Part 3 – Vanities
THEIR NEXT-DOOR SUITEMATES their second year in Hood had been a trio of lesbians, all seniors, who had been in a band called Backfat and had for some reason taken a liking to JB (and, eventually, Jude, and then Willem, and finally, reluctantly, Malcolm). Now, fifteen years after the four of them had graduated, two of the lesbians had coupled up and were living in Brooklyn. Of the four of them, only JB talked to them regularly: Marta was a nonprofit labor lawyer, and Francesca was a set designer.
“Exciting news!” JB told them one Friday in October over dinner. “The Bitches of Bushwick called—Edie is in town!” Edie was the third in the lesbians’ trio, a beefy, emotional Korean American who shuttled back and forth between San Francisco and New York, and seemed always to be preparing for one improbable job or another: the last time they had seen her, she was about to leave for Grasse to begin training to become a professional nose, and just eight months before that, she had finished a cooking course in Afghani cuisine.
“And why is this exciting news?” asked Malcolm, who had never quite forgiven the three of them for their inexplicable dislike of him.
“Well,” said JB, and paused, grinning. “She’s transitioning!”
“To a man?” asked Malcolm. “Give me a break, JB. She’s never exhibited any gender dysphoric ideations for as long as we’ve known her!” A former coworker of Malcolm’s had transitioned the year before and Malcolm had become a self-anointed expert on the subject, lecturing them about their intolerance and ignorance until JB had finally shouted at him, “Jesus, Malcolm, I’m far more trans than Dominic’ll ever be!”
“Well, anyway, she is,” JB continued, “and the Bitches are throwing her a party at their house, and we’re all invited.”
They groaned. “JB, I only have five weeks before I leave for London, and I have so much shit to get done,” Willem protested. “I can’t spend a night listening to Edie Kim complaining out in Bushwick.”
“You can’t not go!” shrieked JB. “They specifically asked for you! Francesca’s inviting some girl who knows you from something or other and wants to see you again. If you don’t go, they’re all going to think you think you’re too good for them now. And there’s going to be a ton of other people we haven’t seen in forever—”
“Yeah, and maybe there’s a reason we haven’t seen them,” Jude said.
“—and besides, Willem, the pussy will be waiting for you whether you spend an hour in Brooklyn or not. And it’s not like it’s the end of the world. It’s Bushwick. Judy’ll drive us.” Jude had bought a car the year before, and although it wasn’t particularly fancy, JB loved to ride around in it.
“What? I’m not going,” Jude said.
“Why not?”
“I’m in a wheelchair, JB, remember? And as I recall, Marta and Francesca’s place doesn’t have an elevator.”
“Wrong place,” JB replied triumphantly. “See how long it’s been? They moved. Their new place definitely has one. A freight elevator, actually.” He leaned back, drumming his fist on the table as the rest of them sat in a resigned silence. “And off we go!”
So the following Saturday they met at Jude’s loft on Greene Street and he drove them to Bushwick, where he circled Marta and Francesca’s block, looking for a parking space.
“There was a spot right back there,” JB said after ten minutes.
“It was a loading zone,” Jude told him.
“If you just put that handicapped sign up, we can park wherever we want,” JB said.
“I don’t like using it—you know that.”
“If you’re not going to use it, then what’s the point of having a car?”
“Jude, I think that’s a space,” said Willem, ignoring JB.
“Seven blocks from the apartment,” muttered JB.
Once inside the party, they were each tugged by a different person to a separate corner of the room. Willem watched as Jude was pulled firmly away by Marta: Help me, Jude mouthed to him, and he smiled and gave him a little wave. Courage, he mouthed back, and Jude rolled his eyes. He knew how much Jude hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t wanted to explain again and again why he was in a wheelchair, and yet Willem had begged him: “Don’t make me go alone.”
“You won’t be alone. You’ll be with JB and Malcolm.”
“You know what I mean. Forty-five minutes and we’re out of there. JB and Malcolm can find their own way back to the city if they want to stay longer.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Thirty.”
“Fine.”
