Page 301 - A Little Life: A Novel

“No,” he said. And he never had: his life was as far from his childhood as
he could imagine. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less
valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

Malcolm had sighed. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He’d
smiled. “I mean, I don’t really want them.”
He smiled back. “Well,” he said, “you can always wait. Maybe someday
you can adopt a sad thirty-year-old.”
“Maybe,” Malcolm said again. “After all, I hear it is a trend in certain
parts of the country.”
Now Alex excuses herself to help Rhodes in the kitchen, who has been

calling her name with mounting urgency—“Alex. Alex! Alex!”—and he
turns to the person on his right, whom he doesn’t recognize from Rhodes’s
other parties, a dark-haired man with a nose that looks like it’s been broken:
it starts heading decisively in one direction before reversing directions, just
as decisively, right below the bridge.
“Caleb Porter.”

“Jude St. Francis.”
“Let me guess: Catholic.”
“Let me guess: not.”
Caleb laughs. “You’re right about that.”
They talk, and Caleb tells him he’s just moved to the city from London,
where he’s spent the past decade as the president of a fashion label, to take
over as the new CEO at Rothko. “Alex very sweetly and spontaneously

invited me yesterday, and I thought”—he shrugs—“why not? It’s this, a
good meal with nice people, or sitting in a hotel room looking desultorily at
real estate listings.” From the kitchen there is a timpani clatter of falling
metal, and Rhodes swearing. Caleb looks at him, his eyebrows raised, and
he smiles. “Don’t worry,” he reassures him. “This always happens.”
Over the remainder of the meal, Rhodes makes attempts to corral his

guests into a group conversation, but it doesn’t work—the table is too wide,
and he has unwisely seated friends near each other—and so he ends up
talking to Caleb. He is forty-nine, and grew up in Marin County, and hasn’t
lived in New York since he was in his thirties. He too went to law school,
although, he says, he’s never used a day of what he learned at work.
“Never?” he asks. He is always skeptical when people say that; he is
skeptical of people who claim law school was a colossal waste, a three-year

mistake. Although he also recognizes that he is unusually sentimental about