Page 37 - A Little Life: A Novel

In a way, he had never enjoyed a party more, and no one seemed to
notice his deliberate rovings except for Richard, who, as the four of them
were leaving an hour later to go uptown (Malcolm’s parents were in the

country, and Malcolm thought he knew where his mother hid her weed),
gave him an unexpectedly sweet old-man clap on the shoulder. “Working on
something?”
“I think so.”
“Good for you.”
The next day he sat at his computer looking at the night’s images on the
screen. The camera wasn’t a great one, and it had hazed every picture with a

smoky yellow light, which, along with his poor focusing skills, had made
everyone warm and rich and slightly soft-edged, as if they had been shot
through a tumblerful of whiskey. He stopped at a close-up of Willem’s face,
of him smiling at someone (a girl, no doubt) off camera, and at the one of
Jude and Phaedra on the sofa: Jude was wearing a bright navy sweater that
JB could never figure out belonged to him or to Willem, as both of them

wore it so much, and Phaedra was wearing a wool dress the shade of port,
and she was leaning her head toward his, and the dark of her hair made his
look lighter, and the nubbly teal of the sofa beneath them made them both
appear shining and jewel-like, their colors just-licked and glorious, their
skin delicious. They were colors anyone would want to paint, and so he did,
sketching out the scene first in his book in pencil, and then again on stiffer
board in watercolors, and then finally on canvas in acrylics.

That had been four months ago, and he now had almost eleven paintings
completed—an astonishing output for him—all of scenes from his friends’
lives. There was Willem waiting to audition, studying the script a final time,
the sole of one boot pressed against the sticky red wall behind him; and
Jude at a play, his face half shadowed, at the very second he smiled (getting
that shot had almost gotten JB thrown out of the theater); Malcolm sitting

stiffly on a sofa a few feet away from his father, his back straight and his
hands clenching his knees, the two of them watching a Buñuel film on a
television just out of frame. After some experimentation, he had settled on
canvases the size of a standard C-print, twenty by twenty-four inches, all
horizontally oriented, and which he imagined might someday be displayed
in a long snaking single layer, one that would wrap itself around a gallery’s
walls, each image following the next as fluidly as cells in a film strip. The

renderings were realistic, but photo-realistic; he had never replaced Ali’s