Page 36 - A Little Life: A Novel

He wasn’t sure, then, that he was really working toward anything, but the
next weekend, when they all went out to Pho Viet Huong, he brought along
one of Ali’s old cameras and shot the three of them eating and then, later,

walking up the street in the snow. They were moving particularly slowly in
deference to Jude, because the sidewalks were slippery. He saw them lined
up in the camera’s viewfinder: Malcolm, Jude, and Willem, Malcolm and
Willem on either side of Jude, close enough (he knew, having been in the
position himself) to catch him if he skidded but not so close that Jude would
suspect that they were anticipating his fall. They had never had a
conversation that they would do this, he realized; they had simply begun it.

He took the picture. “What’re you doing, JB?” asked Jude, at the same
time as Malcolm complained, “Cut it out, JB.”
The party that night was on Centre Street, in the loft of an acquaintance
of theirs, a woman named Mirasol whose twin, Phaedra, they knew from
college. Once inside, everyone dispersed into their different subgroups, and
JB, after waving at Richard across the room and noting with irritation that

Mirasol had provided a whole tableful of food, meaning that he’d just
wasted fourteen dollars at Pho Viet Huong when he could’ve eaten here for
free, found himself wandering toward where Jude was talking with Phaedra
and some fat dude who might have been Phaedra’s boyfriend and a skinny
bearded guy he recognized as a friend of Jude’s from work. Jude was
perched on the back of one of the sofas, Phaedra next to him, and the two of
them were looking up at the fat and skinny guys and all of them were

laughing at something: He took the picture.
Normally at parties he grabbed or was grabbed by a group of people, and
spent the night as the nuclei for a variety of three- or foursomes, bounding
from one to the next, gathering the gossip, starting harmless rumors,
pretending to share confidences, getting others to tell him who they hated
by divulging hatreds of his own. But this night, he traveled the room alert

and purposeful and largely sober, taking pictures of his three friends as they
moved in their own patterns, unaware that he was trailing them. At one
point, a couple of hours in, he found them by the window with just one
another, Jude saying something and the other two leaning in close to hear
him, and then in the next moment, the three of them leaning back and all
laughing, and although for a moment he felt both wistful and slightly
jealous, he was also triumphant, as he had gotten both shots. Tonight, I am a

camera, he told himself, and tomorrow I will be JB again.