Page 168 - A Little Life: A Novel

first solo show, “The Boys,” a series of twenty-four paintings based on
photographs he’d taken of the three of them. As he’d promised years ago,
JB had let him see the pictures of him that he wanted to paint, and although

he had approved many of them (reluctantly: he had felt queasy even as he
did so, but he knew how important the series was to JB), JB had ultimately
been less interested in the ones he’d approved than in the ones he wouldn’t,
a few of which—including an image in which he was curled into himself in
bed, his eyes open but scarily unseeing, his left hand stretched open
unnaturally wide, like a ghoul’s claw—he alarmingly had no memory of JB
even taking. That had been the first fight: JB wheedling, then sulking, then

threatening, then shouting, and then, when he couldn’t change his mind,
trying to convince Willem to advocate for him.
“You realize I don’t actually owe you anything,” JB had told him once he
realized his negotiations with Willem weren’t progressing. “I mean, I don’t
technically have to ask your permission here. I could technically just paint
whatever the fuck I want. This is a courtesy I’m extending you, you know.”

He could’ve swamped JB with arguments, but he was too angry to do so.
“You promised me, JB,” he said. “That should be enough.” He could have
added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to
realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was
different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you
either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although
recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel

more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.
In the end, JB had had to admit defeat, although in the months before his
show opened, he had made occasional allusions to what he called his “lost
paintings,” great works he could’ve made had he, Jude, been less rigid, less
timid, less self-conscious, and (this was his favorite of JB’s arguments) less
of a philistine. Later, though, he would be embarrassed by his own

gullibility, by how he had trusted that his wishes would be respected.
The opening had been on a Thursday in late April shortly after his
thirtieth birthday, a night so unseasonably cold that the plane trees’ first
leaves had frozen and cracked, and rounding the corner onto Norfolk Street,
he had stopped to admire the scene the gallery made, a bright golden box of
light and shimmered warmth against the chilled flat black of the night.
Inside, he immediately encountered Black Henry Young and a friend of

theirs from law school, and then so many other people he knew—from