A Little Life

  But although Giles was an idiot, JB did find himself thinking about his questions, because they were questions that he had asked himself as well. And although Giles posed each as a discrete quandary, he knew that in reality each one was inseparable from the last, and that if it had been grammatically and linguistically possible to ask all of them together in one big question, then that would be the truest expression of why he was where he was.

  First, he’d say to Giles, he hadn’t set out to like drugs as much as he did. That sounded like an obvious and even silly thing to say, but the truth was that JB knew people—mostly rich, mostly white, mostly boring, mostly unloved by their parents—who had in fact started taking drugs because they thought it might make them more interesting, or more frightening, or more commanding of attention, or simply because it made the time go faster. His friend Jackson, for example, was one of those people. But he was not. Of course, he had always done drugs—everyone had—but in college, and in his twenties, he had thought of drugs the way he thought of desserts, which he also loved: a consumable that had been forbidden to him as a child and which was now freely available. Doing drugs, like having post-dinner snacks of cereal so throat-singeingly sweet that the leftover milk in the bowl could be slurped down like sugarcane juice, was a privilege of adulthood, one he intended to enjoy.

  Questions two and three: When and why had drugs become so important to him? He knew the answers to those as well. When he was thirty-two, he’d had his first show. Two things had happened after that show: The first was that he had become, genuinely, a star. There were articles written about him in the art press, and articles written about him in magazines and newspapers read by people who wouldn’t know their Sue Williams from their Sue Coe. And the second was that his friendship with Jude and Willem had been ruined.

  Perhaps “ruined” was too strong a word. But it had changed. He had done something bad—he could admit it—and Willem had taken Jude’s side (and why should he have been surprised at all that Willem had taken Jude’s side, because really, when he reviewed their entire friendship, there was the evidence: time after time after time of Willem always taking Jude’s side), and although they both said they forgave him, something had shifted in their relationship. The two of them, Jude and Willem, had become their own unit, united against everyone, united against him (why had he never seen this before?): We two form a multitude. And yet he had always thought that he and Willem had been a unit.

  But all right, they weren’t. So who was he left with? Not Malcolm, because Malcolm had eventually started dating Sophie, and they made their own unit. And so who would be his partner, who would make his unit? No one, it often seemed. They had abandoned him.

  And then, with each year, they abandoned him further. He had always known he would be the first among the four of them to be a success. This wasn’t arrogance: he just knew it. He worked harder than Malcolm, he was more ambitious than Willem. (He didn’t count Jude in this race, as Jude’s profession was one that operated on an entirely different set of metrics, one that didn’t much matter to him.) He was prepared to be the rich one, or the famous one, or the respected one, and he knew, even as he was dreaming about his riches and fame and respect, that he would remain friends with all of them, that he would never forsake them for anyone else, no matter how overwhelming the temptation might be. He loved them; they were his.

  But he hadn’t counted on them abandoning him, on them outgrowing him through their own accomplishments. Malcolm had his own business. Jude was doing whatever he did impressively enough so that when he was representing JB in a silly argument he’d had the previous spring with a collector he was trying to sue to reclaim an early painting that the collector had promised he could buy back and then reneged on, the collector’s lawyer had raised his eyebrows when JB had told him to contact his lawyer, Jude St. Francis. “St. Francis?” asked the opposing lawyer. “How’d you get him?” He told Black Henry Young about this, who wasn’t surprised. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Jude’s known for being icy, and vicious. He’ll get it for you, JB, don’t worry.” This had startled him: His Jude? Someone who literally hadn’t been able to lift his head and look him in the eye until their sophomore year? Vicious? He simply couldn’t imagine it. “I know,” said Black Henry Young, when he expressed his disbelief. “But he becomes someone else at work, JB; I saw him in court once and he was borderline frightening, just incredibly relentless. If I hadn’t known him, I’d’ve thought he was a giant asshole.” But Black Henry Young had turned out to be right—he got his painting back, and not only that, but he got a letter of apology from the collector as well.

  And then, of course, there was Willem. The horrible, petty part of him had to admit that he had never, ever expected Willem to be as successful as he was. Not that he hadn’t wanted it for him—he had just never thought it would happen. Willem, with his lack of competitive spirit; Willem, with his deliberateness; Willem, who in college had turned down a starring role in Look Back in Anger to go tend to his sick brother. On the one hand, he had understood it, and on the other hand—his brother hadn’t been fatally ill, not then; even his own mother had told him not to come—he hadn’t. Where once his friends had needed him—for color, for excitement—they no longer did. He didn’t like to think of himself as someone who wanted his friends to be, well, not unsuccessful, but in thrall to him, but maybe he was.

