A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

At night, as beneath him his parents completed their routines, the banging of the old pipes as they washed their faces and the sudden thunk into silence as they turned down the living-room radiators better than any clock at indicating that it was eleven, eleven thirty, midnight, he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain).

how it washed the weariness from his seat-mates’ faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the country, when they were young and America seemed conquerable.

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?

But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.

Only here did you feel compelled to somehow justify anything short of rabidity for your career; only here did you have to apologize for having faith in something other than yourself.

But Jude never blamed Willem for his failings; JB always did. He wasn’t sure which was less helpful.

At such times, he envied his friends for the exact things he had once pitied them for: the fact that no one had any expectations for them, the ordinariness of their families (or their very lack of them), the way they navigated their lives by only their own ambitions.

but then he was always exhausted those days: it was as if the daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else.

(He was aware, sometimes, of seeming wooden, icy, of being boring, which he recognized that here might have been considered the greater misfortune than being whatever it was he was.)

They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information.

“One thing I’ve learned,” she said, “you have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them. I’m going to teach you how to talk about them, because it’s going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?”

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.

It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.

JUDE—I’M SO FUCKING EMBARRASSED I CAN BARELY WRITE THIS NOTE. PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR YESTERDAY. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER FOR YOU AND THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHAT TOOK HAROLD SO FUCKING LONG. I HOPE YOU’LL TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT YOU NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF SO SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE THE STRENGTH TO CHANGE HAROLD’S ADULT DIAPERS WHEN HE’S A THOUSAND YEARS OLD AND INCONTINENT, BECAUSE YOU KNOW HE’S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU BY DYING AT A RESPECTABLE AGE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. BELIEVE ME, PARENTS ARE PAINS IN THE ASS LIKE THAT. (BUT GREAT TOO, OF COURSE.) LOVE, ANDY

He knows his telling other people about the adoption is a form of bragging, and that bragging has its own consequences, but he cannot help himself. Just this once, he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior. Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.

the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Once, at a party, he had overheard Jude tell someone that he told him, Willem, everything, and he had been both flattered and perplexed, because really: he knew nothing. It was sometimes incredible to him how much he cared about someone who refused to tell him any of the things friends shared with each other—how he had lived before they met, what he feared, what he craved, who he was attracted to, the mortifications and sadnesses of daily life.

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.

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.

But although Giles was an idiot, JB did find himself thinking about his questions, because they were questions that he had asked himself as well. And although Giles posed each as a discrete quandary, he knew that in reality each one was inseparable from the last, and that if it had been grammatically and linguistically possible to ask all of them together in one big question, then that would be the truest expression of why he was where he was.

He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults.

What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?

Help me, he’d say aloud, in those moments. Help me. But he didn’t know to whom he was addressing his plea, or what he expected to happen.

Some of them ask him with pity, and some ask him with suspicion: the first group feels sorry for him because they assume his singlehood is not his decision but a state imposed upon him; and the second group feels a kind of hostility for him, because they think that singlehood is his decision, a defiant violation of a fundamental law of adulthood.

Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.

Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, of perpetual doubt.

But sometimes he wonders whether he has insulated himself so much that he has neglected some essential part of being human: maybe he is ready to be with someone.

He likes Caleb’s slow, thoughtful way of speaking, the way he talks about the designers he’s worked with, his understanding of color and his appreciation of art. He likes that he can discuss his work—about Malpractice and Bastard—and that Caleb will not only understand the challenges his cases present for him but will find them interesting as well. He likes how closely Caleb listens to his stories, and how his questions show how closely he’s been paying attention. He likes how Caleb admires Willem’s and Richard’s and Malcolm’s work, and lets him talk about them as much as he wants. He likes how, when he is leaving, Caleb will put his hands on either side of his face and hold them there for a moment in a sort of silent blessing. He likes Caleb’s solidity, his physical strength: he likes watching him move, likes how, like Willem, he is so easy in his own body. He likes how Caleb will sometimes in sleep sling an arm possessively across his chest. He likes waking with Caleb next to him. He likes how Caleb is slightly strange, how he carries a faint threat of danger: he is different from the people he has sought out his entire adult life, people he has determined will never hurt him, people defined by their kindnesses.

