Page 43 - A Little Life: A Novel

the gig, he told Willem, but what could he do? It was too much money to
refuse.) Willem had been glad for the referral, because besides its food and
service, the other thing that Ortolan was known for—albeit among a much

smaller group of people—was its flexible hours, especially if Findlay liked
you. Findlay liked small flat-chested brunette women and all sorts of men
as long as they were tall and thin and, it was rumored, not Asian.
Sometimes Willem would stand on the edge of the kitchen and watch as
mismatched pairs of tiny dark-haired waitresses and long skinny men
circled through the main dining room, skating past one another in a weirdly
cast series of minuets.

Not everyone who waited at Ortolan was an actor. Or to be more precise,
not everyone at Ortolan was still an actor. There were certain restaurants in
New York where one went from being an actor who waited tables to,
somehow, being a waiter who was once an actor. And if the restaurant was
good enough, respected enough, that was not only a perfectly acceptable
career transition, it was a preferable one. A waiter at a well-regarded

restaurant could get his friends a coveted reservation, could charm the
kitchen staff into sending out free dishes to those same friends (though as
Willem learned, charming the kitchen staff was less easy than he’d thought
it would be). But what could an actor who waited tables get his friends?
Tickets to yet another off-off-Broadway production for which you had to
supply your own suit because you were playing a stockbroker who may or
may not be a zombie, and yet there was no money for costumes? (He’d had

to do exactly that last year, and because he didn’t have a suit of his own,
he’d had to borrow one of Jude’s. Jude’s legs were about an inch longer
than his, and so for the duration of the run he’d had to fold the pants legs
under and stick them in place with masking tape.)
It was easy to tell who at Ortolan was once an actor and was now a career
waiter. The careerists were older, for one, and precise and fussy about

enforcing Findlay’s rules, and at staff dinners they would ostentatiously
swirl the wine that the sommelier’s assistant poured them to sample and say
things like, “It’s a little like that Linne Calodo Petite Sirah you served last
week, José, isn’t it?” or “Tastes a little minerally, doesn’t it? This a New
Zealand?” It was understood that you didn’t ask them to come to your
productions—you only asked your fellow actor-waiters, and if you were
asked, it was considered polite to at least try to go—and you certainly didn’t

discuss auditions, or agents, or anything of the sort with them. Acting was