  The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas. And yet here again, it seemed that Jude and Willem had something he didn’t, something that was protecting them from the suffocating ennui of being successful, from the tedium of waking up and realizing that you were a success and that every day you had to keep doing whatever it was that made you a success, because once you stopped, you were no longer a success, you were becoming a failure. He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had (though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?

  And that, he sometimes felt, was why he loved being high so much: not because it offered an escape from everyday life, as so many people thought, but because it made everyday life seem less everyday. For a brief period—briefer and briefer with each week—the world was splendid and unknown.

  At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike? Too often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been college; grad s
chool. And then they had, slowly but inevitably, become like everyone else. Take the members of Backfat: in school, they had marched topless, the three of them fat and luscious and jiggly, all the way down the Charles to protest cutbacks to Planned Parenthood (no one had been sure how the toplessness had been relevant, but whatever), and played amazing sets in the Hood Hall basement, and lit an effigy of an antifeminist state senator on fire in the Quad. But now Francesca and Marta were talking about having babies, and moving from their Bushwick loft into a Boerum Hill brownstone, and Edie was actually, actually starting a business for real this time, and last year, when he’d suggested they stage a Backfat reunion, they had all laughed, although he hadn’t been joking. His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

  Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand.

  But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn’t noticed earlier. Malcolm had always been conventional, of course, but he had expected, somehow, more from Willem and Jude. He knew how awful this sounded (and so he never said it aloud), but he often thought that he had been cursed with a happy childhood. What if, instead, something actually interesting had happened to him? As it was, the only interesting thing that had happened to him was that he had attended a mostly white prep school, and that wasn’t even interesting. Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have had nothing to write about. And then there was someone like Jude, who hadn’t grown up like everyone else, and didn’t look like everyone else, and yet who JB knew was constantly trying to make himself exactly like everyone else. He would have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp that was really more of a glide and to have the face and body that he did. But Jude spent most of his time trying to stand still and look down, as if by doing so, no one would notice he existed. This had been sad and yet somewhat understandable in college, when Jude had been so childlike and bony that it made JB’s joints hurt to look at him, but these days, now that he’d grown into his looks, JB found it simply enraging, especially as Jude’s self-consciousness often interfered with his own plans.

  “Do you want to spend your life just being completely average and boring and typical?” he’d once asked Jude (this was during their second big fight, when he was trying to get Jude to pose nude, an argument he’d known even before he’d begun it that he had no chance at all of winning).

  “Yes, JB,” Jude had said, giving him that gaze he sometimes summoned, which was intimidating, even slightly scary, in its flat blankness. “That’s in fact exactly what I want.”

  Sometimes he suspected that all Jude really wanted to do in life was hang out in Cambridge with Harold and Julia and play house with them. Last year, for example, JB had been invited on a cruise by one of his collectors, a hugely wealthy and important patron who had a yacht that plied the Greek islands and that was hung with modern masterpieces that any museum would have been happy to own—only they were installed in the bathroom of a boat.

  Malcolm had been working on his project in Doha, or somewhere, but Willem and Jude had been in town, and he’d called Jude and asked him if he wanted to go: The collector would pay their way. He would send his plane. It would be five days on a yacht. He didn’t know why he even needed to have a conversation. “Meet me at Teterboro,” he should’ve just texted them. “Bring sunscreen.”

  But no, he had asked, and Jude had thanked him. And then Jude had said, “But that’s over Thanksgiving.”

  “So?” he’d asked.

  “JB, thank you so much for inviting me,” Jude had said, as he listened in disbelief. “It sounds incredible. But I have to go to Harold and Julia’s.”

  He had been gobsmacked by this. Of course, he too was very fond of Harold and Julia, and like the others, he too could see how good they were for Jude, and how he’d become slightly less haunted with their friendship, but come on! It was Boston. He could always see them. But Jude said no, and that was that. (And then, of course, because Jude said no, Willem had said no as well, and in the end, he had ended up with the two of them and Malcolm in Boston, seething at the scene around the table—parental stand-ins; friends of the parental stand-ins; lots of mediocre food; liberals having arguments with one another about Democratic politics that involved a lot of shouting about issues they all agreed on—that was so clichéd and generic that he wanted to scream and yet held such bizarre fascination for Jude and Willem.)

