A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

  These days, he argues with Malcolm about his most recent plans. The last time they reviewed the sketches, three months ago, he had noticed an element around the toilet in the master bathroom that he couldn’t identify. “What’s that?” he’d asked Malcolm.

  “Grab bars,” Malcolm said, briskly, as if by saying it quickly it would become less significant. “Judy, I know what you’re going to say, but—” But he was already examining the blueprints more closely, peering at Malcolm’s tiny notations in the bathroom, where he’d added steel bars in the shower and around the bathtub as well, and in the kitchen, where he’d lowered the height of some of the countertops.

  “But I’m not even in a wheelchair,” he’d said, dismayed.

  “But Jude,” Malcolm had begun, and then stopped. He knew what Malcolm wanted to say: But you have been. And you will be again. But he didn’t. “These are standard ADA guidelines,” he said instead.

  “Mal,” he’d said, chagrined by how upset he was. “I understand. But I don’t want this to be some cripple’s apartment.”

  “It won’t be, Jude. It’ll be yours. But don’t you think, maybe, just as a precaution—”

  “No, Malcolm. Get rid of them. I mean it.”

  “But don’t you think, just as a matter of practicality—”

  “Now you’re interested in practicalities? The man who wanted me to live in a five-thousand-square-foot space with no walls?” He stopped. “I’m sorry, Mal.”

  “It’s okay, Jude,” Malcolm said. “I understand. I do.”

  Now, Malcolm stands before him, grinning. “I have something to show you,” he says, waving the baton of rolled-up paper in his hand.

  “Malcolm, thank you,” he says. “But should we look at them later?” He’d had to schedule an appointment with the tailor; he doesn’t want to be late.

  “It’ll be fast,” Malcolm says, “and I’ll leave them with you.” He sits next to him and smooths out the sheaf of pages, giving him one end to hold, explaining things he’s changed and tweaked. “Counters back up to standard height,” says Malcolm, pointing at the kitchen. “No grab bars in the shower area, but I gave you this ledge that you can use as a seat, just in case. I swear it’ll look nice. I kept the ones around the toilet—just think about it, okay? We’ll install them last, and if you really, really hate them, we’ll leave them off, but … but I’d do it, Judy.” He nods, reluctantly. He won’t know it then, but years later, he will be grateful that Malcolm has prepared for his future, even when he hadn’t wanted to: he will notice that in his apartment, the passages are wider, that the bathroom and kitchen are oversize, so a wheelchair can make a full, clean revolution in them, that the doorways are generous, that wherever possible, the doors slide instead of swing, that there is no cabinetry under the master bathroom sink, that the highest-placed closet rods lower with the touch of a pneumatic button, that there is a benchlike seat in the bathtub, and, finally, that Malcolm won the fight about the grab bars around the toilet. He’ll feel a sort of bitter wonderment that yet another person in his life—Andy, Willem, Richard, and now Malcolm—had foreseen his future, and knew how inevitable it was.

  After their appointment, where Malcolm is measured for a navy suit and a dark gray one, and where Franklin, the tailor, greets him and asks why he hasn’t seen him for two years—“I’m pretty sure that’s my fault,” Malcolm says, smiling—they have lunch. It’s nice taking a Saturday off, he thinks, as they drink rosewater lemonade and eat za’atar-dusted roasted cauliflower at the crowded Israeli restaurant near Franklin’s shop. Malcolm is excited to start work on the apartment, and he is, too. “This is such perfect timing,” Malcolm keeps saying. “I’ll have the office submit everything to the city on Monday, and by the time it’s approved, I’ll be done with Doha and be able to get started right away, and you can move into Willem’s while it’s being done.” Malcolm has just finished the final pieces of work on Willem’s apartment, which he has supervised more of than Willem has; by the end of the process, he was making decisions for Willem on paint colors. Malcolm did a beautiful job, he thinks; he won’t mind at all staying there for the next year.

