A Little Life

  The Sycamore Court had been an unexpected hit and had won Willem the best reviews he’d ever had, and award nominations, and its release, paired with a larger, flashier film that he had shot two years earlier but had been delayed in postproduction, had created a certain moment that even he recognized would transform his career. He had always chosen his roles wisely—if he could be said to have superior talent in anything, he always thought it was that: his taste for parts—but until that year, there had never been a time in which he felt that he was truly secure, that he could talk about films he’d like to do when he was in his fifties or sixties. Jude had always told him that he had an overdeveloped sense of circumspection about his career, that he was far better along than he thought, but it had never felt that way; he knew he was respected by his peers and by critics, but a part of him always feared that it would end abruptly and without warning. He was a practical person in the least practical of careers, and after every job he booked, he would tell his friends he would never book another, that this was certain to be the last, partly as a way of staving off his fears—if he acknowledged the possibility, it was less likely to happen—and partly to give voice to them, because they were real.

  Only later, when he and Jude were alone, would he allow himself to truly worry aloud. “What if I never work again?” he would ask Jude.

  “That won’t happen,” Jude would say.

  “But what if it does?”

  “Well,” said Jude, seriously, “in the extraordinarily unlikely event that you never act again, then you’ll do something else. And while you figure it out, you’ll move in with me.”

  He knew, of course, that he would work again: he had to believe it. Every actor did. Acting was a form of grifting, and once you stopped believing you could, so did everyone else. But he still liked having Jude reassure him; he liked knowing he had somewhere to go just in case it really did end. Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly, uncharacteristically self-pitying, he would think of what he would do if it ended: he thought he might work with disabled children. He would be good at it, and he would enjoy it. He could see himself walking home from an elementary school he imagined might be on the Lower East Side, west to SoHo, toward Greene Street. His apartment would be gone, of course, sold to pay for his master’s program in education (in this dream, all the millions he’d earned, all the millions he had never spent, had somehow vanished), and he would be living in Jude’s apartment, as if the past two decades had never happened at all.

  But after The Sycamore Court, these mopey fantasies had diminished in frequency, and he spent the latter half of his thirty-seventh year feeling closer to confidence than he ever had before. Something had shifted; something had cemented; somewhere his name had been tapped into stone. He would always have work; he could rest for a bit if he wanted to.

  It was September, and he was coming back from a shoot and about to embark upon a European publicity tour; he had one day in the city, just one, and Jude told him he’d take him anywhere he wanted. They’d see each other, they’d have lunch, and then he’d get back into the car and go straight to the airport for the flight to London. It had been so long since he had been in New York, and he really wanted to go somewhere cheap and downtown and homey, like the Vietnamese noodle place they had gone to when they were in their twenties, but he instead picked a French restaurant known for its seafood in midtown so Jude wouldn’t have to travel far.

  The restaurant was filled with businessmen, the kinds of people who telegraphed their wealth and power with the cut of their suits and the subtlety of their watches: you had to be wealthy and powerful yourself in order to understand what was being communicated. To everyone else, they were men in gray suits, indistinguishable from one another. The hostess brought him to Jude, who was there already, waiting, and when Jude stood, he reached over and hugged him very close, which he knew Jude didn’t like but which he had recently decided he would start doing anyway. They stood there, holding each other, surrounded on either side by gray-suited men, until he released Jude and they sat.

  “Did I embarrass you enough?” he asked him, and Jude smiled and shook his head.

  There were so many things to discuss in so little time that Jude had actually written an agenda on the back of a receipt, which he had laughed at when he had seen it but which they ended up following fairly closely. Between Topic Five (Malcolm’s wedding: What were they going to say in their toasts?) and Topic Six (the progression of the Greene Street apartment, which was being gutted), he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and as he walked back to the table, he had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched. He was of course used to being appraised and inspected, but there was something different about the quality of this attention, its intensity and hush, and for the first time in a long time, he was self-conscious, aware of the fact that he was wearing jeans and not a suit, and that he clearly didn’t belong. He became aware, in fact, that everyone was wearing a suit, and he was the only one not.

  “I think I’m wearing the wrong thing,” he said quietly to Jude as he sat back down. “Everyone’s staring.”

  “They’re not staring at you because of what you’re wearing,” Jude said. “They’re staring at you because you’re famous.”

  He shook his head. “To you and literally dozens of other people, maybe.”

  “No, Willem,” Jude had said. “You are.” He smiled at him. “Why do you think they didn’t make you wear a jacket? They don’t let just anyone waltz in here who’s not in corporate mufti. And why do you think they keep bringing over all these appetizers? It’s not because of me, I guarantee you.” Now he laughed. “Why did you choose this place anyway? I thought you were going to pick somewhere downtown.”

  He groaned. “I heard the crudo was good. And what do you mean: Is there a dress code here?”

  Jude smiled again and was about to answer when one of the discreet gray-suited men came over to them and, vividly embarrassed, apologized for interrupting them. “I just wanted to say that I loved The Sycamore Court,” he said. “I’m a big fan.” Willem thanked him, and the man, who was older, in his fifties, was about to say something else when he saw Jude and blinked, clearly recognizing him, and stared at him for a bit, obviously recategorizing Jude in his head, refiling what he knew about him. He opened his mouth and shut it and then apologized again as he left, Jude smiling serenely at him the entire time.

