Page 44 - A Little Life: A Novel

like war, and they were veterans: they didn’t want to think about the war,
and they certainly didn’t want to talk about it with naïfs who were still
eagerly dashing toward the trenches, who were still excited to be in-country.

Findlay himself was a former actor, but unlike the other former actors, he
liked to—or perhaps “liked” was not the word; perhaps the more accurate
word would be simply “did”—talk about his past life, or at least a certain
version of it. According to Findlay, he had once almost, almost booked the
second lead in the Public Theater production of A Bright Room Called Day
(later, one of the waitresses had told them that all of the significant roles in
the play were for women). He had understudied a part on Broadway (for

what production was never made clear). Findlay was a walking career
memento mori, a cautionary tale in a gray wool suit, and the still-actors
either avoided him, as if his particular curse were something contagious, or
studied him closely, as if by remaining in contact with him, they could
inoculate themselves.
But at what point had Findlay decided he would give up acting, and how

had it happened? Was it simply age? He was, after all, old: forty-five, fifty,
somewhere around there. How did you know that it was time to give up?
Was it when you were thirty-eight and still hadn’t found an agent (as they
suspected had happened to Joel)? Was it when you were forty and still had a
roommate and were making more as a part-time waiter than you had made
the year you decided to be a full-time actor (as they knew had happened to
Kevin)? Was it when you got fat, or bald, or got bad plastic surgery that

couldn’t disguise the fact that you were fat and bald? When did pursuing
your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you
know when to stop? In earlier, more rigid, less encouraging (and ultimately,
more helpful) decades, things would be much clearer: you would stop when
you turned forty, or when you got married, or when you had kids, or after
five years, or ten years, or fifteen. And then you would go get a real job,

and acting and your dreams for a career in it would recede into the evening,
a melting into history as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath.
But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that
was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble.
Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from
being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times
when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if

happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that