Page 561 - A Little Life: A Novel

magazine for a long profile, he vanished whenever he knew the writer
would be present. He knew Willem wasn’t offended by this, that he
attributed his scarcity to his sense of privacy. And while this was true, it

wasn’t the only reason.
Once, shortly after they had become a couple, there had been a picture of
them that had run with a Times story about Willem and the first installment
he had completed in a spy movie trilogy. The photo had been taken at the
opening of JB’s fifth, long-delayed show, “Frog and Toad,” which had been
exclusively images of the two of them, but very blurred, and much more
abstract than JB’s previous work. (They hadn’t quite known what to think

of the series title, though JB had claimed it was affectionate. “Arnold
Lobel?” he had screeched at them when they asked him about it. “Hello?!”
But neither he nor Willem had read Lobel’s books as children, and they’d
had to go out and buy them to make sense of the reference.) Curiously, it
had been this show, even more than the initial New York magazine story
about Willem’s new life, that had made their relationship real for their

colleagues and peers, despite the fact that most of the paintings had been
made from photographs taken before they had become a couple.
It was also this show that would mark, as JB later said, his ascendancy:
they knew that despite his sales, his reviews, his fellowships and accolades,
he was tormented that Richard had had a mid-career museum retrospective
(as had Asian Henry Young), and he hadn’t. But after “Frog and Toad,”
something shifted for JB, the way that The Sycamore Court had shifted

things for Willem, the way that the Doha museum had shifted things for
Malcolm, even the way—if he was to be boastful—that the Malgrave and
Baskett suit had shifted things for him. It was only when he stepped outside
his firmament of friends that he realized that that shift, that shift they had all
hoped for and received, was rarer and more precious than they even knew.
Of all of them, only JB had been certain that he deserved that shift, that it

was absolutely going to happen for him; he and Malcolm and Willem had
had no such certainty, and so when it was given to them, they were
befuddled. But although JB had had to wait the longest for his life to
change, he was calm when it finally did—something in him seemed to
become defanged; he became, for the first time since they had known him,
mellowed, and the constant prickly humor that fizzed off of him like static
was demagnetized and quieted. He was glad for JB; he was glad he now had