Page 217 - A Little Life: A Novel

“Right, except aliens. Although not even them—you kill them all in the
end, don’t you? But Willem, I love watching them, and so do so many other
people. That’s got to count for something, right? How many people get to

say that, that they can actually remove someone from his daily life?” And
when he didn’t answer: “You know, maybe we should stop going to these
parties; they’re becoming unhealthy exercises in masochism and self-
loathing for us both.” Jude turned to him and grinned. “At least you’re in
the arts. I might as well be working for an arms dealer. Dorothy Wharton
asked me tonight how it felt waking up each morning knowing I’d
sacrificed yet another piece of my soul the day before.”

Finally, he laughed. “No, she didn’t.”
“Yes, she did. It was like having a conversation with Harold.”
“Yeah, if Harold was a white woman with dreadlocks.”
Jude smiled. “As I said, like having a conversation with Harold.”
But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties:
because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had

to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to
create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive
by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of
fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same.
It also provided them an excuse to pretend that everything was fine with
JB, when they all three knew that something wasn’t. Willem couldn’t quite
identify what was wrong with him—JB could be, in his way, almost as

evasive as Jude when it came to certain conversations—but he knew that JB
was lonely, and unhappy, and uncertain, and that none of those sensations
were familiar ones to him. He sensed that JB—who had so loved college, its
structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to
navigate so well—was trying with every party to re-create the easy,
thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional

identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations
instead of divided by their daily realities. So he organized these outings, and
they all obediently followed as they had always done, giving him the small
kindness of letting him be the leader, the one who decided for them, always.
He would have liked to have seen JB one-on-one, just the two of them,
but these days, when he wasn’t with his college friends, JB ran with a
different crowd, one consisting mostly of art world hangers-on, who seemed

to be only interested in doing lots of drugs and then having dirty sex, and it