A Little Life (45 page)

The night after he had made Jude get rid of his stash, he had finally called him back, and Jude had asked him over, and he had refused, and so Jude had come to him. He had sat and stared at the wall as Jude made him dinner, a shrimp risotto, handing him the plate and then leaning on the counter to watch him eat.

“Can I have more?” he asked when he was done with the first serving, and Jude gave it to him. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was, and his hand shook as he brought the spoon to his mouth. He thought
of Sunday-night dinners at his mother’s, which he hadn’t gone to since his grandmother died.

“Aren’t you going to lecture me?” he finally asked, but Jude shook his head.

After he ate, he sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound turned off, not really seeing anything but comforted by the flash and blur of images, and Jude had washed the dishes and then sat on the sofa near him, working on a brief.

One of Willem’s movies was on television—the one in which he played a con man in a small Irish town, whose entire left cheek was webbed with scars—and he stopped on the channel, not watching it, but looking at Willem’s face, his mouth moving silently. “I miss Willem,” he’d said, and then realized how ungrateful he sounded. But Jude had put down his pen and looked at the screen. “I miss him, too,” he said, and the two of them stared at their friend, so far away from them.

“Don’t go,” he’d said to Jude as he was falling asleep. “Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t,” Jude had said, and he knew Jude wouldn’t.

When he woke early the next morning, he was still on the sofa, and the television was turned off, and he was under his duvet. And there was Jude, huddled into the cushions on the other end of the sectional, still asleep. Some part of him had always been insulted by Jude’s unwillingness to divulge anything of himself to them, by his furtiveness and secretiveness, but in that moment he felt only gratitude toward and admiration for him, and had sat on the chair next to him, studying his face, which he so loved to paint, his sweep of complicated-colored hair that he could never see without remembering how much mixing, the number of shades it took to accurately represent it.

I can do this
, he told Jude, silently.
I can do this
.

Except he clearly couldn’t. He was in his studio, and it was still only one p.m., and he wanted to smoke so badly, so badly that in his head all he could see was the pipe, its glass frosted with leftover white powder, and it was only day one of his attempt not to do drugs, and already it was making
—he
was making—a mockery of him. Surrounding him were the only things he cared about, the paintings in his next series, “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days,” for which he had followed Malcolm, Jude, and Willem around for an entire day, photographing everything they did, and then chose eight to ten images from each of their days to
paint. He had decided to document a typical workday for each of them, all from the same month of the same year, and had labeled each painting with their name, location, and time of day he had shot the image.

Willem’s series had been the most far-flung: he had gone to London, where Willem had been on location filming something called
Latecomers
, and the images he had chosen were a mix of Willem off and on the set. He had favorites from each person’s take: for Willem, it was
Willem, London, October 8, 9:08 a.m.
, an image of him in the makeup artist’s chair, staring at his reflection in the mirror, while the makeup artist held his chin up with the fingertips of her left hand and brushed powder onto his cheeks with her right. Willem’s eyes were lowered, but it was still clear that he was looking at himself, and his hands were gripping the chair’s wooden arms as if he was on a roller coaster and was afraid he’d fall off if he let go. Before him, the counter was cluttered with wood-shaving curls from freshly sharpened eyebrow pencils that looked like tatters of lace, and open makeup palettes whose every hue was a shade of red, all the reds you could imagine, and wads of tissue with more red smeared on them like blood. For Malcolm, he had taken a long shot of him late at night, sitting at his kitchen counter at home, making one of his imaginary buildings out of squares of rice paper. He liked
Malcolm, Brooklyn, October 23, 11:17 p.m
. not so much for its composition or color but for more personal reasons: in college, he had always made fun of Malcolm for those small structures he built and displayed on his windowsill, but really he had admired them and had liked watching Malcolm compose them—his breaths slowed, and he was completely silent, and his constant nervousness, which at times seemed almost physical, an appendage like a tail, fell away.

