A Little Life (40 page)

Harold didn’t really approve of his volunteer work, either; he could tell he thought it frivolous. “Are any of these artists any
good
?” Harold asked. “Probably not,” he said. But it wasn’t for him to judge whether the artists were good or not—other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as so many of them lived in a world that was deaf to practicalities. He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at: he considered them such successes, and he was proud of them. Unlike him, they had had no clear path to follow, and yet they had plowed stubbornly ahead. They spent their days making beautiful things.

His friend Richard was on the board of the organization, and some Wednesdays he’d stop by on his way home—he had recently moved to SoHo—and sit and talk with him if he was between clients, or just give him a wave across the room if he was occupied. One night after studio hours, Richard invited him back to his apartment for a drink, and they walked west on Broome Street, past Centre, and Lafayette, and Crosby, and Broadway, and Mercer, before turning south on Greene. Richard lived in a narrow building, its stone gone the color of soot, with a towering garage door marking its first floor and, to its right, a metal door with a face-size glass window cut into its top. There was no lobby, but rather a gray, tiled-floor hallway lit by a series of three glowing bare bulbs
dangling from cords. The hallway turned right and led to a cell-like industrial elevator, the size of their living room and Willem’s bedroom at Lispenard Street combined, with a rattling cage door that shuddered shut at the press of a button, but which glided smoothly up through an exposed cinder-block shaft. At the third floor, it stopped, and Richard opened the cage and turned his key into the set of massive, forbidding steel doors before them, which opened into his apartment.

“God,” he said, stepping into the space, as Richard flicked on some lights. The floors were whitewashed wood, and the walls were white as well. High above him, the ceiling winked and shone with scores of chandeliers—old, glass, new, steel—that were strung every three feet or so, at irregular heights, so that as they walked deeper into the loft, he could feel glass bugles skimming across the top of his head, and Richard, who was even taller than he was, had to duck so they wouldn’t scrape his forehead. There were no dividing walls, but near the far end of the space was a shallow, freestanding box of glass as tall and wide as the front doors, and as he drew closer, he could see that within it was a gigantic honeycomb shaped like a graceful piece of fan coral. Beyond the glass box was a blanket-covered mattress, and before it was a shaggy white Berber rug, its mirrors twinkling in the lights, and a white woolen sofa and television, an odd island of domesticity in the midst of so much aridity. It was the largest apartment he had ever been in.

“It’s not real,” said Richard, watching him look at the honeycomb. “I made it from wax.”

“It’s spectacular,” he said, and Richard nodded his thanks.

“Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the tour.”

He handed him a beer and then unbolted a door next to the refrigerator. “Emergency stairs,” he said. “I love them. They’re so—descent-into-hell looking, you know?”

“They are,” he agreed, looking into the doorway, where the stairs seemed to vanish into the gloom. And then he stepped back, suddenly uneasy and yet feeling foolish for being so, and Richard, who hadn’t seemed to notice, shut the door and bolted it.

They went down in the elevator to the second floor and into Richard’s studio, and Richard showed him what he was working on. “I call them misrepresentations,” he said, and let him hold what he had assumed was a white birch branch but was actually made from fired clay, and then a stone, round and smooth and lightweight, that
had been whittled from ash and lathe-turned but that gave the suggestion of solidity and heft, and a bird skeleton made of hundreds of small porcelain pieces. Bisecting the space lengthwise was a row of seven glass boxes, smaller than the one upstairs with the wax honeycomb but each still as large as one of the casement windows, and each containing a jagged, crumbling mountain of a sickly dark yellow substance that appeared to be half rubber, half flesh. “These are real honeycombs, or they were,” Richard explained. “I let the bees work on them for a while, and then I released them. Each one is named for how long they were occupied, for how long they were actually a home and a sanctuary.”

They sat on the rolling leather desk chairs that Richard worked from and drank their beers and talked: about Richard’s work, and about his next show, his second, that would open in six months, and about JB’s new paintings.

