Page 40 - A Little Life: A Novel

to do anything about it. He knew Jude would hate how fragile, how
feminine, how vulnerable, how young it made him look, and knew too he
would find lots of other imaginary things to hate about it as well, things JB

couldn’t even begin to anticipate because he wasn’t a self-loathing nut job
like Jude. But to him, it expressed everything about what he hoped this
series would be: it was a love letter, it was a documentation, it was a saga, it
was his. When he worked on this painting, he felt sometimes as if he were
flying, as if the world of galleries and parties and other artists and ambitions
had shrunk to a pinpoint beneath him, something so small he could kick it
away from himself like a soccer ball, watch it spin off into some distant

orbit that had nothing to do with him.
It was almost six. The light would change soon. For now, the space was
still quiet around him, although distantly, he could hear the train rumbling
by on its tracks. Before him, his canvas waited. And so he picked up his
brush and began.

There was poetry on the subway. Above the rows of scooped-plastic
seats, filling the empty display space between ads for dermatologists and

companies that promised college degrees by mail, were long laminated
sheets printed with poems: second-rate Stevens and third-rate Roethke and
fourth-rate Lowell, verse meant to agitate no one, anger and beauty reduced
to empty aphorisms.
Or so JB always said. He was against the poems. They had appeared
when he was in junior high, and for the past fifteen years he had been
complaining about them. “Instead of funding real art and real artists,

they’re giving money to a bunch of spinster librarians and cardigan fags to
pick out this shit,” he shouted at Willem over the screech of the F train’s
brakes. “And it’s all this Edna St. Vincent Millay–type shit. Or it’s actually
good people they’ve neutered. And they’re all white, have you noticed that?
What the fuck is up with that?”
The following week, Willem saw a Langston Hughes poster and called

JB to tell him. “Langston Hughes?!” JB groaned. “Let me guess—‘A
Dream Deferred,’ right? I knew it! That shit doesn’t count. And anyway, if
something really did explode, that shit’d be down in two seconds flat.”
Opposite Willem that afternoon is a Thom Gunn poem: “Their
relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed.” Underneath, someone