He worked on all of them out of sequence, but he couldn’t quite get the colors the way he wanted them for Jude’s installment, and so he had the fewest and least of these paintings done. As he’d gone through the photos, he’d noticed that each of his friends’ days was defined, glossed, by a certain tonal consistency: he had been following Willem on the days he was shooting in what was supposed to be a large Belgravia flat, and the lighting had been particularly golden, like beeswax. Later, back in the apartment in Notting Hill that Willem was renting, he had taken pictures of him sitting and reading, and there, too, the light had been yellowish, although it was less like syrup and instead crisper, like the skin of a late-fall apple. By contrast, Malcolm’s world was bluish: his
sterile, white-marble-countertopped office on Twenty-second Street; the house he and Sophie had bought in Cobble Hill after they had gotten married. And Jude’s was grayish, but a silvery gray, a shade particular to gelatin prints that was proving very difficult to reproduce with acrylics, although for Jude’s he had thinned the colors considerably, trying to capture that shimmery light. Before he began, he had to first find a way to make gray seem bright, and clean, and it was frustrating, because all he wanted to do was paint, not fuss around with colors.

But getting frustrated with your paintings—and it was impossible not to think of your work as your colleague and co-participant, as if it was something that sometimes decided to be agreeable and collaborate with you, and sometimes decided to be truculent and unyielding, like a grouchy toddler—was just what happened. You had to just keep doing it, and doing it, and one day, you’d get it right.

And yet like his promise to himself—
You’re not going to make it!
squealed the taunting, dancing imp in his head;
You’re not going to make it!
—the paintings were making a mockery of him as well. For this series, he had decided he was going to paint a sequence of one of his days, too, and yet for almost three years, he had been unable to find a day worth documenting. He had tried—he had taken hundreds of pictures of himself over the course of dozens of days. But when he reviewed them, they all ended the same way: with him getting high. Or the images would stop in the early evening, and he’d know it was because he had gotten high, too high to keep taking pictures. And there were other things in those photographs that he didn’t like, either: he didn’t want to include Jackson in a documentation of his life, and yet Jackson was always there. He didn’t like the goofy smile he saw on his face when he was on drugs, he didn’t like seeing how his face changed from fat and hopeful to fat and avaricious as the day sank into night. This wasn’t the version of himself he wanted to paint. But increasingly, he had begun to think this was the version of himself he
should
paint: this was, after all, his life. This was who he now was. Sometimes he would wake and it would be dark and he wouldn’t know where he was or what time it was or what day it was. Days: even the very concept of a day had become a mockery. He could no longer accurately measure when one began or ended.
Help me
, he’d say aloud, in those moments.
Help me
. But he didn’t know to whom he was addressing his plea, or what he expected to happen.

And now he was tired. He had tried. It was one thirty p.m. on Friday, the Friday of July Fourth weekend. He put on his clothes. He closed his studio’s windows and locked the door and walked down the stairs of the silent building. “Chen,” he said, his voice loud in the stairwell, pretending he was broadcasting a warning to his fellow artists, that he was communicating to someone who might need his help. “Chen, Chen, Chen.” He was going home, he was going to smoke.

He woke to a horrible noise, the noise of machinery, of metal grinding against metal, and started screaming into his pillow to drown it out until he realized it was the buzzer, and then slowly brought himself to his feet, and slouched over to the door. “Jackson?” he asked, holding down the intercom button, and he heard how frightened he sounded, how tentative.

There was a pause. “No, it’s us,” said Malcolm. “Let us in.” He did.

And then there they all were, Malcolm and Jude and Willem, as if they had come to see him perform a show. “Willem,” he said. “You’re supposed to be in Cappadocia.”

“I just got back yesterday.”

“But you’re supposed to be gone until”—he knew this—“July sixth. That’s when you said you’d be back.”

“It’s July seventh,” Willem said, quietly.

He started to cry, then, but he was dehydrated and he didn’t have any tears, just the sounds. July seventh: he had lost so many days. He couldn’t remember anything.

“JB,” said Jude, coming close to him, “we’re going to get you out of this. Come with us. We’re going to get you help.”

