Page 254 - A Little Life: A Novel

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THE LAST TIME JB tried—really tried—to stop doing drugs, it was Fourth of
July weekend. No one else was in the city. Malcolm was with Sophie
visiting her parents in Hamburg. Jude was with Harold and Julia in
Copenhagen. Willem was shooting in Cappadocia. Richard was in
Wyoming, at an artists’ colony. Asian Henry Young was in Reykjavík. Only
he remained, and if he hadn’t been so determined, he wouldn’t have been in
town, either. He’d have been in Beacon, where Richard had a house, or in

Quogue, where Ezra had a house, or in Woodstock, where Ali had a house,
or—well. There weren’t that many other people who would give him their
house nowadays, and besides, he wasn’t talking to most of them because
they were getting on his nerves. But he hated summer in New York. All fat
people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to

everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry. And
yet there he was, unlocking the door of his studio on the third floor of the
white brick building in Kensington, glancing involuntarily toward the end
of the hall, where Jackson’s studio was, before he let himself in.
JB was not an addict. Yes, he did drugs. Yes, he did a lot of them. But he
wasn’t an addict. Other people were addicts. Jackson was an addict. So was
Zane, and so was Hera. Massimo and Topher: also addicts. Sometimes it

felt like he was the only one who hadn’t slipped over the edge.
And yet he knew that a lot of people thought he had, which is why he
was still in the city when he should be in the country: four days, no drugs,
only work—and then no one would be able to say anything ever again.
Today, Friday, was day one. The air-conditioning unit in his studio was
broken, so the first thing he did was open all the windows and then, once he

had knocked, lightly, on Jackson’s door to make sure he wasn’t inside, the
door as well. Normally he never opened the door, both because of Jackson
and because of the noise. His studio was one of fourteen rooms on the third
floor of a five-story building. The rooms were meant to be used only as
studio space, but he guessed about twenty percent of the building’s
occupants actually lived there illegally. On the rare occasions he had arrived
at his studio before ten in the morning, he would see people shuffling