Chapter 3 #5
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 he was 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, maybe you’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 thought of 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.
“Don’t go,” he’d said to Jude as he was falling asleep. “Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” Jude had said, and he knew Jude wouldn’t.
When he woke early the next morning, he was still on the sofa, and the television was turned off, and he was under his duvet.
And there was Jude, huddled into the cushions on the other end of the sectional, still asleep.
Some part of him had always been insulted by Jude’s unwillingness to divulge anything of himself to them, by his furtiveness and secretiveness, but in that moment he felt only gratitude toward and admiration for him, and had sat on the chair next to him, studying his face, which he so loved to paint, his sweep of complicated-colored hair that he could never see without remembering how much mixing, the number of shades it took to accurately represent it.
I can do this , he told Jude, silently. I can do this .
Except he clearly couldn’t. He was in his studio, and it was still only one p.m., and he wanted to smoke so badly, so badly that in his head all he could see was the pipe, its glass frosted with leftover white powder, and it was only day one of his attempt not to do drugs, and already it was making —he was making—a mockery of him.
Surrounding him were the only things he cared about, the paintings in his next series, “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days,” for which he had followed Malcolm, Jude, and Willem around for an entire day, photographing everything they did, and then chose eight to ten images from each of their days to paint.
He had decided to document a typical workday for each of them, all from the same month of the same year, and had labeled each painting with their name, location, and time of day he had shot the image.
Willem’s series had been the most far-flung: he had gone to London, where Willem had been on location filming something called Latecomers , and the images he had chosen were a mix of Willem off and on the set.
He had favorites from each person’s take: for Willem, it was Willem, London, October 8, 9:08 a.m. , an image of him in the makeup artist’s chair, staring at his reflection in the mirror, while the makeup artist held his chin up with the fingertips of her left hand and brushed powder onto his cheeks with her right.
Willem’s eyes were lowered, but it was still clear that he was looking at himself, and his hands were gripping the chair’s wooden arms as if he was on a roller coaster and was afraid he’d fall off if he let go.
Before him, the counter was cluttered with wood-shaving curls from freshly sharpened eyebrow pencils that looked like tatters of lace, and open makeup palettes whose every hue was a shade of red, all the reds you could imagine, and wads of tissue with more red smeared on them like blood.
For Malcolm, he had taken a long shot of him late at night, sitting at his kitchen counter at home, making one of his imaginary buildings out of squares of rice paper.
He liked Malcolm, Brooklyn, October 23, 11:17 p.m .
not so much for its composition or color but for more personal reasons: in college, he had always made fun of Malcolm for those small structures he built and displayed on his windowsill, but really he had admired them and had liked watching Malcolm compose them—his breaths slowed, and he was completely silent, and his constant nervousness, which at times seemed almost physical, an appendage like a tail, fell away.
He worked on all of them out of sequence, but he couldn’t quite get the colors the way he wanted them for Jude’s installment, and so he had the fewest and least of these paintings done.
As he’d gone through the photos, he’d noticed that each of his friends’ days was defined, glossed, by a certain tonal consistency: he had been following Willem on the days he was shooting in what was supposed to be a large Belgravia flat, and the lighting had been particularly golden, like beeswax.
Later, back in the apartment in Notting Hill that Willem was renting, he had taken pictures of him sitting and reading, and there, too, the light had been yellowish, although it was less like syrup and instead crisper, like the skin of a late-fall apple.
By contrast, Malcolm’s world was bluish: his sterile, white-marble-countertopped office on Twenty-second Street; the house he and Sophie had bought in Cobble Hill after they had gotten married.
And Jude’s was grayish, but a silvery gray, a shade particular to gelatin prints that was proving very difficult to reproduce with acrylics, although for Jude’s he had thinned the colors considerably, trying to capture that shimmery light.
Before he began, he had to first find a way to make gray seem bright, and clean, and it was frustrating, because all he wanted to do was paint, not fuss around with colors.
But getting frustrated with your paintings—and it was impossible not to think of your work as your colleague and co-participant, as if it was something that sometimes decided to be agreeable and collaborate with you, and sometimes decided to be truculent and unyielding, like a grouchy toddler—was just what happened.
You had to just keep doing it, and doing it, and one day, you’d get it right.