Willem, meanwhile, had been ensnared by Edie Kim, who looked basically the same as she had when they were in college: a little rounder, maybe, but that was it. He hugged her. “Edie,” he said, “congratulations.”
“Thanks, Willem,” said Edie. She smiled at him. “You look great. Really, really great.” JB had always had a theory that Edie had a crush on him, but he’d never believed it. “I really loved The Lacuna Detectives. You were really great in it.”
“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” He had hated The Lacuna Detectives. He had despised the production of it so much—the story, which was fantastic, had concerned a pair of metaphysical detectives who entered the unconscious minds of amnesiacs, but the director had been so tyrannical that Willem’s costar had quit two weeks into the shoot and had to be recast, and once a day, someone had run off the set crying—that he had never actually seen the film itself. “So,” he said, trying to redirect the conversation, “when—”
“Why’s Jude in a wheelchair?” Edie asked.
He sighed. When Jude had begun using the wheelchair regularly two months ago, the first time he’d had to in four years, since he was thirty-one, he had prepped them all on how to respond to this question. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “He just has an infection in his leg and it makes it painful for him to walk long distances.”
“God, poor guy,” said Edie. “Marta says he left the U.S. Attorney’s and has a huge job at some corporate firm.” JB had also always suspected Edie had a crush on Jude, which Willem thought was fairly plausible.
“Yeah, for a few years now,” he said, eager to move the subject away from Jude, for whom he never liked to answer; he would have loved to talk about Jude, and he knew what he could and couldn’t say about him, or on his behalf, but he didn’t like the sly, confiding tone people took when asking about him, as if he might be cajoled or tricked into revealing what Jude himself wouldn’t. (As if he ever would.) “Anyway, Edie, this is really exciting for you.” He stopped. “I’m sorry—I should’ve asked—do you still want to be called Edie?”
Edie frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well—” He paused. “I didn’t know how far into the process you were, and—”
“What process?”
“Um, the transition process?” He should’ve stopped when he saw Edie’s befuddlement, but he didn’t. “JB said you were transitioning?”
“Yeah, to Hong Kong,” said Edie, still frowning. “I’m going to be a freelance vegan consultant for medium-size hospitality businesses. Wait a minute—you thought I was transitioning genders?”
“Oh god,” he said, and two thoughts, separate but equally resonant, filled his mind: I am going to kill JB. And: I can’t wait to tell Jude about this conversation. “Edie, I’m so, so sorry.”
He remembered from college that Edie was tricky: little, little-kid things upset her (he once saw her sobbing because the top scoop of her ice cream cone had tumbled onto her new shoes), but big things (the death of her sister; her screaming, snowball-throwing breakup with her girlfriend, which had taken place in the Quad, and which everyone at Hood had leaned out of their windows to witness) seemed to leave her unfazed. He wasn’t sure into which category his gaffe fell, and Edie herself appeared equally uncertain, her small mouth convoluting itself into shapes in confusion. Finally, though, she started laughing, and called across the room at someone—“Hannah! Hannah! Come here! You’ve got to hear this!”—and he exhaled, apologized to and congratulated her again, and made his escape.
He started across the room toward Jude. After years—decades, almost—of these parties, the two of them had worked out their own sign language, a pantomime whose every gesture meant the same thing—save me—albeit with varying levels of intensity. Usually, they were able to simply catch each other’s eye across the room and telegraph their desperation, but at parties like this, where the loft was lit only by candles and the guests seemed to have multiplied themselves in the space of his short conversation with Edie, more expressive body language was often necessary. Grabbing the back of one’s neck meant the other person should call him on his phone right away; fiddling with one’s watch-band meant “Come over here and replace me in this conversation, or at least join in”; and yanking down on the left earlobe meant “Get me out of this right now.” He had seen, from the edge of his eye, that Jude had been pulling steadily on his earlobe for the past ten minutes, and he could now see that Marta had been joined by a grim-looking woman he vaguely remembered meeting (and disliking) at a previous party. The two of them were looming interrogatively over Jude in a way that made them appear proprietary and, in the candlelight, fierce, as if Jude were a child who had just been caught breaking a licorice-edged corner off their gingerbread house, and they were deciding whether to broil him with prunes or bake him with turnips.