“You haven’t seen them, right?” Richard asked. “I stopped by his studio two weeks ago, and they’re really beautiful, the best he’s ever done.” He smiled at him. “There’re going to be a lot of you, you know.”

“I know,” he said, trying not to grimace. “So, Richard,” he said, changing the subject, “how did you find this space? It’s incredible.”

“It’s mine.”

“Really? You own it? I’m impressed; that’s so adult of you.”

Richard laughed. “No, the building—it’s mine.” He explained: his grandparents had an import business, and when his father and his aunt were young, they had bought sixteen buildings downtown, all former factories, to store their wares: six in SoHo, six in TriBeCa, and four in Chinatown. When each of their four grandchildren turned thirty, they got one of the buildings. When they turned thirty-five—as Richard had the previous year—they got another. When they turned forty, they got a third. They would get the last when they turned fifty.

“Did you get to choose?” he asked, feeling that particular mix of giddiness and disbelief he did whenever he heard these kinds of stories: both that such wealth existed and could be discussed so casually, and that someone he had known for such a long time was in possession of it. They were reminders of how naïve and unsophisticated he somehow still was—he could never imagine such riches, he could never imagine people he knew
had
such riches. Even all these years later, even though his years in New York and, especially, his job had taught him differently, he couldn’t help but imagine the rich not as Ezra or Richard or
Malcolm but as they were depicted in cartoons, in satires: older men, stamping out of cars with dark-tinted windows and fat-fingered and plush and shinily bald, with skinny brittle wives and large, polished-floor houses.

“No,” Richard grinned, “they gave us the ones they thought would best suit our personalities. My grouchy cousin got a building on Franklin Street that was used to store vinegar.”

He laughed. “What was this one used for?”

“I’ll show you.”

And so back in the elevator they went, up to the fourth floor, where Richard opened the door and turned on the lights, and they were confronted with pallets and pallets stacked high, almost to the ceiling, with what he thought were bricks. “But not
just
bricks,” said Richard, “decorative terra-cotta bricks, imported from Umbria.” He picked one up from an incomplete pallet and gave it to him, and he turned the brick, which was glazed with a thin, bright green finish, in his hand, running his palm over its blisters. “The fifth and sixth floors are full of them, too,” said Richard, “they’re in the process of selling them to a wholesaler in Chicago, and then those floors’ll be clear.” He smiled. “Now you see why I have such a good elevator in here.”

They returned to Richard’s apartment, back through the hanging garden of chandeliers, and Richard gave him another beer. “Listen,” he said, “I need to talk to you about something important.”

“Anything,” he said, placing the bottle on the table and leaning forward.

“The tiles will probably be out of here by the end of the year,” said Richard. “The fifth and sixth floors are set up exactly like this one—wet walls in the same place, three bathrooms—and the question is whether you’d want one of them.”

“Richard,” he said, “I’d love to. But how much are you charging?”

“I’m not talking about renting it, Jude,” said Richard. “I’m talking about buying it.” Richard had already talked to his father, who was his grandparents’ lawyer: they’d convert the building into a co-op, and he’d buy a certain number of shares. The only thing Richard’s family requested is that he or his heirs give them the right to buy the apartment back from him first if he ever decided to sell it. They would offer him a fair price, and he would pay Richard a monthly rent that would be applied toward his purchase. The Goldfarbs had done this before—his
grouchy cousin’s girlfriend had bought a floor of the vinegar building a year ago—and it had worked out fine. Apparently, they got some sort of tax break if they each converted one of their buildings into at least a two-unit co-op, and so Richard’s father was trying to get all of the grandchildren to do so.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked Richard, quietly, once he had recovered. “Why me?”

Richard shrugged. “It gets lonely here,” he said. “Not that I’m going to be stopping by all the time. But it’d be nice to know there’s another living being in this building sometimes. And you’re the most responsible of my friends, not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. And I like your company. Also—” He stopped. “Promise you won’t get mad.”

“Oh god,” he said. “But I promise.”

