Page 34 - A Little Life: A Novel

whom he was painting a herringbone skirt and saddle shoes, would hand
them a snarl of steel wool that he needed shredded to resemble
tumbleweeds, or some fine-gauge wire that he wanted punctuated with little

ties so that it would look barbed.
But it was Richard’s work that JB admired the most. He was a sculptor
too, but worked with only ephemeral materials. He’d draw on drafting
paper impossible shapes, and then render them in ice, in butter, in
chocolate, in lard, and film them as they vanished. He was gleeful about
witnessing the disintegration of his works, but JB, watching just last month
as a massive, eight-foot-tall piece Richard had made—a swooping sail-like

batwing of frozen grape juice that resembled coagulated blood—dripped
and then crumbled to its demise, had found himself unexpectedly about to
cry, though whether from the destruction of something so beautiful or the
mere everyday profundity of its disappearance, he was unable to say. Now
Richard was less interested in substances that melted and more interested in
substances that would attract decimators; he was particularly interested in

moths, which apparently loved honey. He had a vision, he told JB, of a
sculpture whose surface so writhed with moths that you couldn’t even see
the shape of the thing they were devouring. The sills of his windows were
lined with jars of honey, in which the porous combs floated like fetuses
suspended in formaldehyde.
JB was the lone classicist among them. He painted. Worse, he was a
figurative painter. When he had been in graduate school, no one really cared

about figurative work: anything—video art, performance art, photography
—was more exciting than painting, and truly anything was better than
figurative work. “That’s the way it’s been since the nineteen-fifties,” one of
his professors had sighed when JB complained to him. “You know that
slogan for the marines? ‘The few, the brave …’? That’s us, we lonely
losers.”

It was not as if, over the years, he hadn’t attempted other things, other
mediums (that stupid, fake, derivative Meret Oppenheim hair project!
Could he have done anything cheaper? He and Malcolm had gotten into a
huge fight, one of their biggest, when Malcolm had called the series “ersatz
Lorna Simpson,” and of course the worst thing was that Malcolm had been
completely right), but although he would never have admitted to anyone
else that he felt there was something effete, girlish almost and at any rate

certainly not gangster, about being a figurative painter, he had recently had