Chapter 1
T HERE HAD BEEN a day, about a month after he turned thirty-eight, when Willem realized he was famous.
Initially, this had fazed him less than he would have imagined, in part because he had always considered himself sort of famous—he and JB, that is.
He’d be out downtown with someone, Jude or someone else, and somebody would come over to say hello to Jude, and Jude would introduce him: “Aaron, do you know Willem?” And Aaron would say, “Of course. Willem Ragnarsson. Everyone knows Willem,” but it wouldn’t be because of his work—it would be because Aaron’s former roommate’s sister had dated him at Yale, or he had two years ago done a reading for Aaron’s friend’s brother’s friend who was a playwright, or because Aaron, who was an artist, had once been in a group show with JB and Asian Henry Young, and he’d met Willem at the after-party.
New York City, for much of his adulthood, had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.
The four of them talked to the same—well, if not the same people, the same types of people at least, that they had in college, and in that realm of artists and actors and musicians, of course he was known, because he always had been.
It wasn’t such a vast world; everyone knew everyone else.
Of the four of them, only Jude, and to some degree Malcolm, had experience living in another world, the real world, the one populated with people who did the necessary stuff of life: making laws, and teaching, and healing people, and solving problems, and handling money, and selling and buying things (the bigger surprise, he always thought, was not that he knew Aaron but that Jude did).
Just before he turned thirty-seven, he had taken a role in a quiet film titled The Sycamore Court in which he played a small-town Southern lawyer who was finally coming out of the closet.
He’d taken the part to work with the actor playing his father, who was someone he admired and who in the film was taciturn and casually vituperative, a man disapproving of his own son and made unkind by his own disappointments.
As part of his research, he had Jude explain to him what, exactly, he did all day, and as he listened, he found himself feeling slightly sad that Jude, whom he considered brilliant, brilliant in ways he would never understand, was spending his life doing work that sounded so crushingly dull, the intellectual equivalent of housework: cleaning and sorting and washing and tidying, only to move on to the next house and have to begin all over.
He didn’t say this, of course, and on one Saturday he met Jude at Rosen Pritchard and looked through his folders and papers and wandered around the office as Jude wrote.
“Well, what do you think?” Jude asked, and leaned back in his chair and grinned at him, and he smiled back and said, “Pretty impressive,” because it was, in its own way, and Jude had laughed.
“I know what you’re thinking, Willem,” he’d said.
“It’s okay. Harold thinks it, too. ‘Such a waste,’” he said in Harold’s voice. “‘Such a waste, Jude.’”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” he protested, although really, he had been: Jude was always bemoaning his own lack of imagination, his own unswervable sense of practicality, but Willem had never seen him that way.
And it did seem a waste: not that he was at a corporate firm but that he was in law at all, when really, he thought, a mind like Jude’s should be doing something else.
What, he didn’t know, but it wasn’t this.
He knew it was ridiculous, but he had never truly believed that Jude’s attending law school would actually result in his becoming a lawyer: he had always imagined that at some point he’d give it up and do something else, like be a math professor, or a voice teacher, or (although he had recognized the irony, even then) a psychologist, because he was such a good listener and always so comforting to his friends.
He didn’t know why he clung to this idea of Jude, even after it was clear that he loved what he did and excelled at it.
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.”