Page 68 - A Little Life: A Novel

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IT WAS JB who decided that Willem and Jude should host a New Year’s Eve
party at their apartment. This was resolved at Christmas, which was a three-
part affair: Christmas Eve was held at JB’s mother’s place in Fort Greene,
and Christmas dinner itself (a formal, organized event, at which suits and
ties were required) was at Malcolm’s house, and succeeded a casual lunch
at JB’s aunts’ house. They had always followed this ritual—four years ago,
they had added Thanksgiving at Jude’s friends Harold and Julia’s house in

Cambridge to the lineup—but New Year’s Eve had never been assigned.
The previous year, the first post-school-life New Year’s that they had all
been in the same city at the same time, they had all ended up separate and
miserable—JB lodged at some lame party at Ezra’s, Malcolm stuck at his
parents’ friends’ dinner uptown, Willem trapped by Findlay into a holiday

shift at Ortolan, Jude mired in bed with the flu at Lispenard Street—and had
resolved to actually make plans for the next year. But they hadn’t, and
hadn’t, and then it was December and they still hadn’t done anything.
So they didn’t mind JB deciding for them, not in this case. They figured
they could accommodate twenty-five people comfortably, or forty
uncomfortably. “So make it forty,” said JB, promptly, as they’d known he
would, but later, back at their apartment, they wrote up a list of just twenty,

and only their and Malcolm’s friends, knowing that JB would invite more
people than were allotted him, extending invitations to friends and friends
of friends and not-even friends and colleagues and bartenders and shop
clerks, until the place grew so dense with bodies that they could open all the
windows to the night air and still not dispel the fog of heat and smoke that
would inevitably accumulate.

“Don’t make this complicated,” was the other thing JB had said, but
Willem and Malcolm knew that was a caution meant solely for Jude, who
had a tendency to make things more elaborate than was necessary, to spend
nights making batches of gougères when everyone would have been content
with pizza, to actually clean the place beforehand, as if anyone would care
if the floors were crunchy with grit and the sink was scummed with dried
soap stains and flecks of previous days’ breakfasts.