Page 225 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 225

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
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