Page 486 - A Little Life: A Novel

alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm’s
money wouldn’t immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and
he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all—

Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he
with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone,
something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the
world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.
These days, Malcolm works on fewer and fewer residences; in fact, they
see far less of him than they once did. Bellcast now has offices in London
and Hong Kong, and although Malcolm handles most of the American

business—he is now planning a new wing of the museum at their old
college—he is increasingly scarce. But he has overseen their house himself,
and he has never missed or rescheduled one of their appointments. As they
leave the property, he puts his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. “Mal,” he says,
“I can’t thank you enough,” and Malcolm smiles. “This is my favorite
project, Jude,” he says. “For my favorite people.”

Back in the city, he drops Malcolm off in Cobble Hill and then drives
over the bridge and north, to his office. This is the final piece of pleasure he
finds in Willem’s absences: because it means he can stay at work later, and
longer. Without Lucien, work is simultaneously more and less enjoyable—
less, because although he still sees Lucien, who has retired to a life of, as he
says, pretending to enjoy golf in Connecticut, he misses talking to him
daily, misses Lucien’s attempts to appall and provoke him; more, because

he has found that he enjoys chairing the department, that he enjoys being on
the firm’s compensation committee, deciding how the company’s profits
will be divvied up each year. “Who knew you were such a powermonger,
Jude?” Lucien asked him when he admitted this, and he had protested: it
wasn’t that, he told Lucien—it was that he took satisfaction in seeing what
had actually been brought in each year, how his hours and days at the office

—his and everyone else’s—had translated themselves into numbers, and
then those numbers into cash, and then that cash into the stuff of his
colleagues’ lives: their houses and tuitions and vacations and cars. (He
didn’t tell Lucien this part. Lucien would think he was being romantic, and
there would be a wry, ironic lecture on his tendency toward
sentimentalism.)
Rosen Pritchard had always been important to him, but after Caleb it had

become essential. In his life at the firm, he was assessed only by the