A Little Life (9 page)

Jude had looked down. “You’re not stupid,” he said, quietly. “I’m just not explaining it well enough.” Jude took seminars in pure math that you had to be invited to enroll in; the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom what, exactly, he did in it.

In retrospect, he was surprised only by his own surprise when his mother called three months later to tell him that Hemming was on life support. This was in late May, and he was halfway through his final exams. “Don’t come back,” she’d told him, commanded him, almost. “Don’t, Willem.” He spoke with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later, when a Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents, one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.

Over the next few days he fretted, did poorly in his exams: French, comparative literature, Jacobean drama, the Icelandic sagas, the hated calculus all slurring into one. He picked a fight with his girlfriend, who was a senior and graduating. She cried; he felt guilty but also unable to repair the situation. He thought of Wyoming, of a machine coughing life into Hemming’s lungs. Shouldn’t he go back? He
had
to go back. He wouldn’t be able to stay for long: on June fifteenth, he and Jude were moving into a sublet off-campus for the summer—they’d both found jobs in the city, Jude working on weekdays as a classics professor’s amanuensis and on weekends at the bakery he worked at during the school year, Willem as a teacher’s assistant at a program for disabled children—but before then, the four of them were going to stay at Malcolm’s parents’ house in Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard, after which Malcolm and JB would drive back to New York. At nights, he called
Hemming at the hospital, made his parents or one of the nurses hold the phone up to his ear, and spoke to his brother, even though he knew he probably couldn’t hear him. But how could he not have tried?

And then, one morning a week later, his mother called: Hemming had died. There was nothing he could say. He couldn’t ask why she hadn’t told him how serious the situation had been, because some part of him had known she wouldn’t. He couldn’t say he wished he had been there, because she would have nothing to say in response. He couldn’t ask her how she felt, because nothing she said would be enough. He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them
something
—some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming’s death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn’t care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without aching for them.

He didn’t tell his friends, then, about Hemming. They went to Malcolm’s house—a beautiful place, the most beautiful place Willem had ever seen, much less stayed in—and late at night, when the others were asleep, each in his own bed, in his own room with his own bathroom (the house was that big), he crept outside and walked the web of roads surrounding the house for hours, the moon so large and bright it seemed made of something liquid and frozen. On those walks, he tried very hard not to think of anything in particular. He concentrated instead on what he saw before him, noticing at night what had eluded him by day: how the dirt was so fine it was almost sand, and puffed up into little plumes as he stepped in it, how skinny threads of bark-brown snakes whipsawed silently beneath the brush as he passed. He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant.

Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn’t so bad after all, and felt better.

He expected it would be awful to spend his summer around people
who might remind him of Hemming, but it was actually pleasant, helpful even. His class had seven students, all around eight years old, all severely impaired, none very mobile, and although part of the day was ostensibly devoted to trying to teach them colors and shapes, most of the time was spent playing with them: reading to them, pushing them around the grounds, tickling them with feathers. During recess all the classrooms opened their doors to the school’s central courtyard, and the space filled with children on such a variety of wheeled contraptions and vessels and vehicles that it sometimes sounded as if it was populated by mechanical insects, all of them squeaking and whirring and clucking at once. There were children in wheelchairs, and children on small, scaled-down mopeds that putted and clicked along the flagstones at a tortoise’s speed, and children strapped prone atop smooth lengths of wood that resembled abbreviated surfboards on wheels, and who pulled themselves along the ground with their elbowed stumps, and a few children with no means of conveyance at all, who sat in their minders’ laps, the backs of their necks cupped in their minders’ palms. Those were the ones who reminded him most keenly of Hemming.

Some of the children on the motorcycles and the wheeled boards could speak, and he would toss, very gently, large foam balls to them and organize races around the courtyard. He would always begin these races at the head of the pack, loping with an exaggerated slowness (though not so exaggerated that he appeared too broadly comic; he wanted them to think he was actually trying), but at some point, usually a third of the way around the square, he would pretend to trip on something and fall, spectacularly, to the ground, and all the kids would pass him and laugh. “Get up, Willem, get up!” they’d cry, and he would, but by that point they would have finished the lap and he would come in last place. He wondered, sometimes, if they envied him the dexterity of being able to fall and get up again, and if so, if he should stop doing it, but when he asked his supervisor, he had only looked at Willem and said that the kids thought he was funny and that he should keep falling. And so every day he fell, and every afternoon, when he was waiting with the students for their parents to come pick them up, the ones who could speak would ask him if he was going to fall the next day. “No way,” he’d say, confidently, as they giggled. “Are you kidding? How clumsy do you think I am?”

