Page 261 - A Little Life: A Novel

At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its
color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike? Too
often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been

college; grad school. And then they had, slowly but inevitably, become like
everyone else. Take the members of Backfat: in school, they had marched
topless, the three of them fat and luscious and jiggly, all the way down the
Charles to protest cutbacks to Planned Parenthood (no one had been sure
how the toplessness had been relevant, but whatever), and played amazing
sets in the Hood Hall basement, and lit an effigy of an antifeminist state
senator on fire in the Quad. But now Francesca and Marta were talking

about having babies, and moving from their Bushwick loft into a Boerum
Hill brownstone, and Edie was actually, actually starting a business for real
this time, and last year, when he’d suggested they stage a Backfat reunion,
they had all laughed, although he hadn’t been joking. His persistent
nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the
most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in

fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining
then. What had happened?
Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to
forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort
and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by
biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could
withstand.

But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his
friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn’t noticed earlier.
Malcolm had always been conventional, of course, but he had expected,
somehow, more from Willem and Jude. He knew how awful this sounded
(and so he never said it aloud), but he often thought that he had been cursed
with a happy childhood. What if, instead, something actually interesting had

happened to him? As it was, the only interesting thing that had happened to
him was that he had attended a mostly white prep school, and that wasn’t
even interesting. Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have had nothing to
write about. And then there was someone like Jude, who hadn’t grown up
like everyone else, and didn’t look like everyone else, and yet who JB knew
was constantly trying to make himself exactly like everyone else. He would
have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something

small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp