Page 63 - A Little Life: A Novel

JB’s already flagging enthusiasm for the project—he was only eight days
into it, and Malcolm could see him at times almost wanting to explode into
talk with Willem—and he was able to last another two days before grandly

concluding the experiment a success and announcing that his point had been
made.
“What point?” Malcolm had asked. “That you can be as annoying to
white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?”
“Oh, fuck you, Mal,” said JB, but lazily, too triumphant to even engage
with him. “You wouldn’t understand.” And then he headed off to see his
boyfriend, a white guy with a face like a praying mantis’s who was always

regarding JB with a fervent and worshipful expression that made Malcolm
feel slightly sick.
At the time, Malcolm had been convinced that this racial discomfort he
felt was a temporary thing, a purely contextual sensation that was awakened
in everyone in college but then evaporated the further from it you moved.
He had never felt any particular agita about or pride in being black, except

in the most remote ways: he knew he was supposed to have certain feelings
about certain things in life (taxicab drivers, for one), but somehow that
knowledge was only theoretical, not anything he had experienced himself.
And yet blackness was an essential part of his family’s narrative, which had
been told and retold until it was worn to a shine: how his father had been
the third black managing director at his investment firm, the third black
trustee at the very white boys’ preparatory school that Malcolm had

attended, the second black CFO of a major commercial bank. (Malcolm’s
father had been born too late to be the first black anything, but in the
corridor in which he moved—south of Ninety-sixth Street and north of
Fifty-seventh; east of Fifth and west of Lexington—he was still as rare as
the red-tailed hawk that sometimes nested in the crenellations of one of the
buildings opposite theirs on Park Avenue.) Growing up, the fact of his

father’s blackness (and, he supposed, his own), had been trumped by other,
more significant matters, factors that counted for more in their slice of New
York City than his father’s race: his wife’s prominence in the Manhattan
literary scene, for example, and, most important, his wealth. The New York
that Malcolm and his family occupied was one divided not along racial
lines but rather tax brackets, and Malcolm had grown up insulated from
everything that money could protect him from, including bigotry itself—or

so it in retrospect seemed. In fact, it wasn’t until college that he was made