Page 299 - A Little Life: A Novel

birthday party and Phaedra’s new job, about people he’s talked to and what
they’ve said.
“Five and a half more months,” Willem says at the end of one

conversation.
“Five and a half more,” he repeats.
That Thursday he goes to dinner at Rhodes’s new apartment, which is
near Malcolm’s parents’ house, and which Rhodes had told him over drinks
in December is the source of all his nightmares: he wakes at night with
ledgers scrolling through his mind, the stuff of his life—tuition, mortgages,
maintenances, taxes—reduced to terrifyingly large figures. “And this is with

my parents’ help,” he’d said. “And Alex wants to have another kid. I’m
forty-five, Jude, and I’m already beat; I’m going to be working until I’m
eighty if we have a third.”
Tonight, he is relieved to see, Rhodes seems more relaxed, his neck and
cheeks pink. “Christ,” Rhodes says, “how do you stay so thin year after
year?” When they had met at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, fifteen years ago,

Rhodes had still looked like a lacrosse player, all muscle and sinew, but
since joining the bank, he has thickened, grown abruptly old.
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘scrawny,’ ” he tells Rhodes.
Rhodes laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says, “but I’d take scrawny at this
point.”
There are eleven people at dinner, and Rhodes has to retrieve his desk
chair from his office, and the bench from Alex’s dressing room. He

remembers this about Rhodes’s dinners: the food is always perfect, there are
always flowers on the table, and yet something always goes wrong with the
guest list and the seating—Alex invites someone she’s just met and forgets
to tell Rhodes, or Rhodes miscounts, and what is intended as a formal,
organized event becomes instead chaotic and casual. “Shit!” Rhodes says,
as he always does, but he’s always the only one who minds.

Alex is seated to his left, and he talks to her about her job as the public
relations director of a fashion label called Rothko, which she has just quit,
to Rhodes’s consternation. “Do you miss it yet?” he asks.
“Not yet,” she says. “I know Rhodes isn’t happy about it”—she smiles
—“but he’ll get over it. I just felt I should stay home while the kids are
young.”
He asks about the country house the two of them have bought in

Connecticut (another source of Rhodes’s nightmares), and she tells him