle whose gauge was as thick as a hummingbird’s beak; it would have been agonizing.

  When I went to his apartment, finally, it was so neat, with his office boxed up and the refrigerator emptied and everything—his will, letters—tiered on the dining-room table, like place cards at a wedding. Richard, JB, Andy, all of your and his old friends: they were all around, constantly, all of us moving about and around one another, shocked but not shocked, surprised only that we were so surprised, devastated and beaten and mostly, helpless. Had we missed something? Could we have done something different? After his service—which was crowded, with his friends and your friends and their parents and families, with his law school classmates, with his clients, with the staff and patrons of the arts nonprofit, with the board of the food kitchen, with a huge population of Rosen Pritchard employees, past and present, including Meredith, who came with an almost completely discombobulated Lucien (who lives, cruelly, to this day, although in a nursing home in Connecticut), with our friends, with people I wouldn’t have expected: Kit and Emil and Philippa and Robin—Andy came to me, crying, and confessed that he thought things had started really going wrong for him after he’d told him he was leaving his practice, and that it was his fault. I hadn’t even known Andy was leaving—he had never mentioned it to me—but I comforted him, and told him it wasn’t his fault, not at all, that he had always been good to him, that I had always trusted him.

  “At least Willem isn’t here,” we said to one another. “At least Willem isn’t here to see this.”

  Though, of course—if you were here, wouldn’t he still be as well?

  But if I cannot say that I didn’t know how he would die, I can say that there was much I didn’t know, not at all, not after all. I didn’t know that Andy would be dead three years later of a heart attack, or Richard two years after that of brain cancer. You all died so young: you, Malcolm, him. Elijah, of a stroke, when he was sixty; Citizen, when he was sixty as well, of pneumonia. In the end there was, and is, only JB, to whom he left the house in Garrison, and whom we see often—there, or in the city, or in Cambridge. JB has a serious boyfriend now, a very good man named Tomasz, a specialist in Japanese medieval art at Sotheby’s, whom we like very much; I know both you and he would have as well. And although I feel bad for myself, for us—of course—I feel most bad most often for JB, deprived of you all, left to live the beginnings of old age by himself, with new friends, certainly, but without most of his friends who had known him since he was a child. At least I have known him since he was twenty-two; off and on, perhaps, but neither of us count the off years.

  And now JB is sixty-one and I am eighty-four, and he has been dead for six years and you have been dead for nine. JB’s most recent show was called “Jude, Alone,” and was of fifteen paintings of just him, depicting imagined moments from the years after you died, from those nearly three years he managed to hang on without you. I have tried, but I cannot look at them: I try, and try, but I cannot.

  And there were still more things I didn’t know. He was right: we had only moved to New York for him, and after we had settled his estate—Richard was his executor, though I helped him—we went home to Cambridge, to be near the people who had known us for so long. I’d had enough of cleaning and sorting—we had, along with Richard and JB and Andy, gone through all of his personal papers (there weren’t many), and clothes (a heartbreak itself, watching his suits get narrower and narrower) and your clothes; we had looked through your files at Lantern House together, which took many days because we kept stopping to cry or exclaim or pass around a picture none of us had seen before—but when we were back home, back in Cambridge, the very movement of organizing had become reflexive, and I sat down one Saturday to clean out the bookcases, an ambitious project that I soon lost interest in, when I found, tucked between two books, two envelopes, our names in his handwriting. I opened my envelope, my heart thrumming, and saw my name—Dear Harold—and read his note from decades ago, from the day of his adoption, and cried, sobbed, really, and then I slipped the disc into the computer and heard his voice, and although I would have cried anyway for its beauty, I cried more because it was his. And then Julia came home and found me and read her note and we cried all over again.

  And it wasn’t until a few weeks after that that I was able to open the letter he had left us on his table. I hadn’t been able to bear it earlier; I wasn’t sure I would be able to bear it now. But I did. It was eight pages long, and typed, and it was a confession: of Brother Luke, and Dr. Traylor, and what had happened to him. It took us several days to read, because although it was brief, it was also endless, and we had to keep putting the pages down and walking away from them, and then bracing each other—Ready?—and sitting down and reading some more.

  “I’m sorry,” he wrote. “Please forgive me. I never meant to deceive you.”

  I still don’t know what to say about that letter, I still cannot think of it. All those answers I had wanted about who and why he was, and now those answers only torment. That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself—after you, after me, after all of us who loved him—makes me think that my life has been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted. It is then that I talk to you the most, that I go downstairs late at night and stand before Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, which now hangs above our dining-room table: “Willem,” I ask you, “do you feel like I do? Do you think he was happy with me?” Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it. But you only smile, not at me but just past me, and you never have an answer. It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffin
g after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

  But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.

  “You jumped off the roof?” I repeated. “Why on earth would you have done such a thing?”

  “It’s a good story,” he said. He even grinned at me. “I’ll tell you.”

  “Please,” I said.

  And then he did.

  Acknowledgments

  For their expertise on matters of architecture, law, medicine, and filmmaking, my great thanks to Matthew Baiotto, Janet Nezhad Band, Steve Blatz, Karen Cinorre, Michael Gooen, Peter Kostant, Sam Levy, Dermot Lynch, and Barry Tuch. Special thanks to Douglas Eakeley for his erudition and patience, and to Priscilla Eakeley, Drew Lee, Eimear Lynch, Seth Mnookin, Russell Perreault, Whitney Robinson, Marysue Rucci, and Ronald and Susan Yanagihara for their unstinting support.

  My deepest thanks to the brilliant Michael “Bitter” Dykes, Kate Maxwell, and Kaja Perina for bringing my life joy, and to Kerry Lauerman for bringing it comfort. I have long thought Yossi Milo and Evan Smoak and Stephen Morrison and Chris Upton role models for how to behave in a loving relationship; I appreciate and admire them for many reasons.

  I’m grateful to the devoted and faithful Gerry Howard and to the inimitable Ravi Mirchandani, who gave themselves over to the life of this book with such generosity and dedication, and to Andrew Kidd for his belief, and to Anna Stein O’Sullivan for her indulgence, equanimity, and constancy. Thank you too to everyone who helped make this book happen, in particular Lexy Bloom, Alex Hoyt, Jeremy Medina, Bill Thomas, and the Estate of Peter Hujar.

  Finally and essentially: I not only never could have, but never would have, written this book without the conversations with—and the kindness, grace, empathy, forgiveness, and wisdom of—Jared Hohlt, my first and favorite reader, secret keeper, and North Star. His beloved friendship is the greatest gift of my adulthood.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.