  It is early when they finish lunch, and they linger on the sidewalk outside. For the past week it’s been raining, but today the skies are blue and he is still feeling strong, and even a little restless, and he asks Malcolm if he wants to walk for a bit. He can see Malcolm hesitate, flicking his gaze up and down his body as if trying to determine how capable he is, but then he smiles and agrees, and the two of them start heading west, and then north, toward the Village. They pass the building on Mulberry Street that JB used to live in before he moved farther east, and they are quiet for a minute, both of them, he knows, thinking about JB and wondering what he’s doing, and knowing but also not knowing why he hasn’t answered their and Willem’s calls, their texts, their e-mails. The three of them have had dozens of conversations with one another, with Richard, with Ali and the Henry Youngs about what to do, but with every attempt they have made to find JB, he has eluded them, or barred their way, or ignored them. “We just have to wait until it gets worse,” Richard had said at one point, and he fears that Richard is correct. It is, sometimes, as if JB is no longer theirs at all, and they can do nothing but wait for the moment in which he will have a crisis only they can solve, and they will be able to parachute into his life once again.

  “Okay, Malcolm, I’ve got to ask you,” he says, as they walk up the stretch of Hudson Street that is deserted on the weekends, its sidewalks treeless and empty of people, “are you getting married to Sophie or not? We all want to know.”

  “God, Jude, I just don’t know,” Malcolm begins, but he sounds relieved, as if he’s been waiting to be asked the question all along. Maybe he has. He lists the potential negatives (marriage is so conventional; it feels so permanent; he’s not really interested in the idea of a wedding but fears Sophie is; his parents are going to try to get involved; something about spending the rest of his life with another architect depresses him; he and Sophie are cofounders of the firm—if something happens between them, what will happen to Bellcast?) and the positives, which also sound like negatives (if he doesn’t propose, he thinks Sophie will leave; his parents have been bothering him about it nonstop and he’d like to shut them up; he really does love Sophie, and knows he won’t be able to do better than her; he’s thirty-eight, and feels he has to do something). As he listens to Malcolm, he tries not to smile: he has always liked this about Malcolm, how he can be so decisive on the page and in his designs, and yet in the rest of his life so in a dither, and so unself-conscious about sharing it. Malcolm has never been someone who pretended he was cooler, or more confident, or silkier than he actually is, and as they grow older, he appreciates and admires more and more his sweet guilelessness, his complete trust in his friends and their opinions.

  “What do you think, Jude?” Malcolm asks at last. “I’ve actually really wanted to talk to you about this. Should we sit down somewhere? Do you have time? I know Willem’s on his way back home.”

  He could be more like Malcolm, he thinks; he could ask his friends for help, he could be vulnerable around them. He has been before, after all; it just hasn’t been by choice. But they have always been kind to him, they have never tried to make him feel self-conscious—shouldn’t that teach him something? Maybe, for instance, he will ask Willem if he could help him with his back: if Willem is disgusted by his appearance, he’ll never say anything. And Andy was right—it is too difficult to apply the creams by himself, and eventually he stopped, although he didn’t throw any of them away, either.

  He tries to think how he might begin the conversation with Willem, but he finds he can’t move beyond the first word—Willem—even in his imaginings. And in that moment, he knows he won’t be able to ask Willem after all: Not because I don’t trust you, he says to Willem, with whom he will never have this conversation. But because I can’t bear to have you see me as I really am. Now when he imagines himself as an old man, he
is still alone, but on Greene Street, and in these wanderings, he sees Willem in a house somewhere green and tree-filled—the Adirondacks, the Berkshires—and Willem is happy, he is surrounded by people who love him, and maybe a few times a year he comes into the city to visit him on Greene Street, and they spend the afternoon together. In these dreams, he is always sitting down, so he’s uncertain if he can still walk or not, but he knows that he is delighted to see Willem, always, and that at the end of all their meetings, he is able to tell him not to worry, that he can take care of himself, giving him that assurance like a benediction, pleased that he has had the strength to not spoil Willem’s idyll with his needs, his loneliness, his wants.

  But that, he reminds himself, is many years in the future. Right now there is Malcolm, and his hopeful, anxious face, waiting to hear his reply.

