Jean Baptiste “JB” Marion Character Analysis

It was a great painting, and he knew it, knew it absolutely the way you sometimes did, and he had no intention of ever showing it to Jude until it was hanging on a gallery wall somewhere and Jude would be powerless to do anything about it.

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?

But the odd thing was this: by his story morphing into one about a car accident, he was being given an opportunity for reinvention; all he had to do was claim it. But he never could. He could never call it an accident, because it wasn’t. And so was it pride or stupidity to not take the escape route he’d been offered? He didn’t know.

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?

He stopped. What he wanted to say—but what he didn’t think he could get through—was what he had overheard Malcolm say as Willem was complaining about hefting the bookcase back into place and he was in the bathroom gathering the brushes and paint from beneath the sink.

“If I had left it like it was, he could’ve tripped against it and fallen, Willem,” Malcolm had whispered. “Would you want that?”

“No,” Willem had said, after a pause, sounding ashamed. “No, of course not. You’re right, Mal.”

Malcolm, he realized, had been the first among them to recognize that he was disabled; Malcolm had known this even before he did. He had always been conscious of it, but he had never made him feel self-conscious. Malcolm had sought, only, to make his life easier, and he had once resented him for this.

When Jacob was a baby, I would find myself feeling more assured with each month he lived, as if the longer he stayed in this world, the more deeply he would become anchored to it[…]. It was a preposterous notion, of course, and it was proven wrong in the most horrible way. But I couldn’t stop thinking this: that life tethered life. And yet at some point in his life—after Caleb, if I had to date it—I had the sense that he was in a hot-air balloon, one that was staked to the earth with a long twisted rope, but each year the balloon strained and strained against its cords, […]. And down below, there was a knot of us trying to pull the balloon back to the ground, back to safety. And so I was always frightened for him, and I was always frightened of him, as well.