A Little Life (51 page)

Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are
, says one voice.

Take a chance
, says the other voice.
You’re lonely. You have to try
. This is the voice he always ignores.

This may never happen again
, the voice adds, and this stops him.

It will end badly
, says the first voice, and then both voices fall silent, waiting to see what he will do.

He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know what will happen. He has to find out. Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay.
Be brave
, he tells himself.
Be brave for once
.

And so he looks back at Caleb. “Let’s go,” he says, and although he is already frightened, he begins the long walk down the narrow hallway toward the elevator as if he is not, and along with the scrape of his right
foot against the cement, he hears the tap of Caleb’s footsteps, and the explosions of rain pinging off the fire escape, and the thrum of his own anxious heart.

A year ago, he had begun working on a defense for a gigantic pharmaceutical company called Malgrave and Baskett whose board of directors was being sued by a group of their shareholders for malfeasance, incompetence, and neglect of their fiduciary duties. “Gee,” Lucien had said, sarcastically, “I wonder why they’d think that?”

He had sighed. “I know,” he said. Malgrave and Baskett was a disaster, and everyone knew it. Over the previous few years, before they had come to Rosen Pritchard, the company had had to contend with two whistle-blower lawsuits (one alleging that a manufacturing facility was dangerously out of date, the other that a different facility was producing contaminated products), had been served with subpoenas in connection with an investigation into an elaborate kickback scheme involving a chain of nursing homes, and had been alleged to be illegally marketing one of their bestselling drugs, which was approved only for treatment of schizophrenics, to Alzheimer’s patients.

And so he had spent the last eleven months interviewing fifty of Malgrave and Baskett’s current and former directors and officers and compiling a report to answer the lawsuit’s claims. He had fifteen other lawyers on his team; one night he overheard some of them referring to the company as Malpractice and Bastard.

“Don’t you dare let the client hear you say that,” he scolded them. It was late, two in the morning; he knew they were tired. If he had been Lucien, he would have yelled at them, but he was tired too. The previous week, another of the associates on the case, a young woman, had stood up from her desk at three a.m., looked around her, and collapsed. He had called an ambulance and sent everyone home for the night, as long as they returned by nine a.m.; he had stayed an hour longer and then had gone home himself.

“You let them
go home
and you stayed here?” asked Lucien the next day. “You’re getting soft, St. Francis. Thank god you don’t act like this when you’re at trial or we’d never get anywhere. If only opposing counsel knew what a pushover they were actually dealing with.”

“So does this mean the firm isn’t going to send poor Emma Gersh any flowers?”

“Oh, we already sent them,” said Lucien, getting up and wandering out of his office. “ ‘Emma: Get better, get back here soon. Or else. Love from your family at Rosen Pritchard.’ ”

He loved going to trial, he loved arguing and speaking in a courtroom—you never got to do it enough—but his goal with Malgrave and Baskett was to get the lawsuit tossed by a judge before it entered the grinding, tedious drone years of investigation and discovery. He wrote the motion to dismiss, and in early September, the district court judge threw out the suit.

“I’m proud of you,” Lucien says that night. “Malpractice and Bastard don’t know how fucking lucky they are; that suit was as solid as they come.”

“Well, there’s a lot that Malpractice and Bastard don’t seem to know,” he says.

“True. But I guess you can be complete cretins as long as you have enough sense to hire the right lawyer.” He stands. “Are you going anywhere this weekend?”

“No.”

“Well, do something relaxing. Go outside. Have a meal. You don’t look too good.”

“Good night, Lucien!”

“Okay, okay. Good night. And congratulations—really. This is a big one.”

He stays at the office for another two hours, tidying and sorting papers, attempting to batten down the constant detritus. He feels no sense of relief, or victory, after these outcomes: just a tiredness, but a simple, well-earned tiredness, as if he has completed a day’s worth of physical labor. Eleven months: interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting—and then, in an instant, it is over, and another case will take its place.

Finally he goes home, where he is suddenly so exhausted that he stops on the way to his bedroom to sit on the sofa, and wakes an hour later, disoriented and parched. He hasn’t seen or talked to most of his friends in the past few months—even his conversations with Willem have been briefer than usual. Part of this is attributable to Malpractice and Bastard, and the frantic preparations they had demanded; but the
other part is attributable to his ongoing confusion over Caleb, about whom he has not told Willem. This weekend, though, Caleb is in Bridgehampton, and he is glad of the time alone.

He still doesn’t know how he feels about Caleb, even three months later. He is not altogether certain that Caleb even likes him. Or rather: he knows he enjoys talking to him, but there are times when he catches Caleb looking at him with an expression that borders on disgust. “You’re really handsome,” Caleb once said, his voice perplexed, taking his chin between his fingers and turning his face toward him. “But—” And although he didn’t finish, he could sense what Caleb wanted to say: But something’s wrong. But you still repel me. But I don’t understand why I don’t like you, not really.

He knows Caleb hates his walk, for example. A few weeks after they had started seeing each other, Caleb was sitting on the sofa and he had gone to get a bottle of wine, and as he was walking back, he noticed Caleb staring at him so intently that he had grown nervous. He poured the wine, and they drank, and then Caleb said, “You know, when I met you, we were sitting down, so I didn’t know you had a limp.”

“That’s true,” he said, reminding himself that this was not something for which he had to apologize: he hadn’t entrapped Caleb; he hadn’t intended to deceive him. He took a breath and tried to sound light, mildly curious. “Would you not have wanted to go out with me if you’d known?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb said, after a silence. “I don’t know.” He had wanted to vanish, then, to close his eyes and reel back time, back to before he had ever met Caleb. He would have turned down Rhodes’s invitation; he would have kept living his little life; he would have never known the difference.

