Page 501 - A Little Life: A Novel

experienced that same insecurity that had visited him as a younger man:
What if he never worked again? What if this was it? And although things
had, he could now see, continued with almost no discernible hitch at all, it

had taken him a year to be reassured that his circumstances hadn’t changed,
that he was still as he had been, desirable to some directors and not to
others (“Bullshit,” Kit had said, and he was grateful for him; “anyone
would want to work with you”), and at any rate, the same actor, no better or
worse, that he had been before.
But if he was allowed to be the same actor, he was not allowed to be the
same person, and in the months after he was declared gay—and never

refuted it; he didn’t have a publicist to issue these sorts of denials and
avowals—he found himself in possession of more identities than he’d had
in a very long time. For much of his adult life, he had been placed in
circumstances that required the shedding of selves: no longer was he a
brother; no longer was he a son. But with a single revelation, he had now
become a gay man; a gay actor; a high-profile gay actor; a high-profile,

nonparticipating gay actor; and, finally, a high-profile traitorous gay actor.
A year or so ago he had gone to dinner with a director named Max whom
he’d known for many years, and over dinner Max had tried to get him to
give a speech at a gala dinner benefiting a gay-rights organization at which
he would announce himself as gay. Willem had always supported this
organization, and he told Max that although he would be pleased to present
an award or sponsor a table—as he had every year for the past decade—he

wouldn’t come out, because he didn’t believe there was anything to come
out of: he wasn’t gay.
“Willem,” Max said, “you’re in a relationship, a serious relationship,
with a man. That is the very definition of gay.”
“I’m not in a relationship with a man,” he said, hearing how absurd the
words were, “I’m in a relationship with Jude.”

“Oh my god,” Max muttered.
He’d sighed. Max was sixteen years older than he; he had come of age in
a time when identity politics were your very identity, and he understood
Max’s—and the other people who pecked at and pleaded with him to come
out, and then accused him of self-loathing, and cowardice, and hypocrisy,
and denial, when he didn’t—arguments; he understood that he had come to
represent something he had never asked to represent; he understood that