A Little Life (18 page)

They gave him a bus ticket north; Leslie came to the station to see him off. He had packed his things in a double-layered black garbage bag, and then inside the backpack he’d bought at the Army Navy Store: everything he owned in one neat package. On the bus he stared out the window and thought of nothing. He hoped his back wouldn’t betray him on the ride, and it didn’t.

He had been the first to arrive in their room, and when the second boy came in—it had been Malcolm—with his parents and suitcases and books and speakers and television and phones and computers and refrigerator and flotillas of digital gadgetry, he had felt the first sensations of sickening fear, and then anger, directed irrationally at Ana: How could she let him believe he might be equipped to do this? Who could he say he was? Why had she never told him exactly how poor, how ugly, what a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth, his life really was? Why had she let him believe he might belong here?

As the months passed, this feeling dampened, but it never disappeared; it lived on him like a thin scum of mold. But as that knowledge became more acceptable, another piece became less so: he began to realize that she was the first and last person to whom he would never have to explain anything. She knew that he wore his life on his skin, that his biography was written in his flesh and on his bones. She would never ask him why he wouldn’t wear short sleeves, even in the steamiest of weather, or why he didn’t like to be touched, or, most important, what had happened to his legs or back: she knew already. Around her he had felt none of the constant anxiety, nor watchfulness, that he seemed condemned to feel around everyone else; the vigilance was exhausting, but it eventually became simply a part of life, a habit like good posture. Once, she had reached out to (he later realized) embrace him, but he had reflexively brought his hands up over his head to protect himself,
and although he had been embarrassed, she hadn’t made him feel silly or overreactive. “I’m an idiot, Jude,” she’d said instead. “I’m sorry. No more sudden movements, I promise.”

But now she was gone, and no one knew him. His records were sealed. His first Christmas, Leslie had sent him a card, addressed to him through the student affairs office, and he had kept it for days, his last link to Ana, before finally throwing it away. He never wrote back, and he never heard from Leslie again. It was a new life. He was determined not to ruin it for himself.

Still, sometimes, he thought back to their final conversations, mouthing them aloud. This was at night, when his roommates—in various configurations, depending on who was in the room at the time—slept above and next to him. “Don’t let this silence become a habit,” she’d warned him shortly before she died. And: “It’s all right to be angry, Jude; you don’t have to hide it.” She had been wrong about him, he always thought; he wasn’t what she thought he was. “You’re destined for greatness, kid,” she’d said once, and he wanted to believe her, even though he couldn’t. But she was right about one thing: it
did
get harder and harder. He
did
blame himself. And although he tried every day to remember the promise he’d made to her, every day it became more and more remote, until it was just a memory, and so was she, a beloved character from a book he’d read long ago.

“The world has two kinds of people,” Judge Sullivan used to say. “Those who are inclined to believe, and those who aren’t. In my courtroom, we value belief. Belief in
all
things.”

He made this proclamation often, and after doing so, he would groan himself to his feet—he was very fat—and toddle out of the room. This was usually at the end of the day—Sullivan’s day, at least—when he left his chambers and came over to speak to his law clerks, sitting on the edge of one of their desks and delivering often opaque lectures that were interspersed with frequent pauses, as if his clerks were not lawyers but scriveners, and should be writing down his words. But no one did, not even Kerrigan, who was a true believer and the most conservative of the three of them.

After the judge left, he would grin across the room at Thomas,
who would raise his eyes upward in a gesture of helplessness and apology. Thomas was a conservative, too, but “a
thinking
conservative,” he’d remind him, “and the fact that I even have to make that distinction is fucking depressing.”

He and Thomas had started clerking for the judge the same year, and when he had been approached by the judge’s informal search committee—really, his Business Associations professor, with whom the judge was old friends—the spring of his second year of law school, it had been Harold who had encouraged him to apply. Sullivan was known among his fellow circuit court judges for always hiring one clerk whose political views diverged from his own, the more wildly, the better. (His last liberal law clerk had gone on to work for a Hawaiian rights sovereignty group that advocated for the islands’ secession from the United States, a career move that had sent the judge into a fit of apoplectic self-satisfaction.)

“Sullivan hates me,” Harold had told him then, sounding pleased. “He’ll hire you just to spite me.” He smiled, savoring the thought. “And because you’re the most brilliant student I’ve ever had,” he added.

The compliment made him look at the ground: Harold’s praise tended to be conveyed to him by others, and was rarely handed to him directly. “I’m not sure I’m liberal enough for him,” he’d replied. Certainly he wasn’t liberal enough for Harold; it was one of the things—his opinions; the way he read the law; how he applied it to life—that they argued about.

Harold snorted. “Trust me,” he said. “You are.”

But when he went to Washington for his interview the following year, Sullivan had talked about the law—and political philosophy—with much less vigor and specificity than he had anticipated. “I hear that you sing,” Sullivan said instead after an hour of conversation about what he had studied (the judge had attended the same law school), and his position as the articles editor on the law review (the same position the judge himself had held), and his thoughts on recent cases.

“I do,” he replied, wondering how the judge had learned that. Singing was his comfort, but he rarely did it in front of others. Had he been singing in Harold’s office and been overheard? Or sometimes he sang in the law library, when he was re-shelving books late at night and the space was as quiet and still as a church—had someone overheard him there?

“Sing me something,” said the judge.

“What would you like to hear, sir?” he asked. Normally, he would have been much more nervous, but he had heard that the judge would make him do a performance of some sort (legend had it that he’d made a previous applicant juggle), and Sullivan was a known opera lover.

The judge put his fat fingers to his fat lips and thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Sing me something that tells me something about you.”

