Page 58 - A Little Life: A Novel

First there was the life of the office you saw: forty of them in the main
room, each with their own desk, Rausch’s glass-walled room at one end,
closest to Malcolm’s desk, Thomasson’s glass-walled room at the other.

Between them: two walls of windows, one that looked over Fifth Avenue,
toward Madison Square Park, the other of which peered over Broadway, at
the glum, gray, gum-stamped sidewalk. That life existed officially from ten
a.m. until seven p.m., Monday through Friday. In this life, they did what
they were told: they tweaked models, they drafted and redrew, they
interpreted Rausch’s esoteric scribbles and Thomasson’s explicit, block-
printed commands. They did not speak. They did not congregate. When
clients came in to meet with Rausch and Thomasson at the long glass table

that stood in the center of the main room, they did not look up. When the
client was famous, as was more and more the case, they bent so low over
their desks and stayed so quiet that even Rausch began whispering, his
voice—for once—accommodating itself to the office’s volume.
Then there was the second life of the office, its real life. Thomasson was

less and less present anyway, so it was Rausch whose exit they awaited, and
sometimes they had to wait for a long time; Rausch, for all his partygoing
and press-courting and opining and traveling, was in reality a hard worker,
and although he might go out to an event (an opening, a lecture), he might
also return, and then things would have to be hastily reassembled, so that
the office he walked back into would resemble the office he had left. It was
better to wait for the nights he would disappear completely, even if it meant

waiting until nine or ten o’clock. They had cultivated Rausch’s assistant,
brought her coffees and croissants, and knew they could trust her
intelligence on Rausch’s arrivals and departures.
But once Rausch was definitively gone for the day, the office transformed
itself as instantaneously as a pumpkin into a carriage. Music was turned on
(they rotated among the fifteen of them who got to choose), and takeout

menus materialized, and on everyone’s computers, work for Ratstar
Architects was sucked back into digital folders, put to sleep, unloved and
forgotten, for the night. They allowed themselves an hour of waste, of
impersonating Rausch’s weird Teutonic boom (some of them thought he
was secretly from Paramus and had adopted the name—Joop Rausch, how
could it not be fake?—and the extravagant accent to obscure the fact that he
was boring and from Jersey and his name was probably Jesse Rosenberg),