Page 257 - A Little Life: A Novel

for an intervention, even one as low-key and cozy as theirs had been (his
mother had provided his favorite cheesecake, which they all ate as they
discussed his flaws), because, among other things, he was still angry at

them. The month before, his grandmother had died, and his mother had
taken a whole day to call him. She claimed it was because she couldn’t find
him and he wasn’t picking up his phone, but he knew that the day she had
died he had been sober, and his phone had been on all day, and so he wasn’t
sure why his mother was lying to him.
“JB, Grandma would have been heartbroken if she knew what you’ve
become,” his mother said to him.

“God, Ma, just fuck off,” he’d said, wearily, sick of her wailing and
quivering, and Christine had popped up and slapped him across the face.
After that, he’d agreed to go see Giles (some friend of a friend of
Silvia’s) as a way of apologizing to Christine and, of course, to his mother.
Unfortunately, Giles truly was an idiot, and during their sessions (paid for
by his mother: he wasn’t going to waste his money on therapy, especially

bad therapy), he would answer Giles’s uninventive questions—Why do you
think you’re so attracted to drugs, JB? What do you feel they give you? Why
do you think your use of them has accelerated so much over the past few
years? Why do you think you’re not talking to Malcolm and Jude and
Willem as much?—with answers he knew would excite him. He would slip
in mentions of his dead father, of the great emptiness and sense of loss his
absence had inspired in him, of the shallowness of the art world, of his fears

that he would never fulfill his promise, and watch Giles’s pen bob
ecstatically over his pad, and feel both disdain for stupid Giles as well as
disgust for his own immaturity. Fucking with one’s therapist—even if one’s
therapist truly deserved to be fucked with—was the sort of thing you did
when you were nineteen, not when you were thirty-nine.
But although Giles was an idiot, JB did find himself thinking about his

questions, because they were questions that he had asked himself as well.
And although Giles posed each as a discrete quandary, he knew that in
reality each one was inseparable from the last, and that if it had been
grammatically and linguistically possible to ask all of them together in one
big question, then that would be the truest expression of why he was where
he was.
First, he’d say to Giles, he hadn’t set out to like drugs as much as he did.

That sounded like an obvious and even silly thing to say, but the truth was