A Little Life (109 page)

The rest of the floor is given over to images from “The Boys,” and he walks slowly through the rooms, looking at pictures of Malcolm, of him, of Willem. Here are the two of them in their bedroom at Lispenard Street, both of them sitting on their twin beds, staring straight into JB’s camera, Willem with a small smile; here they are again at the card table, he working on a brief, Willem reading a book. Here they are at a party. Here they are at another party. Here he is with Phaedra; here Willem is with Richard. Here is Malcolm with his sister, Malcolm with his parents. Here is
Jude with Cigarette
, here is
Jude, After Sickness.
Here is a wall with pen-and-ink sketches of these images, sketches of them. Here are the photographs that inspired the paintings. Here is the photograph of him from which
Jude with Cigarette
was painted: here he is—that expression on his face, that hunch of his shoulders—a stranger to himself and yet instantly recognizable to himself as well.

The stairwells between the floors are densely hung with interstitial pieces, drawings and small paintings, studies and experimentations, that JB made between bodies of work. He sees the portrait JB made of him for Harold and Julia, for his adoption; he sees drawings of him in Truro, of him in Cambridge, of Harold and Julia. Here are the four of them; here are JB’s aunts and mother and grandmother; here is the Chief and Mrs. Irvine; here is Flora; here is Richard, and Ali, and the Henry Youngs, and Phaedra.

The next floor: “Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked”; “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days.” Behind him, around him, installers mill, making small adjustments with their white-gloved hands, standing back and staring at the walls. Once again he enters the stairwell. Once again he looks up, and there he sees, again and again, drawings of him: of his face, of him standing, of him in his wheelchair, of him with Willem, of him alone. These are pieces that JB had made when they weren’t speaking, when he had abandoned JB. There are drawings of other people as well, but they are mostly of him: him and Jackson. Again and again, Jackson and him, a checkerboard of the two of them. The images of him are wistful, faint, pencils and pen-and-inks and watercolors. The ones of Jackson are acrylics, thick-lined, looser and angrier. There is one drawing of him that is very small, on a postcard-size piece of paper, and when he examines it more closely, he sees that something had been written on it, and then erased: “Dear Jude,” he makes out, “please”—but there is nothing more after that word. He turns away, his breathing quick, and sees the watercolor of a camellia bush that JB had sent him when he was in the hospital, after he had tried to kill himself.

The next floor: “The Narcissist’s Guide to Self-Hatred.” This had been JB’s least commercially successful show, and he can understand why—to look at these works, their insistent anger and self-loathing, was to be both awed and made almost unbearably uncomfortable.
The Coon
, one painting was called;
The Buffoon; The Bojangler; The Steppin Fetchit
. In each, JB, his skin shined and dark, his eyes bulging and
yellowed, dances or howls or cackles, his gums awful and huge and fish-flesh pink, while in the background, Jackson and his friends emerge half formed from a gloom of Goyan browns and grays, all crowing at him, clapping their hands and pointing and laughing. The last painting in this series was called
Even Monkeys Get the Blues
, and it was of JB wearing a pert red fez and a shrunken red epauletted jacket, pantsless, hopping on one leg in an empty warehouse. He lingers on this floor, staring at these paintings, blinking, his throat shutting, and then slowly moves to the stairs a final time.

Then he is on the top floor, and here there are more people, and for a while he stands to the side, watching JB talking to the curators and his gallerist, laughing and gesturing. These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from “Frog and Toad,” and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB’s studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts—a second heart, a second brain—to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life.

He is staring at one of the paintings when JB finally sees him and comes over, and he hugs JB tightly and congratulates him. “JB,” he says. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Thanks, Judy,” JB says, smiling. “I’m proud of me too, goddammit.” And then he stops smiling. “I wish they were here,” he says.

He shakes his head. “I do too,” he manages to say.

For a while they are silent. Then, “Come here,” JB says, and grabs his hand and pulls him to the far side of the floor, past JB’s gallerist, who waves at him, past a final crate of framed drawings that are being unboxed, to a wall where a canvas is having its skin of bubble wrap carefully cut away from it. JB positions them before it, and when the plastic is unpeeled, he sees it is a painting of Willem.

The piece isn’t large—just four feet by three feet—and is horizonally oriented. It is by far the most sharply photorealistic painting JB has produced in years, the colors rich and dense, the brushstrokes that made Willem’s hair feathery-fine. The Willem in this painting looks like Willem did shortly before he died: he thinks he is seeing Willem in the months before or after shooting
The Dancer and the Stage
, for which his hair was longer and darker than it was in life. After
Dancer,
he decides, because the sweater he is wearing, a black-green the color of magnolia leaves, is one he remembers buying for Willem in Paris when he went to visit him there.

He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning toward something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant was happy. Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas, and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table; he knows it from the way JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name, then the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title—
Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street
—and he feels his breath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.

He is abruptly dizzy. “I need to sit,” he finally says, and JB takes him around the corner, to the other side of the wall where Willem will hang, where there’s a small cul-de-sac. He half sits atop one of the crates that’s been left here and hangs his head, resting his hands on his thighs. “I’m sorry,” he manages to say. “I’m sorry, JB.”

“It’s for you,” JB says, quietly. “When the show comes down, Jude. It’s yours.”

“Thank you, JB,” he says. He makes himself stand upright, feels everything within him shift. I need to eat something, he thinks. When was the last time he ate? Breakfast, he thinks, but yesterday. He reaches his hand out toward the crate to center himself, to stop the rocking he feels within his head and spine; he feels this sensation more and more frequently, a floating away, a state close to ecstasy.
Take me somewhere
, he hears a voice inside him say, but he doesn’t know to whom he is
saying this, or where he wants to go.
Take me, take me
. He is thinking this, crossing his arms over himself, when JB suddenly grabs him by his shoulders and kisses him on the mouth.

