Page 225 - A Little Life: A Novel

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