He tried, he’d later tell Jude, he really did; but he was at one end of the room and Jude was at the other, and he kept getting stopped and tangled in conversations with people he hadn’t seen in years and, more annoyingly, people he had seen just a few weeks ago. As he pressed forward, he waved at Malcolm and pointed in Jude’s direction, but Malcolm gave him a helpless shrug and mouthed “What?” and he made a dismissive gesture back: Never mind.
I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, as he pushed through the crowd, but the truth was that he usually didn’t mind these parties, not really; a large part of him even enjoyed them. He suspected the same might be true of Jude as well, though perhaps to a lesser extent—certainly he did fine for himself at parties, and people always wanted to talk to him, and although the two of them always complained to each other about JB and how he kept dragging them to these things and how tedious they were, they both knew they could simply refuse if they really wanted to, and they both rarely did—after all, where else would they get to use their semaphores, that language that had only two speakers in the whole world?
In recent years, as his life had moved further from college and the person he had been, he sometimes found it relaxing to see people from there. He teased JB about how he had never really graduated from Hood, but in reality, he admired how JB had maintained so many of his, and their, relationships from then, and how he had somehow managed to contextualize so many of them. Despite his collection of friends from long ago, there was an insistent present tenseness to how JB saw and experienced life, and around him, even the most dedicated nostalgists found themselves less inclined to pick over the chaff and glitter of the past, and instead made themselves contend with whoever the person standing before them had become. He also appreciated how the people JB had chosen to remain friendly with were, largely, unimpressed with who he had become (as much as he could be said to have become anyone). Some of them behaved differently around him now—especially in the last year or so—but most of them were dedicated to lives and interests and pursuits that were so specific and, at times, marginal, that Willem’s accomplishments were treated as neither more nor less important than their own. JB’s friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers—he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money—and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB’s Hood Hall assortment, wasn’t defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it. (People had actually said that to him at these parties: “Oh, I didn’t see Black Mercury 3081. But were you proud of your work in it?” No, he hadn’t been proud of it. He had played a brooding intergalactic scientist who was also a jujitsu warrior and who successfully and single-handedly defeated a gargantuan space monster. But he had been satisfied with it: he had worked hard and had taken his performance seriously, and that was all he ever hoped to do.) Sometimes he wondered whether he was being fooled, if this entire circle of JB’s was a performance art piece in itself, one in which the competitions and concerns and ambitions of the real world—the world that sputtered along on money and greed and envy—were overlooked in favor of the pure pleasure of doing work. Sometimes this felt astringent to him, in the best way: he saw these parties, his time with the Hoodies, as something cleansing and restorative, something that returned him to who he once was, thrilled to get a part in the college production of Noises Off, making his roommates run lines with him every evening.
“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.
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?”
But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option? (But then, a sole option was no option at all.) “Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?” he’d asked Harold when they were up in Truro this past summer, and Harold had laughed. “Look, Willem,” he said, “I think you’re doing just fine. I know I give you a hard time about settling down, and I agree with Malcolm’s dad that couplehood is wonderful, but all you really have to do is just be a good person, which you already are, and enjoy your life. You’re young. You have years and years to figure out what you want to do and how you want to live.”
“And what if this is how I want to live?”
“Well, then, that’s fine,” said Harold. He smiled at Willem. “You boys are living every man’s dream, you know. Probably even John Irvine’s.”
Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
More troubling to him than his possible immaturity, though, were his capabilities as a friend. He had always taken pride in the fact that he was a good friend; friendship had always been important to him. But was he actually any good at it? There was the unresolved JB problem, for example; a good friend would have figured something out. And a good friend would certainly have figured out a better way to deal with Jude, instead of telling himself, chantlike, that there simply was no better way to deal with Jude, and if there was, if someone (Andy? Harold? Anyone?) could figure out a plan, then he’d be happy to follow it. But even as he told himself this, he knew that he was just making excuses for himself.
