Page 302 - A Little Life: A Novel

law school, which gave him not only his livelihood but, in many ways, his
life.
Caleb thinks. “Well, maybe not never, but not in the way you’d expect,”

he finally says. He has a deep, careful, slow voice, at once soothing and,
somehow, slightly menacing. “The thing that actually has ended up being
useful is, of all things, civil procedure. Do you know anyone who’s a
designer?”
“No,” he says. “But I have a lot of friends who’re artists.”
“Well, then. You know how differently they think—the better the artist,
the higher the probability that they’ll be completely unsuited for business.

And they really are. I’ve worked at five houses in the past twenty-odd
years, and what’s fascinating is witnessing the patterns of behavior—the
refusal to hew to deadlines, the inability to stay within budget, the near
incompetence when it comes to managing a staff—that are so consistent
you begin to wonder if lacking these qualities is something that’s a
prerequisite to having the job, or whether the job itself encourages these

sorts of conceptual gaps. So what you have to do, in my position, is
construct a system of governance within the company, and then make sure
it’s enforceable and punishable. I’m not quite sure how to explain it: you
can’t tell them that it’s good business to do one thing or another—that
means nothing to them, or at least to some of them, as much as they say
they understand it—you have to instead present it as the bylaws of their
own small universe, and convince them that if they don’t follow these rules,

their universe will collapse. As long as you can persuade them of this, you
can get them to do what you need. It’s completely maddening.”
“So why do you keep working with them?”
“Because—they do think so differently. It’s fascinating to watch. Some of
them are essentially subliterate: you get notes from them and they can really
barely construct a sentence. But then you watch them sketching, or draping,

or just putting colors together, and it’s … I don’t know. It’s wondrous. I
can’t explain it any better than that.”
“No—I know exactly what you mean,” he says, thinking of Richard, and
JB, and Malcolm, and Willem. “It’s as if you’re being allowed entrée into a
way of thinking you don’t even have language to imagine, much less
articulate.”
“That’s exactly right,” Caleb says, and smiles at him for the first time.