  “He’s not back until this evening,” he tells Malcolm. “We’ve got all afternoon, Mal. I’ve got as much time as you need.”

  3

  THE LAST TIME JB tried—really tried—to stop doing drugs, it was Fourth of July weekend. No one else was in the city. Malcolm was with Sophie visiting her parents in Hamburg. Jude was with Harold and Julia in Copenhagen. Willem was shooting in Cappadocia. Richard was in Wyoming, at an artists’ colony. Asian Henry Young was in Reykjavík. Only he remained, and if he hadn’t been so determined, he wouldn’t have been in town, either. He’d have been in Beacon, where Richard had a house, or in Quogue, where Ezra had a house, or in Woodstock, where Ali had a house, or—well. There weren’t that many other people who would give him their house nowadays, and besides, he wasn’t talking to most of them because they were getting on his nerves. But he hated summer in New York. All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry. And yet there he was, unlocking the door of his studio on the third floor of the white brick building in Kensington, glancing involuntarily toward the end of the hall, where Jackson’s studio was, before he let himself in.

  JB was not an addict. Yes, he did drugs. Yes, he did a lot of them. But he wasn’t an addict. Other people were addicts. Jackson was an addict. So was Zane, and so was Hera. Massimo and Topher: also addicts. Sometimes it felt like he was the only one who hadn’t slipped over the edge.

  And yet he knew that a lot of people thought he had, which is why he was still in the city when he should be in the country: four days, no drugs, only work—and then no one would be able to say anything ever again.

  Today, Friday, was day one. The air-conditioning unit in his studio was broken, so the first thing he did was open all the windows and then, once he had knocked, lightly, on Jackson’s door to make sure he wasn’t inside, the door as well. Normally he never opened the door, both because of Jackson and because of the noise. His studio was one of fourteen rooms on the third floor of a five-story building. The rooms were meant to be used only as studio space, but he guessed about twenty percent of the building’s occupants actually lived there illegally. On the rare occasions he had arrived at his studio before ten in the morning, he would see people shuffling through the corridors in their boxers, and when he went to the bathroom at the end of the hall, there’d be someone in there taking a sponge bath in the sink or shaving or brushing his teeth, and he’d nod at them—“Whassup, man?”—and they’d nod back. Sadly, however, the overall effect was less collegiate and more institutional. This depressed him. JB could have found studio space elsewhere, better, more private studio space, but he’d taken this one because (he was embarrassed to admit) the building looked like a dormitory, and he hoped it might feel like college again. But it didn’t.

  The building was also supposed to be a “low noise density” site, whatever that meant, but along with the artists, a number of bands—ironic thrasher bands, ironic folk bands, ironic acoustic bands—had also rented studios there, which meant that the hallway was always jumbled with noise, all of the bands’ instruments melding together to make one long whine of guitar feedback. The bands weren’t supposed to be there, and once every few months, when the owner of the building, a Mr. Chen, stopped by for a surprise inspection, he would hear the shouts bouncing through the hallways, even through his closed door, each person’s call of alarm echoed by the next, until the warning had saturated all five floors—“Chen!” “Chen!” “Chen!”—so by the time Mr. Chen stepped inside the front door, all was quiet, so unnaturally quiet that he imagined he could hear his next-door neighbor grinding his inks against his whetstone, and his other neighbor’s spirograph skritching against canvas. And then Mr. Chen would get into his car and drive away, and the echoes would reverse themselves—“Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!”—and the cacophony would rise up again, like a flock of screeching cicadas.

  Once he was certain he was alone on the floor (god, where was everyone? Was he truly the last person left on earth?), he took off his shirt and then, after a moment, his pants, and began cleaning his studio, which he hadn’t done in months. Back and forth he walked to the trash cans near the service elevator, stuffing them full of old pizza boxes and empty beer cans and scraps of paper with doodles on them and brushes whose bristles had gone strawlike because he hadn’t cleaned them and palettes of watercolors that had turned to clay because he hadn’t kept them moist.

