A Little Life: Part 1: Lispenard Street: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Willem and Jude examine the apartment. It’s small, but they don’t have much to put in it. They tell the apartment’s agent that they’ll take it. But when they return to the agent’s office, the agent tells them they won’t be able to rent the apartment after all: they don’t make enough money, and they don’t have anything in savings. The agent asks if their parents would co-sign the lease for them. Willem immediately replies that their parents are dead. 

When Willem and Jude relay this story to JB and Malcolm over dinner in Chinatown, they comically bend the truth, claiming that the place was full of mouse droppings, and the agent got mad at them because Willem wouldn’t return her flirtations. Malcolm asks why Willem and Jude don’t just stay where they are now. Willem reminds Malcolm that Merritt’s boyfriend is moving in, so he has to move out. And Jude can’t stay with Malcolm’s parents forever, even though they really like Jude.

JB offers to let Willem and Jude live with him, but he knows they’d hate it—JB lives with other struggling artists in Ezra’s loft. Ezra is a horrible artist, but he’s exorbitantly wealthy and throws big parties with lots of free food, booze, and drugs. Just then, JB remembers that one of his coworkers at the magazine is trying to help her aunt find tenants for an apartment she owns near Chinatown. JB can introduce her to Jude and Willem. Willem agrees to stop by JB’s office tomorrow around lunch. 

The next day, Willem meets JB at the arts magazine in SoHo, where JB works as a receptionist. JB took the job because he planned to befriend one of the magazine’s editors and then convince them to feature him in the magazine. This was three months ago, and nothing’s happened yet—and JB can’t believe that nobody has recognized his obvious talent. He’s not good at his job and hardly ever answers the ringing phones—he’s too preoccupied with the garbage bag of hair he keeps beneath his desk. Lately, JB has been making sculptures out of Black hair that he’s collected from barbers and beauty shops throughout the city. The project involves braiding the accumulated hair into one giant braid. Last week, he duped his friends into helping him braid, promising them beer and pizza; everyone left once it became clear that JB had no plans to order food or drink.   

Jude is the only one of JB’s friends who thinks the hair pieces could be great one day. JB gave Jude a hair-covered hairbrush as thanks, but he’d taken it back when Ezra’s father, who is very wealthy, seemed interested in buying it. The second time JB tricked his friends into helping him, Malcolm mentioned that the hair stank, and Jude accused him of being “a self-hating Negro and an Uncle Tom.” Malcolm usually doesn’t take criticisms like this too badly, but that night, he dumped his wine into one of the bags of hair and stormed out.

Now, JB leaves the ringing phone behind, and he and Willem head out to meet up with Annika. As they walk JB complains about Dean, the pretentious senior editor he’s been trying to win over. But it’s been weeks now, and Dean hasn’t warmed to JB. Lately, JB has started to complain that his time at the magazine has been a waste, and everything else—graduate school, moving to New York, and sometimes, life itself—has been for nothing, too.

JB and Willem reach Lispenard Street, which neither of them has heard of. At the office, Annika is normally very intimidating, but around Willem, she becomes “nervous and girlish” and can’t even bring herself to look at him. Willem seems unaware of the effect he has on her—and on most women. Jude once suggested that Willem sensed women’s attention but ignored it to be nonthreatening to other men. Willem asks Annika if the building’s elevator works well—his friend, he explains, has trouble with stairs. Annika blushes and says the elevator works fine. 

They enter the apartment, and it’s not great: the place is comically tiny and dilapidated. There are two twin beds in the small bedroom. Willem asks JB how he likes the place. Inwardly, JB thinks the place is “a shithole.” Though Ezra’s place isn’t great either, JB is only living there because the rent is free. He also knows his family would help him out before they’d let him stay in a place like this. Still, he knows that Willem and Jude are on their own, so to JB tells Willem the place is great, and Willem tells Annika they’ll take it. After they leave, JB asks Willem to treat him to lunch.

On Sunday, JB rides the train to JB’s mother’s house and thinks about how grateful he is for his family. JB’s father, an immigrant from Haiti, died when JB was only three. After JB’s father’s death, JB’s mother, a second-generation Haitian American woman, earned her doctorate in education. She sent JB to a private school on scholarship. Later, she went on to become the principal of a magnet program in Manhattan and an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. His grandmother cooked for him and sang to him in French, and his mother’s sister, a detective, and her partner didn’t have any children and thought of him as their own. His aunt loved art and once took him to the Museum of Modern Art, where was blown away by Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950.

Though JB’s homelife was harmonious and supportive, he lied about his life to make his white schoolfriends uncomfortable, insinuating that he was just “another fatherless black boy.” He told them his mother had finished school after he was born, not specifying that it was graduate school; and he said his aunt “walked the streets,” not clarifying that she did so as a detective, not a sex worker.

