A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  And so back in the elevator they went, up to the fourth floor, where Richard opened the door and turned on the lights, and they were confronted with pallets and pallets stacked high, almost to the ceiling, with what he thought were bricks. “But not just bricks,” said Richard, “decorative terra-cotta bricks, imported from Umbria.” He picked one up from an incomplete pallet and gave it to him, and he turned the brick, which was glazed with a thin, bright green finish, in his hand, running his palm over its blisters. “The fifth and sixth floors are full of them, too,” said Richard, “they’re in the process of selling them to a wholesaler in Chicago, and then those floors’ll be clear.” He smiled. “Now you see why I have such a good elevator in here.”

  They returned to Richard’s apartment, back through the hanging garden of chandeliers, and Richard gave him another beer. “Listen,” he said, “I need to talk to you about something important.”

  “Anything,” he said, placing the bottle on the table and leaning forward.

  “The tiles will probably be out of here by the end of the year,” said Richard. “The fifth and sixth floors are set up exactly like this one—wet walls in the same place, three bathrooms—and the question is whether you’d want one of them.”

  “Richard,” he said, “I’d love to. But how much are you charging?”

  “I’m not talking about renting it, Jude,” said Richard. “I’m talking about buying it.” Richard had already talked to his father, who was his grandparents’ lawyer: they’d convert the building into a co-op, and he’d buy a certain number of shares. The only thing Richard’s family requested is that he or his heirs give them the right to buy the apartment back from him first if he ever decided to sell it. They would offer him a fair price, and he would pay Richard a monthly rent that would be applied toward his purchase. The Goldfarbs had done this before—his grouchy cousin’s girlfriend had bought a floor of the vinegar building a year ago—and it had worked out fine. Apparently, they got some sort of tax break if they each converted one of their buildings into at least a two-unit co-op, and so Richard’s father was trying to get all of the grandchildren to do so.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked Richard, quietly, once he had recovered. “Why me?”

  Richard shrugged. “It gets lonely here,” he said. “Not that I’m going to be stopping by all the time. But it’d be nice to know there’s another living being in this building sometimes. And you’re the most responsible of my friends, not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. And I like your company. Also—” He stopped. “Promise you won’t get mad.”

  “Oh god,” he said. “But I promise.”

  “Willem told me about what happened, you know, when you were trying to get upstairs last year and the elevator broke. It’s not anything to be embarrassed about, Jude. He’s just worried about you. I told him I was going to ask you about this anyway, and he thought—he thinks—it’s someplace you could live for a long time: forever. And the elevator will never break here. And if it does, I’ll be right downstairs. I mean—obviously, you can buy somewhere else, but I hope you’ll consider moving in here.”

  In that moment he feels not angry but exposed: not just to Richard but to Willem. He tries to hide as much as he can from Willem, not because he doesn’t trust him but because he doesn’t want Willem to see him as less of a person, as someone who has to be looked after and helped. He wants Willem, wants them all, to think of him as someone reliable and hardy, someone they can come to with their problems, instead of him always having to turn to them. He is embarrassed, thinking of the conversations that have been had about him—between Willem and Andy, and between Willem and Harold (which he is certain happens more often than he fears), and now between Willem and Richard—and saddened as well that Willem is spending so much time worrying about him, that he is having to think of him the way he would have had to think of Hemming, had Hemming lived: as someone who needed care, as someone who needed decisions made for him. He sees the image of himself as an old man again: Is it possible it is also Willem’s vision, that the two of them share the same fear, that his ending seems as inevitable to Willem as it does to himself?

  He thinks, then, of a conversation he had once had with Willem and Philippa; Philippa was talking about how someday, when she and Willem were old, they’d take over her parents’ house and orchards in southern Vermont. “I can see it now,” she said. “The kids’ll have moved back in with us, because they won’t be able to make it in the real world, and they’ll have six kids between them with names like Buster and Carrot and Vixen, who’ll run around naked and won’t be sent to school, and whom Willem and I will have to support until the end of time—”

  “What will your kids do?” he asked, practical even in play.

