A Little Life: Part 1: Lispenard Street: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

JB takes the subway to his studio in Long Island City. He loves taking the train in on the weekends, since he can watch the shifting ethnicities of people enter and exist—Polish, Korean, and Pakistani people. Seeing these immigrants makes JB feel grateful for his life and sentimental about New York. When he sees Haitian people on the train and hears them speaking Creole, he wants to speak to them in their language, but the opportunity never presents itself. And they never recognize him as one of their own, either—he knows he has more in common with his American friends than with these people. “Real” Haitian people would never think to leave their rent-free apartment and use 30 minutes of their precious time to travel to a dirty studio. Such reasoning requires “an American mind.”

The studio is a loft on the third floor of a run-down building. It has a common area with a large table in the center, which any of the studio artists can use for larger-scale projects. The space is divided into four quadrants with blue electrical tape. JB shares the studio with Asian Henry Young, who told him about it; with Richard, who tends bar at night and is mostly here in the morning; and with Ali, a photographer. JB’s been coming here for five months, and he loves it. The light is amazing, and it’s so much better than working at Ezra’s place. There, the artists treat art as “an accessory to a lifestyle,” much like the ironic cheap beers they drink and the hand-rolled cigarettes they smoke. But JB and the artists who work here live and breathe art.

All the artists here work with different mediums, so nobody feels that they’re competing with anybody else. Ali is working on a series called “The History of Asians in America,” for which he creates a photograph to represent each decade of Asian American life since 1890. For each photograph, Ali creates a diorama that represents a significant moment in Asian American history.

But it’s Richard’s work that truly captivates JB. He’s a sculptor, but he only works with ephemeral materials. He sketches out complex forms, and then he creates them with things like chocolate, butter, or ice. Then he films the sculptures as they disintegrate. Last month, JB watched as Richard filmed an eight-foot-tall sculpture made from frozen grape juice melt into nothing. The experience made JB want to cry. 

JB is the only classicist in the studio—he’s a figurative painter, which has been out of fashion since the 1950s. Though he secretly feels that there’s something “girlish” and uncool about figurative painting, he’s come to accept that it’s simply who he is. There are artists with a better sense of color and better discipline than JB, certainly, but they lack ideas. And he didn’t have any ideas of his own for a long time.

But this changed one day, when JB’s family was away on a tacky cruise he refused to go on, and so he went to Jude and Willem’s place to force them to make him dinner. He had his sketch pad with him, as he always did, and before he knew what he was doing, he was sketching Jude as he sat at the table chopping onions. And then he sketched Willem tenderizing a piece of butterflied chicken with the bottom of a pan.

The next week, while attending a party on Centre Street, JB followed his friends from room to room, photographing them from a distance. He had more fun at this party than ever before. The next day, he connected the camera to his computer. The photos he took weren’t great—they were yellowy and unfocused—but these flaws made his friends appear compellingly “soft-edged” and golden. And JB was fascinated and touched by the candid images of his friends. He got to work, sketching the photos, and then eventually painting them in acrylics.

JB took these photos four months ago, and now, he’s nearly finished his 11th painting. The scenes include Willem waiting to audition, Jude watching a play, and Malcolm sitting stiffly beside his father on the couch. Each painting captures the fuzzy quality of the photo it was based on. Sometimes JB misses being a part of these scenes of his friends’ lives. But he also “enjoy[s] the godlike role he play[s]” in being the person who captures these moments.

When JB was a month into the project, he knew this was what he wanted to do. And he also knew he’d have to explain to his friends what he was doing. One night, over dinner at a Vietnamese noodle shop, he nervously explained the project to his friends. When he finished, everyone looked expectantly at Jude. JB knew that everyone had to agree to the project for it to work, and he also knew that Jude would be the most difficult to convince, since he’s incredibly self-conscious; in fact, he has a troubling habit of covering his mouth whenever he smiles and laughs. Jude was predictably skeptical of the project. After dinner, JB promised Jude that he’d let Jude veto any photos he didn’t want the world to see. JB immediately regretted his offer, though, since Jude is his favorite friend to paint—he is the most beautiful, the most interesting, and the shyest.

