A Little Life (57 page)

The next morning I left early, before eight, and bought bagels and orange juice and went down to Greene Street. It was a gray day, soggy
and humid, and I rang the buzzer three times, each for several seconds, before stepping back toward the curb, squinting up at the sixth floor.

I was about to buzz again when I heard his voice coming over the speaker: “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Can I come up?” There was no response. “I want to apologize,” I said. “I need to see you. I brought bagels.”

There was another silence. “Hello?” I asked.

“Harold,” he said, and I noticed his voice sounded funny. Muffled, as if his mouth had grown an extra set of teeth and he was speaking around them. “If I let you up, do you promise you won’t get angry and start yelling?”

I was quiet then, myself. I didn’t know what this meant. “Yes,” I said, and after a second or two, the door clicked open.

I stepped off the elevator, and for a minute, I saw nothing, just that lovely apartment with its walls of light. And then I heard my name and looked down and saw him.

I nearly dropped the bagels. I felt my limbs turn to stone. He was sitting on the ground, but leaning on his right hand for support, and as I knelt beside him, he turned his head away and held his left hand before his face as if to shield himself.

“He took the spare set of keys,” he said, and his face was so swollen that his lips barely had room to move. “I came home last night and he was here.” He turned toward me then, and his face was an animal skinned and turned inside out and left in the heat, its organs melting together into a pudding of flesh: all I could see of his eyes were their long line of lashes, a smudge of black against his cheeks, which were a horrible blue, the blue of decay, of mold. I thought he might have been crying then, but he didn’t cry. “I’m sorry, Harold, I’m so sorry.”

I made sure I wasn’t going to start shouting—not at him, just shouting to express something I couldn’t say—before I spoke to him. “We’re going to get you better,” I said. “We’re going to call the police, and then—”

“No,” he said. “Not the police.”

“We have to,” I said. “Jude. You have to.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t report it. I can’t”—he took a breath—“I can’t take the humiliation. I can’t.”

“All right,” I said, thinking that I would discuss this with him later. “But what if he comes back?”

He shook his head, just slightly. “He won’t,” he said, in his new mumbly voice.

I was beginning to feel light-headed from the effort of suppressing the need to run out and find Caleb and kill him, from the effort of accepting that someone had done this to him, from seeing him, someone who was so dignified, who made certain to always be composed and neat, so beaten, so helpless. “Where’s your chair?” I asked him.

He made a sound like a bleat, and said something so quietly I had to ask him to repeat it, though I could see how much pain it caused him to speak. “Down the stairs,” he finally said, and this time, I was certain he was crying, although he couldn’t even open his eyes enough for tears. He began to shake.

I was shaking myself by this point. I left him there, sitting on the floor, and went to retrieve his wheelchair, which had been thrown down the stairs so hard that it had bounced off the far wall and was halfway down to the fourth floor. On the way back to him, I noticed the floor was tacky with something, and saw too a large bright splash of vomit near the dining-room table, congealed into paste.

“Put your arm around my neck,” I told him, and he did, and as I lifted him, he cried out, and I apologized and settled him in his chair. As I did, I noticed that the back of his shirt—he was wearing one of those gray thermal-weave sweatshirts he liked to sleep in—was bloody, with new and old blood, and the back of his pants were bloody as well.

I stepped away from him and called Andy, told him I had an emergency. I was lucky: Andy had stayed in the city that weekend, and he would meet us at his office in twenty minutes.

I drove us there. I helped him out of the car—he seemed unwilling to use his left arm, and when I had him stand, he held his right leg aloft, so that it wouldn’t touch the ground, and made a strange noise, a bird’s noise, as I wrapped my arm around his chest to lower him into the chair—and when Andy opened the door and saw him, I thought he was going to throw up.

“Jude,” Andy said once he could speak, crouching beside him, but he didn’t respond.

Once we’d installed him in an examination room, we spoke in the receptionist’s area. I told him about Caleb. I told him what I thought had happened. I told him what I thought was wrong: that I thought he had broken his left arm, that something was wrong with his right leg,
that he was bleeding and where, that the floors had blood on them. I told him he wouldn’t report it to the police.

