Page 53 of A Little Life
What could he say? “’Sup,” he said.
Then his phone rang: Jude, telling him that all was safe, and he could come back. “I’ve got to go,” he said, standing, and as he left, Jackson followed him.
He watched Jude’s expression change as he saw Jackson by his side. “JB,” he said, calmly, “I’m glad to see you. Are you ready to go?”
“Go where?” he asked, stupidly.
“Back to my place,” said Jude. “You said you’d help me reach that box I can’t get?”
But he was so confused, still so muddled, that he hadn’t understood. “What box?”
“The box on the closet shelf that I can’t reach,” Jude said, still ignoring Jackson. “I need your help; it’s too difficult for me to climb the ladder on my own.”
He should’ve known, then; Jude never made references to what he couldn’t do. He was offering him a way out, and he was too stupid to recognize it.
But Jackson did. “I think your friend wants to get you away from me,” he told JB, smirking. That was what Jackson always called them, even though he had met them all before:Your friends. JB’s friends.
Jude looked at him. “You’re right,” he said, still in that calm, steady voice. “I do.” And then, turning back to him, “JB—won’t you come with me?”
Oh, he wanted to. But in that moment, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t know why, not ever, but he couldn’t. He was powerless, so powerless that he couldn’t even pretend otherwise. “I can’t,” he whispered to Jude.
“JB,” said Jude, and took his arm and pulled him toward the curb, as Jackson watched them with his stupid, mocking smile. “Come with me. You don’t have to stay here. Come with me, JB.”
He had started crying then, not loudly, not steadily, but crying nonetheless. “JB,” Jude said again, his voice low. “Come with me. You don’t have to go back there.”
But “I can’t,” he heard himself saying. “I can’t. I want to go upstairs. I want to go home.”
“Then I’ll come in with you.”
“No. No, Jude. I want to be alone. Thank you. But go home.”
“JB,” Jude began, but he turned from him and ran, jamming the key into the front door and running up the stairs, knowing Jude wouldn’t be capable of following him, but with Jackson right behind him, laughing his mean laugh, while Jude’s calls—“JB! JB!”—trailed after him, until he was inside his apartment (Jude had cleaned while he was here: the sink was empty; the dishes were stacked in the rack, drying) and couldn’t hear him any longer. He turned off his phone, on which Jude was calling him, and muted the front-door buzzer’s intercom, on which Jude was ringing and ringing him.
And then Jackson had cut the lines of coke he had brought and they had snorted them, and the night had become the same night he’dhad hundreds of times before: the same rhythms, the same despair, the same awful feeling of suspension.
“Heispretty, your friend,” he heard Jackson say at some point late that evening. “But too bad about—” And he stood and did an imitation of Jude’s walk, a lurching grotesquerie that looked nothing like it, his mouth slack like a cretin’s, his hands bobbling in front of him. He had been too high to protest, too high to say anything at all, and so he had only blinked and watched Jackson hobble around the room, trying to speak words in Jude’s defense, his eyes prickling with tears.
The next day he had awoken, late, facedown on the floor near the kitchen. He stepped around Jackson, who was also asleep on the floor, near his bookcases, and went into his room, where he saw that Jude had made his bed as well, and something about that made him want to cry again. He lifted the plank under the right side of the bed, cautiously, and stuck his hand inside the space: there was nothing there. And so he lay atop the comforter, bringing one end of it over himself completely, covering the top of his head the way he used to when he was a child.
As he tried to sleep, he made himself think of why he had fallen in with Jackson. It wasn’t that he didn’t know why; it was that he was ashamed to remember why. He had begun hanging out with Jackson to prove that he wasn’t dependent on his friends, that he wasn’t trapped by his life, that he could make and would make his own decisions, even if they were bad ones. By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller. Jackson was stupid and callow and cruel and not the sort of person he was supposed to value, who was supposed to be worth his time. He knew this. And that was why he kept at it: to dismay his friends, to show them that he wasn’t bound by their expectations of him. It was stupid, stupid, stupid. It was hubris. And he was the only one who was suffering because of it.
“You can’tactuallylike this guy,” Willem had said to him once. And although he had known exactly what Willem meant, he had pretended not to, just to be a brat.
“Whycan’tI, Willem?” he’d asked. “He’s fucking hilarious. Heactuallywants to do things. He’sactuallyaround when I need someone. Why can’t I? Huh?”
It was the same with the drugs. Doing drugs wasn’t hard core, it wasn’t badass, it didn’t make him more interesting. But it wasn’t what hewas supposed to do. These days, if you were serious about your art, you didn’t do drugs. Indulgence, the very idea of it, had disappeared, was a thing of the Beats and AbExes and the Ops and the Pops. These days,maybeyou’d smoke some pot.Maybe, every once in a while, if you were feeling very ironic, you might do a line of coke. But that was it. This was an age of discipline, of deprivation, not inspiration, and at any rate inspiration no longer meant drugs. No one he knew and respected—Richard, Ali, Asian Henry Young—did them: not drugs, not sugar, not caffeine, not salt, not meat, not gluten, not nicotine. They were artists-as-ascetics. In his more defiant moments, he tried to pretend to himself that doing drugs was so passé, so tired, that it had actually become cool again. But he knew this wasn’t true. Just as he knew it wasn’t really true that he enjoyed the sex parties that sometimes convened in Jackson’s echoey apartment in Williamsburg, where shifting groups of soft skinny people groped blindly at one another, and where the first time a boy, too reedy and young and hairless to really be JB’s type, told him he wanted JB to watch him suck away his own blood from a cut he’d give himself, he had wanted to laugh. But he hadn’t, and had instead watched as the boy cut himself on his bicep and then twisted his neck to lap at the blood, like a kitten cleaning itself, and had felt a crush of sorrow. “Oh JB, I just want a nice white boy,” his ex and now-friend Toby had once moaned to him, and he smiled a little, remembering it. He did, too. All he wanted was a nice white boy, not this sad salamander-like creature, so pale he was almost translucent, licking blood from himself in what had to be the least-erotic gesture in the world.
But of all the questions he was able to answer, there was one he was not: How was he to get out? How was he to stop? Here he was, literally trapped in his studio, literally peeking down the hallway to make sure Jackson wasn’t approaching. How was he to escape Jackson? How was he to recover his life?
The night after he had made Jude get rid of his stash, he had finally called him back, and Jude had asked him over, and he had refused, and so Jude had come to him. He had sat and stared at the wall as Jude made him dinner, a shrimp risotto, handing him the plate and then leaning on the counter to watch him eat.
“Can I have more?” he asked when he was done with the first serving, and Jude gave it to him. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was, and his hand shook as he brought the spoon to his mouth. He thoughtof Sunday-night dinners at his mother’s, which he hadn’t gone to since his grandmother died.
“Aren’t you going to lecture me?” he finally asked, but Jude shook his head.
After he ate, he sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound turned off, not really seeing anything but comforted by the flash and blur of images, and Jude had washed the dishes and then sat on the sofa near him, working on a brief.
One of Willem’s movies was on television—the one in which he played a con man in a small Irish town, whose entire left cheek was webbed with scars—and he stopped on the channel, not watching it, but looking at Willem’s face, his mouth moving silently. “I miss Willem,” he’d said, and then realized how ungrateful he sounded. But Jude had put down his pen and looked at the screen. “I miss him, too,” he said, and the two of them stared at their friend, so far away from them.