Andy knew it, too. Five years ago, Andy had called him in Sofia and yelled at him. It was his first shoot; it had been very late at night, and from the moment he answered the phone and heard Andy say, “For someone who claims to be such a great friend, you sure as fuck haven’t been around to prove it,” he had been defensive, because he knew Andy was right.
“Wait a minute,” he said, sitting upright, fury and fear clearing away any residual sleepiness.
“He’s sitting at home fucking cutting himself to shreds, he’s essentially all scar tissue now, he looks like a fucking skeleton, and where are you, Willem?” asked Andy. “And don’t say ‘I’m on a shoot.’ Why aren’t you checking in on him?”
“I call him every single day,” he began, yelling himself.
“You knew this was going to be hard for him,” Andy continued, talking over him. “You knew the adoption was going to make him feel more vulnerable. So why didn’t you put any safeguards in place, Willem? Why aren’t your other so-called friends doing anything?”
“Because he doesn’t want them to know that he cuts himself, that’s why! And I didn’t know it was going to be this hard for him, Andy,” he said. “He never tells me anything! How was I supposed to know?”
“Because! You’re supposed to! Fucking use your brain, Willem!”
“Don’t you fucking shout at me,” he shouted. “You’re just mad, Andy, because he’s your patient and you can’t fucking figure out a way to make him better and so you’re blaming me.”
He regretted it the moment he said it, and in that instant they were both silent, panting into their phones. “Andy,” he began.
“Nope,” said Andy. “You’re right, Willem. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He was abruptly miserable, thinking of Jude in the ugly Lispenard Street bathroom. Before he had left, he had looked everywhere for Jude’s razors—beneath the toilet tank lid; in the back of the medicine cabinet; even under the drawers in the cupboard, taking each out and examining them from all angles—but couldn’t find them. But Andy was right—it was his responsibility. He should have done a better job. And he hadn’t, so really, he had failed.
“No,” said Andy. “I’m really sorry, Willem; it’s totally inexcusable. And you’re right—I don’t know what to do.” He sounded tired. “It’s just that he’s had—he’s had such a shitty life, Willem. And he trusts you.”
“I know,” he mumbled. “I know he does.”
So they’d worked out a plan, and when he got back home, he’d monitored Jude more closely than he had before, a process that had proved singularly unrevealing. Indeed, in the month or so after the adoption, Jude was different than he’d seen him before. He couldn’t exactly define how: except on rare occasions, he wasn’t ever able to determine the days Jude was unhappy and the days he wasn’t. It wasn’t as if he normally moped around and was unemotive and then, suddenly, wasn’t—his fundamental behavior and rhythms and gestures were the same as before. But something had changed, and for a brief period, he had the strange sensation that the Jude he knew had been replaced by another Jude, and that this other Jude, this changeling, was someone of whom he could ask anything, who might have funny stories about pets and friends and scrapes from childhood, who wore long sleeves only because he was cold and not because he was trying to hide something. He was determined to take Jude at his word as often and as much as he could: after all, he wasn’t his doctor. He was his friend. His job was to treat him as he wanted to be treated, not as a subject to be spied on.
And so, after a certain point, his vigilance diminished, and eventually, that other Jude departed, back to the land of fairies and enchantments, and the Jude he knew reclaimed his space. But then, every once in a while, there would be troubling reminders that what he knew of Jude was only what Jude allowed him to know: he called Jude daily when he was away shooting, usually at a prearranged time, and one day last year he had called and they’d had a normal conversation, Jude sounding no different than he always did, and the two of them laughing at one of Willem’s stories, when he heard in the background the clear and unmistakable intercom announcement of the sort one only hears at hospitals: “Paging Dr. Nesarian, Dr. Nesarian to OR Three.”
“Jude?” he’d asked.
“Don’t worry, Willem,” he’d said. “I’m fine. I just have a slight infection; I think Andy’s gone a little crazy.”
“What kind of infection? Jesus, Jude!”
“A blood infection, but it’s nothing. Honestly, Willem, if it was serious, I would’ve told you.”
“No, you fucking wouldn’t have, Jude. A blood infection is serious.”
