Page 42 - A Little Life: A Novel

the shoulders and the two of them laughing into each other’s faces. It was in
these moments that he loved JB completely, his ability and willingness to be
wholly silly and frivolous, which he could never be with Malcolm or Jude

—Malcolm because he was, for all his talk otherwise, interested in
propriety, and Jude because he was serious.
Of course, this morning he had suffered. He woke in JB’s corner of
Ezra’s loft, on JB’s unmade mattress (nearby, on the floor, JB himself
snored juicily into a pile of peaty-smelling laundry), unsure how, exactly,
they’d gotten back over the bridge. Willem wasn’t normally a drinker or a
stoner, but around JB he occasionally found himself behaving otherwise. It

had been a relief to return to Lispenard Street, its quiet and clean, the
sunlight that baked his side of the bedroom hot and loafy between eleven
a.m. and one p.m. already slanting through the window, Jude long gone for
the day. He set his alarm and fell instantly asleep, waking with enough time
only to shower and swallow an aspirin before hurrying to the train.
The restaurant where he worked had made its reputation on both its food

—which was complicated without being challenging—and the consistency
and approachability of its staff. At Ortolan they were taught to be warm but
not familiar, accessible but not informal. “It’s not Friendly’s,” his boss,
Findlay, the restaurant’s general manager, liked to say. “Smile, but don’t tell
people your name.” There were lots of rules such as these at Ortolan:
Women employees could wear their wedding rings, but no other jewelry.
Men shouldn’t wear their hair longer than the bottom of their earlobes. No

nail polish. No more than two days’ worth of beard. Mustaches were to be
tolerated on a case-by-case basis, as were tattoos.
Willem had been a waiter at Ortolan for almost two years. Before
Ortolan, he had worked the weekend brunch and weekday lunch shift at a
loud and popular restaurant in Chelsea called Digits, where the customers
(almost always men, almost always older: forty, at least) would ask him if

he was on the menu, and then laugh, naughty and pleased with themselves,
as if they were the first people to ever ask him that, instead of the eleventh
or twelfth that shift alone. Even so, he always smiled and said, “Only as an
appetizer,” and they’d retort, “But I want an entrée,” and he would smile
again and they would tip him well at the end.
It had been a friend of his from graduate school, another actor named
Roman, who’d recommended him to Findlay after he’d booked a recurring

guest role on a soap opera and had quit. (He was conflicted about accepting