A Little Life (58 page)

By the time I returned to the house it was almost dark, and I could see, through the window, his outline moving about in the kitchen. I sat on a chair on the porch and wished Julia were there, that she wasn’t in England with her father.

The back door opened. “Dinner,” he said, quietly, and I got up to go inside.

He’d made one of my favorite meals: the sea bass I had bought the day before, poached, and potatoes roasted the way he knew I liked them, with lots of thyme and carrots, and a cabbage salad that I knew would have the mustard-seed dressing I liked. But I didn’t have an appetite for any of it. He served me, and then himself, and sat.

“This looks wonderful,” I told him. “Thank you for making it.” He nodded. We both looked at our plates, at his lovely meal that neither of us would eat.

“Jude,” I said, “I have to apologize. I’m really sorry—I never should have run out on you like that.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I understand.”

“No,” I told him. “It was wrong of me. I was just so upset.”

He looked back down. “Do you know why I was upset?” I asked him.

“Because,” he began, “because I brought that into your house.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not why. Jude, this house isn’t just my house, or Julia’s: it’s yours, too. I want you to feel you can bring anything you’d have at home here.

“I’m upset because you’re doing this terrible thing to yourself.” He didn’t look up. “Do your friends know you do this? Does Andy?”

He nodded, slightly. “Willem knows,” he said, in a low voice. “And Andy.”

“And what does Andy say about this?” I asked, thinking, Goddammit, Andy.

“He says—he says I should see a therapist.”

“And have you?” He shook his head, and I felt rage build up in me again. “Why not?” I asked him, but he didn’t say anything. “Is there a bag like this in Cambridge?” I said, and after a silence, he looked up at me and nodded again.

“Jude,” I said, “why do you do this to yourself?”

For a long time, he was quiet, and I was quiet too. I listened to the sea. Finally, he said, “A few reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes it’s because I feel so awful, or ashamed, and I need to make physical what I feel,” he began, and glanced at me before looking down again. “And sometimes it’s because I feel so many things and I need to feel nothing at all—it helps clear them away. And sometimes it’s because I feel happy, and I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t.”

“Why?” I asked him once I could speak again, but he only shook his head and didn’t answer, and I too went silent.

He took a breath. “Look,” he said, suddenly, decisively, looking at me directly, “if you want to dissolve the adoption, I’ll understand.”

I was so stunned that I was angry—that hadn’t even occurred to me. I was about to bark something back when I looked at him, at how he was trying to be brave, and saw that he was terrified: He really did think this was something I might want to do. He really would understand if I said I did. He was expecting it. Later, I realized that in those years just after the adoption, he was always wondering how permanent it was, always wondering what he would eventually do that would make me disown him.

“I would never,” I said, as firmly as I could.

That night, I tried to talk to him. He was ashamed of what he did, I could see that, but he genuinely couldn’t understand why I cared so much, why it so upset you and me and Andy. “It’s not fatal,” he kept saying, as if that were the concern, “I know how to control it.” He wouldn’t see a shrink, but he couldn’t tell me why. He hated doing it, I could tell, but he also couldn’t conceive of a life without it. “I need it,” he kept saying. “I need it. It makes things right.” But surely, I told him, there was a time in your life when you
didn’t
have it?, and he shook his head. “I need it,” he repeated. “It helps me, Harold, you have to believe me on this one.”

“
Why
do you need it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It helps me control my life,” he said, finally.

At the end, there was nothing more I could say. “I’m keeping this,” I said, holding the bag up, and he winced, and nodded. “Jude,” I said, and he looked back at me. “If I throw this away, are you going to make another one?”

He was very quiet, then, looking at his plate. “Yes,” he said.

I threw it out anyway, of course, stuffing it deep into a garbage bag that I carried to the Dumpster at the end of the road. We cleaned the kitchen in silence—we were both exhausted, and neither of us had eaten anything—and then he went to bed, and I did as well. In those days I was still trying to be respectful of his personal space, or I’d have grabbed him and held him, but I didn’t.

But as I was lying awake in bed, I thought of him, his long fingers craving the slice of the razor between them, and went downstairs to the kitchen. I got the big mixing bowl from the drawer beneath the oven, and began loading it with everything sharp I could find: knives and scissors and corkscrews and lobster picks. And then I took it with me to the living room, where I sat in my chair, the one facing the sea, clasping the bowl in my arms.

I woke to a creaking. The kitchen floorboards were noisy, and I sat up in the dark, willing myself to stay silent, and listened to his walk, the distinctive soft stamp of his left foot followed by the swish of his right, and then a drawer opening and, a few seconds later, shutting. Then another drawer, then another, until he had opened and shut every drawer, every cupboard. He hadn’t turned on the light—there was moonlight enough—and I could envision him standing in the newly blunt world of the kitchen, understanding that I’d taken everything from him: I had even taken the forks. I sat, holding my breath, listening to the silence from the kitchen. For a moment it was almost as if we were having a conversation, a conversation without words or sight. And then, finally, I heard him turn and his footsteps retreating, back to his room.

When I got home to Cambridge the next night, I went to his bathroom and found another bag, a double of the Truro one, and threw it away. But I never found another of those bags again in either Cambridge or Truro. He must have found some other place to hide them, someplace
I never discovered, because he couldn’t have carried those blades back and forth on the plane. But whenever I was at Greene Street, I would find an opportunity to sneak off to his bathroom. Here, he kept the bag in his same old hiding place, and every time, I would steal it, and shove it into my pocket, and then throw it away after I left. He must have known I did this, of course, but we never discussed it. Every time it would be replaced. Until he learned he had to hide it from you as well, there was not a single time I checked that I failed to find it. Still, I never stopped checking: whenever I was at the apartment, or later, the house upstate, or the flat in London, I would go to his bathroom and look for that bag. I never found it again. Malcolm’s bathrooms were so simple, so clean-lined, and yet even in them he had found somewhere to conceal it, somewhere I would never again discover.

