Page 248 - A Little Life: A Novel

themselves lasers, something that was hovering over him and healing him,
the skin beneath them turning healthy and unmarked. Finally Andy told him
he could cover himself again, and he did, and turned back around. “I’m

really sorry, Jude,” Andy said, and this time, it was Andy who couldn’t look
at him.
“Do you want to grab something to eat?” Andy asked after the
appointment was over, as he was putting his clothes back on, but he shook
his head: “I should go back to the office.” Andy was quiet then, but as he
was leaving, he stopped him. “Jude,” he said, “I really am sorry. I don’t like
being the one who has to destroy your hopes.” He nodded—he knew Andy

didn’t—but in that moment, he couldn’t stand being around him, and
wanted only to get away.
However, he reminds himself—he is determined to be more realistic, to
stop thinking he can make himself better—the fact that he can’t get this
surgery means he now has the money for Malcolm to begin the renovation
in earnest. Over the years he has owned the apartment, he has witnessed

Malcolm grow both bolder and more imaginative in his work, and so the
plans he drew when he first bought the place have been changed and
revised and improved upon multiple times: in them, he can see the
development of what even he can recognize as an aesthetic confidence, a
self-assured idiosyncracy. Shortly before he began working at Rosen
Pritchard and Klein, Malcolm had quit his job at Ratstar, and with two of
his former colleagues and Sophie, an acquaintance of his from architecture

school, had founded a firm called Bellcast; their first commission had been
the renovation of the pied-à-terre of one of Malcolm’s parents’ friends.
Bellcast did mostly residential work, but last year they had been awarded
their first significant public commission, for a photography museum in
Doha, and Malcolm—like Willem, like himself—was absent from the city
more and more frequently.

“Never underestimate the importance of having rich parents, I guess,”
some asshole at one of JB’s parties had grumbled, sourly, when he heard
that Bellcast had been the runners-up in a competition to design a memorial
in Los Angeles for Japanese Americans who had been interned in the war,
and JB had started shouting at him before he and Willem had a chance; the
two of them had smiled at each other over JB’s head, proud of him for
defending Malcolm so vehemently.