He was silent. “I would’ve, Willem.”
“Does Harold know?”
“No,” he said, sharply. “And you’re not to tell him.”
Exchanges like this left him stunned and bothered, and he spent the rest of the evening trying to remember the previous week’s conversations, picking through them for clues that something might have been amiss and he might have simply, stupidly overlooked it. In more generous, wondering moments, he imagined Jude as a magician whose sole trick was concealment, but every year, he got better and better at it, so that now he had only to bring one wing of the silken cape he wore before his eyes and he would become instantly invisible, even to those who knew him best. But at other times, he bitterly resented this trick, the year-after-year exhaustion of keeping Jude’s secrets and yet never being given anything in return but the meanest smidges of information, of not being allowed the opportunity to even try to help him, to publicly worry about him. This isn’t fair, he would think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play. Everything Jude communicated to them indicated that he didn’t want to be helped. And yet he couldn’t accept that. The question was how you ignored someone’s request to be left alone—even if it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won’t be helped while realizing that if you don’t try to help, then you’re not being a friend at all? Talk to me, he sometimes wanted to shout at Jude. Tell me things. Tell me what I need to do to make you talk to me.
Once, at a party, he had overheard Jude tell someone that he told him, Willem, everything, and he had been both flattered and perplexed, because really: he knew nothing. It was sometimes incredible to him how much he cared about someone who refused to tell him any of the things friends shared with each other—how he had lived before they met, what he feared, what he craved, who he was attracted to, the mortifications and sadnesses of daily life. In the absence of talking to Jude himself, he often wished he could talk to Harold about Jude, and figure out how much he knew, and whether, if they—and Andy—braided together all their knowledge, they might be able to find some sort of solution. But this was dreaming: Jude would never forgive him, and instead of the connection he did have with him, he would have none at all.
Back in his apartment, he shuffled quickly through his mail—he rarely got anything of any interest: everything business-related went to his agent or lawyer; anything personal went to Jude’s—found the copy of the script he’d forgotten there the week before when he stopped by the apartment after the gym, and left again; he didn’t even take off his coat.
Since he’d bought the apartment a year ago, he’d spent a total of six weeks there. There was a futon in the bedroom, and the coffee table from Lispenard Street in the living room, and the scuffed Eames fiberglass chair that JB had found in the street, and his boxes of books. But that was it. In theory, Malcolm was meant to be renovating the space, converting the airless little study near the kitchen into a dining alcove and addressing a list of other issues as well, but Malcolm, as if sensing Willem’s lack of interest, had made the apartment his last priority. He complained about this sometimes, but he knew it wasn’t Malcolm’s fault: after all, he hadn’t answered Malcolm’s e-mails about finishes or tiles or the dimensions of the built-in bookcase or banquette that Malcolm needed him to approve before he ordered the millwork. It was only recently that he’d had his lawyer’s office send Malcolm the final paperwork he needed to begin construction, and the following week, they were finally going to sit down and he was going to make some decisions, and when he returned home in mid-January, the apartment would be, Malcolm promised him, if not totally transformed, then at least greatly improved.
In the meantime, he still more or less lived with Jude, into whose apartment on Greene Street he’d moved directly after he and Philippa had broken up. He used his unfinished apartment, and the promise he’d made to Andy, as the reasons for his apparently interminable occupancy of Jude’s extra bedroom, but the fact was that he needed Jude’s company and the constancy of his presence. When he was away in England, in Ireland, in California, in France, in Tangiers, in Algeria, in India, in the Philippines, in Canada, he needed to have an image of what was waiting for him back home in New York, and that image never included Perry Street. Home for him was Greene Street, and when he was far away and lonely, he thought of Greene Street, and his room there, and how on weekends, after Jude finished working, they would stay up late, talking, and he would feel time slow and expand, letting him believe the night might stretch out forever.