He wrenches away. “What the
hell
are you doing?” he asks, and he fumbles backward, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Jude, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything,” JB says. “You just look so—so sad.”

“So this is what you do?” he spits at JB, who steps toward him. “Don’t you
dare
touch me, JB.” In the background, he can hear the chatter of the installers, JB’s gallerist, the curators. He takes another step, this time toward the edge of the wall. I’m going to faint, he thinks, but he doesn’t.

“Jude,” JB says, and then, his face changing, “Jude?”

But he is moving away from him. “Get away from me,” he says. “Don’t touch me. Leave me alone.”

“Jude,” JB says in a low voice, following him, “you don’t look good. Let me help you.” But he keeps walking, trying to get away from JB. “I’m sorry, Jude,” JB continues. “I’m sorry.” He is aware of the pack of people moving as a clump to the other side of the floor, hardly noticing him leaving, JB next to him; it is as if they don’t exist.

Twenty more steps to the elevators, he estimates; eighteen more steps; sixteen; fifteen; fourteen. Beneath him, the floor has become a loosely spinning top, wobbling on its axis. Ten; nine; eight. “Jude,” says JB, who won’t stop talking, “let me help you. Why won’t you talk to me anymore?” He is at the elevator; he smacks the button with his palm; he leans against the wall, praying he’ll be able to stay upright.

“Get away from me,” he hisses at JB. “Leave me alone.”

The elevator arrives; the doors open. He steps toward them. His walk now is different: he still leads with his left leg, always, and he still lifts it unnaturally high—that hasn’t changed, that has been dictated by his injury. But he no longer drags his right leg, and because his prosthetic feet are so well-articulated—much more so than his own feet had been—he is able to feel the roll of his foot as it leaves the floor, the complicated, beautiful pat of it laying itself down on the ground again, section by section.

But when he is tired, when he is desperate, he finds himself unconsciously reverting to his old gait, with each foot landing flatly, slabbily, on the floor, with his right leg listing behind him. And as he steps into
the elevator he forgets that his steel-and-fiberglass legs are made for more nuance than he is allowing them, and he trips and falls. “Jude!” he hears JB call out, and because he is so weak, for a moment everything is dark and empty, and when he regains his vision, he sees that the flock of people have heard JB cry out, that they are now walking in his direction. He sees as well JB’s face above him, but he is too tired to interpret his expression.
Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story
, he thinks, and before him appears the painting: Willem’s face, Willem’s smile, but Willem isn’t looking at him, he is looking somewhere else. What if, he thinks, the Willem of the painting is in fact looking
for
him? He has a sudden urge to stand to the painting’s right, to sit in a chair in what would be Willem’s sightline, to never leave that painting by itself. There is Willem, imprisoned forever in a one-sided conversation. Here he is, in life, imprisoned as well. He thinks of Willem, alone in his painting, night after night in the empty museum, waiting and waiting for him to tell him a story.

Forgive me, Willem
, he tells Willem in his head.
Forgive me, but I have to leave you now. Forgive me, but I have to go
.

“Jude,” JB says. The elevator doors are closing, but JB reaches his arm out to him.

But he ignores it, works himself to his feet, leans into the corner of the elevator car. The people are very close now. Everyone moves so much faster than he does. “Stay away from me,” he says to JB, but he is quiet. “Leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”

“Jude,” JB says again. “I’m sorry.”

And he begins to say something else, but as he does, the elevator doors close—and he is left alone at last.

H
E DIDN
’
T BEGIN
it consciously, he really didn’t, and yet when he comprehends what he is doing, he doesn’t stop it, either. It is the middle of November, and he is getting out of the pool after his morning swim, and as he’s lifting himself up on the metal bars that Richard had had installed around the pool to help him get in and out of his wheelchair, the world disappears.

When he wakes again, it’s only ten minutes later. One moment it was six forty-five a.m., and he was pulling himself up; the next it is six fifty-five a.m., and he is prone on the black rubber floor, his arms reaching forward for the chair, his torso leaving a wet splotch on the ground. He groans, moving into a sitting position, and waits until the room rights itself again, before attempting—and this time, succeeding—to hoist himself up.

The second time comes a few days later. He has just gotten home from the office, and it is late. Increasingly, he has begun to feel as if Rosen Pritchard supplies him with his very energy, and once he leaves its premises, so too does his strength: the moment Mr. Ahmed shuts the back door of the car, he is asleep, and he doesn’t wake until he is delivered to Greene Street. But as he walks into the dark, quiet apartment that night, he is overcome by a sense of displacement, one so debilitating that for a moment he stops, blinking and confused, before he moves to the sofa in the living room and lies down. He means to just rest, just for a few minutes, just until he can stand again, but when he opens his eyes next it is day, and the living room is gray with light.

The third time is Monday morning. He wakes before his alarm, and although he is lying down, he feels everything around and within him roiling, as if he is a bottle half filled with water set adrift on an ocean of clouds. In recent weeks, he hasn’t had to drug himself at all on Sundays: he gets home from dinner with JB on Saturday, and climbs into bed, and only wakes when Richard comes to find him the next day. When Richard doesn’t come—as he hadn’t this Sunday; he and India are visiting her parents in New Mexico—he sleeps through the entire day, through the entire night. He dreams of nothing, and nothing wakes him.