Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

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.

“I think maybe half an inch more,” Marco said, pinching the back of the jacket in around the waist. He swatted some threads off his sleeve. “Now all you need’s a good haircut.”

He found Harold waiting for him in the tie area, reading a magazine. “Are you done?” he asked, as if the entire trip had been his idea and Harold had been the one indulging his whimsy.

Over their early dinner, he tried to thank Harold again, but every time he tried, Harold stopped him with increasing impatience. “Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?” he finally asked.

“You said to never just accept anything,” he reminded Harold.

“That’s in the classroom and in the courtroom,” Harold said. “Not in life. You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry — they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”

He shut up then, and after dinner he let Harold drive him back to his apartment on Hereford Street. “Besides,” Harold said as he was getting out of the car, “you looked really, really nice. You’re a great-looking kid; I hope someone’s told you that before.” And then, before he could protest, “Acceptance, Jude.”

So he swallowed what he was going to say. “Thank you, Harold. For everything.”

“You’re very welcome, Jude,” said Harold. “I’ll see you Monday.”

He stood on the sidewalk and watched Harold’s car drive away, and then went up to his apartment, which was on the second floor of a brownstone adjacent to an MIT fraternity house. The brownstone’s owner, a retired sociology professor, lived on the ground floor and leased out the remaining three floors to graduate students: on the top floor were Santosh and Federico, who were getting their doctorates in electrical engineering at MIT, and on the third floor were Janusz and Isidore, who were both Ph.D. candidates at Harvard — Janusz in biochemistry and Isidore in Near Eastern religions — and directly below them were he and his roommate, Charlie Ma, whose real name was Chien-Ming Ma and whom everyone called CM. CM was an intern at Tufts Medical Center, and they kept almost entirely opposite schedules: he would wake and CM’s door would be closed and he would hear his wet, snuffly snores, and when he returned home in the evenings at eight, after working with Harold, CM would be gone. What he saw of CM he liked — he was from Taipei and had gone to boarding school in Connecticut and had a sleepy, roguish grin that made you want to smile back at him — and he was a friend of Andy’s friend, which was how they had met. Despite his perpetual air of stoned languor, CM was tidy as well, and liked to cook: he’d come home sometimes and find a plate of fried dumplings in the center of the table, with a note beneath that read EAT ME, or, occasionally, receive a text instructing him to rotate the chicken in its marinade before he went to bed, or asking him to pick up a bunch of cilantro on his way home. He always would, and would return to find the chicken simmered into a stew, or the cilantro minced and folded into scallop pancakes. Every few months or so, when their schedules intersected, all six of them would meet in Santosh and Federico’s apartment — theirs was the largest — and eat and play poker. Janusz and Isidore would worry aloud that girls thought they were gay because they were always hanging out with each other (CM cut his eyes toward him; he had bet him twenty dollars that they were sleeping together but were trying to pretend they were straight — at any rate, an impossible thing to prove), and Santosh and Federico would complain about how stupid their students were, and about how the quality of MIT undergraduates had really gone downhill since their time there five years ago.