Page 300 - A Little Life: A Novel

about the renovation, which is grinding into its third summer, and he groans
in sympathy. “Rhodes said you were looking somewhere in Columbia
County,” she says. “Did you end up buying?”

“Not yet,” he says. It had been a choice: either the house, or he and
Richard were going to renovate the ground floor, make the garage usable
and add a gym and a small pool—one with a constant current, so you could
swim in place in it—and in the end, he chose the renovation. Now he swims
every morning in complete privacy; not even Richard enters the gym area
when he’s in it.
“We wanted to wait on the house, actually,” Alex admits. “But really, we

didn’t have a choice—we wanted the kids to have a yard while they were
little.”
He nods; he has heard this story before, from Rhodes. Often, it feels as if
he and Rhodes (and he and almost every one of his contemporaries at the
firm) are living parallel versions of adulthood. Their world is governed by
children, little despots whose needs—school and camp and activities and

tutors—dictate every decision, and will for the next ten, fifteen, eighteen
years. Having children has provided their adulthood with an instant and
nonnegotiable sense of purpose and direction: they decide the length and
location of that year’s vacation; they determine if there will be any leftover
money, and if so, how it might be spent; they give shape to a day, a week, a
year, a life. Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey
the map they present to you on the day they are born.

But he and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world
sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one’s
status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for
himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual
insecurity, of perpetual doubt. Or it is to some people—certainly it is to
Malcolm, who recently reviewed with him a list he’d made in favor of and

against having children with Sophie, much as he had when he was deciding
whether to marry Sophie in the first place, four years ago.
“I don’t know, Mal,” he said, after listening to Malcolm’s list. “It sounds
like the reasons for having them are because you feel you should, not
because you really want them.”
“Of course I feel I should,” said Malcolm. “Don’t you ever feel like
we’re all basically still living like children, Jude?”