Page 415 - A Little Life: A Novel

day, and as he listened, he found himself feeling slightly sad that Jude,
whom he considered brilliant, brilliant in ways he would never understand,
was spending his life doing work that sounded so crushingly dull, the

intellectual equivalent of housework: cleaning and sorting and washing and
tidying, only to move on to the next house and have to begin all over. He
didn’t say this, of course, and on one Saturday he met Jude at Rosen
Pritchard and looked through his folders and papers and wandered around
the office as Jude wrote.
“Well, what do you think?” Jude asked, and leaned back in his chair and
grinned at him, and he smiled back and said, “Pretty impressive,” because it

was, in its own way, and Jude had laughed. “I know what you’re thinking,
Willem,” he’d said. “It’s okay. Harold thinks it, too. ‘Such a waste,’ ” he
said in Harold’s voice. “ ‘Such a waste, Jude.’ ”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” he protested, although really, he had
been: Jude was always bemoaning his own lack of imagination, his own
unswervable sense of practicality, but Willem had never seen him that way.

And it did seem a waste: not that he was at a corporate firm but that he was
in law at all, when really, he thought, a mind like Jude’s should be doing
something else. What, he didn’t know, but it wasn’t this. He knew it was
ridiculous, but he had never truly believed that Jude’s attending law school
would actually result in his becoming a lawyer: he had always imagined
that at some point he’d give it up and do something else, like be a math
professor, or a voice teacher, or (although he had recognized the irony, even

then) a psychologist, because he was such a good listener and always so
comforting to his friends. He didn’t know why he clung to this idea of Jude,
even after it was clear that he loved what he did and excelled at it.
The Sycamore Court had been an unexpected hit and had won Willem the
best reviews he’d ever had, and award nominations, and its release, paired
with a larger, flashier film that he had shot two years earlier but had been

delayed in postproduction, had created a certain moment that even he
recognized would transform his career. He had always chosen his roles
wisely—if he could be said to have superior talent in anything, he always
thought it was that: his taste for parts—but until that year, there had never
been a time in which he felt that he was truly secure, that he could talk
about films he’d like to do when he was in his fifties or sixties. Jude had
always told him that he had an overdeveloped sense of circumspection

about his career, that he was far better along than he thought, but it had