Page 271 - A Little Life: A Novel

displayed on his windowsill, but really he had admired them and had liked
watching Malcolm compose them—his breaths slowed, and he was
completely silent, and his constant nervousness, which at times seemed

almost physical, an appendage like a tail, fell away.
He worked on all of them out of sequence, but he couldn’t quite get the
colors the way he wanted them for Jude’s installment, and so he had the
fewest and least of these paintings done. As he’d gone through the photos,
he’d noticed that each of his friends’ days was defined, glossed, by a certain
tonal consistency: he had been following Willem on the days he was
shooting in what was supposed to be a large Belgravia flat, and the lighting

had been particularly golden, like beeswax. Later, back in the apartment in
Notting Hill that Willem was renting, he had taken pictures of him sitting
and reading, and there, too, the light had been yellowish, although it was
less like syrup and instead crisper, like the skin of a late-fall apple. By
contrast, Malcolm’s world was bluish: his sterile, white-marble-
countertopped office on Twenty-second Street; the house he and Sophie had

bought in Cobble Hill after they had gotten married. And Jude’s was
grayish, but a silvery gray, a shade particular to gelatin prints that was
proving very difficult to reproduce with acrylics, although for Jude’s he had
thinned the colors considerably, trying to capture that shimmery light.
Before he began, he had to first find a way to make gray seem bright, and
clean, and it was frustrating, because all he wanted to do was paint, not fuss
around with colors.

But getting frustrated with your paintings—and it was impossible not to
think of your work as your colleague and co-participant, as if it was
something that sometimes decided to be agreeable and collaborate with you,
and sometimes decided to be truculent and unyielding, like a grouchy
toddler—was just what happened. You had to just keep doing it, and doing
it, and one day, you’d get it right.

And yet like his promise to himself—You’re not going to make it!
squealed the taunting, dancing imp in his head; You’re not going to make it!
—the paintings were making a mockery of him as well. For this series, he
had decided he was going to paint a sequence of one of his days, too, and
yet for almost three years, he had been unable to find a day worth
documenting. He had tried—he had taken hundreds of pictures of himself
over the course of dozens of days. But when he reviewed them, they all

ended the same way: with him getting high. Or the images would stop in the