Chapter 3 #3
At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves.
When had everyone become so alike? Too often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been college; grad school.
And then they had, slowly but inevitably, become like everyone else.
Take the members of Backfat: in school, they had marched topless, the three of them fat and luscious and jiggly, all the way down the Charles to protest cutbacks to Planned Parenthood (no one had been sure how the toplessness had been relevant, but whatever), and played amazing sets in the Hood Hall basement, and lit an effigy of an antifeminist state senator on fire in the Quad.
But now Francesca and Marta were talking about having babies, and moving from their Bushwick loft into a Boerum Hill brownstone, and Edie was actually, actually starting a business for real this time, and last year, when he’d suggested they stage a Backfat reunion, they had all laughed, although he hadn’t been joking.
His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn’t stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone.
Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?
Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one’s relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand.
But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn’t noticed earlier.
Malcolm had always been conventional, of course, but he had expected, somehow, more from Willem and Jude.
He knew how awful this sounded (and so he never said it aloud), but he often thought that he had been cursed with a happy childhood.
What if, instead, something actually interesting had happened to him?
As it was, the only interesting thing that had happened to him was that he had attended a mostly white prep school, and that wasn’t even interesting.
Thank god he wasn’t a writer, or he’d have had nothing to write about.
And then there was someone like Jude, who hadn’t grown up like everyone else, and didn’t look like everyone else, and yet who JB knew was constantly trying to make himself exactly like everyone else.
He would have taken Willem’s looks, of course, but he would have killed something small and adorable to have looked like Jude, to have had a mysterious limp that was really more of a glide and to have the face and body that he did.
But Jude spent most of his time trying to stand still and look down, as if by doing so, no one would notice he existed.
This had been sad and yet somewhat understandable in college, when Jude had been so childlike and bony that it made JB’s joints hurt to look at him, but these days, now that he’d grown into his looks, JB found it simply enraging, especially as Jude’s self-consciousness often interfered with his own plans.
“Do you want to spend your life just being completely average and boring and typical?” he’d once asked Jude (this was during their second big fight, when he was trying to get Jude to pose nude, an argument he’d known even before he’d begun it that he had no chance at all of winning).
“Yes, JB,” Jude had said, giving him that gaze he sometimes summoned, which was intimidating, even slightly scary, in its flat blankness. “That’s in fact exactly what I want.”
Sometimes he suspected that all Jude really wanted to do in life was hang out in Cambridge with Harold and Julia and play house with them.
Last year, for example, JB had been invited on a cruise by one of his collectors, a hugely wealthy and important patron who had a yacht that plied the Greek islands and that was hung with modern masterpieces that any museum would have been happy to own—only they were installed in the bathroom of a boat.
Malcolm had been working on his project in Doha, or somewhere, but Willem and Jude had been in town, and he’d called Jude and asked him if he wanted to go: The collector would pay their way.
He would send his plane. It would be five days on a yacht.
He didn’t know why he even needed to have a conversation.
“Meet me at Teterboro,” he should’ve just texted them. “Bring sunscreen.”
But no, he had asked, and Jude had thanked him. And then Jude had said, “But that’s over Thanksgiving.”
“So?” he’d asked.
“JB, thank you so much for inviting me,” Jude had said, as he listened in disbelief. “It sounds incredible. But I have to go to Harold and Julia’s.”
He had been gobsmacked by this. Of course, he too was very fond of Harold and Julia, and like the others, he too could see how good they were for Jude, and how he’d become slightly less haunted with their friendship, but come on!
It was Boston . He could always see them.
But Jude said no, and that was that. (And then, of course, because Jude said no, Willem had said no as well, and in the end, he had ended up with the two of them and Malcolm in Boston, seething at the scene around the table—parental stand-ins; friends of the parental stand-ins; lots of mediocre food; liberals having arguments with one another about Democratic politics that involved a lot of shouting about issues they all agreed on —that was so clichéd and generic that he wanted to scream and yet held such bizarre fascination for Jude and Willem.)
So which had come first: becoming close to Jackson or realizing how boring his friends were?
He had met Jackson after the opening of his second show, which had come almost five years after his first. The show was called “Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked” and was exactly that: a hundred and fifty fifteen-by-twenty-two-inch paintings on thin pieces of board of the faces of everyone he had ever known.
The series had been inspired by a painting he had done of Jude and given to Harold and Julia on the day of Jude’s adoption.
(God, he loved that painting. He should have just kept it.
Or he should have exchanged it: Harold and Julia would’ve been happy with a less-superior piece, as long as it was of Jude.
The last time he had been in Cambridge, he had seriously considered stealing it, slipping it off its hook in the hallway and stuffing it into his duffel bag before he left.) Once again, “Everyone I’ve Ever Known” was a success, although it hadn’t been the series he had wanted to do; the series he had wanted to do was the series he was working on now.
Jackson was another of the gallery’s artists, and although JB had known of him, he had never actually met him before, and was surprised, after being introduced to him at the dinner after the opening, how much he had liked him, how unexpectedly funny he was, because Jackson was not the type of person he’d normally gravitate toward.
For one thing, he hated, really hated Jackson’s work: he made found sculptures, but of the most puerile and obvious sort, like a Barbie doll’s legs glued to the bottom of a can of tuna fish.
Oh god, he’d thought, the first time he’d seen that on the gallery’s website.
He’s being represented by the same gallery as I am?
He didn’t even consider it art. He considered it provocation, although only a high-school student—no, a junior-high student—would consider it provocative.
Jackson thought the pieces Kienholzian, which offended JB, and he didn’t even like Kienholz.
For another, Jackson was rich: so rich that he had never worked a single day in his life.
So rich that his gallerist had agreed to represent him (or so everyone said, and god, he hoped it was true) as a favor to Jackson’s father.
So rich that his shows sold out because, it was rumored, his mother—who had divorced Jackson’s father, a manufacturer of some sort of essential widget of airplane machinery, when Jackson was young and married an inventor of some sort of essential widget of heart transplant surgeries—bought out all his shows and then auctioned the pieces, driving up the prices and then buying them back, inflating Jackson’s sales record.
Unlike other rich people he knew—including Malcolm and Richard and Ezra—Jackson only rarely pretended not to be rich.
JB had always found the others’ parsimoniousness put-on and irritating, but seeing Jackson once smack down a hundred-dollar bill for two candy bars when they were both high and giggly and starving at three in the morning, telling the cashier to keep the change, had sobered him.
There was something obscene about how careless Jackson was with money, something that reminded JB that as much as he thought of himself otherwise, he too was boring, and conventional, and his mother’s son.
For a third, Jackson wasn’t even good-looking.
He supposed he was straight—at any rate, there were always girls around, girls whom Jackson treated disdainfully and yet who drifted after him, lint-like, their faces smooth and empty—but he was the least sexy person JB had ever met.
Jackson had very pale hair, almost white, and pimple-stippled skin, and teeth that were clearly once expensive-looking but had gone the color of dust and whose gaps were grouted with butter-yellow tartar, the sight of which repulsed JB.