“Willem told me about what happened, you know, when you were trying to get upstairs last year and the elevator broke. It’s not anything to be embarrassed about, Jude. He’s just worried about you. I told him I was going to ask you about this anyway, and he thought—he thinks—it’s someplace you could live for a long time: forever. And the elevator will never break here. And if it does, I’ll be right downstairs. I mean—obviously, you can buy somewhere else, but I hope you’ll consider moving in here.”

In that moment he feels not angry but exposed: not just to Richard but to Willem. He tries to hide as much as he can from Willem, not because he doesn’t trust him but because he doesn’t want Willem to see him as less of a person, as someone who has to be looked after and helped. He wants Willem, wants them all, to think of him as someone reliable and hardy, someone they can come to with their problems, instead of him always having to turn to them. He is embarrassed, thinking of the conversations that have been had about him—between Willem and Andy, and between Willem and Harold (which he is certain happens more often than he fears), and now between Willem and Richard—and saddened as well that Willem is spending so much time worrying about him, that he is having to think of him the way he would have had to think of Hemming, had Hemming lived: as someone who needed care, as someone who needed decisions made for him. He sees the image of himself as an old man again: Is it possible it is also Willem’s vision, that the two of them share the same fear, that his ending seems as inevitable to Willem as it does to himself?

He thinks, then, of a conversation he had once had with Willem and Philippa; Philippa was talking about how someday, when she and Willem were old, they’d take over her parents’ house and orchards in southern Vermont. “I can see it now,” she said. “The kids’ll have moved back in with us, because they won’t be able to make it in the real world, and
they’ll
have six kids between them with names like Buster and Carrot and Vixen, who’ll run around naked and won’t be sent to school, and whom Willem and I will have to support until the end of time—”

“What will your kids do?” he asked, practical even in play.

“Oberon will make art installations using only food products, and Miranda will play a zither with yarn for strings,” said Philippa, and he had smiled. “They’ll stay in grad school forever, and Willem will have to keep working until he’s so broken down that I have to push him onto the set in a wheelchair”—she stopped, blushing, but carried on after a hitch—“to pay for all their degrees and experiments. I’ll have to give up costume design and start an organic applesauce company to pay all our debts and maintain the house, which’ll be this huge, glorious wreck with termites everywhere, and we’ll have a huge, scarred wooden table big enough to seat all twelve of us.”

“Thirteen,” said Willem, suddenly.

“Why thirteen?”

“Because—Jude’ll be living with us, too.”

“Oh, will I?” he asked lightly, but pleased, and relieved, to be included in Willem’s vision of old age.

“Of course. You’ll have the guest cottage, and every morning Buster will bring you your buckwheat waffles because you’ll be too sick of us to join us at the main table, and then after breakfast I’ll come hang out with you and hide from Oberon and Miranda, who’re going to want me to make intelligent and supportive comments about their latest endeavors.” Willem grinned at him, and he smiled back, though he could see that Philippa herself wasn’t smiling any longer, but staring at the table. Then she looked up, and their eyes met for half a second, and she looked away, quickly.

It was shortly after that, he thought, that Philippa’s attitude toward him changed. It wasn’t obvious to anyone but him—perhaps not even to her—but where he used to come into the apartment and see her sketching at the table and the two of them were able to talk, companionably, as he drank a glass of water and looked at her drawings, she would now
just nod at him and say, “Willem’s at the store,” or “He’s coming back soon,” even though he hadn’t asked (she was always welcome at Lispenard Street, whether Willem was there or not), and he would linger a bit until it was clear she didn’t want to speak, and then retreat to his room to work.

He understood why Philippa might resent him: Willem invited him everywhere with them, included him in everything, even in their retirement, even in Philippa’s daydream of their old age. After that, he was careful to always decline Willem’s invitations, even if it was to things that didn’t involve his and Philippa’s couplehood—if they were going to a party at Malcolm’s to which he was also invited, he’d leave separately, and at Thanksgiving, he made sure to ask Philippa to Boston as well, though she hadn’t come in the end. He had even tried to talk to Willem about what he sensed, to awaken him to what he was certain she was feeling.