A Little Life (50 page)

“We wanted to wait on the house, actually,” Alex admits. “But really, we didn’t have a choice—we wanted the kids to have a yard while they were little.”

He nods; he has heard this story before, from Rhodes. Often, it feels as if he and Rhodes (and he and almost every one of his contemporaries at the firm) are living parallel versions of adulthood. Their world is governed by children, little despots whose needs—school and camp and activities and tutors—dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen years. Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction: they decide the length and location of that year’s vacation; they determine if there will be any leftover money, and if so, how it might be spent; they give shape to a day, a week, a year, a life. 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.

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. 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. Or it is to some people—certainly it is to Malcolm, who recently reviewed with him a list he’d made in favor of and against having children with Sophie, much as he had when he was deciding whether to marry Sophie in the first place, four years ago.

“I don’t know, Mal,” he said, after listening to Malcolm’s list. “It sounds like the reasons for having them are because you feel you
should
, not because you really want them.”

“
Of course
I feel I should,” said Malcolm. “Don’t you ever feel like we’re all basically still living like children, Jude?”

“No,” he said. And he never had: his life was as far from his childhood as he could imagine. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

Malcolm had sighed. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He’d smiled. “I mean, I don’t really want them.”

He smiled back. “Well,” he said, “you can always wait. Maybe someday you can adopt a sad thirty-year-old.”

“Maybe,” Malcolm said again. “After all, I hear it
is
a trend in certain parts of the country.”

Now Alex excuses herself to help Rhodes in the kitchen, who has been calling her name with mounting urgency—“Alex. Alex!
Alex!
”—and
he turns to the person on his right, whom he doesn’t recognize from Rhodes’s other parties, a dark-haired man with a nose that looks like it’s been broken: it starts heading decisively in one direction before reversing directions, just as decisively, right below the bridge.

“Caleb Porter.”

“Jude St. Francis.”

“Let me guess: Catholic.”

“Let
me
guess: not.”

Caleb laughs. “You’re right about that.”

They talk, and Caleb tells him he’s just moved to the city from London, where he’s spent the past decade as the president of a fashion label, to take over as the new CEO at Rothko. “Alex very sweetly and spontaneously invited me yesterday, and I thought”—he shrugs—“why not? It’s this, a good meal with nice people, or sitting in a hotel room looking desultorily at real estate listings.” From the kitchen there is a timpani clatter of falling metal, and Rhodes swearing. Caleb looks at him, his eyebrows raised, and he smiles. “Don’t worry,” he reassures him. “This always happens.”

Over the remainder of the meal, Rhodes makes attempts to corral his guests into a group conversation, but it doesn’t work—the table is too wide, and he has unwisely seated friends near each other—and so he ends up talking to Caleb. He is forty-nine, and grew up in Marin County, and hasn’t lived in New York since he was in his thirties. He too went to law school, although, he says, he’s never used a day of what he learned at work.

“Never?” he asks. He is always skeptical when people say that; he is skeptical of people who claim law school was a colossal waste, a three-year mistake. Although he also recognizes that he is unusually sentimental about law school, which gave him not only his livelihood but, in many ways, his life.

Caleb thinks. “Well, maybe not
never
, but not in the way you’d expect,” he finally says. He has a deep, careful, slow voice, at once soothing and, somehow, slightly menacing. “The thing that actually
has
ended up being useful is, of all things, civil procedure. Do you know anyone who’s a designer?”

“No,” he says. “But I have a lot of friends who’re artists.”

“Well, then. You know how differently they think—the better the artist, the higher the probability that they’ll be completely unsuited
for business. And they really are. I’ve worked at five houses in the past twenty-odd years, and what’s fascinating is witnessing the patterns of behavior—the refusal to hew to deadlines, the inability to stay within budget, the near incompetence when it comes to managing a staff—that are so consistent you begin to wonder if lacking these qualities is something that’s a prerequisite to having the job, or whether the job itself encourages these sorts of conceptual gaps. So what you have to do, in my position, is construct a system of governance within the company, and then make sure it’s enforceable and punishable. I’m not quite sure how to explain it: you can’t tell them that it’s good business to do one thing or another—that means nothing to them, or at least to some of them, as much as they say they understand it—you have to instead present it as the bylaws of their own small universe, and convince them that if they don’t follow these rules, their universe will collapse. As long as you can persuade them of this, you can get them to do what you need. It’s completely maddening.”

