Page 270 - A Little Life: A Novel

but in that moment he felt only gratitude toward and admiration for him,
and had sat on the chair next to him, studying his face, which he so loved to
paint, his sweep of complicated-colored hair that he could never see without

remembering how much mixing, the number of shades it took to accurately
represent it.
I can do this, he told Jude, silently. I can do this.
Except he clearly couldn’t. He was in his studio, and it was still only one
p.m., and he wanted to smoke so badly, so badly that in his head all he
could see was the pipe, its glass frosted with leftover white powder, and it
was only day one of his attempt not to do drugs, and already it was making

—he was making—a mockery of him. Surrounding him were the only
things he cared about, the paintings in his next series, “Seconds, Minutes,
Hours, Days,” for which he had followed Malcolm, Jude, and Willem
around for an entire day, photographing everything they did, and then chose
eight to ten images from each of their days to paint. He had decided to
document a typical workday for each of them, all from the same month of

the same year, and had labeled each painting with their name, location, and
time of day he had shot the image.
Willem’s series had been the most far-flung: he had gone to London,
where Willem had been on location filming something called Latecomers,
and the images he had chosen were a mix of Willem off and on the set. He
had favorites from each person’s take: for Willem, it was Willem, London,
October 8, 9:08 a.m., an image of him in the makeup artist’s chair, staring

at his reflection in the mirror, while the makeup artist held his chin up with
the fingertips of her left hand and brushed powder onto his cheeks with her
right. Willem’s eyes were lowered, but it was still clear that he was looking
at himself, and his hands were gripping the chair’s wooden arms as if he
was on a roller coaster and was afraid he’d fall off if he let go. Before him,
the counter was cluttered with wood-shaving curls from freshly sharpened

eyebrow pencils that looked like tatters of lace, and open makeup palettes
whose every hue was a shade of red, all the reds you could imagine, and
wads of tissue with more red smeared on them like blood. For Malcolm, he
had taken a long shot of him late at night, sitting at his kitchen counter at
home, making one of his imaginary buildings out of squares of rice paper.
He liked Malcolm, Brooklyn, October 23, 11:17 p.m. not so much for its
composition or color but for more personal reasons: in college, he had

always made fun of Malcolm for those small structures he built and