  “Well, well,” said Jude, after the man had hurried away. “That was the head of the litigation department of one of the biggest firms in the city. And, apparently, an admirer of yours.” He grinned at Willem. “Now are you convinced you’re famous?”

  “If the benchmark for fame is being recognized by twentysomething female RISD graduates and aging closet cases, then yes,” he said, and the two of them started snickering, childishly, until they were both able to compose themselves again.

  Jude looked at him. “Only you could be on magazine covers and not think you’re famous,” he said, fondly. But Willem wasn’t anywhere real when those magazine covers came out; he was on set. On set, everyone acted like they were famous.

  “It’s different,” he told Jude. “I can’t explain it.” But later, in the car to the airport, he realized what the difference was. Yes, he was used to being looked at. But he was only really used to being looked at by certain kinds of people in certain kinds of rooms—people who wanted to sleep with him, or who wanted to talk to him because it might help their own careers, or people for whom the simple fact that he was recognizable was enough to trigger something hungry and frantic in them, to crave being in his presence. He wasn’t, however, accustomed to being looked at by people who had other things to do, who had bigger and more important matters to worry about than an actor in New York. Actors in New York: they were everywhere. The only time men with power ever looked at him was at premieres, when he was being presented to the studio head and they were shaking his hand and making small talk even as he could see them examining him, calculating how we
ll he’d tested and how much they’d paid for him and how much the film would have to earn in order for them to look at him more closely.

  Perversely, though, as this began happening more and more—he would enter a room, a restaurant, a building, and would feel, just for a second, a slight collective pause—he also began realizing that he could turn his own visibility on and off. If he walked into a restaurant expecting to be recognized, he always was. And if he walked in expecting not to be, he rarely was. He was never able to determine what, exactly, beyond his simply willing it, made the difference. But it worked; it was why, six years after that lunch, he was able to walk through much of SoHo in plain sight, more or less, after he moved in with Jude.

  He had been at Greene Street since Jude got home from his suicide attempt, and as the months passed, he found that he was migrating more and more of his things—first his clothes, then his laptop, then his boxes of books and his favorite woolen blanket that he liked to wrap about himself and shuffle around in as he made his morning coffee: his life was so itinerant that there really wasn’t much else he needed or owned—to his old bedroom. A year later, he was living there still. He’d woken late one morning and made himself some coffee (he’d had to bring his coffeemaker as well, because Jude didn’t have one), and had meandered sleepily about the apartment, noticing as if for the first time that somehow his books were now on Jude’s shelves, and the pieces of art he’d brought over were hanging on Jude’s walls. When had this happened? He couldn’t quite remember, but it felt right; it felt right that he should be back here.

  Even Mr. Irvine agreed. Willem had seen him at Malcolm’s house the previous spring for Malcolm’s birthday and Mr. Irvine had said, “I hear you’ve moved back in with Jude,” and he said he had, preparing himself for a lecture on their eternal adolescence: he was going to be forty-four, after all; Jude was nearly forty-two. But “You’re a good friend, Willem,” Mr. Irvine had said. “I’m glad you boys are taking care of each other.” He had been deeply rattled by Jude’s attempt; they all had, of course, but Mr. Irvine had always liked Jude the best of all of them, and they all knew it.

  “Well, thanks, Mr. Irvine,” he’d said, surprised. “I’m glad, too.”

  In the first, raw weeks after Jude had gotten out of the hospital, Willem used to go into his room at odd hours to give himself confirmation that Jude was there, and alive. Back then, Jude slept constantly, and he would sometimes sit on the end of his bed, staring at him and feeling a sort of horrible wonder that he was still with them at all. He would think: If Richard had found him just twenty minutes later, Jude would have been dead. About a month after Jude had been released, Willem had been at the drugstore and had seen a box cutter hanging on the rack—such a medieval, cruel instrument, it seemed—and had almost burst into tears: Andy had told him that the emergency room surgeon had said Jude’s had been the deepest, most decisive self-inflicted incisions he had ever seen in his career. He had always known that Jude was troubled, but he was awestruck, almost, by how little he knew him, by the depths of his determination to harm himself.

  He felt that he had in some ways learned more about Jude in the past year than he had in the past twenty-six, and each new thing he learned was awful: Jude’s stories were the kinds of stories that he was unequipped to answer, because so many of them were unanswerable. The story of the scar on the back of his hand—that had been the one that had begun it—had been so terrible that Willem had stayed up that night, unable to sleep, and had seriously contemplated calling Harold, just to be able to have someone else share the story with him, to be speechless alongside him.

  The next day he couldn’t stop himself from staring at Jude’s hand, and Jude had finally drawn his sleeve over it. “You’re making me self-conscious,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d said.

  Jude had sighed. “Willem, I’m not going to tell you these stories if you’re going to react like this,” he said, finally. “It’s okay, it really is. It was a long time ago. I never think about it.” He paused. “I don’t want you to look at me differently if I tell you these things.”

