A Little Life

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason had said when Malcolm had told him of his decision. “You realize what your life is going to be like as an associate at a place like that, don’t you?”

“It’s a great firm,” he’d said, staunchly, sounding like his mother, and Jason had rolled his eyes. “I mean, it’s a great name to have on my résumé.” But even as he said it, he knew (and, worse, feared Jason knew as well) what he really meant: it was a great name for his parents to say at cocktail parties. And, indeed, his parents liked to say it. “Two kids,” Malcolm had overheard his father say to someone at a di

And now? Now Jason and Sonal had had two projects appear in New York and one in The New York Times, while he was still doing the sort of work he had done in his first year of architecture school, working for two pretentious men at a firm they had pretentiously named after a pretentious A

He had gone to architecture school for the worst reason of all, it seemed: because he loved buildings. It had been a respectable passion, and when he was a child, his parents had indulged him with tours of houses, of monuments wherever they had traveled. Even as a very young boy, he had always drawn imaginary buildings, built imaginary structures: they were a comfort and they were a repository—everything he was unable to articulate, everything he was unable to decide, he could, it seemed, resolve in a building.

And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and pla

It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his. But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler’s perfect knife edge.

3

IT WAS JB who decided that Willem and Jude should host a New Year’s Eve party at their apartment. This was resolved at Christmas, which was a three-part affair: Christmas Eve was held at JB’s mother’s place in Fort Greene, and Christmas di

So they didn’t mind JB deciding for them, not in this case. They figured they could accommodate twenty-five people comfortably, or forty uncomfortably. “So make it forty,” said JB, promptly, as they’d known he would, but later, back at their apartment, they wrote up a list of just twenty, and only their and Malcolm’s friends, knowing that JB would invite more people than were allotted him, extending invitations to friends and friends of friends and not-even friends and colleagues and bartenders and shop clerks, until the place grew so dense with bodies that they could open all the windows to the night air and still not dispel the fog of heat and smoke that would inevitably accumulate.

“Don’t make this complicated,” was the other thing JB had said, but Willem and Malcolm knew that was a caution meant solely for Jude, who had a tendency to make things more elaborate than was necessary, to spend nights making batches of gougères when everyone would have been content with pizza, to actually clean the place beforehand, as if anyone would care if the floors were crunchy with grit and the sink was scummed with dried soap stains and flecks of previous days’ breakfasts.

The night before the party was unseasonably warm, warm enough that Willem walked the two miles from Ortolan to the apartment, which was so thick with its rich butter scents of cheese and dough and fe

When he woke, though, the weather had turned again, and it took him a moment to realize that he had been shivering, and that the sounds in his dream had been of wind, and that he was being shaken awake, and that his name was being repeated, not by birds but by a human voice: “Willem, Willem.”

He turned over and propped himself up on his elbows, but was able to register Jude only in segments: his face first, and then the fact that he was holding his left arm before him with his right hand, and that he had cocooned it with something—his towel, he realized—which was so white in the gloom that it seemed a source of light itself, and he stared at it, transfixed.

“Willem, I’m sorry,” said Jude, and his voice was so calm that for a few seconds, he thought it was a dream, and stopped listening, and Jude had to repeat himself. “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry. I need you to take me to Andy’s.”

Finally he woke. “What kind of accident?”

“I cut myself. It was an accident.” He paused. “Will you take me?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, but he was still confused, still asleep, and it was without understanding that he fumblingly dressed, and joined Jude in the hallway, where he was waiting, and then walked with him up to Canal, where he turned for the subway before Jude pulled him back: “I think we need a cab.”