The next Sunday, when JB was home for one of his family dinners, he searched for and found an old photo of Jude. The photo depicts Jude standing in their suite’s living room. He’s partially facing the camera, and you could see “a starburst-shaped scar” on his hand. He's wearing a striped shirt that’s too big for him. He’s very small and thin and has long hair that he hides behind. He looks tired and sad, and the photo has always made JB feel “empty.” The photo is “a love letter” and “a documentation,” and “it[’s] his.” It’s this photo that JB is painting now, and he knows it’s great. He also knows he’ll never show the painting to Jude until it’s hanging in a gallery somewhere, since he knows Jude will hate how “fragile” he looks. 

The narrative switches to Willem’s perspective as he rides the subway to work. Willem is tired, and his shift hasn’t even begun; he knows he shouldn’t have agreed to go out with JB in Brooklyn last night. They saw a “hard-core” band that one of JB’s friends is in. The band was awful, but Willem had fun moshing with JB. Willem likes that he can be silly with JB; his other friends are so serious.

But this morning was brutal—he’d woken up on JB’s unmade mattress and couldn’t remember how they returned to Manhattan. Willem quickly returned to Lispenard Street and took a nap, waking up with just enough time to make it to his shift at Ortolan, an upscale restaurant. Willem has been a waiter at Ortolan for two years now. It’s rare to find a place with such flexible hours, and working at an upscale restaurant pays well. Not everyone at Ortolan is an actor—some people are waiters who used to be actors. You can tell which are which because the career waiters are usually older, and they’re usually stricter about enforcing the boss, Findlay’s, many rules. It’s a known fact that an actor-waiter doesn’t ask a career waiter to attend their performances—they only ask their fellow actor-waiters. And you don’t talk about auditions or agents with them, either. 

Findlay used to be an actor, too, and Willem wonders when Findlay had decided to give up acting. Did he just grow too old one day? (He’s in his mid-40s now.) And how does a person know when to quit—when to give up and get a real job? In today’s culture of “self-fulfillment,” it’s weak and sad to settle for less than one’s dreams. Willem wonders if he’ll give up acting one day, too.

JB thinks that Willem’s good looks have made him expect that good things will simply come to him and that he shouldn’t have to work for them. But in New York, where everybody is good looking, Willem’s looks do him little good. Willem thinks this is rather hypocritical of JB, who is spoiled by his family’s constant praise. Then Willem thinks about what drives each of his friends. JB is driven by lust, while Jude is driven by fear. Once, on a drunken night, JB had said “Ambition is my only religion.” Willem felt the line was rehearsed and insincere—something JB dreamed of saying to an interviewer one day.

New York has always made Willem feel inadequate, uncultured, and dumb. Last year, Willem and his former roommate Merritt were up for one of the lead roles in an off-Broadway revival of True West, but the director had selected Merritt, not Willem. Willem’s friends had expressed outrage on his behalf. But while JB has blamed Willem for his failures, Jude never has. And though his friends’ outrage comforted Willem, he knows that Merritt doesn’t deserve their criticism, either. He’s not a bad actor. JB thinks Willem is too kind to make anything of himself.

Willem has always been kind, and everyone knows it. Willem’s teachers were always shocked when they met his parents and saw how aloof and unkind they were. Growing up, Willem’s father, a ranch hand, taught him to be humble and know his place. So, Willem has always known who and what he is—a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming. Moving to New York hasn’t changed that.

Willem was his parents’ fourth child, and he’s the only one who’s still living. The oldest, Britte, died of leukemia in Sweden when she was two. His father, an Icelandic man, had been working on a fish farm in Sweden when he met Willem’s mother, a Danish woman. They had a second child, Hemming, after they moved to America. Hemming was born with cerebral palsy. Three years later, Aksel, their second son, died in his sleep when he was still an infant.