“So why do you keep working with them?”

“Because—they
do
think so differently. It’s fascinating to watch. Some of them are essentially subliterate: you get notes from them and they can really barely construct a sentence. But then you watch them sketching, or draping, or just putting colors together, and it’s … I don’t know. It’s wondrous. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“No—I know exactly what you mean,” he says, thinking of Richard, and JB, and Malcolm, and Willem. “It’s as if you’re being allowed entrée into a way of thinking you don’t even have language to imagine, much less articulate.”

“That’s exactly right,” Caleb says, and smiles at him for the first time.

The dinner winds down, and as everyone’s drinking coffee, Caleb disentangles his legs from under the table. “I’m going to head off,” he says. “I think I’m still on London time. But it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“You, too,” he says. “I really enjoyed it. And good luck establishing a system of civil governance within Rothko.”

“Thanks, I’ll need it,” says Caleb, and then, as he’s about to stand, he stops and says, “Would you like to have dinner sometime?”

For a moment, he is paralyzed. But then he rebukes himself: he has nothing to fear. Caleb has just moved back to the city—he knows how
difficult it must be to find someone to talk to, how difficult it is to find friends when, in your absence, all your friends have started families and are strangers to you. It is talking, nothing more. “That’d be great,” he says, and he and Caleb exchange cards.

“Don’t get up,” Caleb says, as he starts to rise. “I’ll be in touch.” He watches as Caleb—who is taller than he had thought, at least two inches taller than he is, with a powerful-looking back—rumbles his goodbyes to Alex and Rhodes and then leaves without turning around.

He gets a message from Caleb the following day, and they schedule a dinner for Thursday. Late in the afternoon, he calls Rhodes to thank him for dinner, and ask him about Caleb.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even speak to him,” Rhodes says. “Alex invited him very last minute. This is exactly what I’m talking about with these dinner parties: Why is she inviting someone who’s taking over at a company she’s just leaving?”

“So you don’t know anything about him?”

“Nothing. Alex says he’s well-respected and that Rothko fought hard to bring him back from London. But that’s all I know. Why?” He can almost hear Rhodes smiling. “Don’t tell me you’re expanding your client base from the glamorous world of securities and pharma?”

“That’s
exactly
what I’m doing, Rhodes,” he says. “Thanks again. And tell Alex thanks as well.”

Thursday arrives, and he meets Caleb at an izakaya in west Chelsea. After they’ve ordered, Caleb says, “You know, I was looking at you all through that dinner and trying to remember where I knew you from, and then I realized—it was a painting by Jean-Baptiste Marion. The creative director at my last company owned it—actually, he tried to make the company pay for it, but that’s a different story. It’s a really tight image of your face, and you’re standing outside; you can see a streetlight behind you.”

“Right,” he says. This has happened to him a few times before, and he always finds it unsettling. “I know exactly the one you mean; it’s from ‘Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days’—the third series.”

“That’s right,” says Caleb, and smiles at him. “Are you and Marion close?”

“Not so much anymore,” he says, and as always, it hurts him to admit it. “But we were college roommates—I’ve known him for years.”

“It’s a great series,” Caleb says, and they talk about JB’s other work, and Richard, whose work Caleb also knows, and Asian Henry Young; and about the paucity of decent Japanese restaurants in London; and about Caleb’s sister, who lives in Monaco with her second husband and their huge brood of children; and about Caleb’s parents, who died, after long illnesses, when he was in his thirties; and about the house in Bridgehampton that Caleb’s law school classmate is letting him use this summer while he’s in L.A. And then there is enough talk of Rosen Pritchard, and the financial mess that Rothko has been left in by the departing CEO to convince him that Caleb is looking not just for a friend but potentially for representation as well, and he starts thinking about who at the firm should be responsible for the company. He thinks: I should give this to Evelyn, who is one of the young partners the firm nearly lost the previous year to, in fact, a fashion house, where she would have been their in-house counsel. Evelyn would be good for this account—she is smart and she is interested in the industry, and it would be a good match.