JB’s family has always had faith that his art will be appreciated one day. And some days he lets himself believe them. Other days, he wonders if they must be crazy or have bad taste. But regardless, he looks forward to these secret Sunday visits, especially when he thinks of his friends’ parents: Malcolm’s father is highly intelligent and critical, and Malcolm’s mother is somewhat spacey. Willem’s parents are dead and Jude’s parents are “nonexistent”; his childhood was apparently too horrific for him to speak of. Willem once said, “We don’t get the families we deserve,” and JB had agreed, outwardly. Inside, though, he knows he deserves his family. They think he's “wonderful,” and JB believes he is wonderful.

The elevator breaks the day Willem and Jude move into their new apartment. Willem is upset, but nobody minds that much; it’s a late fall day, and the air is cold and dry. And they have plenty of people to help them: Jude and Malcolm and JB’s friend Richard, and two friends they all have in common, both named Henry Young (they call one Black Henry Young and the other Asian Henry Young). Seeing Jude struggling with the stairs, Willem asks him quietly if he needs help. “No,” Jude replies curtly.

Eventually, everyone else leaves, and Jude and Willem are alone together in their new apartment. The apartment isn’t much, but to Jude and Willem, it’s enough. As they talk, Willem can see Jude’s eyes closed and twitching, and by the way he holds his legs rigidly before him, he knows Jude is in pain. But Willem also knows that there’s nothing he can do about it. If he offers Jude aspirin, Jude will decline it. And if he suggests that he lie down, Jude will tell him he’s fine.  Willem gets up and walks to the bathroom.

Willem loves Jude, but he also worries about him and feels like his protector. All of Jude’s friends know that his legs pain him. He used a cane in college, and he had leg braces with external pins that were drilled right into his bones. But he never complained about his legs, nor did he begrudge others for their suffering.

During their sophomore year, for example, JB broke his wrist slipping on some ice. He made such a big deal about it and received so many visitors at the school hospital that the school paper published a story about him. Jude visited JB with Willem and Malcolm and always gave JB the sympathy he craved.

One night, not long after JB was released from the hospital after breaking his wrist, Willem woke up and found their place empty. It wasn’t unusual for Malcolm, JB, and Willem to be gone overnight, but Jude never went out—he’d never had a girlfriend or boyfriend and always spent nights in his and Willem’s room. That night, Willem felt compelled to check on Jude. And when he did, Jude was gone and his crutch was missing.

Willem found Jude in a bathroom stall in the communal bathroom down the hall. Jude had vomited, and he was on the floor and in unbearable pain. Eventually, Willem and Jude were able to return to their room, and Jude explained that he would just have to wait until the pain passed. He asked Willem to stay with him, though, and Willem slept by Jude’s side all night. In the morning, Willem awoke to find bruises on his hand where Jude had squeezed it. He walked into the common area and found Jude sitting at his desk. Jude apologized to Willem, and he made Willem promise not to tell the others. 

Now, as Willem stands in the bathroom while his good friend deals with his pain alone, he looks at his reflection in the mirror and thinks, “You’re a coward.”

Malcolm heads home after helping with the move. JB, after he first visited Lispenard Street, warned Malcolm that Willem and Jude’s new place was awful, and he is right. Even so, Malcolm feels depressed when he returns to his own dwelling on the fourth floor of his parents’ house. He knows it doesn’t make sense to move—he doesn’t make a lot of money, he works long hours, and his parents’ house is so big he rarely has to see them. But he does still feel ashamed that he’s 27 and still living at home.

Malcolm’s arrangement would be better if his parents respected his privacy—they expect him to eat breakfast with them in the morning and brunch on Sunday, and they barge in on him without knocking all the time. His parents had stopped by unannounced on Jude when Jude lived there, too. His father likes Jude—he thinks that of all Malcolm’s friends, Jude is the only one with “intellectual heft and depth.” It doesn’t hurt that Jude graduated from the same law school as Malcolm’s father, and that Malcolm’s father had worked as an assistant prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is where Jude works now.

Malcolm’s situation would also be better if his sister Flora were still here. Flora didn’t seem to mind all the attention their parents required, which gave Malcolm more freedom to retreat to his room. As a child, Malcolm’s father’s clear preference for Flora hurt him—and it still does. Malcolm worries that it’s silly for him to be sulking over his father at this age.

The next morning, Malcolm wakes up and decides that he’s finally ready to announce that he’s moving out. But he finds his mother in the kitchen making him breakfast. When she asks him how many days he’d like to join the family for their annual vacation to St. Barts (his parents still pay for his vacations), he decides to stay. When he walks out the front door, he is in “the world in which no one kn[o]w[s] him, and in which he c[an] be anyone.”