Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“I think we should work on a project together,” I told him that fall (he was still doing pro bono work with the artist nonprofit, which — when I went to volunteer there myself — was actually more moving than I had thought it would be: I had thought it would just be a bunch of untalented hacks trying to make creative lives for themselves when it was clear they never would, and although that was in fact what it was, I found myself admiring them, much as he did — their perseverance, their dumb, hardy faith. These were people no one and nothing could ever dissuade from life, from claiming it as theirs).

“Like what?” he asked.

“You could teach me to cook,” I told him, as he gave me that look he had, in which he was almost smiling but not quite, amused but not ready to show it. “I’m serious. Really cook. Six or seven dishes I could have in my arsenal.”

And so he did. Saturday afternoons, after he’d finished work or visiting with Lucien and the Irvines, we’d drive to Garrison, either alone or with Richard and India or JB or one of the Henry Youngs and their wives, and on Sunday we’d cook something. My main problem, it emerged, was a lack of patience, my inability to accept tedium. I’d wander away to look for something to read and forget that I was leaving the risotto to glue itself into a sticky glop, or I’d forget to turn the carrots in their puddle of olive oil and come back to find them seared to the bottom of the pan. (So much of cooking, it seemed, was petting and bathing and monitoring and flipping and turning and soothing: demands I associated with human infancy.) My other problem, I was told, was my insistence on innovating, which is apparently a guarantee of failure in baking. “It’s chemistry, Harold, not philosophy,” he kept saying, with that same half smile. “You can’t cheat the specifed amounts and hope it’s going to come out the way it should.”

“Maybe it’ll come out better,” I said, mostly to entertain him — I was always happy to play the fool if I thought it might give him some pleasure — and now he smiled, really smiled. “It won’t,” he said.

But finally, I actually did learn how to make some things: I learned how to roast a chicken and poach an egg and broil halibut. I learned how to make carrot cake, and a bread with lots of different nuts that I had liked to buy at the bakery he used to work at in Cambridge: his version was uncanny, and for weeks I made loaf after loaf. “Excellent, Harold,” he said one day, after tasting a slice. “See? Now you’ll be able to cook for yourself when you’re a hundred.”

“What do you mean, cook for myself?” I asked him. “You’ll have to cook for me,” and he smiled back at me, a sad, strange smile, and didn’t say anything, and I quickly changed the subject before he said something that I would have to pretend he didn’t. I was always trying to allude to the future, to make plans for years away, so that he’d commit to them and I could make him honor his commitment. But he was careful: he never promised.

“We should take a music class, you and I,” I told him, not really knowing what I meant by that.

He smiled, a little. “Maybe,” he said. “Sure. We’ll discuss it.” But that was the most he’d allow.

After our cooking lesson, we walked. When we were at the house upstate, we walked the path Malcolm had made: past the spot in the woods where I had once had to leave him propped against a tree, jolting with pain, past the first bench, past the second, past the third. At the second bench we’d always sit and rest. He didn’t need to rest, not like he used to, and we walked so slowly that I didn’t need to, either. But we always made a ceremonial stop, because it was from here that you had the clearest view of the back of the house, do you remember? Malcolm had cut away some of the trees here so that from the bench, you were facing the house straight on, and if you were on the back deck of the house, you were facing the bench straight on. “It’s such a beautiful house,” I said, as I always did, and as I always did, I hoped he was hearing me say that I was proud of him: for the house he built, and for the life he had built within it.

Once, a month or so after we all returned home from Italy, we were sitting on this bench, and he said to me, “Do you think he was happy with me?” He was so quiet I thought I had imagined it, but then he looked at me and I saw I hadn’t.

“Of course he was,” I told him. “I know he was.”

He shook his head. “There were so many things I didn’t do,” he said at last.

I didn’t know what he meant by this, but it didn’t change my mind. “Whatever it was, I know it didn’t matter,” I told him. “I know he was happy with you. He told me.” He looked at me, then. “I know it,” I repeated. “I know it.” (You had never said this to me, not explicitly, but I know you will forgive me; I know you will. I know you would have wanted me to say this.)

Another time, he said, “Dr. Loehmann thinks I should tell you things.”

“What things?” I asked, careful not to look at him.

“Things about what I am,” he said, and then paused. “Who I am,” he corrected himself.

“Well,” I said, finally, “I’d like that. I’d like to know more about you.”

Then he smiled. “That sounds strange, doesn’t it?” he asked. “ ‘More about you.’ We’ve known each other so long now.”

I always had the sense, during these exchanges, that although there might not be a single correct answer, there was in fact a single incorrect one, after which he would never say anything again, and I was forever trying to calculate what that answer might be so I would never say it.

“That’s true,” I said. “But I always want to know more, where you’re concerned.”

He looked at me quickly, and then back at the house. “Well,” he said. “Maybe I’ll try. Maybe I’ll write something down.”

“I’d love that,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“It might take me a while,” he said.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You’ll take as long as you need.” A long time was a good thing, I thought: it meant years, years of him trying to figure out what he wanted to say, and although they would be difficult, torturous years, at least he would be alive. That was what I thought: that I would rather have him suffering and alive — than dead.

But in the end, it didn’t take him much time at all. It was February, about a year after our intervention. If he could keep his weight on through May, we’d stop monitoring him, and he’d be able to stop seeing Dr. Loehmann if he wanted, although both Andy and I thought he should keep going. But it would no longer be our decision. That Sunday, we had stayed in the city, and after a cooking lesson at Greene Street (an asparagus-and-artichoke terrine) we went out for our walk.

It was a chilly day, but windless, and we walked south on Greene until it changed into Church, and then down and down, through TriBeCa, through Wall Street, and almost to the very tip of the island, where we stood and watched the river, its splashing gray water. And then we turned and walked north, back up the same street: Trinity to Church, Church to Greene. He had been quiet all day, still and silent, and I prattled on about a middle-aged man I had met at the career placement center, a refugee from Tibet a year or so older than he, a doctor, who was applying to American medical schools.

“That’s admirable,” he said. “It’s difficult to start over.”

“It is,” I said. “But you’ve started over too, Jude. You’re admirable, too.” He glanced at me, then looked away. “I mean it,” I said. I was reminded of a day a year or so after he had been discharged from the hospital after his suicide attempt, and he was staying with us in Truro. We had taken a walk then as well. “I want you to tell me three things you think you do better than anyone else,” I had told him as we sat on the sand, and he made a weary puffing noise, filling his cheeks with air and blowing it out through his mouth.