Page 47 - A Little Life: A Novel

who responded with a long silence, stuffed with disapproval, before he
started lecturing Willem. “I don’t know about you sometimes, Willem,” he
began. “Sometimes I get the sense you don’t even really want to be an

actor.”
“That’s not true,” he’d protested. “It’s just that I don’t think that every
rejection is meaningless, and I don’t think everyone who gets a job over me
does so out of dumb luck.”
There had been another silence. “You’re too kind, Willem,” JB said,
darkly. “You’re never going to get anywhere like this.”
“Thanks, JB,” he’d said. He was rarely offended by JB’s opinions—

often, he was right—but at that particular moment, he didn’t much feel like
hearing JB’s thoughts on his shortcomings and his gloomy predictions
about his future unless he completely changed his personality. He’d gotten
off the phone and had lain in bed awake, feeling stuck and sorry for himself.
Anyway, changing his personality seemed basically out of the question—
wasn’t it too late? Before he was a kind man, after all, Willem had been a

kind boy. Everyone had noticed: his teachers, his classmates, the parents of
his classmates. “Willem is such a compassionate child,” his teachers would
write on his report cards, report cards his mother or father would look at
once, briefly and wordlessly, before adding them to the stacks of
newspapers and empty envelopes that they’d take to the recycling center.
As he grew older, he had begun to realize that people were surprised, even
upset, by his parents; a high-school teacher had once blurted to him that

given Willem’s temperament, he had thought his parents would be different.
“Different how?” he’d asked.
“Friendlier,” his teacher had said.
He didn’t think of himself as particularly generous or unusually good-
spirited. Most things came easily to him: sports, school, friends, girls. He
wasn’t nice, necessarily; he didn’t seek to be everyone’s friend, and he

couldn’t tolerate boors, or pettiness, or meanness. He was humble and
hardworking, diligent, he knew, rather than brilliant. “Know your place,”
his father often said to him.
His father did. Willem remembered once, after a late-spring freeze had
killed off a number of new lambs in their area, his father being interviewed
by a newspaper reporter who was writing a story about how it had affected
the local farms.