Page 417 - A Little Life: A Novel

to the airport for the flight to London. It had been so long since he had been
in New York, and he really wanted to go somewhere cheap and downtown
and homey, like the Vietnamese noodle place they had gone to when they

were in their twenties, but he instead picked a French restaurant known for
its seafood in midtown so Jude wouldn’t have to travel far.
The restaurant was filled with businessmen, the kinds of people who
telegraphed their wealth and power with the cut of their suits and the
subtlety of their watches: you had to be wealthy and powerful yourself in
order to understand what was being communicated. To everyone else, they
were men in gray suits, indistinguishable from one another. The hostess

brought him to Jude, who was there already, waiting, and when Jude stood,
he reached over and hugged him very close, which he knew Jude didn’t like
but which he had recently decided he would start doing anyway. They stood
there, holding each other, surrounded on either side by gray-suited men,
until he released Jude and they sat.
“Did I embarrass you enough?” he asked him, and Jude smiled and shook

his head.
There were so many things to discuss in so little time that Jude had
actually written an agenda on the back of a receipt, which he had laughed at
when he had seen it but which they ended up following fairly closely.
Between Topic Five (Malcolm’s wedding: What were they going to say in
their toasts?) and Topic Six (the progression of the Greene Street apartment,
which was being gutted), he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and as he

walked back to the table, he had the unsettling feeling that he was being
watched. He was of course used to being appraised and inspected, but there
was something different about the quality of this attention, its intensity and
hush, and for the first time in a long time, he was self-conscious, aware of
the fact that he was wearing jeans and not a suit, and that he clearly didn’t
belong. He became aware, in fact, that everyone was wearing a suit, and he

was the only one not.
“I think I’m wearing the wrong thing,” he said quietly to Jude as he sat
back down. “Everyone’s staring.”
“They’re not staring at you because of what you’re wearing,” Jude said.
“They’re staring at you because you’re famous.”
He shook his head. “To you and literally dozens of other people, maybe.”
“No, Willem,” Jude had said. “You are.” He smiled at him. “Why do you

think they didn’t make you wear a jacket? They don’t let just anyone waltz