“Okay,” Andy said. He was in shock, I could see. He kept swallowing. “Okay, okay.” He stopped and rubbed at his eyes. “Will you wait here for a little while?”

He came out from the examining room forty minutes later. “I’m going to take him to the hospital to get some X-rays,” he said. “I’m pretty sure his left wrist is broken, and some of his ribs. And if his leg is—” He stopped. “If it is, this is really going to be a problem,” he said. He seemed to have forgotten I was in the room. Then he recalled himself. “You should go,” he said. “I’ll call you when I’m almost done.”

“I’ll stay,” I said.

“Don’t, Harold,” he said, and then, more gently, “you have to call his office; there’s no way he can go into work this week.” He paused. “He said—he said you should tell them he was in a car accident.”

As I was leaving, he said, quietly, “He told me he was playing tennis.”

“I know,” I said. I felt bad for us, then, for being so stupid. “He told me that, too.”

I went back to Greene Street with his keys. For a long time, many minutes, I just stood there in the doorway, looking at the space. Some of the cloud cover had parted, but it didn’t take much sun—even with the shades drawn—to make that apartment feel light. I had always thought it a hopeful place, with its high ceilings, its cleanliness, its visibility, its promise of transparency.

This was his apartment, and so of course there were lots of cleaning products, and I started cleaning. I mopped the floors; the sticky areas were dried blood. It was difficult to distinguish because the floors were so dark, but I could smell it, a dense, wild scent that the nose instantly recognizes. He had clearly tried to clean the bathroom, but here too there were swipes of blood on the marble, dried into the rusty pinks of sunsets; these were difficult to remove, but I did the best I could. I looked in the trash cans—for evidence, I suppose, but there was nothing: they had all been cleaned and emptied. His clothes from the night before were scattered near the living-room sofa. The shirt was so ripped, clawed at almost, that I threw it away; the suit I took to be dry-cleaned. Otherwise, the apartment was very tidy. I had entered the bedroom with dread, expecting to find lamps broken, clothes strewn about, but
it was so unruffled that you might have thought that no one lived there at all, that it was a model house, an advertisement for an enviable life. The person who lived here would have parties, and would be carefree and sure of himself, and at night he would raise the shades and he and his friends would dance, and people passing by on Greene Street, on Mercer, would look up at that box of light floating in the sky, and imagine its inhabitants above unhappiness, or fear, or any concerns at all.

I e-mailed Lucien, whom I’d met once, and who was a friend of a friend of Laurence’s, actually, and said there had been a terrible car accident, and that Jude was in the hospital. I went to the grocery store and bought things that would be easy for him to eat: soups, puddings, juices. I looked up Caleb Porter’s address, and repeated it to myself—Fifty West Twenty-ninth Street, apartment 17J—until I had it memorized. I called the locksmith and said it was an emergency and that I needed to have all the locks changed: front door, elevator, apartment door. I opened the windows to let the damp air carry away the fragrance of blood, of disinfectant. I left a message with the law school secretary saying there was a family emergency and I wouldn’t be able to teach that week. I left messages for a couple of my colleagues asking if they could cover for me. I thought about calling my old law school friend, who worked at the D.A.’s office. I would explain what had happened; I wouldn’t use his name. I would ask how we could have Caleb Porter arrested.

“But you’re saying the victim won’t report it?” Avi would say.

“Well, yes,” I’d have to admit.

“Can he be convinced?”

“I don’t think so,” I’d have to admit.

“Well, Harold,” Avi would say, perplexed and irritated. “I don’t know what to tell you, then. You know as well as I do that I can’t do anything if the victim won’t speak.” I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protections the most.

And then I went into his bathroom and felt under the sink and found his bag of razors and cotton pads and threw it down the incinerator. I hated that bag, I hated that I knew I would find it.

