Page 171 - A Little Life: A Novel

over whatever issues he had with himself, he’d come to appreciate them,
and how it wasn’t even that big a deal, and how he really needed to confront
his insecurities, which were groundless anyway, and maybe this would

prove helpful in that process, and how everyone except him knew how
incredibly great-looking he was, and so shouldn’t that tell him something,
that maybe—no, definitely—he was the one who was wrong about himself,
and finally, how the pictures were already done, they were finished, and
what did he expect should happen? Would he be happier if they were
destroyed? Should he rip them off the wall and set them on fire? They had
been seen and couldn’t be un-seen, so why couldn’t he just accept it and get

over it?
“I’m not asking you to destroy them, JB,” he’d said, so furious and
dizzied by JB’s bizarre logic and almost offensive intractability that he
wanted to scream. “I’m asking you to apologize.”
But JB couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and finally he had gotten up and left, and
JB hadn’t tried to stop him.

After that, he simply stopped speaking to JB. Willem had made his own
approach, and the two of them (as Willem told him) had actually begun
shouting at each other in the street, and then Willem, too, had stopped
speaking to JB, and so from then on, they had to rely primarily on Malcolm
for news of JB. Malcolm, typically noncommittal, had admitted to them that
he thought JB was totally in the wrong, while at the same time suggesting
that they were both being unrealistic: “You know he’s not going to

apologize, Judy,” he said. “This is JB we’re talking about. You’re wasting
your time.”
“Am I being unreasonable?” he asked Willem after this conversation.
“No,” Willem said, immediately. “It’s fucked up, Jude. He fucked up, and
he needs to apologize.”
The show sold out. Willem and the Girl was delivered to him at work, as

was Willem and Jude, Lispenard Street, II, which Willem had bought. Jude,
After Sickness (the title, when he learned it, had made him so newly angry
and humiliated that for a moment he experienced what the saying “blind
with rage” meant) was sold to a collector whose purchases were considered
benedictions and predictive of future success: he only bought from artists’
debut shows, and almost every artist whose work he had bought had gone
on to have a major career. Only the show’s centerpiece, Jude with Cigarette,

remained unplaced, and this was due to a shockingly amateurish error, in