Page 64 - A Little Life: A Novel

to truly confront the different ways in which blackness had been
experienced by other people, and, perhaps more stunningly, how apart his
family’s money had set him from the rest of the country (although this

assumed you could consider his classmates representative of the rest of the
country, which you of course couldn’t). Even today, almost a decade after
meeting him, he still had trouble comprehending the sort of poverty that
Jude had been raised in—his disbelief when he finally realized that the
backpack Jude had arrived to college with had contained, literally,
everything on earth in his possession had been so intense that it had been
almost physical, so profound that he had mentioned it to his father, and he

was not in the habit of revealing to his father evidence of his naïveté, for
fear of provoking a lecture about his naïveté. But even his father, who had
grown up poor in Queens—albeit with two working parents and a new set
of clothes every year—had been shocked, Malcolm sensed, although he had
endeavored to conceal it by sharing a story of his own childhood
deprivation (something about a Christmas tree that had to be bought the day

after Christmas), as if lack of privilege were a competition that he was still
determined to win, even in the face of another’s clear and inarguable
triumph.
However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one
was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core
of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if
clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an

outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its
potent apotheosis in college applications. At his age, the only truly
important aspects of one’s identity were sexual prowess; professional
accomplishments; and money. And in all three of these aspects, Malcolm
was also failing.
Money he set aside. He would someday inherit a huge amount. He didn’t

know how huge, and he had never felt the need to ask, and no one had ever
felt the need to tell him, which is how he knew it was huge indeed. Not
Ezra huge, of course, but—well, maybe it was Ezra huge. Malcolm’s
parents lived much more modestly than they might, thanks to his mother’s
aversions to garish displays of wealth, so he never knew if they lived
between Lexington and Park because they couldn’t afford to live between
Madison and Fifth, or whether they lived between Lexington and Park

because his mother would find it too ostentatious to live between Madison