“Okay,” he said, still crying. “Okay, okay.” He kept his blanket wrapped around him, he was so cold, but he allowed Malcolm to lead him to the sofa, and when Willem came over with a sweater, he held his arms up obediently, the way he had when he was a child and his mother had dressed him. “Where’s Jackson?” he asked Willem.

“Jackson’s not going to bother you,” he heard Jude say, somewhere above him. “Don’t worry, JB.”

“Willem,” he said, “when did you stop being my friend?”

“I’ve never stopped being your friend, JB,” Willem said, and sat down next to him. “You know I love you.”

He leaned against the sofa and closed his eyes; he could hear Jude and Malcolm talking to each other, quietly, and then Malcolm walking
toward the other end of the apartment, where his bedroom was, and the plank of wood being lifted and then dropped back into place, and the flush of the toilet.

“We’re ready,” he heard Jude say, and he stood, and Willem stood with him, and Malcolm came over to him and put his arm across his back and they shuffled as a group toward the door, where he was gripped by a terror: if he went outside, he knew he would see Jackson, appearing as suddenly as he had that day in the café.

“I can’t go,” he said, stopping. “I don’t want to go, don’t make me go.”

“JB,” Willem began, and something about Willem’s voice, about his very presence, made him in that moment irrationally furious, and he shook Malcolm’s arm off of him and turned to face them, energy flooding his body. “You don’t get a say in what I do, Willem,” he said. “You’re never here and you’ve never supported me and you never called me, and you don’t get to come in making fun of me—poor, stupid, fucked-up JB, I’m Willem the Hero, I’m coming in to save the day—just because you want to, okay? So leave me the fuck alone.”

“JB, I know you’re upset,” Willem said, “but no one’s making fun of you, least of all me,” but before he’d begun speaking, JB had seen Willem look over, quickly, and, it seemed, conspiratorially, at Jude, and for some reason this had made him even more livid. What had happened to the days when they all understood one another, when he and Willem had gone out every weekend, when they had returned the next day to share the night’s stories with Malcolm and Jude, Jude who never went anywhere, who never shared stories of his own? How had it happened that he was the one who was all alone? Why had they left him for Jackson to pick over and destroy? Why hadn’t they fought harder for him? Why had he ruined it all for himself? Why had they let him? He wanted to devastate them; he wanted them to feel as inhuman as he did.

“And you,” he said, turning to Jude. “You like knowing how fucked up I am? You like always being the person who gets to learn everyone else’s secrets, without ever telling us a single fucking thing? What do you think this is, Jude? You think you get to be a part of the club and you never have to say anything, you never have to tell us anything? Well, it doesn’t fucking work like that, and we’re all fucking sick of you.”

“That’s enough, JB,” Willem said sharply, grabbing his shoulder,
but he was strong suddenly, and he wrenched out of Willem’s grasp, his feet unexpectedly nimble, dancing toward the bookcase like a boxer. He looked at Jude, who was standing in silence, his face very still and his eyes very large, almost as if he was waiting for him to continue, waiting for JB to hurt him further. The first time he had painted Jude’s eyes, he had gone to a pet store to take photographs of a rough green snake because the colors were so similar. But in that moment they were darker, almost like a grass snake’s, and he wished, ridiculously, that he had his paints, because he knew that if he had them, he’d be able to get the shade exactly right without even having to try.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said to Jude again. And then, before he knew it, he was doing Jackson’s imitation of Jude, the hideous parody, his mouth open as Jackson had done it, making an imbecile’s moan, dragging his right leg behind him as if it were made of stone. “I’m Jude,” he slurred. “I’m Jude St. Francis.” For a few seconds, his was the only voice in the room, his movements the only movements, and in those seconds, he wanted to stop, but he couldn’t stop. And then Willem had run at him, and the last thing he had seen was Willem drawing his fist back, and the last thing he had heard was the cracking of bone.

He woke and didn’t know where he was. It was difficult to breathe. Something was on his nose, he realized. But when he tried to lift his hand to feel what it was, he couldn’t. And then he had looked down and seen that his wrists were in restraints, and he knew he was in the hospital. He closed his eyes and remembered: Willem had hit him. Then he remembered why, and he shut his eyes very tightly, howling but not making a noise.