  “Oberon will make art installations using only food products, and Miranda will play a zither with yarn for strings,” said Philippa, and he had smiled. “They’ll stay in grad school forever, and Willem will have to keep working until he’s so broken down that I have to push him onto the set in a wheelchair”—she stopped, blushing, but carried on after a hitch—“to pay for all their degrees and experiments. I’ll have to give up costume design and start an organic applesauce company to pay all our debts and maintain the house, which’ll be this huge, glorious wreck with termites everywhere, and we’ll have a huge, scarred wooden table big enough to seat all twelve of us.”

  “Thirteen,” said Willem, suddenly.

  “Why thirteen?”

  “Because—Jude’ll be living with us, too.”

  “Oh, will I?” he asked lightly, but pleased, and relieved, to be included in Willem’s vision of old age.

  “Of course. You’ll have the guest cottage, and every morning Buster will bring you your buckwheat waffles because you’ll be too sick of us to join us at the main table, and then after breakfast I’ll come hang out with you and hide from Oberon and Miranda, who’re going to want me to make intelligent and supportive comments about their latest endeavors.” Willem grinned at him, and he smiled back, though he could see that Philippa herself wasn’t smiling any longer, but staring at the table. Then she looked up, and their eyes met for half a second, and she looked away, quickly.

  It was shortly after that, he thought, that Philippa’s attitude toward him changed. It wasn’t obvious to anyone but him—perhaps not even to her—but where he used to come into the apartment and see her sketching at the table and the two of them were able to talk, companionably, as he drank a glass of water and looked at her drawings, she would now just nod at him and say, “Willem’s at the store,” or “He’s coming back soon,” even though he hadn’t asked (she was always welcome at Lispenard Street, whether Willem was there or not), and he would linger a bit until it was clear she didn’t want to speak, and then retreat to his room to work.

  He understood why Philippa might resent him: Willem invited him everywhere with them, included him in everything, even in their retirement, even in Philippa’s daydream of their old age. After that, he was careful to always decline Willem’s invitations, even if it was to things that didn’t involve his and Philippa’s couplehood—if they were going to a party at Malcolm’s to which he was also invited, he’d leave separately, and at Thanksgiving, he made sure to ask Philippa to Boston as well, though she hadn’t come in the end. He had even tried to talk to Willem about what he sensed, to awaken him to what he was certain she was feeling.

  “Do you not like her?” Willem had asked him, concerned.

  “You know I like Philippa,” he’d replied. “But I think—I think you should just hang out with her more alone, Willem, with just the two of you. It must get annoying for her to always have me around.”

  “Did she say that to you?”

  “No, Willem, of course not. I’m just guessing. From my vast experience with women, you know.”

  Later, when Willem and Philippa broke up, he would feel as guilty as if he had been solely to blame. But even before that, he had wondered whether Willem, too,
had come to realize that no serious girlfriend would tolerate his constant presence in Willem’s life; he wondered whether Willem was trying to make alternative plans for him, so he didn’t end up living in a cottage on the property he’d someday have with his wife, so he wouldn’t be Willem’s sad bachelor friend, a useless reminder of his forsaken, childish life. I will be alone, he decided. He wouldn’t be the one to ruin Willem’s chances for happiness: he wanted Willem to have the orchard and the termite-nibbled house and the grandchildren and the wife who was jealous of his company and attention. He wanted Willem to have everything he deserved, everything he desired. He wanted every day of his to be free of worries and obligations and responsibilities—even if that worry and obligation and responsibility was him.

  The following week, Richard’s father—a tall, smiling, pleasant man he’d met at Richard’s first show, three years ago—sent him the contract, which he had a law school classmate, a real estate lawyer, review in tandem with him, and the building’s engineering report, which he gave to Malcolm. The price had almost nauseated him, but his classmate said he had to do it: “This is an unbelievable deal, Jude. You will never, never, never find something that size in that neighborhood for this amount of money.” And after reviewing the report, and then the space, Malcolm told him the same thing: Buy it.