He thought, and then sang. He was surprised to hear what he chose—Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—both because he didn’t even really like Mahler that much and because the lied was a difficult one to perform, slow and mournful and subtle and not meant for a tenor. And yet he liked the poem itself, which his voice teacher in college had dismissed as “second-rate romanticism,” but which he had always thought suffered unfairly from a poor translation. The standard interpretation of the first line was “I am lost to the world,” but he read it as “I have
become
lost to the world,” which, he believed, was less self-pitying, less melodramatic, and more resigned, more confused.
I have become lost to the world / In which I otherwise wasted so much time
. The lied was about the life of an artist, which he was definitely not. But he understood, primally almost, the concept of losing, of loosing oneself from the world, of disappearing into a different place, one of retreat and safety, of the twinned yearnings of escape and discovery.
It means nothing to me / Whether the world believes me dead / I can hardly say anything to refute it / For truly, I am no longer a part of the world
.

When he finished, he opened his eyes to the judge clapping and laughing. “Bravo,” he said. “Bravo! But I think you might be in the wrong profession altogether, you know.” He laughed again. “Where’d you learn to sing like that?”

“The brothers, sir,” he’d replied.

“Ah, a Catholic boy?” asked the judge, sitting up fatly in his chair and looking ready to be pleased.

“I was raised Catholic,” he began.

“But you’re not now?” the judge asked, frowning.

“No,” he said. He had worked for years to keep the apology out of his voice when he said this.

Sullivan made a noncommittal grunting noise. “Well, whatever they gave you should have offered at least some sort of protection against
whatever Harold Stein’s been filling your head with for the past few years,” he said. He looked at his résumé. “You’re his research assistant?”

“Yes,” he said. “For more than two years.”

“A good mind, wasted,” Sullivan declared (it was unclear whether he meant his or Harold’s). “Thanks for coming down, we’ll be in touch. And thanks for the lied; you have one of the most beautiful tenors I’ve heard in a long time. Are you
sure
you’re in the right field?” At this, he smiled, the last time he would ever see Sullivan smile with such pleasure and sincerity.

Back in Cambridge, he told Harold about his meeting (“You
sing
?” Harold asked him, as if he’d just told him he flew), but that he was certain he wouldn’t get the clerkship. A week later, Sullivan called: the job was his. He was surprised, but Harold wasn’t. “I told you so,” he said.

The next day, he went to Harold’s office as usual, but Harold had his coat on. “Normal work is suspended today,” he announced. “I need you to run some errands with me.” This was unusual, but Harold was unusual. At the curb, he held out the keys: “Do you want to drive?”

“Sure,” he said, and went to the driver’s side. This was the car he’d learned to drive in, just a year ago, while Harold sat next to him, far more patient outside the classroom than he was in it. “Good,” he’d said. “Let go of the clutch a little more–good. Good, Jude, good.”

Harold had to pick up some shirts he’d had altered, and they drove to the small, expensive men’s store on the edge of the square where Willem had worked his senior year. “Come in with me,” Harold instructed him, “I’m going to need some help carrying these out.”

“My god, Harold, how many shirts did you buy?” he asked. Harold had an unvarying wardrobe of blue shirts, white shirts, brown corduroys (for winter), linen pants (for spring and summer), and sweaters in various shades of greens and blues.

“Quiet, you,” said Harold.

Inside, Harold went off to find a salesperson, and he waited, running his fingers over the ties in their display cases, rolled and shiny as pastries. Malcolm had given him two of his old cotton suits, which he’d had tailored and had worn throughout both of his summer internships, but he’d had to borrow his roommate’s suit for the Sullivan interview, and he had tried to move carefully in it the entire time it was his, aware of its largeness and the fineness of its wool.

Then “That’s him,” he heard Harold say, and when he turned, Harold
was standing with a small man who had a measuring tape draped around his neck like a snake. “He’ll need two suits—a dark gray and a navy—and let’s get him a dozen shirts, a few sweaters, some ties, socks, shoes: he doesn’t have anything.” To him he nodded and said, “This is Marco. I’ll be back in a couple of hours or so.”

“Wait,” he said. “Harold. What are you doing?”

“Jude,” said Harold, “you need something to wear. I’m hardly an expert on this front, but you can’t show up to Sullivan’s chambers wearing what you’re wearing.”

He was embarrassed: by his clothes, by his inadequacy, by Harold’s generosity. “I know,” he said. “But I can’t accept this, Harold.”

He would’ve continued, but Harold stepped between him and Marco and turned him away. “Jude,” he said, “accept this. You’ve earned it. What’s more, you need it. I’m not going to have you humiliating me in front of Sullivan. Besides, I’ve already paid for it, and I’m not getting my money back. Right, Marco?” he called behind him.

“Right,” said Marco, immediately.

“Oh, leave it, Jude,” Harold said, when he saw him about to speak. “I’ve got to go.” And he marched out without looking back.

And so he found himself standing before the triple-leafed mirror, watching the reflection of Marco busying about his ankles, but when Marco reached up his leg to measure the inseam, he flinched, reflexively. “Easy, easy,” Marco said, as if he were a nervous horse, and patted his thigh, also as if he were a horse, and when he gave another involuntary half kick as Marco did the other leg, “Hey! I have pins in my mouth, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and held himself still.

When Marco was finished, he looked at himself in his new suit: here was such anonymity, such protection. Even if someone were to accidentally graze his back, he was wearing enough layers so that they’d never be able to feel the ridges of scars beneath. Everything was covered, everything was hidden. If he was standing still, he could be anyone, someone blank and invisible.