  Cleaning was boring; it was particularly boring while sober. He reflected, as he sometimes did, that none of the supposedly good things that were supposed to happen to you when you were on meth had happened to him. Other people he knew had grown gaunt, or had nonstop anonymous sex, or had binges in which they cleaned or organized their apartments or studios for hours. But he remained fat. His sex drive had vanished. His studio and apartment remained disasters. True, he was working remarkably long stretches—twelve, fourteen hours at a time—but he couldn’t attribute that to the meth: he had always been a hard worker. When it came to painting or drawing, he had always had a long attention span.

  After an hour or so of picking things up, the studio looked exactly the same as it had when he began, and he was craving a cigarette, which he didn’t have, or a drink, which he also didn’t have, and shouldn’t have anyway, as it was still only noon. He knew he had a ball of gum in his jeans pocket, which he dug around for and found—it was slightly damp from the heat—and stuffed into his mouth, chewing it as he lay supine, his eyes closed, the cement floor cool beneath his back and thighs, pretending he was elsewhere, not in Brooklyn in July in the ninety-degree heat.

  How am I feeling? he asked himself.

  Okay, he answered himself.

  The shrink he had started seeing had told him to ask himself that. “It’s like a soundcheck,” he’d said. “Just a way to check in with yourself: How am I feeling? Do I want to use? If I do want to use, why do I want to use? It’s a way for you to communicate with yourself, to examine your impulses instead of simply giving in to them.” What a moron, JB had thought. He still thought this. And yet, like many moronic things, he was unable to expunge the question from his memory. Now, at odd, unwelcome moments, he would find himself asking himself how he felt. Sometimes, the answer was, “Like I want to do drugs,” and so he’d do them, if only to illustrate to his therapist just how moronic his method was. See? he’d say to Giles in his head, Giles who wasn’t even a PhD, just an MSW. So much for your self-examination theory. What else, Giles? What’s next?

  Seeing Giles had not been JB’s idea. Six months ago, in January, his mother and aunts had had a mini-intervention with him, which had begun with his mother sharing memories of what a bright and precocious boy JB had been, and look at him now, and then his aunt Christine, literally playing bad cop, yelling at him about how he was wasting all the opportunities that her sister had provided him and how he had become a huge pain in the ass, and then his aunt Silvia, who had always been the gentlest of the three, reminding him that he was so talented, and that they all wanted him back, and wouldn’t he consider getting treatment? He had not been in the mood for an intervention,
even one as low-key and cozy as theirs had been (his mother had provided his favorite cheesecake, which they all ate as they discussed his flaws), because, among other things, he was still angry at them. The month before, his grandmother had died, and his mother had taken a whole day to call him. She claimed it was because she couldn’t find him and he wasn’t picking up his phone, but he knew that the day she had died he had been sober, and his phone had been on all day, and so he wasn’t sure why his mother was lying to him.

  “JB, Grandma would have been heartbroken if she knew what you’ve become,” his mother said to him.

  “God, Ma, just fuck off,” he’d said, wearily, sick of her wailing and quivering, and Christine had popped up and slapped him across the face.

  After that, he’d agreed to go see Giles (some friend of a friend of Silvia’s) as a way of apologizing to Christine and, of course, to his mother. Unfortunately, Giles truly was an idiot, and during their sessions (paid for by his mother: he wasn’t going to waste his money on therapy, especially bad therapy), he would answer Giles’s uninventive questions—Why do you think you’re so attracted to drugs, JB? What do you feel they give you? Why do you think your use of them has accelerated so much over the past few years? Why do you think you’re not talking to Malcolm and Jude and Willem as much?—with answers he knew would excite him. He would slip in mentions of his dead father, of the great emptiness and sense of loss his absence had inspired in him, of the shallowness of the art world, of his fears that he would never fulfill his promise, and watch Giles’s pen bob ecstatically over his pad, and feel both disdain for stupid Giles as well as disgust for his own immaturity. Fucking with one’s therapist—even if one’s therapist truly deserved to be fucked with—was the sort of thing you did when you were nineteen, not when you were thirty-nine.