Page 226 - A Little Life: A Novel

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