Page 258 - A Little Life: A Novel

that JB knew people—mostly rich, mostly white, mostly boring, mostly
unloved by their parents—who had in fact started taking drugs because they
thought it might make them more interesting, or more frightening, or more

commanding of attention, or simply because it made the time go faster. His
friend Jackson, for example, was one of those people. But he was not. Of
course, he had always done drugs—everyone had—but in college, and in
his twenties, he had thought of drugs the way he thought of desserts, which
he also loved: a consumable that had been forbidden to him as a child and
which was now freely available. Doing drugs, like having post-dinner
snacks of cereal so throat-singeingly sweet that the leftover milk in the

bowl could be slurped down like sugarcane juice, was a privilege of
adulthood, one he intended to enjoy.
Questions two and three: When and why had drugs become so important
to him? He knew the answers to those as well. When he was thirty-two,
he’d had his first show. Two things had happened after that show: The first
was that he had become, genuinely, a star. There were articles written about

him in the art press, and articles written about him in magazines and
newspapers read by people who wouldn’t know their Sue Williams from
their Sue Coe. And the second was that his friendship with Jude and Willem
had been ruined.
Perhaps “ruined” was too strong a word. But it had changed. He had done
something bad—he could admit it—and Willem had taken Jude’s side (and
why should he have been surprised at all that Willem had taken Jude’s side,

because really, when he reviewed their entire friendship, there was the
evidence: time after time after time of Willem always taking Jude’s side),
and although they both said they forgave him, something had shifted in
their relationship. The two of them, Jude and Willem, had become their own
unit, united against everyone, united against him (why had he never seen
this before?): We two form a multitude. And yet he had always thought that

he and Willem had been a unit.
But all right, they weren’t. So who was he left with? Not Malcolm,
because Malcolm had eventually started dating Sophie, and they made their
own unit. And so who would be his partner, who would make his unit? No
one, it often seemed. They had abandoned him.
And then, with each year, they abandoned him further. He had always
known he would be the first among the four of them to be a success. This

wasn’t arrogance: he just knew it. He worked harder than Malcolm, he was