A Little Life (36 page)

“A career mikva,” said Jude, smiling, when he told him this.

“A free-market douche,” he countered.

“An ambition enema.”

“Ooh, that’s good!”

But sometimes the parties—like tonight’s—had the opposite effect. Sometimes he found himself resenting the others’ definition of him, the reductiveness and immovability of it: he was, and forever would be, Willem Ragnarsson of Hood Hall, Suite Eight, someone bad at math and good with girls, an identity both simple and understandable, his persona drawn in two quick brushstrokes. They weren’t wrong, necessarily—there was something depressing about being in an industry in which he was considered an intellectual simply because he didn’t read certain magazines and websites and because he had gone to the college he had—but it made his life, which he knew was small anyway, feel smaller still.

And sometimes he sensed in his former peers’ ignorance of his career something stubborn and willful and begrudging; last year, when his first truly big studio film had been released, he had been at a party in Red Hook and had been talking to a Hood hanger-on who was always at these gatherings, a man named Arthur who’d lived in the loser house, Dillingham Hall, and who now published an obscure but respected journal about digital cartography.

“So, Willem, what’ve you been doing lately?” Arthur asked, finally, after talking for ten minutes about the most recent issue of
The Histories
, which had featured a three-dimensional rendering of the Indochinese opium route from eighteen thirty-nine through eighteen forty-two.

He experienced, then, that moment of disorientation he occasionally had at these gatherings. Sometimes that very question was asked in a jokey, ironic way, as a congratulations, and he would smile and play along—“Oh, not much, still waiting at Ortolan. We’re doing a great sablefish with tobiko these days”—but sometimes, people genuinely didn’t know. The genuine not-knowing happened less and less frequently these days, and when it did, it was usually from someone who lived so far off the cultural grid that even the reading of
The New York Times
was treated as a seditious act or, more often, someone who was trying to communicate their disapproval—no, their dismissal—of him and his life and work by remaining determinedly ignorant of it.

He didn’t know Arthur well enough to know into which category
he fell (although he knew him well enough to not like him, the way he pressed so close into his space that he had literally backed into a wall), so he answered simply. “I’m acting.”

“Really,” said Arthur, blandly. “Anything I’d’ve heard of?”

This question—not the question itself, but Arthur’s tone, its carelessness and derision—irritated him anew, but he didn’t show it. “Well,” he said slowly, “they’re mostly indies. I did something last year called
The Kingdom of Frankincense
, and I’m leaving next month to shoot
The Unvanquished
, based on the novel?” Arthur looked blank. Willem sighed; he had won an award for
The Kingdom of Frankincense
. “And something I shot a couple of years ago’s just been released: this thing called
Black Mercury 3081
.”

“Sounds interesting,” said Arthur, looking bored. “I don’t think I’ve heard of it, though. Huh. I’ll have to look it up. Well, good for you, Willem.”

He hated the way certain people said “good for you, Willem,” as if his job were some sort of spun-sugar fantasy, a fiction he fed himself and others, and not something that actually existed. He especially hated it that night, when not fifty yards away, framed clearly in the window just behind Arthur’s head, happened to be a spotlit billboard mounted atop a building with his face on it—his scowling face, admittedly: he was, after all, fighting off an enormous mauve computer-generated alien—and
BLACK MERCURY 3081:
COMING SOON
in two-foot-high letters. In those moments, he would be disappointed in the Hoodies.
They’re no better than anyone else after all
, he would realize.
In the end, they’re jealous and trying to make me feel bad. And I’m stupid, because I
do
feel bad
. Later, he would be irritated with himself:
This is what you wanted
, he would remind himself.
So why do you care what other people think?
But acting
was
caring what other people thought (sometimes it felt like that was all it was), and as much as he liked to think himself immune to other people’s opinions—as if he was somehow above worrying about them—he clearly wasn’t.

“I know it sounds so fucking petty,” he told Jude after that party. He was embarrassed by how annoyed he was—he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else.

“It doesn’t sound petty at all,” Jude had said. They were driving back to the city from Red Hook. “But Arthur’s a jerk, Willem. He always
has been. And years of studying Herodotus hasn’t made him any less of one.”

He smiled, reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I feel there’s something so … so pointless about what I do.”

“How can you say that, Willem? You’re an amazing actor; you really are. And you—”

“
Don’t
say I bring joy to so many people.”

“Actually, I wasn’t going to say that. Your films aren’t really the sorts of things that bring joy to anyone.” (Willem had come to specialize in playing dark and complicated characters—often quietly violent, usually morally compromised—that inspired different degrees of sympathy. “Ragnarsson the Terrible,” Harold called him.)

“Except aliens, of course.”

“Right, except aliens. Although not even them—you kill them all in the end, don’t you? But Willem, I love watching them, and so do so many other people. That’s got to count for something, right? How many people get to say that, that they can actually remove someone from his daily life?” And when he didn’t answer: “You know, maybe we should stop going to these parties; they’re becoming unhealthy exercises in masochism and self-loathing for us both.” Jude turned to him and grinned. “At least you’re in the arts.
I
might as well be working for an arms dealer. Dorothy Wharton asked me tonight how it felt waking up each morning knowing I’d sacrificed yet another piece of my soul the day before.”

Finally, he laughed. “No, she didn’t.”

“Yes, she did. It was like having a conversation with Harold.”

“Yeah, if Harold was a white woman with dreadlocks.”

Jude smiled. “As I said, like having a conversation with Harold.”

But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same.

