Page 32 - A Little Life: A Novel

was something that was just an accessory to a lifestyle. You painted or
sculpted or made crappy installation pieces because it justified a wardrobe
of washed-soft T-shirts and dirty jeans and a diet of ironic cheap American

beers and ironic expensive hand-rolled American cigarettes. Here, however,
you made art because it was the only thing you’d ever been good at, the
only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking
about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends
and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making
out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always
your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your

pupils. There was a period—or at least you hoped there was—with every
painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you
than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only
of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had
tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your
plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip

like silt.
He liked too the specific and unexpected companionability of the place.
There were times on the weekends when everyone was there at the same
time, and at moments, he would emerge from the fog of his painting and
sense that all of them were breathing in rhythm, panting almost, from the
effort of concentrating. He could feel, then, the collective energy they were
expending filling the air like gas, flammable and sweet, and would wish he

could bottle it so that he might be able to draw from it when he was feeling
uninspired, for the days in which he would sit in front of the canvas for
literally hours, as though if he stared long enough, it might explode into
something brilliant and charged. He liked the ceremony of waiting at the
edge of the blue tape and clearing his throat in Richard’s direction, and then
crossing over the boundary to look at his work, the two of them standing

before it in silence, needing to exchange only the fewest of words yet
understanding exactly what the other meant. You spent so much time
explaining yourself, your work, to others—what it meant, what you were
trying to accomplish, why you were trying to accomplish it, why you had
chosen the colors and subject matter and materials and application and
technique that you had—that it was a relief to simply be with another
person to whom you didn’t have to explain anything: you could just look

and look, and when you asked questions, they were usually blunt and