  He’d taken a deep breath. “No,” he said. “You’re right. You’re right.” And so now when he listened to these stories of Jude’s, he was careful not to say anything, to make small, nonjudgmental noises, as if all his friends had been whipped with a belt soaked in vinegar until they had passed out or been made to eat their own vomit off the floor, as if those were normal rites of childhood. But despite these stories, he still knew nothing: He still didn’t know who Brother Luke was. He still didn’t know anything except isolated stories about the monastery, or the home. He still didn’t know how Jude had made it to Philadelphia or what had happened to him there. And he still didn’t know the story about the injury. But if Jude was beginning with the easier stories, he now knew enough to know that those stories, if he ever heard them, would be horrific. He almost didn’t want to know.

  The stories had been part of a compromise when Jude had made it clear that he wouldn’t go to Dr. Loehmann. Andy had been stopping by most Friday nights, and he came over one evening shortly after Jude had returned to Rosen Pritchard. As Andy examined Jude in his bedroom, Willem made everyone drinks, which they had on the sofa, the lights low and the sky outside grainy with snow.

  “Sam Loehmann says you haven’t called him,” Andy said. “Jude—this is bullshit. You’ve got to call him. This was part of the deal.”

  “Andy, I’ve told you,” Jude said, “I’m not going.” Willem was pleased, then, to hear that Jude’s stubbornness had returned, even though he disagreed with him. Two months ago, when they had been in Morocco, he had looked up from his plate at dinner to see Jude staring at the dishes of mezze before him, unable to serve himself any of them. “Jude?” he’d asked, and Jude had looked at him, his face fearful. “I don’t know how to begin,” he’d said, quietly, and so Willem had reached over and spooned a little from each dish onto Jude’s plate, and told him to start with the scoop of stewed eggplant at the top and eat his way clockwise through the rest of it.

  “You have to do something,” Andy said. He could tell Andy was trying to remain calm, and failing, and that too he found heartening: a sign of a certain return to normalcy. “Willem thinks so too, right, Willem? You can’t just keep going on like this! You’ve had a major trauma in your life! You have to start discussing things with someone!”

  “Fine,” said Jude, looking tired. “I’ll tell Willem.”

  “Willem’s not a health-care professional!” said Andy. “He’s an actor!” And at that, Jude had looked at him and the two of them had started laughing, so hard that they had to put their drinks down, and Andy had finally stood and said that they were both so immature he didn’t know why he bothered and had left, Jude trying to call after him—“Andy! We’re sorry! Don’t leave!”—but laughing too hard to be intelligible. It was the first time in months—the first time since even before the attempt—that he had heard Jude laugh.

  Later, when they had recovered, Jude had said, “I thought I might, you know, Willem—start telling you things sometimes. But do you mind? Is it going to be a burden?” And he had said of course it wouldn’t be, that he wanted to know. He had always wanted to know, but he didn’t say this; he knew it would sound like criticism.

  But as much as he was able to convince himself that Jude had returned to himself, he was also able to recognize that he had been changed. Some of these changes were, he thought, good ones: the talking, for example. And some of them were sad ones: although his hands were much stronger, and although it was less and less frequent, they still shook occasionally, and he knew Jude was embarrassed by it. And he was more skittish than ever about being touched, especially, Willem noticed, by Harold; a month ago, when Harold had visited, Jude had practically danced out of the way to keep Harold from hugging him. He had felt bad for Harold, seeing the expression on his face, and so had gone over and hugged him himself. “You know he can’t help it,” he told Harold quietly
, and Harold had kissed him on the cheek. “You’re a sweet man, Willem,” he’d said.

  Now it was October, thirteen months after the attempt. During the evening he was at the theater; two months after his run ended in December, he’d start shooting his first project since he returned from Sri Lanka, an adaptation of Uncle Vanya that he was excited about and was being filmed in the Hudson Valley: he’d be able to come home every night.

  Not that the location was a coincidence. “Keep me in New York,” he’d instructed his manager and his agent after he’d dropped out of the film in Russia the previous fall.

  “For how long?” asked Kit, his agent.

  “I don’t know,” he’d said. “At least the next year.”

  “Willem,” Kit had said, after a silence, “I understand how close you and Jude are. But don’t you think you should take advantage of the momentum you have? You could do whatever you wanted.” He was referring to The Iliad and The Odyssey, which had both been enormous successes, proof, Kit liked to point out, that he could do anything he wanted now. “From what I know of Jude, he’d say the same thing.” And then, when he didn’t say anything, “It’s not like this is your wife, or kid, or something. This is your friend.”

  “You mean ‘just your friend,’ ” he’d said, testily. Kit was Kit; he thought like an agent, and he trusted how Kit thought—he had been with him since the beginning of his career; he tried not to fight with him. And Kit had always guided him well. “No fat, no filler,” he liked to brag about Willem’s career, reviewing the history of his roles. They both knew that Kit was far more ambitious for him than he was—he always had been. And yet it had been Kit who’d gotten him on the first flight out of Sri Lanka after Richard had called him; Kit who’d had the producers shut down production for seven days so he could fly to New York and back.