Page 215 - A Little Life: A Novel

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.”