When he is with Caleb, he feels simultaneously more and less human.

He had decided to believe Caleb, to believe him over us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought and always been taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind.

In his new life, he promised himself, he would be less demanding of his friends; he would be more generous. Whatever they wanted, he would give them. If Willem wanted information, he could have it, and it was up to him to figure out how to give it to him. He would be hurt again and again—everyone was—but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.

it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

He would remember, then, Harold’s claim that life compensated for its losses, and he would realize the truth of that, although sometimes it would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it, so he would allow it to keep moving him forward.

He is sitting by the pool and talking to Harold and Julia when abruptly, he feels that strange hollowing in his stomach that he occasionally experiences even when he and Jude are in the same house: the sensation of missing him, an odd sharp desire to see him. And although he would never say it to him, this is the way in which Jude reminds him of Hemming—that awareness that sometimes touches him, as lightly as wings, that the people he loves are more temporal, somehow, than others, that he has borrowed them, and that someday they will be reclaimed from him.

“And who are you?” he asks, looking at the man who is holding him, who is describing someone he doesn’t recognize, someone who seems to have so much, someone who seems like such an enviable, beloved person. “Who are you?” The man has an answer to this question as well. “I’m Willem Ragnarsson,” he says. “And I will never let you go.”

This is the best summer. But this summer, he knows, really is the best. And not just the summer: the spring, the winter, the fall. As he gets older, he is given, increasingly, to thinking of his life as a series of retrospectives, assessing each season as it passes as if it’s a vintage of wine, dividing years he’s just lived into historical eras: The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.

Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear; it would live within the three of them, a shared disease, a shimmery strand that had woven itself through their DNA.

In the past few years, he had found himself subconsciously drawn to ever-more physical roles, and he was always astonished by, and appreciative of, how heroically his body met its every demand. He had been given a new awareness of it, and now, as he stretched his arms behind him as he leaped, he could feel how every sore muscle came alive for him, how it allowed him to do whatever he wanted, how nothing within him ever broke, how it indulged him every time.

To heighten the fantasy’s believability, he wrote Willem an e-mail every night telling him what had happened that day, just as he would have done had Willem been alive. Every message always ended the same way: I hope the shoot’s going well. I miss you so much. Jude.

He sometimes thinks he continues to come more for Meredith’s sake than for Lucien’s, and he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost.

“People are going to think certain things about you because of how you walk,” Mr. Irvine had once said to him, and he had looked down. “No,” he’d said. “Don’t look down, Jude. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re a brilliant man, and you’ll be brilliant, and you’ll be rewarded for your brilliance. But if you act like you don’t belong, if you act like you’re apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too.” He’d taken a deep breath. “Believe me.” Be as steely as you want to be, Mr. Irvine had said. Don’t try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable. Harold had taught him how to think as a litigator, but Mr. Irvine had taught him how to behave as one.

But then, didn’t everyone only tell their lives—truly tell their lives—to one person?

“My sweetheart,” Harold says again, and he wants him to stop; he wants him to never stop. “My baby.” And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent’s reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.

And here in the bathroom, which is cold and silent, he plays his old game of “If” with himself: If I hadn’t followed Brother Luke. If I hadn’t let myself be taken by Dr. Traylor. If I hadn’t let Caleb inside. If I had listened more to Ana. On he plays, his recriminations beating a rhythm in his head. But then he also thinks: If I had never met Willem. If I had never met Harold. If I had never met Julia, or Andy, or Malcolm, or JB, or Richard, or Lucien, or so many other people: Rhodes and Citizen and Phaedra and Elijah. The Henry Youngs. Sanjay. All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.

In those months I thought often of what I was trying to do, of how hard it is to keep alive someone who doesn’t want to stay alive. First you try logic (You have so much to live for), and then you try guilt (You owe me), and then you try anger, and threats, and pleading (I’m old; don’t do this to an old man). But then, once they agree, it is necessary that you, the cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don’t want to be here, you can see that the mere act of existing is depleting for them, and then you have to tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing.

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.