Page 264 - A Little Life: A Novel

For another, Jackson was rich: so rich that he had never worked a single
day in his life. So rich that his gallerist had agreed to represent him (or so
everyone said, and god, he hoped it was true) as a favor to Jackson’s father.

So rich that his shows sold out because, it was rumored, his mother—who
had divorced Jackson’s father, a manufacturer of some sort of essential
widget of airplane machinery, when Jackson was young and married an
inventor of some sort of essential widget of heart transplant surgeries—
bought out all his shows and then auctioned the pieces, driving up the prices
and then buying them back, inflating Jackson’s sales record. Unlike other
rich people he knew—including Malcolm and Richard and Ezra—Jackson

only rarely pretended not to be rich. JB had always found the others’
parsimoniousness put-on and irritating, but seeing Jackson once smack
down a hundred-dollar bill for two candy bars when they were both high
and giggly and starving at three in the morning, telling the cashier to keep
the change, had sobered him. There was something obscene about how
careless Jackson was with money, something that reminded JB that as much

as he thought of himself otherwise, he too was boring, and conventional,
and his mother’s son.
For a third, Jackson wasn’t even good-looking. He supposed he was
straight—at any rate, there were always girls around, girls whom Jackson
treated disdainfully and yet who drifted after him, lint-like, their faces
smooth and empty—but he was the least sexy person JB had ever met.
Jackson had very pale hair, almost white, and pimple-stippled skin, and

teeth that were clearly once expensive-looking but had gone the color of
dust and whose gaps were grouted with butter-yellow tartar, the sight of
which repulsed JB.
His friends hated Jackson, and as it became clear that Jackson and his
own group of friends—lonely rich girls like Hera and sort-of artists like
Massimo and alleged art writers like Zane, many of them Jackson’s

classmates from the loser day school he’d gone to after failing out of every
other private school in New York, including the one that JB had attended—
were in his life to stay, they all tried to talk to him about Jackson.
“You’re always going on about what a phony Ezra is,” Willem had said.
“But how, exactly, is Jackson any different than Ezra, other than being a
total fucking asshole?”
And Jackson was an asshole, and around him, JB was an asshole as well.

A few months ago, the fourth or fifth time he’d tried to stop doing drugs, he