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.
This had begun the second fight, which had started with a confrontation with JB at a café near JB’s apartment, during which JB had proven maddeningly incapable of apologizing: instead, he talked and talked, about how wonderful the pictures were, and how someday, once he had gotten over whatever issues he had with himself, he’d come to appreciate them, and how it wasn’t even that big a deal, and how he really needed to confront his insecurities, which were groundless anyway, and maybe this would prove helpful in that process, and how everyone except him knew how incredibly great-looking he was, and so shouldn’t that tell him something, that maybe—no, definitely—he was the one who was wrong about himself, and finally, how the pictures were already done, they were finished, and what did he expect should happen? Would he be happier if they were destroyed? Should he rip them off the wall and set them on fire? They had been seen and couldn’t be un-seen, so why couldn’t he just accept it and get over it?
“I’m not asking you to destroy them, JB,” he’d said, so furious and dizzied by JB’s bizarre logic and almost offensive intractability that he wanted to scream. “I’m asking you to apologize.”
But JB couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and finally he had gotten up and left, and JB hadn’t tried to stop him.
After that, he simply stopped speaking to JB. Willem had made his own approach, and the two of them (as Willem told him) had actually begun shouting at each other in the street, and then Willem, too, had stopped speaking to JB, and so from then on, they had to rely primarily on Malcolm for news of JB. Malcolm, typically noncommittal, had admitted to them that he thought JB was totally in the wrong, while at the same time suggesting that they were both being unrealistic: “You know he’s not going to apologize, Judy,” he said. “This is JB we’re talking about. You’re wasting your time.”
“Am I being unreasonable?” he asked Willem after this conversation.
“No,” Willem said, immediately. “It’s fucked up, Jude. He fucked up, and he needs to apologize.”
The show sold out. Willem and the Girl was delivered to him at work, as was Willem and Jude, Lispenard Street, II, which Willem had bought. Jude, After Sickness (the title, when he learned it, had made him so newly angry and humiliated that for a moment he experienced what the saying “blind with rage” meant) was sold to a collector whose purchases were considered benedictions and predictive of future success: he only bought from artists’ debut shows, and almost every artist whose work he had bought had gone on to have a major career. Only the show’s centerpiece, Jude with Cigarette, remained unplaced, and this was due to a shockingly amateurish error, in which the director of the gallery had sold it to an important British collector and the owner of the gallery had sold it to the Museum of Modern Art.