A Little Life

  Once he had been standing on his mark as the cinematographer made a last adjustment, before coming over and cupping his head gently—“His hair!” barked the first assistant director, warningly—and tilting it an inch to the left, and then to the right, and then to the left again, as if he was positioning a vase on a mantel.

  “Don’t move, Willem,” he’d cautioned, and he’d promised he wouldn’t, barely breathing, but really he had wanted to break into giggles. He suddenly thought of his parents—whom, disconcertingly, he thought of more and more as he grew older—and of Hemming, and for half a second, he saw them standing just off the set to his left, just far enough out of range so he couldn’t see their faces, whose expressions he wouldn’t have been able to imagine anyway.

  He liked telling Jude all of these things, making his days on set something funny and bright. This was not what he thought acting would be, but what had he known about what acting would be? He was always prepared, he was always on time, he was polite to everyone, he did what the cinematographer told him to do and argued with the director only when absolutely necessary. But even all these films later—twelve in the past five years, eight of them in the past two—and through all of their absurdities, he finds most surreal the minute before the camera begins rolling. He stands at his first mark; he stands at his second mark; the cameraman announces he’s ready.

  “Vanities!” shouts the first assistant director, and the vanities—hair, makeup, costume—hurry over to descend upon him as if he is carrion, plucking at his hair and straightening his shirt and tickling his eyelids with their soft brushes. It takes only thirty seconds or so, but in those thirty seconds, his lashes lowered so stray powder doesn’t float into his eyes, other people’s hands moving possessively over his body and head as if they’re no longer his own, he has the strange sensation that he is gone, that he is suspended, and that his very life is an imagining. In those seconds, a whirl of images whips through his mind, too quickly and jumblingly to effectively identify each as it occurs to him: there is the scene he’s about to shoot, of course, and the scene he’d shot earlier, but also all the things that occupy him, always, the things he sees and hears and remembers before he falls asleep at night—Hemming and JB and Malcolm and Harold and Julia. Jude.

  Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).

  I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.

  As Vanities tug and yank at him, it occurs to him that he should have asked Jude what he meant by that: why it was for him and not for Jude. But by the time he’s finished shooting the scene, he won’t remember the question, or the conversation that inspired it.

  “Roll sound!” yells the first A.D., and Vanities scatter.

  “Speed,” the sound person answers, which means he’s rolling.

  “Roll camera,” calls the cameraman, and then there’s the announcement of the scene, and the clap.

  And then he opens his eyes.

  2

  ONE SATURDAY MORNING shortly after he turns thirty-six, he opens his eyes and experiences that strange, lovely sensation he sometimes has, the one in which he realizes that his life is cloudless. He imagines Harold and Julia in Cambridge, the two of them moving dozily through the kitchen, pouring coffee into their stained and chipped mugs and shaking the dew off of the plastic newspaper bags, and, in the air, Willem flying toward him from Cape Town. He pictures Malcolm pressed against Sophie in bed in Brooklyn, and then, because he feels hopeful, JB safe and snoring in his bed on the Lower East Side. Here, on Greene Street, the radiator releases its sibilant sigh. The sheets smell like soap and sky. Above him is the tubular steel chandelier Malcolm installed a month ago. Beneath him is a gleaming black wood floor. The apartment—still impossible in its vastness and possibilities and potential—is silent, and his.

  He points his toes toward the bottom of the bed and then flexes them toward his shins: nothing. He shifts his back against the mattress: nothing. He draws his knees toward his chest: nothing. Nothing hurts, nothing even threatens to hurt: his body is his again, something that will perform for him whatever he can imagine, without complaint or sabotage. He closes his eyes, not because he’s tired but because it is a perfect moment, and he knows how to enjoy them.

  These moments never last for long—sometimes, all he has to do is sit up, and he will be reminded, as if slapped across the face, that his body owns him, not the other way around—but in recent years, as things have gotten worse, he has worked very hard to give up the idea that he will ever improve, and has instead tried to concentrate on and be grateful for the minutes of reprieve, whenever and wherever his body chooses to bestow them. Finally he sits, slowly, and then stands, just as slowly. And still, he feels wonderful. A good day, he decides, and walks to the bathroom, past the wheelchair that sulks, a sullen ogre, in a corner of his bedroom.

  He gets ready and then sits down with some papers from the office to wait. Generally, he spends most of Saturday at work—that at least hasn’t changed from the days he used to take his walks: oh, his walks! Was that once him, someone who could trip, goatlike, to the Upper East Side and home again, all eleven miles on his own?—but today he’s meeting Malcolm and taking him to his suitmaker’s, because Malcolm is going to get married and needs to buy a suit.

  They’re not completely certain if Malcolm is actually getting married or not. They think he is. Over the past three years, he and Sophie have broken up and gotten back together, and broken up, and gotten back together. But in the past year, Malcolm has had conversations with Willem about weddings, and does Willem think they’re an indulgence or not; and with JB about jewelry, and when women say they don’t like diamonds, do they really mean it, or are they just testing the way it sounds; and with him about prenuptial agreements.