He is thinking this when Caleb abruptly asks, “Are you single?” And then, laughing, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Sorry,” he says, startled, but smiling back. “I am, yes. But—I was just having this very conversation with my friend.”

“And what did your friend say?”

“He said—” he begins, but then stops, embarrassed, and confused by the sudden shift of topic, of tone. “Nothing,” he says, and Caleb smiles, almost as if he has actually recounted the conversation, but doesn’t press him. He thinks then how he will make this evening into a story to tell Willem, especially this most recent exchange.
You win, Willem
, he’ll say to him, and if Willem tries to bring up the subject again, he decides he’ll let him, and that this time, he won’t evade his questions.

He pays and they walk outside, where it is raining, not heavily, but steadily enough so that there are no cabs, and the streets gleam like licorice. “I have a car waiting,” Caleb says. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

The car takes them downtown, and by the time they’ve reached Greene Street it’s pouring, so hard that they can no longer discern shapes through the window, just colors, spangles of red and yellow
lights, the city reduced to the honking of horns and the clatter of rain against the roof of the car, so loud that they can barely hear each other over the din. They stop and he’s about to get out when Caleb tells him to wait, he has an umbrella and will walk him into the building, and before he can object, Caleb is getting out and unsnapping an umbrella, and the two of them huddle beneath it and into the lobby, the door thudding shut behind him, leaving them standing in the darkened entryway.

“This is a hell of a lobby,” Caleb says, dryly, looking up at the bare bulb. “Although it
does
have a sort of end-of-empire chic,” and he laughs, and Caleb smiles. “Does Rosen Pritchard know you’re living in a place like this?” he asks, and then, before he can answer, Caleb leans in and kisses him, very hard, so that his back is pressed against the door, and Caleb’s arms make a cage around him.

In that moment, he goes blank, the world, his very self, erasing themselves. It has been a long, long time since anyone has kissed him, and he remembers the sense of helplessness he felt whenever it happened, and how Brother Luke used to tell him to just open his mouth and relax and do nothing, and now—out of habit and memory, and the inability to do anything else—that is what he does, and waits for it to be over, counting the seconds and trying to breathe through his nose.

Finally, Caleb steps back and looks at him, and after a while, he looks back. And then Caleb does it again, this time holding his face between his hands, and he has that sensation he always had when he was a child and was being kissed, that his body was not his own, that every gesture he made was predetermined, reflex after reflex after reflex, and that he could do nothing but succumb to whatever might happen to him next.

Caleb stops a second time and steps back again, looking at him and raising his eyebrows the way he had at Rhodes’s dinner, waiting for him to say something.

“I thought you were looking for legal representation,” he says at last, and the words are so idiotic that he can feel his face get hot.

But Caleb doesn’t laugh. “No,” he says. There is another long silence, and it is Caleb who speaks next. “Aren’t you going to invite me up?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, and he wishes, suddenly, for Willem,
although this is not the sort of problem that Willem has helped him with before, and in fact, probably not the sort of problem that Willem would even consider a problem at all. He knows what a stolid, careful person he is, and although that stolidity and sense of caution guarantee he will never be the most interesting, or provocative, or glittery person in any gathering, in any room, they have protected him so far, they have given him an adulthood free of sordidness and filth. 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. Maybe enough time has passed so it will be different. Maybe he is wrong, maybe Willem is right: maybe this isn’t an experience that is forbidden to him forever. Maybe he is less disgusting than he thinks. Maybe he really is capable of this. Maybe he won’t be hurt after all. Caleb seems, in that moment, to have been conjured, djinn-like, the offspring of his worst fears and greatest hopes, and dropped into his life as a test: On one side is everything he knows, the patterns of his existence as regular and banal as the steady plink of a dripping faucet, where he is alone but safe, and shielded from everything that could hurt him. On the other side are waves, tumult, rainstorms, excitement: everything he cannot control, everything potentially awful and ecstatic, everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of color. Inside him, the creature hesitates, perching on its hind legs, pawing the air as if feeling for answers.