Rhodes laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says, “but I’d take scrawny at this point.”
There are eleven people at dinner, and Rhodes has to retrieve his desk chair from his office, and the bench from Alex’s dressing room. He remembers this about Rhodes’s dinners: the food is always perfect, there are always flowers on the table, and yet something always goes wrong with the guest list and the seating—Alex invites someone she’s just met and forgets to tell Rhodes, or Rhodes miscounts, and what is intended as a formal, organized event becomes instead chaotic and casual. “Shit!” Rhodes says, as he always does, but he’s always the only one who minds.
Alex is seated to his left, and he talks to her about her job as the public relations director of a fashion label called Rothko, which she has just quit, to Rhodes’s consternation. “Do you miss it yet?” he asks.
“Not yet,” she says. “I know Rhodes isn’t happy about it”—she smiles—“but he’ll get over it. I just felt I should stay home while the kids are young.”
He asks about the country house the two of them have bought in Connecticut (another source of Rhodes’s nightmares), and she tells him 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?”
“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.”