Page 658 - A Little Life: A Novel

to a wall where a canvas is having its skin of bubble wrap carefully cut
away from it. JB positions them before it, and when the plastic is unpeeled,
he sees it is a painting of Willem.

The piece isn’t large—just four feet by three feet—and is horizonally
oriented. It is by far the most sharply photorealistic painting JB has
produced in years, the colors rich and dense, the brushstrokes that made
Willem’s hair feathery-fine. The Willem in this painting looks like Willem
did shortly before he died: he thinks he is seeing Willem in the months
before or after shooting The Dancer and the Stage, for which his hair was
longer and darker than it was in life. After Dancer, he decides, because the

sweater he is wearing, a black-green the color of magnolia leaves, is one he
remembers buying for Willem in Paris when he went to visit him there.
He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed
toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in
profile, and he is leaning toward something or someone and smiling. And
because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows Willem has been captured

looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant was happy.
Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas, and although the background
is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table; he
knows it from the way JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s
face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name, then the face in the
painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he
stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his

fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.
But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling
at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes
slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title—Willem Listening to
Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street—and he feels his breath abandon him; it
feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat,

and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling,
plopping to the ground near his feet.
He is abruptly dizzy. “I need to sit,” he finally says, and JB takes him
around the corner, to the other side of the wall where Willem will hang,
where there’s a small cul-de-sac. He half sits atop one of the crates that’s
been left here and hangs his head, resting his hands on his thighs. “I’m
sorry,” he manages to say. “I’m sorry, JB.”