It was, in many ways, a good summer. The apartment was near
MIT and belonged to Jude’s math professor, who was in Leipzig for the season, and who was charging them such a negligible rent that the two of them found themselves making small repairs to the place in order to express their gratitude: Jude organized the books that were stacked into quavering, precarious skyscrapers on every surface and spackled a section of wall that had gone puddingy with water damage; Willem tightened doorknobs, replaced a leaky washer, changed the ballcock in the toilet. He started hanging out with another of the teacher’s aides, a girl who went to Harvard, and some nights she would come over to the house and the three of them would make large pots of spaghetti alle vongole and Jude would tell them about his days with the professor, who had decided to communicate with Jude in only Latin or ancient Greek, even when his instructions were things like, “I need more binder clips,” or “Make sure you get an extra shot of soy milk in my cappuccino tomorrow morning.” In August, their friends and acquaintances from college (and from Harvard, and MIT, and Wellesley, and Tufts) started drifting back to the city, and stayed with them for a night or two until they could move into their own apartments and dorm rooms. One evening toward the end of their stay, they invited fifty people up to the roof and helped Malcolm make a sort of clambake on the grill, blanketing ears of corn and mussels and clams under heaps of dampened banana leaves; the next morning the four of them scooped up the shells from the floor, enjoying the castanety clatter they made as they were tossed into trash bags.

But it was also that summer that he realized he wouldn’t go home again, that somehow, without Hemming, there was no point in him and his parents pretending they needed to stay together. He suspected they felt the same way; there was never any conversation about this, but he never felt any particular need to see them again, and they never asked him. They spoke every now and again, and their conversations were, as always, polite and factual and dutiful. He asked them about the ranch, they asked him about school. His senior year, he got a role in the school’s production of
The Glass Menagerie
(he was cast as the gentleman caller, of course), but he never mentioned it to them, and when he told them that they shouldn’t bother to come east for graduation, they didn’t argue with him: it was nearing the end of foal season anyway, and he wasn’t sure they would have been able to come even if he hadn’t excused them. He and Jude had been adopted by Malcolm’s
and JB’s families for the weekend, and when they weren’t around, there were plenty of other people to invite them to their celebratory lunches and dinners and outings.

“But they’re your
parents
,” Malcolm said to him once a year or so. “You can’t just stop talking to them.” But you could, you did: he was proof of that. It was like any relationship, he felt—it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn’t it wither? The only thing he missed—besides Hemming—was Wyoming itself, its extravagant flatness, its trees so deeply green they looked blue, the sugar-and-turd apple-and-peat smell of a horse after it had been rubbed down for the night.

When he was in graduate school, they died, in the same year: his father of a heart attack in January, his mother of a stroke the following October. Then he
had
gone home—his parents were older, but he had forgotten how vivid, how tireless, they had always been, until he saw how diminished they had become. They had left everything to him, but after he had paid off their debts—and then he was unsettled anew, for all along he had assumed most of Hemming’s care and medical treatments had been covered by insurance, only to learn that four years after his death, they were still writing enormous checks to the hospital every month—there was very little left: some cash, some bonds; a heavy-bottomed silver mug that had been his long-dead paternal grandfather’s; his father’s bent wedding ring, worn smooth and shiny and pale; a black-and-white portrait of Hemming and Aksel that he’d never seen before. He kept these, and a few other things, too. The rancher who had employed his parents had long ago died, but his son, who now owned the ranch, had always treated them well, and it had been he who employed them long after he might reasonably be expected to, and he who paid for their funerals as well.

In their deaths, Willem was able to remember that he had loved them after all, and that they had taught him things he treasured knowing, and that they had never asked from him anything he wasn’t able to do or provide. In less-charitable moments (moments from just a few years prior), he had attributed their lassitude, their unchallenging acceptance of whatever he might or might not do, to a lack of interest: what parent, Malcolm had asked him, half jealously, half pityingly, says nothing when their only child (he had apologized later) tells them he wants to be an actor? But now, older, he was able to appreciate that they
had never even suggested he might owe them a debt—not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty. His father, he knew, had gotten into some sort of trouble in Stockholm—he was never to know what—that had in part encouraged his parents’ move to the States. They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.

And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small universe in which he might spend years, decades—his life—searching bumblingly for a way out that didn’t exist, had never existed.

If he had an agent, someone to guide him, she might be able to show him how to escape, how to find his way downstream. But he didn’t, not yet (he had to be optimistic enough to think it was still a matter of “yet”), and so he was left in the company of other seekers, all of them looking for that same elusive tributary, through which few left the lake and by which no one ever wanted to return.

He was willing to wait. He
had
waited. But recently, he could feel his patience sharpening itself into something splintery and ragged, chipping into dry little bits.

Still—he was not an anxious person, he was not inclined toward self-pity. Indeed, there were moments when, returning from Ortolan or from a rehearsal for a play in which he would be paid almost nothing for a week’s work, so little that he wouldn’t have been able to afford the prix fixe at the restaurant, he would enter the apartment with a feeling of accomplishment. Only to him and Jude would Lispenard Street be considered an achievement—for as much work as he had done to it, and as much as Jude had cleaned it, it was still sad, somehow, and furtive, as if the place was embarrassed to call itself a real apartment—but in those moments he would at times find himself thinking,
This is enough. This is more than I hoped
. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words!—it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.

But then the feeling would dissipate, and he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents’ house, where the porch light washed the night with honey.