The stairwells between the floors are densely hung with interstitial pieces, drawings and small paintings, studies and experimentations, that JB made between bodies of work. He sees the portrait JB made of him for Harold and Julia, for his adoption; he sees drawings of him in Truro, of him in Cambridge, of Harold and Julia. Here are the four of them; here are JB’s aunts and mother and grandmother; here is the Chief and Mrs. Irvine; here is Flora; here is Richard, and Ali, and the Henry Youngs, and Phaedra.
The next floor: “Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked”; “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days.” Behind him, around him, installers mill, making small adjustments with their white-gloved hands, standing back and staring at the walls. Once again he enters the stairwell. Once again he looks up, and there he sees, again and again, drawings of him: of his face, of him standing, of him in his wheelchair, of him with Willem, of him alone. These are pieces that JB had made when they weren’t speaking, when he had abandoned JB. There are drawings of other people as well, but they are mostly of him: him and Jackson. Again and again, Jackson and him, a checkerboard of the two of them. The images of him are wistful, faint, pencils and pen-and-inks and watercolors. The ones of Jackson are acrylics, thick-lined, looser and angrier. There is one drawing of him that is very small, on a postcard-size piece of paper, and when he examines it more closely, he sees that something had been written on it, and then erased: “Dear Jude,” he makes out, “please”—but there is nothing more after that word. He turns away, his breathing quick, and sees the watercolor of a camellia bush that JB had sent him when he was in the hospital, after he had tried to kill himself.
The next floor: “The Narcissist’s Guide to Self-Hatred.” This had been JB’s least commercially successful show, and he can understand why—to look at these works, their insistent anger and self-loathing, was to be both awed and made almost unbearably uncomfortable. The Coon, one painting was called; The Buffoon; The Bojangler; The Steppin Fetchit. In each, JB, his skin shined and dark, his eyes bulging and yellowed, dances or howls or cackles, his gums awful and huge and fish-flesh pink, while in the background, Jackson and his friends emerge half formed from a gloom of Goyan browns and grays, all crowing at him, clapping their hands and pointing and laughing. The last painting in this series was called Even Monkeys Get the Blues, and it was of JB wearing a pert red fez and a shrunken red epauletted jacket, pantsless, hopping on one leg in an empty warehouse. He lingers on this floor, staring at these paintings, blinking, his throat shutting, and then slowly moves to the stairs a final time.
Then he is on the top floor, and here there are more people, and for a while he stands to the side, watching JB talking to the curators and his gallerist, laughing and gesturing. These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from “Frog and Toad,” and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB’s studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts—a second heart, a second brain—to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life.
He is staring at one of the paintings when JB finally sees him and comes over, and he hugs JB tightly and congratulates him. “JB,” he says. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Judy,” JB says, smiling. “I’m proud of me too, goddammit.” And then he stops smiling. “I wish they were here,” he says.
He shakes his head. “I do too,” he manages to say.
For a while they are silent. Then, “Come here,” JB says, and grabs his hand and pulls him to the far side of the floor, past JB’s gallerist, who waves at him, past a final crate of framed drawings that are being unboxed, to a wall where a canvas is having its skin of bubble wrap carefully cut away from it. JB positions them before it, and when the plastic is unpeeled, he sees it is a painting of Willem.
The piece isn’t large—just four feet by three feet—and is horizonally oriented. It is by far the most sharply photorealistic painting JB has produced in years, the colors rich and dense, the brushstrokes that made Willem’s hair feathery-fine. The Willem in this painting looks like Willem did shortly before he died: he thinks he is seeing Willem in the months before or after shooting The Dancer and the Stage, for which his hair was longer and darker than it was in life. After Dancer, he decides, because the sweater he is wearing, a black-green the color of magnolia leaves, is one he remembers buying for Willem in Paris when he went to visit him there.
He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning toward something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant was happy. Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas, and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table; he knows it from the way JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name, then the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.