The narrative flashes back to Willem’s memory of growing up with his brother. Hemming is eight years older than Willem. Though Hemming can’t talk or speak, he can smile, and Willem loves him. As Willem learns to crawl and walk, Hemming remains in his chair, and Willem likes to push him around the property, down the hill on which their house rests to the stables where their parents work all day. Willem is Hemming’s main caretaker and friend. After school, he waits at the side of the road for the van that returns Hemming from the assisted-living facility where he spends his days.

When Willem has to stay after school or work an evening shift at the grocery store, their mother feeds Hemming his porridge for dinner and changes his diaper and puts him to bed. But she doesn’t read to him or take him for walks the way Willem does. Willem hates watching his parents take care of Hemming, because he can tell that they feel responsible for Hemming but don’t love him.

Hemming has to have an emergency appendectomy Willem’s second year of college. Their mother calls Willem to tell him the news, which she conveys in an emotionless tone. Hemming’s caregiver noticed him touching his stomach and moaning. At the hospital, doctors x-rayed the lump in his abdomen and found growths had spread from his large intestine. Willem’s mother says he shouldn’t come home—she’ll let him know if it turns out to be something serious. But Willem remembers when Hemming was 21 and had to have a hernia removed, how he’d cried until Willem held his hand, and Willem knows he has to be there for his brother. But flights are expensive. Malcolm lends Willem the money and refuses to let Willem pay him back (though afterward, Willem will secretly put cash from his paychecks into Malcolm’s wallet).

Willem returns to Wyoming. He and his parents take turns sitting beside Hemming’s hospital bed. Willem reads to Hemming as Hemming stares at the ceiling. At home, he and his parents eat in silence. One night, Willem’s father stops Willem on Willem’s way to visit Hemming; he says there’s no point in visiting, since Hemming won’t know Willem is there. Willem swears at his father for the first time: “I know you don’t fucking care about him, […] but I do.” 

Willem returns to the city. Three months later, in late May, his mother calls to say that Hemming is on life support. She begs Willem not to come back. He obeys but struggles to focus on his schoolwork. Every day, Willem calls the hospital and asks the nurses to put the phone to Hemming’s ear, though he probably can’t hear anything. A week later, Willem’s mother calls to say that Hemming has died. Willem is unable say anything to his mother, knowing that she’ll have nothing to say back. He feels a searing anger at his parents for remaining so composed through it all.

Willem doesn’t tell his friends about Hemming’s death, and they all take the trip to Malcolm’s parents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard that they’d planned earlier that year. When Willem returns to the city, he starts his summer job as a teaching assistant for a class with people with disabilities. He thought it might be painful to work with people who remind him of Hemming, but he finds the experience restorative. 

The summer is good, in some ways. Willem and Jude housesit for Jude’s math professor while he’s working abroad. But it’s also during that summer when Willem decides he’ll never go home again. Since Hemming’s death, Willem and his parents have spoken to each other occasionally, and they’ve been distant as usual; when Willem tells them not to bother coming out for his graduation, they don’t fight him. Malcolm insists that you can’t stop talking to your parents. But Willem can, and he does. When Willem is in graduate school, his parents die within a year of each other. 

Willem goes home to settle his parents’ affairs. They left everything to him, though there isn’t much left by the time he pays off Hemming’s medical bills. After his parents die, Willem remembers that he had loved his parents. He also realized that they’d never acted as though he owed them anything—“not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty.” 

Willem enters adulthood feeling aimless and uncertain. But he doesn’t feel sorry for himself. Even after a week of rehearsing for a play that pays him hardly anything, returning to Lispenard Street still feels like an accomplishment. Willem’s life might not be one that his parents and brother would consider to be a life, but it’s his, and “he g[ets] to dream it for himself every day.”

But this optimism falters when Willem struggles to find work, and he sometimes thinks his dreams are lofty and arrogant. And in these moments, he wishes he could be back in Wyoming, waiting for the van that would bring Hemming back to him. 

