Once, in Texas, one of his clients had been a man who was grotesque—so fat that his stomach had dropped into a pendant of flesh between his legs, and covered everywhere with floes of eczema, the skin so dry that when he moved, small ghostly strips of it floated from his arms and back and into the air. He had been sickened, seeing the man, and yet they all sickened him, and so in a way, this man was no better or worse than the others. As he had given the man a blow job, the man’s stomach pressing against his neck, the man had cried, apologizing to him: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he said, the tips of his fingers on the top of his head. The man had long fingernails, each as thick as bone, and he dragged them over his scalp, but gently, as if they were tines of a comb. And somehow, it is as if over the years he has become that man, and he knows that if anyone were to see him, they too would feel repulsed, nauseated by his deformities. He doesn’t want someone to have to stand before the toilet retching, as he had done afterward, scooping handfuls of liquid soap into his mouth, gagging at the taste, trying to make himself clean again.
So he will never have to do anything he doesn’t want to for food or shelter: he finally knows that. But what is he willing to do to feel less alone? Could he destroy everything he’s built and protected so diligently for intimacy? How much humiliation is he ready to endure? He doesn’t know; he is afraid of discovering the answer.
But increasingly, he is even more afraid that he will never have the chance to discover it at all. What does it mean to be a human, if he can never have this? And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him. He has a better life than so many people, a better life than he had ever thought he would have. To wish for companionship along with everything else he has seems a kind of greed, a gross entitlement.
The weeks pass. Willem’s schedule is erratic, and he calls him at odd hours: at one in the morning, at three in the afternoon. He sounds tired, but it isn’t in Willem’s nature to complain, and he doesn’t. He tells him about the scenery, the archaeological sites they’ve been given permission to shoot in, the little mishaps on set. When Willem is away, he is increasingly inclined to stay indoors and do nothing, which he knows isn’t healthy, and so he has been vigilant about filling his weekends with events, with parties and dinners. He goes to museum shows, and to plays with Black Henry Young and to galleries with Richard. Felix, whom he tutored so long ago, now helms a punk band called the Quiet Amerikans, and he makes Malcolm come with him to their show. He tells Willem about what he’s seen and what he’s read, about conversations with Harold and Julia, about Richard’s latest project and his clients at the nonprofit, about Andy’s daughter’s birthday party and Phaedra’s new job, about people he’s talked to and what they’ve said.
“Five and a half more months,” Willem says at the end of one conversation.
“Five and a half more,” he repeats.
That Thursday he goes to dinner at Rhodes’s new apartment, which is near Malcolm’s parents’ house, and which Rhodes had told him over drinks in December is the source of all his nightmares: he wakes at night with ledgers scrolling through his mind, the stuff of his life—tuition, mortgages, maintenances, taxes—reduced to terrifyingly large figures. “And this is with my parents’ help,” he’d said. “And Alex wants to have another kid. I’m forty-five, Jude, and I’m already beat; I’m going to be working until I’m eighty if we have a third.”
Tonight, he is relieved to see, Rhodes seems more relaxed, his neck and cheeks pink. “Christ,” Rhodes says, “how do you stay so thin year after year?” When they had met at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, fifteen years ago, Rhodes had still looked like a lacrosse player, all muscle and sinew, but since joining the bank, he has thickened, grown abruptly old.
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘scrawny,’ ” he tells Rhodes.
Rhodes laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says, “but I’d take scrawny at this point.”
There are eleven people at dinner, and Rhodes has to retrieve his desk chair from his office, and the bench from Alex’s dressing room. He remembers this about Rhodes’s dinners: the food is always perfect, there are always flowers on the table, and yet something always goes wrong with the guest list and the seating—Alex invites someone she’s just met and forgets to tell Rhodes, or Rhodes miscounts, and what is intended as a formal, organized event becomes instead chaotic and casual. “Shit!” Rhodes says, as he always does, but he’s always the only one who minds.
Alex is seated to his left, and he talks to her about her job as the public relations director of a fashion label called Rothko, which she has just quit, to Rhodes’s consternation. “Do you miss it yet?” he asks.
“Not yet,” she says. “I know Rhodes isn’t happy about it”—she smiles—“but he’ll get over it. I just felt I should stay home while the kids are young.”
He asks about the country house the two of them have bought in Connecticut (another source of Rhodes’s nightmares), and she tells him about the renovation, which is grinding into its third summer, and he groans in sympathy. “Rhodes said you were looking somewhere in Columbia County,” she says. “Did you end up buying?”
“Not yet,” he says. It had been a choice: either the house, or he and Richard were going to renovate the ground floor, make the garage usable and add a gym and a small pool—one with a constant current, so you could swim in place in it—and in the end, he chose the renovation. Now he swims every morning in complete privacy; not even Richard enters the gym area when he’s in it.
“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 m
ounting 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?”
A Little Life Page 38
