Page 59 - A Little Life: A Novel

of imitating Thomasson’s scowl and way of marching up and down the
length of the office when he wanted to perform for company, barking at no
one in particular (them, they supposed), “It’s ze vurk, gentlemen! It’s ze

vurk!” They made fun of the firm’s most senior principal, Dominick
Cheung, who was talented but who was becoming bitter (it was clear to
everyone but him that he would never be made a partner, no matter how
often Rausch and Thomasson promised him), and even of the projects they
worked on: the unrealized neo-Coptic church wrought from travertine in
Cappadocia; the house with no visible framework in Karuizawa that now
wept rust down its faceless glass surfaces; the museum of food in Seville

that was meant to win an award but didn’t; the museum of dolls in Santa
Catarina that never should’ve won an award but did. They made fun of the
schools they’d gone to—MIT, Yale, Rhode Island School of Design,
Columbia, Harvard—and how although they’d of course been warned that
their lives would be misery for years, how they had all of them, to a one,
assumed they’d be the exception (and now all, to a one, secretly thought

they still would be). They made fun of how little money they made, how
they were twenty-seven, thirty, thirty-two, and still lived with their parents,
a roommate, a girlfriend in banking, a boyfriend in publishing (a sad thing,
when you had to sponge off of your boyfriend in publishing because he
made more than you). They bragged of what they would be doing if they
hadn’t gone into this wretched industry: they’d be a curator (possibly the
one job where you’d make even less than you did now), a sommelier (well,

make that two jobs), a gallery owner (make it three), a writer (all right, four
—clearly, none of them were equipped to make money, ever, in any
imagining). They fought about buildings they loved and buildings they
hated. They debated a photography show at this gallery, a video art show at
another. They shouted back and forth at one another about critics, and
restaurants, and philosophies, and materials. They commiserated with one

another about peers who had become successes, and gloated over peers who
had quit the business entirely, who had become llama farmers in Mendoza,
social workers in Ann Arbor, math teachers in Chengdu.
During the day, they played at being architects. Every now and then a
client, his gaze helicoptering slowly around the room, would stop on one of
them, usually either Margaret or Eduard, who were the best-looking among
them, and Rausch, who was unusually attuned to shifts in attention away

from himself, would call the singled-out over, as if beckoning a child to the