And now he was finally going home. He ran down the stairs and out the front door and onto Perry Street. The evening had turned cold, and he walked quickly, almost trotting, enjoying as he always did the pleasure of walking by himself, of feeling alone in a city of so many. It was one of the things he missed the most. On film sets, you were never alone. An assistant director walked you to your trailer and back to the set, even if the trailer and the set were fifty yards away. When he was getting used to sets, he was first startled, then amused, and then, finally, annoyed by the culture of actor infantilization that moviemaking seemed to encourage. He sometimes felt that he had been strapped, upright, to a dolly and was being wheeled from place to place: he was walked to the makeup department and then to the costume department. Then he was walked to the set, and then he was walked back to his trailer, and then, an hour or two later, he would be collected from the trailer and escorted to the set once again.
“Don’t let me ever get used to this,” he’d instruct Jude, begging him, almost. It was the concluding line to all his stories: about the lunches at which everyone segregated themselves by rank and caste—actors and the director at one table, cameramen at another, electricians at a third, the grips at a fourth, the costume department at a fifth—and you made small talk about your workouts, and restaurants you wanted to try, and diets you were on, and trainers, and cigarettes (how much you wanted one), and facials (how much you needed one); about the crew, who both hated the actors and yet were embarrassingly susceptible to even the slightest attention from them; about the cattiness of the hair and makeup team, who knew an almost bewildering amount of information about all the actors’ lives, having learned to keep perfectly quiet and make themselves perfectly invisible as they adjusted hairpieces and dabbed on foundation and listened to actresses screaming at their boyfriends and actors whisperingly arranging late-night hookups on their phones, all while sitting in their chairs. It was on these sets that he realized he was more guarded than he’d always imagined himself, and also how easy, how tempting, it was to begin to believe that the life of the set—where everything was fetched for you, and where the sun could literally be made to shine on you—was actual life.
Once he had been standing on his mark as the cinematographer made a last adjustment, before coming over and cupping his head gently—“His hair!” barked the first assistant director, warningly—and tilting it an inch to the left, and then to the right, and then to the left again, as if he was positioning a vase on a mantel.
“Don’t move, Willem,” he’d cautioned, and he’d promised he wouldn’t, barely breathing, but really he had wanted to break into giggles. He suddenly thought of his parents—whom, disconcertingly, he thought of more and more as he grew older—and of Hemming, and for half a second, he saw them standing just off the set to his left, just far enough out of range so he couldn’t see their faces, whose expressions he wouldn’t have been able to imagine anyway.
He liked telling Jude all of these things, making his days on set something funny and bright. This was not what he thought acting would be, but what had he known about what acting would be? He was always prepared, he was always on time, he was polite to everyone, he did what the cinematographer told him to do and argued with the director only when absolutely necessary. But even all these films later—twelve in the past five years, eight of them in the past two—and through all of their absurdities, he finds most surreal the minute before the camera begins rolling. He stands at his first mark; he stands at his second mark; the cameraman announces he’s ready.
“Vanities!” shouts the first assistant director, and the vanities—hair, makeup, costume—hurry over to descend upon him as if he is carrion, plucking at his hair and straightening his shirt and tickling his eyelids with their soft brushes. It takes only thirty seconds or so, but in those thirty seconds, his lashes lowered so stray powder doesn’t float into his eyes, other people’s hands moving possessively over his body and head as if they’re no longer his own, he has the strange sensation that he is gone, that he is suspended, and that his very life is an imagining. In those seconds, a whirl of images whips through his mind, too quickly and jumblingly to effectively identify each as it occurs to him: there is the scene he’s about to shoot, of course, and the scene he’d shot earlier, but also all the things that occupy him, always, the things he sees and hears and remembers before he falls asleep at night—Hemming and JB and Malcolm and Harold and Julia. Jude.
Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).
I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.
As Vanities tug and yank at him, it occurs to him that he should have asked Jude what he meant by that: why it was for him and not for Jude. But by the time he’s finished shooting the scene, he won’t remember the question, or the conversation that inspired it.
“Roll sound!” yells the first A.D., and Vanities scatter.
“Speed,” the sound person answers, which means he’s rolling.
“Roll camera,” calls the cameraman, and then there’s the announcement of the scene, and the clap.
And then he opens his eyes.
