Page 240 - A Little Life: A Novel

like a graceful piece of fan coral. Beyond the glass box was a blanket-
covered mattress, and before it was a shaggy white Berber rug, its mirrors
twinkling in the lights, and a white woolen sofa and television, an odd

island of domesticity in the midst of so much aridity. It was the largest
apartment he had ever been in.
“It’s not real,” said Richard, watching him look at the honeycomb. “I
made it from wax.”
“It’s spectacular,” he said, and Richard nodded his thanks.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the tour.”
He handed him a beer and then unbolted a door next to the refrigerator.

“Emergency stairs,” he said. “I love them. They’re so—descent-into-hell
looking, you know?”
“They are,” he agreed, looking into the doorway, where the stairs seemed
to vanish into the gloom. And then he stepped back, suddenly uneasy and
yet feeling foolish for being so, and Richard, who hadn’t seemed to notice,
shut the door and bolted it.

They went down in the elevator to the second floor and into Richard’s
studio, and Richard showed him what he was working on. “I call them
misrepresentations,” he said, and let him hold what he had assumed was a
white birch branch but was actually made from fired clay, and then a stone,
round and smooth and lightweight, that had been whittled from ash and
lathe-turned but that gave the suggestion of solidity and heft, and a bird
skeleton made of hundreds of small porcelain pieces. Bisecting the space

lengthwise was a row of seven glass boxes, smaller than the one upstairs
with the wax honeycomb but each still as large as one of the casement
windows, and each containing a jagged, crumbling mountain of a sickly
dark yellow substance that appeared to be half rubber, half flesh. “These are
real honeycombs, or they were,” Richard explained. “I let the bees work on
them for a while, and then I released them. Each one is named for how long

they were occupied, for how long they were actually a home and a
sanctuary.”
They sat on the rolling leather desk chairs that Richard worked from and
drank their beers and talked: about Richard’s work, and about his next
show, his second, that would open in six months, and about JB’s new
paintings.
“You haven’t seen them, right?” Richard asked. “I stopped by his studio

two weeks ago, and they’re really beautiful, the best he’s ever done.” He