Page 65 - A Little Life: A Novel

and Fifth. He would like to make his own money, he would. But he wasn’t
one of those rich kids who tortured himself about it. He would try to earn
his way, but it wasn’t wholly up to him.

Sex, and sexual fulfillment, however, was something he did have to take
responsibility for. He couldn’t blame his lack of a sex life on the fact that
he’d chosen a low-paying field, or on his parents for not properly
motivating him. (Or could he? As a child, Malcolm had had to endure his
parents’ long groping sessions—often conducted in front of him and Flora
—and he now wondered whether their show-offy competence had dulled
some competitive spirit within him.) His last real relationship had been

more than three years ago, with a woman named Imogene who dumped him
to become a lesbian. It was unclear to him, even now, whether he had
actually been physically attracted to Imogene or had simply been relieved to
have someone else make decisions that he had been happy to follow.
Recently, he had seen Imogene (also an architect, although at a public
interest group that built experimental low-income housing—exactly the sort

of job Malcolm felt he should want to have, even if he secretly didn’t) and
had teasingly told her—he had been joking!—that he couldn’t help but feel
that he had driven her to lesbianism. But Imogene had bristled and told him
that she had always been a lesbian and had stayed with him because he had
seemed so sexually confused that she thought she might be able to help
educate him.
But since Imogene, there had been no one. Oh, what was wrong with

him? Sex; sexuality: these too were things he should have sorted out in
college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but
encouraged. In his early twenties, he had tried falling in and out of love
with various people—friends of Flora’s, classmates, one of his mother’s
clients, a debut novelist who had written a literary roman à clef about being
a sexually confused firefighter—and yet still didn’t know to whom he might

be attracted. He often thought that being gay (as much as he also couldn’t
stand the thought of it; somehow it, like race, seemed the province of
college, an identity to inhabit for a period before maturing to more proper
and practical realms) was attractive mostly for its accompanying
accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace
of aesthetics. He was missing, it seemed, the sense of victimization and
woundedness and perpetual anger it took to be black, but he was certain he

possessed the interests that would be required if he were gay.