Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

“No,” he said. And he never had: his life was as far from his childhood as he could imagine. “That’s your dad talking, Mal. Your life won’t be any less valid, or any less legitimate, if you don’t have kids.”

Malcolm had sighed. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” He’d smiled. “I mean, I don’t really want them.”

He smiled back. “Well,” he said, “you can always wait. Maybe someday you can adopt a sad thirty-year-old.”

“Maybe,” Malcolm said again. “After all, I hear it is a trend in certain parts of the country.”

Now Alex excuses herself to help Rhodes in the kitchen, who has been calling her name with mounting urgency—“Alex. Alex! Alex! ”—and he turns to the person on his right, whom he doesn’t recognize from Rhodes’s other parties, a dark-haired man with a nose that looks like it’s been broken: it starts heading decisively in one direction before reversing directions, just as decisively, right below the bridge.

“Caleb Porter.”

“Jude St. Francis.”

“Let me guess: Catholic.”

“Let me guess: not.”

Caleb laughs. “You’re right about that.”

They talk, and Caleb tells him he’s just moved to the city from London, where he’s spent the past decade as the president of a fashion label, to take over as the new CEO at Rothko. “Alex very sweetly and spontaneously invited me yesterday, and I thought”—he shrugs—“why not? It’s this, a good meal with nice people, or sitting in a hotel room looking desultorily at real estate listings.” From the kitchen there is a timpani clatter of falling metal, and Rhodes swearing. Caleb looks at him, his eyebrows raised, and he smiles. “Don’t worry,” he reassures him. “This always happens.”

Over the remainder of the meal, Rhodes makes attempts to corral his guests into a group conversation, but it doesn’t work — the table is too wide, and he has unwisely seated friends near each other — and so he ends up talking to Caleb. He is forty-nine, and grew up in Marin County, and hasn’t lived in New York since he was in his thirties. He too went to law school, although, he says, he’s never used a day of what he learned at work.

“Never?” he asks. He is always skeptical when people say that; he is skeptical of people who claim law school was a colossal waste, a three-year mistake. Although he also recognizes that he is unusually sentimental about 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.

The dinner winds down, and as everyone’s drinking coffee, Caleb disentangles his legs from under the table. “I’m going to head off,” he says. “I think I’m still on London time. But it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“You, too,” he says. “I really enjoyed it. And good luck establishing a system of civil governance within Rothko.”

“Thanks, I’ll need it,” says Caleb, and then, as he’s about to stand, he stops and says, “Would you like to have dinner sometime?”

For a moment, he is paralyzed. But then he rebukes himself: he has nothing to fear. Caleb has just moved back to the city — he knows how difficult it must be to find someone to talk to, how difficult it is to find friends when, in your absence, all your friends have started families and are strangers to you. It is talking, nothing more. “That’d be great,” he says, and he and Caleb exchange cards.

“Don’t get up,” Caleb says, as he starts to rise. “I’ll be in touch.” He watches as Caleb — who is taller than he had thought, at least two inches taller than he is, with a powerful-looking back — rumbles his goodbyes to Alex and Rhodes and then leaves without turning around.

He gets a message from Caleb the following day, and they schedule a dinner for Thursday. Late in the afternoon, he calls Rhodes to thank him for dinner, and ask him about Caleb.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even speak to him,” Rhodes says. “Alex invited him very last minute. This is exactly what I’m talking about with these dinner parties: Why is she inviting someone who’s taking over at a company she’s just leaving?”

“So you don’t know anything about him?”

“Nothing. Alex says he’s well-respected and that Rothko fought hard to bring him back from London. But that’s all I know. Why?” He can almost hear Rhodes smiling. “Don’t tell me you’re expanding your client base from the glamorous world of securities and pharma?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Rhodes,” he says. “Thanks again. And tell Alex thanks as well.”

Thursday arrives, and he meets Caleb at an izakaya in west Chelsea. After they’ve ordered, Caleb says, “You know, I was looking at you all through that dinner and trying to remember where I knew you from, and then I realized — it was a painting by Jean-Baptiste Marion. The creative director at my last company owned it — actually, he tried to make the company pay for it, but that’s a different story. It’s a really tight image of your face, and you’re standing outside; you can see a streetlight behind you.”

“Right,” he says. This has happened to him a few times before, and he always finds it unsettling. “I know exactly the one you mean; it’s from ‘Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days’—the third series.”

“That’s right,” says Caleb, and smiles at him. “Are you and Marion close?”