Page 169 - A Little Life: A Novel

college, and their various parties at Lispenard Street, and JB’s aunts, and
Malcolm’s parents, and long-ago friends of JB’s that he hadn’t seen in years
—that it had taken some time before he could push through the crowd to

look at the paintings themselves.
He had always known that JB was talented. They all did, everyone did:
no matter how ungenerously you might occasionally think of JB as a
person, there was something about his work that could convince you that
you were wrong, that whatever deficiencies of character you had ascribed to
him were in reality evidence of your own pettiness and ill-temper, that
hidden within JB was someone of huge sympathies and depth and

understanding. And that night, he had no trouble at all recognizing the
paintings’ intensity and beauty, and had felt only an uncomplicated pride in
and gratitude for JB: for the accomplishment of the work, of course, but
also for his ability to produce colors and images that made all other colors
and images seem wan and flaccid in comparison, for his ability to make you
see the world anew. The paintings had been arranged in a single row that

unspooled across the walls like a stave, and the tones JB had created—
dense bruised blues and bourbonish yellows—were so distinctly their own,
it was as if JB had invented a different language of color altogether.
He stopped to admire Willem and the Girl, one of the pictures he had
already seen and had indeed already bought, in which JB had painted
Willem turned away from the camera but for his eyes, which seemed to
look directly back at the viewer, but were actually looking at, presumably, a

girl who had been standing in Willem’s exact sightline. He loved the
expression on Willem’s face, which was one he knew very well, when he
was just about to smile and his mouth was still soft and undecided,
somehow, but the muscles around his eyes were already pulling themselves
upward. The paintings weren’t arranged chronologically, and so after this
was one of himself from just a few months ago (he hurried past the ones of

himself), and following that an image of Malcolm and his sister, in what he
recognized from the furniture was Flora’s long-departed first West Village
apartment (Malcolm and Flora, Bethune Street).
He looked around for JB and saw him talking to the gallery director, and
at that moment, JB straightened his neck and caught his eye, and gave him a
wave. “Genius,” he mouthed to JB over people’s heads, and JB grinned at
him and mouthed back, “Thank you.”