But as much as Caleb hates his walk, he loathes his wheelchair. The first time Caleb had come over in daylight, he had given him a tour of the apartment. He was proud of the apartment, and every day he was grateful to be in it, and disbelieving that it was his. Malcolm had kept Willem’s suite—as they called it—where it had been, but had enlarged it and added an office at its northern edge, close to the elevator. And then there was the long open space, with a piano, and a living-room area facing south, and a table that Malcolm had designed on the northern side, the side without windows, and behind it, a bookcase that covered the entire wall until the kitchen, hung with art by his friends,
and friends of friends, and other pieces that he had bought over the years. The whole eastern end of the apartment was his: you crossed from the bedroom, on the north side, through the closet and into the bathroom, which had windows that looked east and south. Although he mostly kept the shades in the apartment lowered, you could open them all at once and the space would feel like a rectangle of pure light, the veil between you and the outside world mesmerizingly thin. He often feels as if the apartment is a falsehood: it suggests that the person within it is someone open, and vital, and generous with his answers, and he of course is not that person. Lispenard Street, with its half-obscured alcoves and dark warrens and walls that had been painted over so many times that you could feel ridges and blisters where moths and bugs had been entombed in its layers, was a much more accurate reflection of who he is.

For Caleb’s visit, he had let the place shimmer with sunlight, and he could tell Caleb was impressed. They walked slowly through it, Caleb looking at the art and asking about different pieces: where he had gotten them, who had made them, noting the ones he recognized.

And then they came to the bedroom, and he was showing Caleb the piece at the far end of the room—a painting of Willem in the makeup chair he had bought from “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days”—when Caleb asked, “Whose wheelchair is that?”

He looked where Caleb was looking. “Mine,” he said, after a pause.

“But why?” Caleb had asked him, looking confused. “You can walk.”

He didn’t know what to say. “Sometimes I need it,” he said, finally. “Rarely. I don’t use it that often.”

“Good,” said Caleb. “See that you don’t.”

He was startled. Was this an expression of concern, or was it a threat? But before he could figure out what he should feel, or what he should answer, Caleb had turned, and was heading into his closet, and he followed him, continuing his tour.

A month after that, he had met Caleb late one night outside his office in the far western borderland of the Meatpacking District. Caleb too worked long hours; it was early July and Rothko would present their spring line in eight weeks. He had driven to work that day, but it was a dry night, and so he got out of the car and sat in his chair under a streetlamp until Caleb came down, talking to someone else. He knew Caleb had seen him—he had raised his hand in his direction and Caleb
had given him a barely perceptible nod: neither of them were demonstrative people—and watched Caleb until he finished his conversation and the other man had begun walking east.

“Hi,” he said, as Caleb came over to him.

“Why are you in your wheelchair?” Caleb demanded.

For a moment, he couldn’t speak, and when he did, he stammered. “I had to use it today,” he finally said.

Caleb sighed, and rubbed at his eyes. “I thought you didn’t use it.”

“I don’t,” he said, so ashamed that he could feel himself start to sweat. “Not really. I only use it when I absolutely have to.”

Caleb nodded, but continued pinching the bridge of his nose. He wouldn’t look at him. “Look,” he said at last, “I don’t think we should have dinner after all. You’re obviously not feeling well, and I’m tired. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“Oh,” he said, dismayed. “That’s all right. I understand.”

“Okay, good,” said Caleb. “I’ll call you later.” He watched Caleb move down the street with his long strides until he disappeared around the corner, and then had gotten into his car and driven home and cut himself until he was bleeding so much that he couldn’t grip the razor properly.

The next day was Friday, and he didn’t hear from Caleb at all. Well, he thought. That’s that. And it was fine: Caleb didn’t like the fact that he was in a wheelchair. Neither did he. He couldn’t resent Caleb for not being able to accept what he himself couldn’t accept.

But then, on Saturday morning, Caleb called just as he was coming back upstairs from the pool. “I’m sorry about Thursday night,” Caleb said. “I know it must seem heartless and bizarre to you, this—aversion I have to your wheelchair.”

He sat down in one of the chairs around the dining-room table. “It doesn’t seem bizarre at all,” he said.

“I told you my parents were sick for much of my adult life,” Caleb said. “My father had multiple sclerosis, and my mother—no one knew what she had. She got sick when I was in college and never got better. She had face pains, headaches: she was in a sort of constant low-grade discomfort, and although I don’t doubt it was real, what bothered me so much is that she never seemed to
want
to try to get better. She just gave up, as did he. Everywhere you looked there was evidence of their
surrender to illness: first canes, then walkers, then wheelchairs, then scooters, and vials of pills and tissues and the perpetual scent of pain creams and gels and who knows what else.”

He stopped. “I want to keep seeing you,” he said, at last. “But—but I can’t be around these accessories to weakness, to disease. I just can’t. I hate it. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel—not depressed, but furious, like I need to fight against it.” He paused again. “I just didn’t know that’s who you were when I met you,” he said at last. “I thought I could be okay with it. But I’m not sure I can. Can you understand that?”

He swallowed; he wanted to cry. But he could understand it; he felt exactly as Caleb did. “I can,” he said.

And yet improbably, they had continued after all. He is astonished, still, by the speed and thoroughness with which Caleb insinuated himself into his life. It was like something out of a fairy tale: a woman living on the edge of a dark forest hears a knock and opens the door of her cottage. And although it is just for a moment, and although she sees no one, in those seconds, dozens of demons and wraiths have slipped past her and into her house, and she will never be able to rid herself of them, ever. Sometimes this was how it felt. Was this the way it was for other people? He doesn’t know; he is too afraid to ask. He finds himself replaying old conversations he has had or overheard with people talking about their relationships, trying to gauge the normalcy of his against theirs, looking for clues about how he should conduct himself.