A Little Life

  “JB,” Jude had said. “Listen to me. Go to that café on Clinton, okay? Take your sketch pad. Get yourself something to eat. I’m coming down as soon as I can, as soon as this meeting’s over. And then I’ll text you when I’m done and you can come home, all right?”

  “Okay,” he’d said. And he’d stood up, and taken a very long shower, hardly scrubbing himself, just standing under the water, and then had done exactly what Jude had instructed: He picked up his sketch pad and pencils. He went to the café. He ate some of a chicken club sandwich and drank some coffee. And he waited.

  And while he was waiting, he saw, passing the window like a bipedal mongoose, with his dirty hair and delicate chin, Jackson. He watched Jackson walk by, his self-satisfied, rich-boy lope, that pleased half smile on his face that made JB want to hit him, as detached as if Jackson was just someone ugly he saw on the street, not someone ugly he saw almost every day. And then, just before he passed out of sight, Jackson turned, and looked in the window, directly at him, and smiled his ugly smile, and reversed direction and walked back toward the café and through the door, as if he had known all along that JB was there, as if he had materialized only to remind JB that JB was his now, that there would be no escaping from him, that JB was there to do what Jackson wanted him to do when Jackson wanted him to do it, and that his life would never be his own again. For the first time, he had been scared of Jackson, and panicked. What has happened? he wondered. He was Jean-Baptiste Marion, he made the plans, people followed him, not the other way around. Jackson would never let him go, he realized, and he was frightened. He was someone else’s; he was owned now. How would he ever become un-owned? How could he ever return to who he was?

  “ ’Sup,” said Jackson, unsurprised to see him, as unsurprised as if he had willed JB into being.

  What could he say? “ ’Sup,” he said.

  Then his phone rang: Jude, telling him that all was safe, and he could come back. “I’ve got to go,” he said, standing, and as he left, Jackson followed him.

  He watched Jude’s expression change as he saw Jackson by his side. “JB,” he said, calmly, “I’m glad to see you. Are you ready to go?”

  “Go where?” he asked, stupidly.

  “Back to my place,” said Jude. “You said you’d help me reach that box I can’t get?”

  But he was so confused, still so muddled, that he hadn’t understood. “What box?”

  “The box on the closet shelf that I can’t reach,” Jude said, still ignoring Jackson. “I need your help; it’s too difficult for me to climb the ladder on my own.”

  He should’ve known, then; Jude never made references to what he couldn’t do. He was offering him a way out, and he was too stupid to recognize it.

  But Jackson did. “I think your friend wants to get you away from me,” he told JB, smirking. That was what Jackson always called them, even though he had met them all before: Your friends. JB’s friends.

  Jude looked at him. “You’re right,” he said, still in that calm, steady voice. “I do.” And then, turning back to him, “JB—won’t you come with me?”

  Oh, he wanted to. But in that moment, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t know why, not ever, but he couldn’t. He was powerless, so powerless that he couldn’t even pretend otherwise. “I can’t,” he whispered to Jude.

  “JB,” said Jude, and took his arm and pulled him toward the curb, as Jackson watched them with his stupid, mocking smile. “Come with me. You don’t have to stay here. Come with me, JB.”

  He had started crying then, not loudly, not steadily, but crying nonetheless. “JB,” Jude said again, his voice low. “Come with me. You don’t have to go back there.”

  But “I can’t,” he heard himself saying. “I can’t. I want to go upstairs. I want to go home.”

  “Then I’ll come in with you.”

  “No. No, Jude. I want to be alone. Thank you. But go home.”

  “JB,” Jude began, but he turned from him and ran, jamming the key into the front door and running up the stairs, knowing Jude wouldn’t be capable of following him, but with Jackson right behind him, laughing his mean laugh, while Jude’s calls—“JB! JB!”—trailed after him, until he was inside his apartment (Jude had cleaned while he was here: the sink was empty; the dishes were stacked in the rack, drying) and couldn’t hear him any longer. He turned off his phone, on which Jude was calling him, and muted the front-door buzzer’s intercom, on which Jude was ringing and ringing him.

