Page 176 - A Little Life: A Novel

“It’s a performance for you,” Willem had said. “It’s his way of telling you
he cares about you enough to try to impress you, without actually saying he
cares about you.”

He’d dismissed this right away: “I don’t think so, Willem.” But
sometimes, he pretended to himself that Willem might be right, feeling silly
and a little pathetic because of how happy the thought made him.
Willem was the only one coming to Thanksgiving this year: by the time
he and JB had reconciled, JB had already made plans to go to his aunts’
with Malcolm; when he’d tried to cancel, they had apparently been so irked
that he’d decided not to antagonize them further.

“What’s it going to be this year?” asked Willem. They were taking the
train up on Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving. “Elk? Venison?
Turtle?”
“Trout,” he said.
“Trout!” Willem replied. “Well, trout’s easy. We may actually end up
with trout this year.”

“He said he was going to stuff it with something, though.”
“Oh. I take it back.”
There were eight of them at dinner: Harold and Julia, Laurence and
Gillian, Julia’s friend James and his boyfriend Carey, and he and Willem.
“This is dynamite trout, Harold,” Willem said, cutting into his second
piece of turkey, and everyone laughed.
What was the point, he wondered, at which he had stopped feeling so

nervous and out of place at Harold’s dinners? Certainly, his friends had
helped. Harold liked sparring with them, liked trying to provoke JB into
making outrageous and borderline racist statements, liked teasing Willem
about when he was going to settle down, liked debating structural and
aesthetic trends with Malcolm. He knew Harold enjoyed engaging with
them, and that they enjoyed it too, and it gave him the chance to simply

listen to them being who they were without feeling the need to participate;
they were a fleet of parrots shaking their bright-colored feathers at one
another, presenting themselves to their peers without fear or guile.
The dinner was dominated by talk of James’s daughter, who was getting
married in the summer. “I’m an old man,” James moaned, and Laurence and
Gillian, whose daughters were still in college and spending the holiday at
their friend’s house in Carmel, made sympathetic noises.