  He had answered Malcolm’s questions as best as he could, and then had given him the name of a classmate from law school, a matrimonial attorney. “Oh,” Malcolm had said, moving backward, as if he had offered him the name of a professional assassin. “I’m not sure I need this yet, Jude.”

  “All right,” he said, and withdrew the card, which Malcolm seemed unwilling to even touch. “Well, if and when you do, just ask.”

  And then, a month ago, Malcolm had asked if he could help him pick out a suit. “I don’t even really have one, isn’t that nuts?” he asked. “Don’t you think I should have one? Don’t you think I should start looking, I don’t know, more grown-up or something? Don’t you think it’d be good for business?”

  “I think you look great, Mal,” he said. “And I don’t think you need any help on the business front. But if you want one, sure, I’m happy to help you.”

  “Thanks,” said Malcolm. “I mean, I just think it’s something I should have. You know, just in case something comes up.” He paused. “I can’t believe you have a suitmaker, by the way.”

  He smiled. “He’s not my suitmaker,” he said. “He’s just someone who makes suits, and some of them happen to be mine.”

  “God,” said Malcolm, “Harold really created a monster.”

  He laughed, obligingly. But he often feels as if a suit is the only thing that makes him look normal. For the months he was in a wheelchair, those suits were a way of reassuring his clients that he was competent and, simultaneously, of reassuring himself that he belonged with the others, that he could at least dress the way they did. He doesn’t consider himself vain, but rather scrupulous: when he was a child, the boys from the home would occasionally play baseball games with the boys from the local school, who would taunt them, pinching their noses as they walked onto the field. “Take a bath!” they would shout. “You smell! You smell!” But they did bathe: they had mandatory showers every morning, pumping the greasy pink soap into their palms and onto washcloths and sloughing off their skin while one of the counselors walked back and forth before the row of showerheads, cracking one of the thin towels at the boys w
ho were misbehaving, or shouting at the ones who weren’t cleaning themselves with enough vigor. Even now, he has a horror of repulsing, by being unkempt, or dirty, or unsightly. “You’ll always be ugly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be neat,” Father Gabriel used to tell him, and although Father Gabriel was wrong about many things, he knows he was right about this.

  Malcolm arrives and hugs him hello and then begins, as he always does, surveying the space, telescoping his long neck and rotating in a slow circle around the room, his gaze like a lighthouse’s beam, making little assessing noises as he does.

  He answers Malcolm’s question before he can ask it: “Next month, Mal.”

  “You said that three months ago.”

  “I know. But now I really mean it. Now I have the money. Or I will, at the end of this month.”

  “But we discussed this.”

  “I know. And Malcolm—it’s so unbelievably generous of you. But I’m not going to not pay you.”

  He has lived in the apartment for more than four years now, and for four years, he’s been unable to renovate it because he hasn’t had the money, and he hasn’t had the money because he was paying off the apartment. In the meantime, Malcolm has drawn up plans, and walled off the bedrooms, and helped him choose a sofa, which sits, a gray spacecraft, in the center of the living room, and fixed some minor problems, including the floors. “That’s crazy,” he had told Malcolm at the time. “You’re going to have to redo it entirely once the renovation’s done.” But Malcolm had said he’d do it anyway; the floor dye was a new product he wanted to try, and until he was ready to begin work, Greene Street would be his laboratory, where he could do a little experimentation, if he didn’t mind (and he didn’t, of course). But otherwise the apartment is still very much as it was when he moved in: a long rectangle on the sixth floor of a building in southern SoHo, with windows at either end, one set facing west and the other facing east, as well as the entire southern wall, which looks over a parking lot. His room and bathroom are at the eastern-facing end, which looks onto the top of a stubby building on Mercer Street; Willem’s rooms—or what he continues to think of as Willem’s rooms—are at the western-facing end, which looks over Greene Street. There is a kitchen in the middle of the apartment, and a third bathroom. And in between the two suites of rooms are acres of space, the black floors shiny as piano keys.

  It is still an unfamiliar feeling to have so much space, and a stranger one to be able to afford it. But you can, he has to remind himself sometimes, just as he does when he stands in the grocery store, wondering whether he should buy a tub of the black olives he likes, which are so salty they make his mouth pucker and his eyes water. When he first moved to the city, they were an indulgence, and he’d buy them just once a month, one glistening spoonful at a time. Every night he’d eat only one, sucking the meat slowly off the stone as he sat reading briefs. You can buy them, he tells himself. You have the money. But he still finds it difficult to remember.

  The reason behind Greene Street, and the container of olives that are usually in the refrigerator, is his job at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, one of the city’s most powerful and prestigious firms, where he is a litigator and, for a little more than a year now, a partner. Five years ago, he and Citizen and Rhodes had been working on a case concerning securities fraud at a large commercial bank called Thackery Smith, and shortly after the case had settled, he had been contacted by a man named Lucien Voigt, whom he knew was the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, and who had represented Thackery Smith in their negotiations.