  So which had come first: becoming close to Jackson or realizing how boring his friends were? He had met Jackson after the opening of his second show, which had come almost five years after his first. The show was called “Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked” and was exactly that: a hundred and fifty fifteen-by-twenty-two-inch paintings on thin pieces of board of the faces of everyone he had ever known. The series had been inspired by a painting he had done of Jude and given to Harold and Julia on the day of Jude’s adoption. (God, he loved that painting. He should have just kept it. Or he should have exchanged it: Harold and Julia would’ve been happy with a less-superior piece, as long as it was of Jude. The last time he had been in Cambridge, he had seriously considered stealing it, slipping it off its hook in the hallway and stuffing it into his duffel bag before he left.) Once again, “Everyone I’ve Ever Known” was a success, although it hadn’t been the series he had wanted to do; the series he had wanted to do was the series he was working on now.

  Jackson was another of the gallery’s artists, and although JB had known of him, he had never actually met him before, and was surprised, after being introduced to him at the dinner after the opening, how much he had liked him, how unexpectedly funny he was, because Jackson was not the type of person he’d normally gravitate toward. For one thing, he hated, really hated Jackson’s work: he made found sculptures, but of the most puerile and obvious sort, like a Barbie doll’s legs glued to the bottom of a can of tuna fish. Oh god, he’d thought, the first time he’d seen that on the gallery’s website. He’s being represented by the same gallery as I am? He didn’t even consider it art. He considered it provocation, although only a high-school student—no, a junior-high student—would consider it provocative. Jackson thought the pieces Kienholzian, which offended JB, and he didn’t even like Kienholz.

  For another, Jackson was rich: so rich that he had never worked a single day in his life. So rich that his gallerist had agreed to represent him (or so everyone said, and god, he hoped it was true) as a favor to Jackson’s father. So rich that his shows sold out because, it was rumored, his mother—who had divorced Jackson’s father, a manufacturer of some sort of essential widget of airplane machinery, when Jackson was young and married an inventor of some sort of essential widget of heart transplant surgeries—bought out all his shows and then auctioned the pieces, driving up the prices and then buying them back, inflating Jackson’s sales record. Unlike other rich people he knew—including Malcolm and Richard and Ezra—Jackson only rarely pretended not to be rich. JB had always found the others’ parsimoniousness put-on and irritating, but seeing Jackson once smack down a hundred-dollar bill for two candy bars when they were both high and giggly and starving at three in the morning, telling the cashier to keep the change, had sobered him. There was something obscene about how careless Jackson was with money, something that reminded JB that as much as he thought of himself otherwise, he too was boring, and conventional, and his mother’s son.

  For a third, Jackson wasn’t even good-looking. He suppo
sed he was straight—at any rate, there were always girls around, girls whom Jackson treated disdainfully and yet who drifted after him, lint-like, their faces smooth and empty—but he was the least sexy person JB had ever met. Jackson had very pale hair, almost white, and pimple-stippled skin, and teeth that were clearly once expensive-looking but had gone the color of dust and whose gaps were grouted with butter-yellow tartar, the sight of which repulsed JB.

  His friends hated Jackson, and as it became clear that Jackson and his own group of friends—lonely rich girls like Hera and sort-of artists like Massimo and alleged art writers like Zane, many of them Jackson’s classmates from the loser day school he’d gone to after failing out of every other private school in New York, including the one that JB had attended—were in his life to stay, they all tried to talk to him about Jackson.

  “You’re always going on about what a phony Ezra is,” Willem had said. “But how, exactly, is Jackson any different than Ezra, other than being a total fucking asshole?”

  And Jackson was an asshole, and around him, JB was an asshole as well. A few months ago, the fourth or fifth time he’d tried to stop doing drugs, he had called Jude one day. It was five in the afternoon, and he’d just woken up, and he felt so awful, so incredibly old and exhausted and just done—his skin slimy, his teeth furry, his eyes dry as wood—that he had wanted, for the first time, to be dead, to simply not have to keep going on and on and on. Something has to change, he told himself. I have to stop hanging around with Jackson. I have to stop. Everything has to stop. He missed his friends, he missed how innocent and clean they were, he missed being the most interesting among them, he missed never having to try around them.

  So he had called Jude (naturally, Willem wasn’t fucking in town, and Malcolm couldn’t be trusted not to freak out) and asked him, begged him, to come over after work. He told him where, exactly, the rest of the crystal was (under the loose half-plank of wood under the right side of the bed), and where his pipe was, and asked him to flush it down the toilet, to get rid of it all.