Page 63 of A Little Life
“Because—theydothink 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 howdifficult 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’sexactlywhat 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?”
“Not so much anymore,” he says, and as always, it hurts him to admit it. “But we were college roommates—I’ve known him for years.”
“It’s a great series,” Caleb says, and they talk about JB’s other work, and Richard, whose work Caleb also knows, and Asian Henry Young; and about the paucity of decent Japanese restaurants in London; and about Caleb’s sister, who lives in Monaco with her second husband and their huge brood of children; and about Caleb’s parents, who died, after long illnesses, when he was in his thirties; and about the house in Bridgehampton that Caleb’s law school classmate is letting him use this summer while he’s in L.A. And then there is enough talk of Rosen Pritchard, and the financial mess that Rothko has been left in by the departing CEO to convince him that Caleb is looking not just for a friend but potentially for representation as well, and he starts thinking about who at the firm should be responsible for the company. He thinks: I should give this to Evelyn, who is one of the young partners the firm nearly lost the previous year to, in fact, a fashion house, where she would have been their in-house counsel. Evelyn would be good for this account—she is smart and she is interested in the industry, and it would be a good match.
He is thinking this when Caleb abruptly asks, “Are you single?” And then, laughing, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Sorry,” he says, startled, but smiling back. “I am, yes. But—I was just having this very conversation with my friend.”
“And what did your friend say?”
“He said—” he begins, but then stops, embarrassed, and confused by the sudden shift of topic, of tone. “Nothing,” he says, and Caleb smiles, almost as if he has actually recounted the conversation, but doesn’t press him. He thinks then how he will make this evening into a story to tell Willem, especially this most recent exchange.You win, Willem, he’ll say to him, and if Willem tries to bring up the subject again, he decides he’ll let him, and that this time, he won’t evade his questions.
He pays and they walk outside, where it is raining, not heavily, but steadily enough so that there are no cabs, and the streets gleam like licorice. “I have a car waiting,” Caleb says. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“You don’t mind?”
“Not at all.”
The car takes them downtown, and by the time they’ve reached Greene Street it’s pouring, so hard that they can no longer discern shapes through the window, just colors, spangles of red and yellowlights, the city reduced to the honking of horns and the clatter of rain against the roof of the car, so loud that they can barely hear each other over the din. They stop and he’s about to get out when Caleb tells him to wait, he has an umbrella and will walk him into the building, and before he can object, Caleb is getting out and unsnapping an umbrella, and the two of them huddle beneath it and into the lobby, the door thudding shut behind him, leaving them standing in the darkened entryway.
“This is a hell of a lobby,” Caleb says, dryly, looking up at the bare bulb. “Although itdoeshave a sort of end-of-empire chic,” and he laughs, and Caleb smiles. “Does Rosen Pritchard know you’re living in a place like this?” he asks, and then, before he can answer, Caleb leans in and kisses him, very hard, so that his back is pressed against the door, and Caleb’s arms make a cage around him.
In that moment, he goes blank, the world, his very self, erasing themselves. It has been a long, long time since anyone has kissed him, and he remembers the sense of helplessness he felt whenever it happened, and how Brother Luke used to tell him to just open his mouth and relax and do nothing, and now—out of habit and memory, and the inability to do anything else—that is what he does, and waits for it to be over, counting the seconds and trying to breathe through his nose.
Finally, Caleb steps back and looks at him, and after a while, he looks back. And then Caleb does it again, this time holding his face between his hands, and he has that sensation he always had when he was a child and was being kissed, that his body was not his own, that every gesture he made was predetermined, reflex after reflex after reflex, and that he could do nothing but succumb to whatever might happen to him next.
Caleb stops a second time and steps back again, looking at him and raising his eyebrows the way he had at Rhodes’s dinner, waiting for him to say something.