Over the years, I tried to talk about it with him. The day after I found the first bag, I called Andy and started yelling at him, and Andy, uncharacteristically, let me. “I know,” he said. “I know.” And then: “Harold, I’m not asking sarcastically or rhetorically. I want you to tell me: What should I do?” And of course, I didn’t know what to tell him.

You were the one who got furthest with him. But I know you blamed yourself. I blamed myself, too. Because I did something worse than accepting it: I tolerated it. I chose to forget he was doing this, because it was too difficult to find a solution, and because I wanted to enjoy him as the person he wanted us to see, even though I knew better. I told myself that I was letting him keep his dignity, while choosing to forget that for thousands of nights, he sacrificed it. I would rebuke him and try to reason with him, even though I knew those methods didn’t work, and even knowing that, I didn’t try something else: something more radical, something that might alienate me from him. I knew I was being a coward, because I never told Julia about that bag, I never told her what I had learned about him that night in Truro. Eventually she found out, and it was one of the very few times I’d seen her so angry. “How could you let this keep happening?” she asked me. “How could you let this go on for this long?” She never said she held me directly responsible, but I knew she did, and how could she not? I did, too.

And now here I was in his apartment, where a few hours ago, while I was lying awake, he was being beaten. I sat down on the sofa with my phone in my hand to wait for Andy’s call, telling me that he was ready
to be returned to me, that he was ready to be released into my care. I opened the shade across from me and sat back down and stared into the steely sky until each cloud blurred into the next, until finally I could see nothing at all, only a haze of gray as the day slowly slurred into night.

Andy called at six that evening, nine hours after I’d dropped him off, and met me at the door. “He’s asleep in the examining room,” he said. And then: “Broken left wrist, four broken ribs, thank
Christ
no broken bones in his legs. No concussion, thank god. Fractured coccyx. Dislocated shoulder, which I reset. Bruising all up and down his back and torso; he was kicked, clearly. But no internal bleeding. His face looks worse than it is: his eyes and nose are fine, no breaks, and I iced the bruising, which you have to do, too—regularly.

“Lacerations on his legs. This is what I’m worried about. I’ve written you a scrip for antibiotics; I’m going to start him on a low dosage as a preventative measure, but if he mentions feeling hot, or chilled, you have to let me know right away—the last thing he needs is an infection there. His back is stripped—”

“What do you mean, ‘stripped’?” I asked him.

He looked impatient. “Flayed,” he said. “He was whipped, probably with a belt, but he wouldn’t tell me. I bandaged them, but I’m giving you this antibiotic ointment and you’re going to need to keep the wounds cleaned and change the dressings starting tomorrow. He’s not going to want to let you, but it’s too fucking bad. I wrote down all the instructions in here.”

He handed me a plastic bag; I looked inside: bottles of pills, rolls of bandages, tubes of cream. “These,” said Andy, plucking something out, “are painkillers, and he hates them. But he’s going to need them; make him take a pill every twelve hours: once in the morning, once at night. They’re going to make him woozy, so don’t let him outside on his own, don’t let him lift anything. They’re also going to make him nauseated, but you have to make him eat: something simple, like rice and broth. Try to make him stay in his chair; he’s not going to want to move around much anyway.

“I called his dentist and made an appointment for Monday at nine;
he’s lost a couple of teeth. The most important thing is that he sleeps as much as he can; I’ll stop by tomorrow afternoon and every night this week. Do
not
let him go to work, although—I don’t think he’ll want to.”

He stopped as abruptly as he’d started, and we stood there in silence. “I can’t fucking believe this,” Andy said, finally. “That fucking asshole. I want to find that fuck and kill him.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

He shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me report it,” he said. “I begged him.”

“I know,” I said. “Me too.”

It was a shock anew to see him, and he shook his head when I tried to help him into the chair, and so we stood and watched as he lowered himself into the seat, still in his same clothes, the blood now dried into rusty continents. “Thank you, Andy,” he said, very quietly. “I’m sorry,” and Andy placed his palm on the back of his head and said nothing.

By the time we got back to Greene Street, it was dark. His wheelchair was, as you know, one of those very lightweight, elegant ones, one so aggressive about its user’s self-sufficiency that there were no handles on it, because it was assumed that the person in it would never allow himself the indignity of being pushed by another. You had to grab the top of the backrest, which was very low, and guide the chair that way. I stopped in the entryway to turn on the lights, and we both blinked.

“You cleaned,” he said.

“Well, yes,” I said. “Not as good a job as you would’ve done, I’m afraid.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. We were quiet. “Why don’t I help you get changed and then you can have something to eat?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you. But I’m not hungry. And I can do it myself.” Now he was subdued, controlled: the person I had seen earlier was gone, caged once more in his labyrinth in some little-opened cellar. He was always polite, but when he was trying to protect himself or assert his competency, he became more so: polite and slightly remote, as if he was an explorer among a dangerous tribe, and was being careful not to find himself too involved in their goings-on.

I sighed, inwardly, and took him to his room; I told him I’d be here if he needed me, and he nodded. I sat on the floor outside the closed door and waited: I could hear the faucets turning on and off, and then
his steps, and then a long period of silence, and then the sigh of the bed as he sat on it.