  And then Jackson had cut the lines of coke he had brought and they had snorted them, and the night had become the same night he’d had hundreds of times before: the same rhythms, the same despair, the same awful feeling of suspension.

  “He is pretty, your friend,” he heard Jackson say at some point late that evening. “But too bad about—” And he stood and did an imitation of Jude’s walk, a lurching grotesquerie that looked nothing like it, his mouth slack like a cretin’s, his hands bobbling in front of him. He had been too high to protest, too high to say anything at all, and so he had only blinked and watched Jackson hobble around the room, trying to speak words in Jude’s defense, his eyes prickling with tears.

  The next day he had awoken, late, facedown on the floor near the kitchen. He stepped around Jackson, who was also asleep on the floor, near his bookcases, and went into his room, where he saw that Jude had made his bed as well, and something about that made him want to cry again. He lifted the plank under the right side of the bed, cautiously, and stuck his hand inside the space: there was nothing there. And so he lay atop the comforter, bringing one end of it over himself completely, covering the top of his head the way he used to when he was a child.

  As he tried to sleep, he made himself think of why he had fallen in with Jackson. It wasn’t that he didn’t know why; it was that he was ashamed to remember why. He had begun hanging out with Jackson to prove that he wasn’t dependent on his friends, that he wasn’t trapped by his life, that he could make and would make his own decisions, even if they were bad ones. By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller. Jackson was stupid and callow and cruel and not the sort of person he was supposed to value, who was supposed to be worth his time. He knew this. And that was why he kept at it: to dismay his friends, to show them that he wasn’t bound by their expectations of him. It was stupid, stupid, stupid. It was hubris. And he was the only one who was suffering because of it.

  “You can’t actually like this guy,” Willem had said to him once. And although he had known exactly what Willem meant, he had pretended not to, just to be a brat.

  “Why can’t I, Willem?” he’d asked. “He’s fucking hilarious. He actually wants to do things. He’s actually around when I need someone. Why can’t I? Huh?”

  It was the same with the drugs. Doing drugs wasn’t hard core, it wasn’t badass, it didn’t make him more interesting. But it wasn’t what he was supposed to do. These days, if you were serious about your art, you didn’t do drugs. Indulgence, the very idea of it, had disappeared, was a thing of the Beats and AbExes and the Ops and the Pops. These days, maybe you’d smoke some pot. Maybe, every once in a while, if you were feeling very ironic, you might do a line of coke. But that was it. This was an age of discipline, of deprivation, not inspiration, and at any rate inspiration no longer meant drugs. No one he knew and respected—Richard, Ali, Asian Henry Young—did them: not drugs, not sugar, not caffeine, not salt, not meat, not gluten, not nicotine. They were artists-as-ascetics. In his more defiant moments, he tried to pretend to himself that doing drugs was so passé, so tired, that it had actually become cool again. But he knew this wasn’t true. Just as he knew it wasn’t really true that he enjoyed the sex parties that sometimes convened in Jackson’s echoey apartment in Williamsburg, where shifting groups of soft skinny people groped blindly at one another, and where the first time a boy, too reedy and young and hairless to really be JB’s type, told him he wanted JB to watch him suck aw
ay his own blood from a cut he’d give himself, he had wanted to laugh. But he hadn’t, and had instead watched as the boy cut himself on his bicep and then twisted his neck to lap at the blood, like a kitten cleaning itself, and had felt a crush of sorrow. “Oh JB, I just want a nice white boy,” his ex and now-friend Toby had once moaned to him, and he smiled a little, remembering it. He did, too. All he wanted was a nice white boy, not this sad salamander-like creature, so pale he was almost translucent, licking blood from himself in what had to be the least-erotic gesture in the world.

  But of all the questions he was able to answer, there was one he was not: How was he to get out? How was he to stop? Here he was, literally trapped in his studio, literally peeking down the hallway to make sure Jackson wasn’t approaching. How was he to escape Jackson? How was he to recover his life?

  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.