Page 213 - A Little Life: A Novel

previous party. The two of them were looming interrogatively over Jude in
a way that made them appear proprietary and, in the candlelight, fierce, as if
Jude were a child who had just been caught breaking a licorice-edged

corner off their gingerbread house, and they were deciding whether to broil
him with prunes or bake him with turnips.
He tried, he’d later tell Jude, he really did; but he was at one end of the
room and Jude was at the other, and he kept getting stopped and tangled in
conversations with people he hadn’t seen in years and, more annoyingly,
people he had seen just a few weeks ago. As he pressed forward, he waved
at Malcolm and pointed in Jude’s direction, but Malcolm gave him a

helpless shrug and mouthed “What?” and he made a dismissive gesture
back: Never mind.
I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, as he pushed through the crowd,
but the truth was that he usually didn’t mind these parties, not really; a large
part of him even enjoyed them. He suspected the same might be true of
Jude as well, though perhaps to a lesser extent—certainly he did fine for

himself at parties, and people always wanted to talk to him, and although
the two of them always complained to each other about JB and how he kept
dragging them to these things and how tedious they were, they both knew
they could simply refuse if they really wanted to, and they both rarely did—
after all, where else would they get to use their semaphores, that language
that had only two speakers in the whole world?
In recent years, as his life had moved further from college and the person

he had been, he sometimes found it relaxing to see people from there. He
teased JB about how he had never really graduated from Hood, but in
reality, he admired how JB had maintained so many of his, and their,
relationships from then, and how he had somehow managed to
contextualize so many of them. Despite his collection of friends from long
ago, there was an insistent present tenseness to how JB saw and

experienced life, and around him, even the most dedicated nostalgists found
themselves less inclined to pick over the chaff and glitter of the past, and
instead made themselves contend with whoever the person standing before
them had become. He also appreciated how the people JB had chosen to
remain friendly with were, largely, unimpressed with who he had become
(as much as he could be said to have become anyone). Some of them
behaved differently around him now—especially in the last year or so—but

most of them were dedicated to lives and interests and pursuits that were so