  So he did. And although he and the Goldfarbs had worked out a leisurely ten-year payment schedule, an interest-free rent-to-own plan, he was determined to pay the apartment off as soon as he could. Every two weeks, he allotted half of his paycheck to the apartment, and the other half to his savings and living expenses. He told Harold he had moved during their weekly phone call (“Thank Christ,” Harold said: he had never liked Lispenard Street), but didn’t tell him he had bought a place, because he didn’t want Harold to feel obligated to offer him money for it. From Lispenard Street he brought only his mattress and lamp and the table and a chair, all of which he arranged into one corner of the space. At nights, he would sometimes look up from his work and think what a ludicrous decision this had been: How could he ever fill so much room? How would it ever feel like his? He was reminded of Boston, of Hereford Street, and how there, he had dreamed only of a bedroom, of a door he might someday close. Even when he was in Washington, clerking for Sullivan, he had slept in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment he shared with a legislative assistant whom he rarely saw—Lispenard Street had been the first time in his life that he’d had a room, a real room with a real window, wholly to himself. But a year after he moved into Greene Street, Malcolm installed the walls, and the place began to feel a little more comfortable, and the year after that, Willem moved in, and it felt more comfortable still. He saw less of Richard than he thought he might—they were both traveling frequently—but on Sunday evenings, he would sometimes go down to his studio and help him with one of his projects, polishing a bunch of small branches smooth with a leaf of sandpaper, or snipping the rachis off the vane from a fluff of peacock feathers. Richard’s studio was the sort of place he would have loved as a child—everywhere were containers and bowls of marvelous things: twigs and stones and dried beetles and feathers and tiny, bright-hued taxidermied birds and blocks in various shapes made of some soft pale wood—and at times he wished he could be allowed to abandon his work and simply sit on the floor and play, which he had usually been too busy to do as a boy.

  By the end of the third year, he had paid for the apartment, and had immediately begun saving for the renovation. This took less time than he’d thought it would, in part because of something that had happened with Andy. He’d gone uptown one day for his appointment, and Andy had walked in, looking grim and yet oddly triumphant.

  “What?” he’d asked, and Andy had silently handed him a magazine article he’d sliced out of a journal. He read it: it was an academic report about how a recently developed semi-experimental laser surgery that had held great promise as a solution for damageless keloid removal was now proven to have adverse medium-term effects: although the keloids were eliminated, patients instead developed raw, burn-like wounds, and the skin beneath the scars became significantly more fragile, more susceptible to splitting and cracking, which resulted in blisters and infection.

  “This is what you’re thinking of doing, isn’t it?” Andy asked him, as he sat holding the pages in his hand, unable to speak. “I know you, Judy. And I know you made an appointment at that quack Thompson’s office. Don’t deny it; they called for your chart. I didn’t send it. Please don’t do this, Jude. I’m serious. The last thing you need are open wounds on your back as well as your legs.” And then, when he didn’t say anything, “Talk to me.”

  He shook his head. Andy was right: he had been saving for this as well. Like his annual bonuses and most of his savings, all the money he’d made long ago from tutoring Felix had been given over to the apartment, but in recent months, as it was clear he was closing in on his final payments, he had begun saving anew for the surgery. He had it all worked out: he’d have the surgery and then he’d finish saving for the renovation. He had visions of it—his back made as smooth as the floors themselves, the thick, unbudgeable worm trail of scars vaporized in seconds, and with it, all evidence of his time in the home and in Philadelphia, the documentation of those years erased from his body. He tried so hard to forget, he tried every day, but as much as he tried, there it was to remind him, proof that what he pretended hadn’t happened, actually had.

  “Jude,” Andy said, sitting next to him on the examining table. “I know you’re disappointed. And I promise you that when there’s a treatment available that’s both effective and safe, I’ll let you know. I know it bothers you; I’m always looking out for something for you. But right now there isn’t anything, and I can’t in good conscience let you do this to yourself.” He was quiet; they both were. “I suppose I should have asked you this more frequently, Jude, but—do they hurt you? Do they cause you any discomfort? Does the skin feel tight?”