Seven years before, he had come to the house in Truro in early
May. It had been a spontaneous visit: I was up there trying to write, there were cheap tickets, I told him he should come, and to my surprise—he never left the offices of Rosen Pritchard, even then—he did. He was happy that day, and so was I. I left him chopping a head of purple cabbage in the kitchen and took the plumber upstairs, where he was installing a new toilet in our bathroom, and then on his way out asked him if he could come take a look at the sink in the downstairs bathroom, the one in Jude’s room, which had been leaking.

He did, tightened something, changed something else, and then, as he was emerging from the cabinet, handed something to me. “This was taped under the basin,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, taking the package from him.

He shrugged. “Dunno. But it was stuck there pretty good, with duct tape.” He repacked his things as I stood there dumbly, staring at the bag, and gave me a wave and left; I heard him say goodbye to Jude as he walked out, whistling.

I looked at the bag. It was a regular, pint-size clear plastic bag, and inside it was a stack of ten razor blades, and individually packaged alcohol wipes, and pieces of gauze, folded into springy squares, and bandages. I stood there, holding this bag, and I knew what it was for, even though I had never seen proof of it, and had indeed never seen anything like it. But I knew.

I went to the kitchen, and there he was, washing off a bowlful of fingerlings, still happy. He was even humming something, very softly, which he did only when he was very contented, like how a cat purrs to itself when it’s alone in the sun. “You should’ve told me you needed help installing the toilet,” he said, not looking up. “I could have done it for you and saved you a bill.” He knew how to do all those things: plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, gardening. We once went to Laurence’s so he could explain to Laurence how, exactly, he could safely unearth the young crabapple tree from one corner of his backyard and successfully move it to another, one that got more sun.

For a while I stood there watching him. I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling. Finally I said his name, and he looked up. “What’s this?” I asked him, and held the bag in front of him.

He went very still, one hand suspended above the bowl, and I
remember watching how little droplets of water beaded and dripped off the ends of his fingertips, as if he had slashed himself with a knife and was bleeding water. He opened his mouth, and shut it.

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, very softly. He lowered his hand, and dried it, slowly, on the dish towel.

That made me angry. “I’m not asking you to apologize, Jude,” I told him. “I’m asking you what this is. And don’t say ‘It’s a bag with razors in it.’ What is this? Why did you tape it beneath your sink?”

He stared at me for a long time with that look he had—I know you know the one—where you can see him receding even as he looks at you, where you can see the gates within him closing and locking themselves, the bridges being cranked above the moat. “You know what it’s for,” he finally said, still very quietly.

“I want to hear you say it,” I told him.

“I just need it,” he said.

“Tell me what you do with these,” I said, and watched him.

He looked down into the bowl of potatoes. “Sometimes I need to cut myself,” he said, finally. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

And suddenly I was panicked, and my panic made me irrational. “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked him—I may have even shouted it.

He was moving backward now, toward the sink, as if I might lunge at him and he wanted some distance. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry, Harold.”

“How often is sometimes?” I asked.

He too was panicking now, I could see. “I don’t know,” he said. “It varies.”

“Well, estimate. Give me a ballpark.”

“I don’t know,” he said, desperate, “I don’t know. A few times a week, I guess.”

“A few times a
week
!” I said, and then stopped. Suddenly I had to get out of there. I took my coat from the chair and crammed the bag into its inside pocket. “You’d better be here when I get back,” I told him, and left. (He was a bolter: whenever he thought Julia or I were displeased with him, he would try as quickly as he could to get out of our sight, as if he were an offending object that needed to be removed.)

I walked downstairs, toward the beach, and then through the dunes, feeling the sort of rage that comes with the realization of one’s
gross inadequacy, of knowing for certain that you are at fault. It was the first time I realized that as much as he was two people around us, so were we two people around him: we saw of him what we wanted, and allowed ourselves not to see anything else. We were so ill-equipped. Most people are easy: their unhappinesses are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable. But his were not. We didn’t know how to help him because we lacked the imagination needed to diagnose the problems. But this is making excuses.