It also provided them an excuse to pretend that everything was fine with JB, when they all three knew that something wasn’t. Willem
couldn’t quite identify what was wrong with him—JB could be, in his way, almost as evasive as Jude when it came to certain conversations—but he knew that JB was lonely, and unhappy, and uncertain, and that none of those sensations were familiar ones to him. He sensed that JB—who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well—was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities. So he organized these outings, and they all obediently followed as they had always done, giving him the small kindness of letting him be the leader, the one who decided for them, always.

He would have liked to have seen JB one-on-one, just the two of them, but these days, when he wasn’t with his college friends, JB ran with a different crowd, one consisting mostly of art world hangers-on, who seemed to be only interested in doing lots of drugs and then having dirty sex, and it simply wasn’t appealing to him. He was in New York less and less often—just eight months in the past three years—and when he
was
home, there were the twin and contradictory pressures to spend meaningful time with his friends and to do absolutely nothing at all.

Now, though, he kept moving toward Jude, who had at least been released by Marta and her grouchy friend and was talking to their friend Carolina (seeing this, he felt guilty anew, as he hadn’t talked to Carolina in months and he knew she was angry with him), when Francesca blocked his path to reintroduce him to a woman named Rachel with whom he had worked four years ago on a production of
Cloud 9
, for which she had been the assistant dramaturg. He was happy enough to see her again—he had liked her all those years ago; he had always thought she was pretty—but he knew, even as he was talking to her, that it would go no further than a conversation. After all, he hadn’t been exaggerating: he started filming in five weeks. Now was not the time to get ensnared in something new and complicated, and he didn’t really have the energy for a one-night hookup which, he knew, had a funny way of becoming as exhausting as something longer-term.

Ten minutes or so into his conversation with Rachel, his phone buzzed, and he apologized and checked the message from Jude:
Leaving.
Don’t want to interrupt your conversation with the future Mrs. Ragnarsson. See you at home
.

“Shit,” he said, and then to Rachel, “Sorry.” Suddenly, the spell of the party ended, and he was desperate to leave. Their participation in these parties were a kind of theater that the four of them agreed to stage for themselves, but once one of the actors left the stage, there seemed little point in continuing. He said goodbye to Rachel, whose expression changed from perplexed to hostile once she realized he was truly leaving and she wasn’t being invited to leave with him, and then to a group of other people—Marta, Francesca, JB, Malcolm, Edie, Carolina—at least half of whom seemed deeply annoyed with him. It took him another thirty minutes to extricate himself from the apartment, and on his way downstairs, he texted Jude back, hopefully,
You still here? Leaving now
, and then, when he didn’t get a reply,
Taking train. Picking something up at the apt—see you soon
.

He took the L to Eighth Avenue and then walked the few blocks south to his apartment. Late October was his favorite time in the city, and he was always sad to miss it. He lived on the corner of Perry and West Fourth, in a third-floor unit whose windows were just level with the tops of the gingko trees; before he’d moved in, he’d had a vision that he would lie in bed late on the weekends and watch the tornado the yellow leaves made as they were shaken loose from their branches by the wind. But he never had.

He had no special feelings for the apartment, other than it was his and he had bought it, the first and biggest thing he had ever bought after paying off the last of his student loans. When he had begun looking, a year and a half ago, he had known only that he wanted to live downtown and that he needed a building with an elevator, so that Jude would be able to visit him.

“Isn’t that a little codependent?” his girlfriend at the time, Philippa, had asked him, teasing but also not teasing.

“Is it?” he had asked, understanding what she meant but pretending not to.

“Willem,” Philippa had said, laughing to conceal her irritation. “It is.”

He had shrugged, unoffended. “I can’t live somewhere he can’t come visit,” he said.

She sighed. “I know.”

He knew that Philippa had nothing against Jude; she liked him, and Jude liked her as well, and had even one day gently told Willem that he thought he should spend more time with Philippa when he was in town. When he and Philippa had begun dating—she was a costume designer, mostly for theater—she had been amused, charmed even, by his friendships. She had seen them, he knew, as proof of his loyalty, and dependability, and consistency. But as they continued dating, as they got older, something changed, and the amount of time he spent with JB and Malcolm and, especially, Jude became evidence instead of his fundamental immaturity, his unwillingness to leave behind the comfort of one life—the life with them—for the uncertainties of another, with her. She never asked him to abandon them completely—indeed, one of the things he had loved about her was how close she was to her own group of friends, and that the two of them could spend a night with their own people, in their own restaurants, having their own conversations, and then meet at its end, two distinct evenings ending as a single shared one—but she wanted, finally, a kind of surrender from him, a dedication to her and their relationship that superseded the others.

Which he couldn’t bring himself to do. But he felt he had given more to her than she recognized. In their last two years together, he hadn’t gone to Harold and Julia’s for Thanksgiving nor to the Irvines’ at Christmas, so he could instead go to her parents’ in Vermont; he had forgone his annual vacation with Jude; he had accompanied her to her friends’ parties and weddings and dinners and shows, and had stayed with her when he was in town, watching as she sketched designs for a production of
The Tempest
, sharpening her expensive colored pencils while she slept and he, his mind still stuck in a different time zone, wandered through the apartment, starting and stopping books, opening and closing magazines, idly straightening the containers of pasta and cereal in the pantry. He had done all of this happily and without resentment. But it still hadn’t been enough, and they had broken up, quietly and, he thought, well, the previous year, after almost four years together.

Mr. Irvine, hearing that they had broken up, shook his head (this had been at Flora’s baby shower). “You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans,” he said. “Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I’m not sure what’s going on with you lot. You’re making money. You’ve
achieved something. Don’t you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?”