  Voigt asked him to have a drink. He had been impressed by his work, especially in the courtroom, he said. And Thackery Smith had been as well. He had heard of him anyway—he and Judge Sullivan had been on law review together—and had researched him. Had he ever considered leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office and coming to the dark side?

  He would have been lying if he said he hadn’t. All around him, people were leaving. Citizen, he knew, was talking to an international firm in Washington, D.C. Rhodes was wondering whether he should go in-house at a bank. He himself had been approached by two other firms, and had turned them both down. They loved the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all of them. But Citizen and Rhodes were older than he was, and Rhodes and his wife wanted to have a baby, and they needed to make money. Money, money: it was all they spoke of sometimes.

  He, too, thought of money—it was impossible not to. Every time he came home from a party at one of JB’s or Malcolm’s friends’ apartments, Lispenard Street seemed a little shabbier, a little less tolerable. Every time the elevator broke and he had to walk up the flights of stairs, and then rest on the floor in the hallway, his back against their front door, before he had the energy to let himself in, he dreamed of living somewhere functional and reliable. Every time he was standing at the top of the subway stairs, readying himself for the climb down, gripping the handrail and nearly breathing through his mouth with effort, he would wish he could take a taxi. And then there were other fears, bigger fears: in his very dark moments, he imagined himself as an old man, his skin stretched vellum-like over his ribs, still in Lispenard Street, pulling himself on his elbows to the bathroom because he was no longer able to walk. In this dream, he was alone—there was no Willem or JB or Malcolm or Andy, no Harold or Julia. He was an old, old man, and there was no one, and he was the only one left to take care of himself.

  “How old are you?” asked Voigt.

  “Thirty-one,” he said.

  “Thirty-one’s young,” said Voigt, “but you won’t be young forever. Do you really want to grow old in the U.S. Attorney’s Office? You know what they say about assistant prosecutors: Men whose best years are behind them.” He talked about compensation, about an accelerated path to partnership. “Just tell me you’ll think about it.”

  “I will,” he said.

  And he did. He didn’t discuss it with Citizen or Rhodes—or Harold, because he knew what he’d say—but he did discuss it with Willem, and together they debated the obvious benefits of the job against the obvious drawbacks: the hours (but he never left work as it was, Willem argued), the tedium, the high probability he’d be working with assholes (but Citizen and Rhodes aside, he already worked with assholes, Willem argued). And, of course, the fact that he would now be defending the people he’d spent the past six years prosecuting: liars and crooks and thieves, the entitled and the powerful masquerading as victims. He wasn’t like Harold or Citizen—he was practical; he knew that making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities, but it still troubled him, this forsaking of what he knew to be just. And for what? So he could insure he wouldn’t become that old man, lonely and sick? It seemed the worst kind of selfishness, the worst kind of self-indulgence, to disavow what he knew was right simply because he was frightened, because he was scared of being uncomfortable and miserable.

  Then, two weeks after his meeting with Voigt, he had come home one Friday night very late. He was exhausted; he’d had to use his wheelchair that day because the wound on his right leg hurt so much, and he was so relieved to get home, back to Lispenard Street, that he had felt himself go weak—in just a few minutes, he would be inside, and he would wrap a damp washcloth, hot and steamed from the microwave, around his calf and sit in the warmth. But when he tried the elevator button, he heard nothing but a grinding of gears, the faint winching noise the machine made when it was broken.

  “No!” he shouted. “No!” His voice echoed in the lobby, and he smacked his palm against the elevator door again and again: “No, no, no!” He picked up his briefcase and threw it against the ground, and papers spun up from it. Around him, the building remained silent and unhelpful.

  Finally he stopped, ashamed and angry, and gathered his papers back into his bag. He checked his watch: it was eleven. Willem was in a play, Cloud 9, but he knew he’d be off stage by then. But when he called him, Willem didn’t pick up. And then he began to panic. Malcolm was on vacation in Greece
. JB was at an artists’ colony. Andy’s daughter, Beatrice, had just been born the previous week: he couldn’t call him. There were only so many people he would let help him, whom he felt at least semi-comfortable clinging to like a sloth, whom he would allow to drag him up the many flights.

  But in that moment, he was irrationally, intensely desperate to get into the apartment. And so he stood, tucking his briefcase under his left arm and collapsing his wheelchair, which was too expensive to leave in the lobby, with his right. He began to work his way up the stairs, cleaving his left side to the wall, gripping the chair by one of its spokes. He moved slowly—he had to hop on his left leg, while trying to avoid putting any weight on his right, or letting the wheelchair bang against the wound. Up he went, pausing to rest every third step. There were a hundred and ten steps from the lobby to the fifth floor, and by the fiftieth, he was shaking so badly he had to stop and sit for half an hour. He called and texted Willem again and again. On the fourth call, he left the message he hoped he would never have to leave: “Willem, I really need help. Please call me. Please.” He had a vision of Willem calling him right back, telling him he’d be right there, but he waited and waited and Willem didn’t call, and finally he managed to stand again.