Chapter 3
T HREE WEEKS BEFORE he left for Thanksgiving in Boston, a package—a large, flat, unwieldy wooden crate with his name and address written on every side in black marker—arrived for him at work, where it sat by his desk all day until he was able to open it late that night.
From the return address, he knew what it was, but he still felt that reflexive curiosity one does when unwrapping anything, even something unwanted. Inside the box were layers of brown paper, and then layers of bubble wrap, and then, wrapped in sheets of white paper, the painting itself.
He turned it over. “To Jude with love and apologies, JB,” JB had scribbled on the canvas, directly above his signature: “Jean-Baptiste Marion.” There was an envelope from JB’s gallery taped to the back of the frame, inside of which was a letter certifying the painting’s authenticity and date, addressed to him and signed by the gallery’s registrar.
He called Willem, who he knew would have already left the theater and was probably on his way home. “Guess what I got today?”
There was only the slightest of pauses before Willem answered. “The painting.”
“Right,” he said, and sighed. “So I suppose you’re behind this?”
Willem coughed. “I just told him he didn’t have a choice in the matter any longer—not if he wanted you to talk to him again at some point.” Willem paused, and he could hear the wind whooshing past him. “Do you need help getting it home?”
“Thanks,” he said. “But I’m just going to leave it here for now and pick it up later.
” He re-clad the painting in its layers and replaced it in its box, which he shoved beneath his console.
Before he shut off his computer, he began a note to JB, but then stopped, and deleted what he’d written, and instead left for the night.
He was both surprised and not that JB had sent him the painting after all (and not at all surprised to learn that it had been Willem who had convinced him to do so).
Eighteen months ago, just as Willem was beginning his first performances in The Malamud Theorem , JB had been offered representation by a gallery on the Lower East Side, and the previous spring, he’d had his first solo show, “The Boys,” a series of twenty-four paintings based on photographs he’d taken of the three of them.
As he’d promised years ago, JB had let him see the pictures of him that he wanted to paint, and although he had approved many of them (reluctantly: he had felt queasy even as he did so, but he knew how important the series was to JB), JB had ultimately been less interested in the ones he’d approved than in the ones he wouldn’t, a few of which—including an image in which he was curled into himself in bed, his eyes open but scarily unseeing, his left hand stretched open unnaturally wide, like a ghoul’s claw—he alarmingly had no memory of JB even taking.
That had been the first fight: JB wheedling, then sulking, then threatening, then shouting, and then, when he couldn’t change his mind, trying to convince Willem to advocate for him.
“You realize I don’t actually owe you anything,” JB had told him once he realized his negotiations with Willem weren’t progressing.
“I mean, I don’t technically have to ask your permission here.
I could technically just paint whatever the fuck I want.
This is a courtesy I’m extending you, you know. ”
He could’ve swamped JB with arguments, but he was too angry to do so.
“You promised me, JB,” he said. “That should be enough.” He could have added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.
In the end, JB had had to admit defeat, although in the months before his show opened, he had made occasional allusions to what he called his “lost paintings,” great works he could’ve made had he, Jude, been less rigid, less timid, less self-conscious, and (this was his favorite of JB’s arguments) less of a philistine.
Later, though, he would be embarrassed by his own gullibility, by how he had trusted that his wishes would be respected.
The opening had been on a Thursday in late April shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a night so unseasonably cold that the plane trees’ first leaves had frozen and cracked, and rounding the corner onto Norfolk Street, he had stopped to admire the scene the gallery made, a bright golden box of light and shimmered warmth against the chilled flat black of the night.
Inside, he immediately encountered Black Henry Young and a friend of theirs from law school, and then so many other people he knew—from college, and their various parties at Lispenard Street, and JB’s aunts, and Malcolm’s parents, and long-ago friends of JB’s that he hadn’t seen in years—that it had taken some time before he could push through the crowd to look at the paintings themselves.
He had always known that JB was talented.
They all did, everyone did: no matter how ungenerously you might occasionally think of JB as a person, there was something about his work that could convince you that you were wrong, that whatever deficiencies of character you had ascribed to him were in reality evidence of your own pettiness and ill-temper, that hidden within JB was someone of huge sympathies and depth and understanding.
And that night, he had no trouble at all recognizing the paintings’ intensity and beauty, and had felt only an uncomplicated pride in and gratitude for JB: for the accomplishment of the work, of course, but also for his ability to produce colors and images that made all other colors and images seem wan and flaccid in comparison, for his ability to make you see the world anew.
The paintings had been arranged in a single row that unspooled across the walls like a stave, and the tones JB had created—dense bruised blues and bourbonish yellows—were so distinctly their own, it was as if JB had invented a different language of color altogether.
He stopped to admire Willem and the Girl , one of the pictures he had already seen and had indeed already bought, in which JB had painted Willem turned away from the camera but for his eyes, which seemed to look directly back at the viewer, but were actually looking at, presumably, a girl who had been standing in Willem’s exact sightline.
He loved the expression on Willem’s face, which was one he knew very well, when he was just about to smile and his mouth was still soft and undecided, somehow, but the muscles around his eyes were already pulling themselves upward.
The paintings weren’t arranged chronologically, and so after this was one of himself from just a few months ago (he hurried past the ones of himself), and following that an image of Malcolm and his sister, in what he recognized from the furniture was Flora’s long-departed first West Village apartment ( Malcolm and Flora, Bethune Street ).
He looked around for JB and saw him talking to the gallery director, and at that moment, JB straightened his neck and caught his eye, and gave him a wave. “Genius,” he mouthed to JB over people’s heads, and JB grinned at him and mouthed back, “Thank you.”
But then he had moved to the third and final wall and had seen them: two paintings, both of him, neither of which JB had ever shown him.
In the first, he was very young and holding a cigarette, and in the second, which he thought was from around two years ago, he was sitting bent over on the edge of his bed, leaning his forehead against the wall, his legs and arms crossed and his eyes closed—it was the position he always assumed when he was coming out of an episode and was gathering his physical resources before attempting to stand up again.
He hadn’t remembered JB taking this picture, and indeed, given its perspective—the camera peeking around the edge of the doorframe—he knew that he wasn’t meant to remember, because he wasn’t meant to be aware of the picture’s existence at all.
For a moment, the noise of the space blotted out around him, and he could only look and look at the paintings: even in his distress, he had the presence of mind to understand that he was responding less to the images themselves than to the memories and sensations they provoked, and that his sense of violation that other people should be seeing these documentations of two miserable moments of his life was a personal reaction, specific only to himself.
To anyone else, they would be two contextless paintings, meaningless unless he chose to announce their meaning.
But oh, they were difficult for him to see, and he wished, suddenly and sharply, that he was alone.
He made it through the post-opening dinner, which was endless and at which he missed Willem intensely—but Willem had a show that night and hadn’t been able to come.
At least he hadn’t had to speak to JB at all, who was busy holding court, and to the people who approached him—including JB’s gallerist—to tell him that the final two pictures, the ones of him, were the best in the show (as if he were somehow responsible for this), he was able to smile and agree with them that JB was an extraordinary talent.
But later, at home, after regaining control of himself, he was at last free to articulate to Willem his sense of betrayal.
And Willem had taken his side so unhesitatingly, had been so angry on his behalf, that he had been momentarily soothed—and had realized that JB’s duplicity had come as a surprise to Willem as well.