Page 86 - A Little Life: A Novel

Aside from their stage-door visits, it felt like he never saw Willem these
days, and for all Willem talked about how lazy he was, it seemed he was
constantly at work, or trying to work: three years ago, on his twenty-ninth

birthday, he had sworn that he was going to quit Ortolan before he turned
thirty, and two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, the two of them had been
in the apartment, squashed into their newly partitioned living room, Willem
worrying about whether he could actually afford to leave his job, when he
got a call, the call he had been waiting for for years. The play that had
resulted from that call had been enough of a success, and had gotten Willem
enough attention, to allow him to quit Ortolan for good thirteen months

later: just one year past his self-imposed deadline. He had gone to see
Willem’s play—a family drama called The Malamud Theorem, about a
literature professor in the early throes of dementia, and his estranged son, a
physicist—five times, twice with Malcolm and JB, and once with Harold
and Julia, who were in town for the weekend, and each time he managed to
forget that it was his old friend, his roommate, onstage, and at curtain call,

he had felt both proud and wistful, as if the stage’s very elevation
announced Willem’s ascendancy to some other realm of life, one not easily
accessible to him.
His own approach to thirty had triggered no latent panic, no fluster of
activity, no need to rearrange the outlines of his life to more closely
resemble what a thirty-year-old’s life ought to be. The same was not true for
his friends, however, and he had spent the last three years of his twenties

listening to their eulogies for the decade, and their detailing of what they
had and hadn’t done, and the cataloging of their self-loathings and
promises. Things had changed, then. The second bedroom, for example,
was erected partly out of Willem’s fear of being twenty-eight and still
sharing a room with his college roommate, and that same anxiety—the fear
that, fairy-tale-like, the turn into their fourth decade would transform them

into something else, something out of their control, unless they preempted it
with their own radical announcements—inspired Malcolm’s hasty coming
out to his parents, only to see him retreat back in the following year when
he started dating a woman.
But despite his friends’ anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for
the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable
adulthood. (He looked forward to being thirty-five, when he would be able

to say he had been an adult for more than twice as long as he had been a