Page 654 - A Little Life: A Novel

week begins. On Tuesday, he gets a message from Todd. The first of the
lawsuits are being settled, for massive figures, but even Todd knows enough
not to ask him to celebrate. His messages, by phone or by e-mail, are

clipped and sober: the name of the company that is ready to settle, the
proposed amount, a short “congratulations.”
On Wednesday, he is meant to stop by the artists’ nonprofit where he still
does pro bono work, but he instead meets JB downtown at the Whitney,
where his retrospective is being hung. This show is another souvenir from
the ghosted past: it has been in the planning stages for almost two years.
When JB had told them about it, the three of them had thrown a small party

for him at Greene Street.
“Well, JB, you know what this means, right?” Willem had asked,
gesturing toward the two paintings—Willem and the Girl and Willem and
Jude, Lispenard Street, II, from JB’s first show, which hung, side by side, in
their living room. “As soon as the show comes down, all of these pieces are
going straight to Christie’s,” and everyone had laughed, JB hardest of all,

proud and delighted and relieved.
Those pieces, along with Willem, London, October 8, 9:08 a.m., from
“Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days,” which he had bought, and Jude, New
York, October 14, 7:02 a.m., which Willem had, along with the ones they
owned from “Everyone I’ve Ever Known” and “The Narcissist’s Guide to
Self-Hatred” and “Frog and Toad,” and all the drawings, the paintings, the
sketches of JB’s that the two of them had been given and had kept, some

since college, will be in the Whitney exhibit, as well as previously unshown
work.
There will also be a concurrent show of new paintings at JB’s gallery,
and three weekends before, he had gone to JB’s studio in Greenpoint to see
them. The series is called “The Golden Anniversary,” and it is a chronicle
of JB’s parents’ lives, both together, before he was born, and in an imagined

future, the two of them living on and on, together, into old age. In reality,
JB’s mother is still alive, as are his aunts, but in these paintings, so too is
JB’s father, who had actually died at the age of thirty-six. The series is just
sixteen paintings, many of them smaller in scale than JB’s previous works,
and as he walked through JB’s studio, looking at these scenes of domestic
fantasy—his sixty-year-old father coring an apple while his mother made a
sandwich; his seventy-year-old father sitting on the sofa reading the paper,

while in the background, his mother’s legs can be seen descending a flight