Page 414 - A Little Life: A Novel

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THERE HAD BEEN a day, about a month after he turned thirty-eight, when
Willem realized he was famous. Initially, this had fazed him less than he
would have imagined, in part because he had always considered himself
sort of famous—he and JB, that is. He’d be out downtown with someone,
Jude or someone else, and somebody would come over to say hello to Jude,
and Jude would introduce him: “Aaron, do you know Willem?” And Aaron
would say, “Of course. Willem Ragnarsson. Everyone knows Willem,” but

it wouldn’t be because of his work—it would be because Aaron’s former
roommate’s sister had dated him at Yale, or he had two years ago done a
reading for Aaron’s friend’s brother’s friend who was a playwright, or
because Aaron, who was an artist, had once been in a group show with JB
and Asian Henry Young, and he’d met Willem at the after-party. New York

City, for much of his adulthood, had simply been an extension of college,
where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of
which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked
down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.
The four of them talked to the same—well, if not the same people, the same
types of people at least, that they had in college, and in that realm of artists
and actors and musicians, of course he was known, because he always had

been. It wasn’t such a vast world; everyone knew everyone else.
Of the four of them, only Jude, and to some degree Malcolm, had
experience living in another world, the real world, the one populated with
people who did the necessary stuff of life: making laws, and teaching, and
healing people, and solving problems, and handling money, and selling and
buying things (the bigger surprise, he always thought, was not that he knew

Aaron but that Jude did). Just before he turned thirty-seven, he had taken a
role in a quiet film titled The Sycamore Court in which he played a small-
town Southern lawyer who was finally coming out of the closet. He’d taken
the part to work with the actor playing his father, who was someone he
admired and who in the film was taciturn and casually vituperative, a man
disapproving of his own son and made unkind by his own disappointments.
As part of his research, he had Jude explain to him what, exactly, he did all