Page 655 - A Little Life: A Novel

of stairs—he couldn’t help but see what his life too was and might have
been. It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life
with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed

to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable.
Interspersing the portraits were still lifes of the objects that had made
JB’s parents’ lives together: two pillows on a bed, both slightly depressed as
if someone had dragged the back of a spoon through a bowl of clotted
cream; two coffee cups, one’s edge faintly pinked with lipstick; a single
picture frame containing a photograph of a teenaged JB with his father: the
only appearance JB made in these paintings. And seeing these images, he

once again marveled at how perfect JB’s understanding was of a life
together, of his life, of how everything in his apartment—Willem’s
sweatpants, still slung over the edge of the laundry hamper; Willem’s
toothbrush, still waiting in the glass on the bathroom sink; Willem’s watch,
its face splintered from the accident, still sitting untouched on his
nightstand—had become totemic, a series of runes only he could read. The

table next to Willem’s side of the bed at Lantern House had become a sort
of unintentional shrine to him: there was the mug he had last drunk from,
and the black-framed glasses he’d recently started wearing, and the book he
was reading, still splayed, facedown, in the position he’d left it.
“Oh, JB,” he had sighed, and although he had wanted to say something
else, he couldn’t. But JB had thanked him anyway. They were quieter
around each other now, and he didn’t know if this was who JB had become

or if this was who JB had become around him.
Now he knocks on the museum’s doors and is let in by one of JB’s studio
assistants, who is waiting for him and who tells him that JB is overseeing
the installation on the top floor, but says he should start on the sixth floor
and work his way up to meet him, and so he does.
The galleries on this floor are dedicated to JB’s early works, including

juvenilia; there is a whole grid of framed drawings from JB’s childhood,
including a math test over which JB had drawn lovely little pencil portraits
of, presumably, his classmates: eight- and nine-year-olds bent over their
desks, eating candy bars, feeding birds. He had neglected to solve any of
the problems, and at the top of the page was a bright red “F,” along with a
note: “Dear Mrs. Marion—you see what the problem is here. Please come
see me. Sincerely, Jamie Greenberg. P.S. Your son is an immense talent.”

He smiles looking at this, the first time he can feel himself smiling in a long