  He nodded. “Look, Jude,” Andy said after a pause. “There are some creams I can give you that’ll help with that, but you’re going to need someone to help massage them in nightly, or it’s not going to be effective. Would you let someone do this for you? Willem? Richard?”

  “I can’t,” he said, speaking to the magazine article in his hands.

  “Well,” said Andy. “I’ll write you a scrip anyway, and I’ll show you how to do it—don’t worry, I asked an actual dermatologist, this isn’t some method I’ve made up—but I can’t say how efficacious it’s going to be on your own.” He slid off the table. “Will you open your gown for me and turn toward the wall?”

  He did, and felt Andy’s hands on his shoulders, and then moving slowly across his back. He thought Andy might say, as he sometimes did, “It’s not so bad, Jude,” or “You don’t have anything to be self-conscious about,” but this time he didn’t, just trailed his hands across him, as if his palms were themselves lasers, something that was hovering over him and healing him, the skin beneath them turning healthy and unmarked. Finally Andy told him he could cover himself again, and he did, and turned back around. “I’m really sorry, Jude,” Andy said, and this time, it was Andy who couldn’t look at him.

  “Do you want to grab something to eat?” Andy asked after the appointment was over, as he was putting his clothes back on, but he shook his head: “I should go back to the office.” Andy was quiet then, but as he was leaving, he stopped him. “Jude,” he said, “I really am sorry. I don’t like being the one who has to destroy your hopes.” He nodded—he knew Andy didn’t—but in that moment, he couldn’t stand being around him, and wanted only to get away.

  However, he reminds himself—he is determined to be more realistic, to stop thinking he can make himself better—the fact that he can’t get this surgery means he now has the money for Malcolm to begin the renovation in earnest. Over the years he has owned the apartment, he has witnessed Malcolm grow both bolder and more imaginative in his work, and so the plans he drew when he first bought t
he place have been changed and revised and improved upon multiple times: in them, he can see the development of what even he can recognize as an aesthetic confidence, a self-assured idiosyncracy. Shortly before he began working at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, Malcolm had quit his job at Ratstar, and with two of his former colleagues and Sophie, an acquaintance of his from architecture school, had founded a firm called Bellcast; their first commission had been the renovation of the pied-à-terre of one of Malcolm’s parents’ friends. Bellcast did mostly residential work, but last year they had been awarded their first significant public commission, for a photography museum in Doha, and Malcolm—like Willem, like himself—was absent from the city more and more frequently.

  “Never underestimate the importance of having rich parents, I guess,” some asshole at one of JB’s parties had grumbled, sourly, when he heard that Bellcast had been the runners-up in a competition to design a memorial in Los Angeles for Japanese Americans who had been interned in the war, and JB had started shouting at him before he and Willem had a chance; the two of them had smiled at each other over JB’s head, proud of him for defending Malcolm so vehemently.

  And so he has watched as, with each new revised blueprint for Greene Street, hallways have materialized and then vanished, and the kitchen has grown larger and then smaller, and bookcases have gone from stretching along the northern wall, which has no windows, to the southern wall, which does, and then back again. One of the renderings eliminated walls altogether—“It’s a loft, Judy, and you should respect its integrity,” Malcolm had argued with him, but he had been firm: he needed a bedroom; he needed a door he could close and lock—and in another, Malcolm had tried to block up the southern-facing windows entirely, which had been the reason he had chosen the sixth-floor unit to begin with, and which Malcolm later admitted had been an idiotic idea. But he enjoys watching Malcolm work, is touched that he has spent so much time—more than he himself has—thinking about how he might live. And now it is going to happen. Now he has enough saved for Malcolm to indulge even his most outlandish design fantasies. Now he has enough for every piece of furniture Malcolm has ever suggested he might get, for every carpet and vase.