Page 288 - A Little Life: A Novel

beautiful day yesterday? After Willem got home, we ran for—what, eight
miles, right, Willem?—all the way up and down the highway.”
“Oh, did you?” he asked her, looking at Willem, who smiled sheepishly

at him.
“What can I say?” he said. “I unexpectedly got a second wind.”
They start walking south, first veering east from Broadway so they won’t
have to cross through Times Square. Willem’s hair has been colored dark
for his next role, and he has a beard, so he’s not instantly recognizable, but
neither of them want to get stuck in a scrum of tourists.
This is the last time he will see Willem for what will likely be more than

six months. On Tuesday, he leaves for Cyprus to begin work on The Iliad
and The Odyssey; he will play Odysseus in both. The two films will be shot
consecutively and released consecutively, but they will have the same cast
and the same director, too. The shoot will take him all across southern
Europe and northern Africa before moving to Australia, where some of the
battle scenes are being shot, and because the pace is so intense and the

distances he has to travel so far, it’s unclear whether he’ll have much time,
if any, to come home on breaks. It is the most elaborate and ambitious shoot
Willem has been on, and he is nervous. “It’s going to be incredible,
Willem,” he reassures him.
“Or an incredible disaster,” Willem says. He isn’t glum, he never is, but
he can tell Willem is anxious, and eager to do well, and worried that he will
somehow disappoint. But he is worried before every film, and yet—as he

reminds Willem—every one has turned out fine, better than fine. However,
he thinks, this is one of the reasons that Willem will always have work, and
good work: because he does take it seriously, because he does feel so
responsible.
He, though, is dreading the next six months, especially because Willem
has been so present for the last year and a half. First he was shooting a

small project, one based in Brooklyn, that lasted just a few weeks. And then
he was in a play, a production called The Maldivian Dodo, about two
brothers, both ornithologists, one of whom is slowly tipping into an
uncategorizable madness. The two of them had a late dinner every
Thursday night for the entire run of the play, which he saw—as he has with
all of Willem’s plays—multiple times. On his third viewing, he spotted JB
with Oliver, just a few rows ahead of him but on the left side of the theater,

and throughout the show he kept glancing over at JB to see if he was