Page 560 - A Little Life: A Novel

such,” he said when he was finished. “You’re just getting older.”
“Oh,” he said, and they were both quiet, for what was there for them to
say? “Well,” he said, at last, “maybe I’ll get so weak that I’ll be able to

convince Willem I don’t have the energy to go to Loehmann any longer,”
because one night that fall he had—stupidly, drunkenly, romantically even
—promised Willem he’d see Dr. Loehmann for another nine months.
Andy had sighed but had smiled, too. “You’re such a brat,” he said.
Now, though, he thinks back on this period fondly, for in every other way
that mattered, that winter was a glorious time. In December, Willem had
been nominated for a major award for his work in The Poisoned Apple; in

January, he won it. Then he was nominated again, for an even bigger and
more prestigious award, and again, he won. He had been in London on
business the night Willem won, but had set his alarm for two a.m. so he
could wake and watch the ceremony online; when Willem’s name was
called, he shouted out loud, watched Willem, beaming, kiss Julia—whom
he had brought as his date—and bound up the stairs to the stage, listened as

he thanked the filmmakers, the studio, Emil, Kit, Alan Turing himself,
Roman and Cressy and Richard and Malcolm and JB, and “my in-laws,
Julia Altman and Harold Stein, for always making me feel like I was their
son as well, and, finally and most important, Jude St. Francis, my best
friend and the love of my life, for everything.” He’d had to stop himself
from crying then, and when he got through to Willem half an hour later, he
had to stop himself again. “I’m so proud of you, Willem,” he said. “I knew

you would win, I knew it.”
“You always think that,” Willem laughed, and he laughed too, because
Willem was right: he always did. He always thought Willem deserved to
win awards for whatever he was nominated for; on the occasions he didn’t,
he was genuinely perplexed—politics and preferences aside, how could the
judges, the voters, deny what was so obviously a superior performance, a

superior actor, a superior person?
In his meetings the next morning—in which he had to stop himself from
not crying, but smiling, dopily and incessantly—his colleagues
congratulated him and asked him again why he hadn’t gone to the
ceremony, and he had shaken his head. “Those things aren’t for me,” he
said, and they weren’t; of all the awards shows, all the premieres, all the
parties that Willem went to for work, he had attended only two or three.

This past year, when Willem was being interviewed by a serious, literary