The narrative switches to Malcolm’s perspective as he describes his office, which features a big open room full of desks. Malcolm’s desk is one of 40. Rausch’s glass-walled office is on one end, and Thomasson’s is on the other. During work hours, Malcolm and the others do whatever Rausch and Thomasson tell them to do; they work in silence and don’t socialize. But once their pretentious bosses leave, they turn on music, bring out take-out menus, and abandon the day’s work.  Everyone talks about what little money they make and what they would’ve become if they hadn’t gotten stuck working here.

Tonight, Malcolm leaves work by himself. Even if he were with people, he couldn’t take the train with them, since most of his coworkers live downtown or in Brooklyn and he lives uptown. But this is good, since nobody can see him getting into a cab. He’s not the only person at the office with rich parents, but he’s the only person who lives with his rich parents. When the cab driver is Black, Malcolm directs them to Seventy-first and Lexington. But when they aren’t Black, he’s more specific—closer to Park than Lexington. JB thinks this is ridiculous—will the driver really think Malcolm is “more gangster” because he lives closer to Lexington than to Park?

This squabble is one of many fights about race Malcolm had with JB over the years. A different one occurred in college, during his and JB’s first meeting with their school’s Black Students’ Union. Malcolm claimed that he never has an issue finding a cab in New York, and that those who claimed they did were exaggerating. He knew it was a mistake the minute he said it. Another student angrily said that Malcolm, as a biracial man, was hardly Black and couldn’t understand what “real” Black people go through. Malcolm has always had feelings of self-hatred when it comes to race, and his sophomore year, he’d even begun to identify as “post-black,” though nobody found the idea particularly compelling, least of all JB.

JB found a way to be “Blacker” than Malcolm later that year, too, when he took on a performance art project in which he “boycotted” (stopped talking to) white people. He talked to Malcolm only half as much; to Willem, not at all; and, because Jude’s ethnicity was unknown, he continued speaking to him—but only in riddles. Malcolm could tell that Jude and Willem were amused by the project, and he tried to tell himself that he should be glad to have a break from JB. 

Back then, Malcolm thought that his racial discomfort was just a phase—he’d never felt proud of being Black, or particularly connected to his Blackness. Blackness was a big part of his family’s personal narrative: Malcolm’s father had been one of the first Black CFOs of a major bank. Still, other parts of their identity were more distinct than Blackness—Malcolm’s mother’s importance in the New York literary scene, for instance, or Malcolm’s father’s wealth. So, Malcolm had grown up with wealth shielding him from everything it could—including racism.

To this day, Malcolm can’t wrap his head around the abject poverty in which Jude grew up—how the backpack Jude brought to college contained all of his earthly possessions. After college, race became less important to Malcolm, and he thought that people who used race to define themselves were immature and childish. Malcolm is also lagging behind in the other areas people supposedly find their identities: sexuality, professional success, and money.

Malcolm can ignore money for now—his family is very wealthy. But sex is a problem. Malcolm knows he should have figured out his sexuality in college, and since then, he’s experimented a bit. To Malcolm, the thought of being gay “[i]s attractive mostly for its accompanying accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace of aesthetics.”

In the past, Malcolm has thought he’s loved Willem and Jude. Once, when he was assembling a bookcase at Willem and Jude’s place, Willem had leaned over Malcolm to grab the measuring tape, and the closeness of Willem’s body stirred something inside of Malcolm—and the shock of this made him run off without explanation.

And then there’s Malcolm’s unfulfilling professional life.  He’d had the option to start a firm with two of his friends from architecture school, Jason and Sonal, but he’d turned them down to work at Ratstar. Jason was furious when he found out, and Malcolm heard himself make excuses like “it’s a great name to have on my résumé,” but he knew that he’d picked Ratstar because he wanted to impress his parents.  

Now, Jason and Sonal have had projects featured in New York and The New York Times. Meanwhile, Malcolm is still doing the kind of work he’d been doing his first year of school. The reason Malcolm went to architecture school in the first place was because he liked buildings. He thinks buildings can say all the things he couldn’t say on his own. And this is what he’s most ashamed of today: not his financial situation, nor his lacking sex life. But that he “ha[s] lost the ability to imagine anything.”