Page 241 - A Little Life: A Novel

smiled at him. “There’re going to be a lot of you, you know.”
“I know,” he said, trying not to grimace. “So, Richard,” he said, changing
the subject, “how did you find this space? It’s incredible.”

“It’s mine.”
“Really? You own it? I’m impressed; that’s so adult of you.”
Richard laughed. “No, the building—it’s mine.” He explained: his
grandparents had an import business, and when his father and his aunt were
young, they had bought sixteen buildings downtown, all former factories, to
store their wares: six in SoHo, six in TriBeCa, and four in Chinatown.
When each of their four grandchildren turned thirty, they got one of the

buildings. When they turned thirty-five—as Richard had the previous year
—they got another. When they turned forty, they got a third. They would
get the last when they turned fifty.
“Did you get to choose?” he asked, feeling that particular mix of
giddiness and disbelief he did whenever he heard these kinds of stories:
both that such wealth existed and could be discussed so casually, and that

someone he had known for such a long time was in possession of it. They
were reminders of how naïve and unsophisticated he somehow still was—
he could never imagine such riches, he could never imagine people he knew
had such riches. Even all these years later, even though his years in New
York and, especially, his job had taught him differently, he couldn’t help but
imagine the rich not as Ezra or Richard or Malcolm but as they were
depicted in cartoons, in satires: older men, stamping out of cars with dark-

tinted windows and fat-fingered and plush and shinily bald, with skinny
brittle wives and large, polished-floor houses.
“No,” Richard grinned, “they gave us the ones they thought would best
suit our personalities. My grouchy cousin got a building on Franklin Street
that was used to store vinegar.”
He laughed. “What was this one used for?”

“I’ll show you.”
And so back in the elevator they went, up to the fourth floor, where
Richard opened the door and turned on the lights, and they were confronted
with pallets and pallets stacked high, almost to the ceiling, with what he
thought were bricks. “But not just bricks,” said Richard, “decorative terra-
cotta bricks, imported from Umbria.” He picked one up from an incomplete
pallet and gave it to him, and he turned the brick, which was glazed with a

thin, bright green finish, in his hand, running his palm over its blisters. “The