Page 416 - A Little Life: A Novel

never felt that way; he knew he was respected by his peers and by critics,
but a part of him always feared that it would end abruptly and without
warning. He was a practical person in the least practical of careers, and after

every job he booked, he would tell his friends he would never book another,
that this was certain to be the last, partly as a way of staving off his fears—
if he acknowledged the possibility, it was less likely to happen—and partly
to give voice to them, because they were real.
Only later, when he and Jude were alone, would he allow himself to truly
worry aloud. “What if I never work again?” he would ask Jude.
“That won’t happen,” Jude would say.

“But what if it does?”
“Well,” said Jude, seriously, “in the extraordinarily unlikely event that
you never act again, then you’ll do something else. And while you figure it
out, you’ll move in with me.”
He knew, of course, that he would work again: he had to believe it. Every
actor did. Acting was a form of grifting, and once you stopped believing

you could, so did everyone else. But he still liked having Jude reassure him;
he liked knowing he had somewhere to go just in case it really did end.
Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly, uncharacteristically self-
pitying, he would think of what he would do if it ended: he thought he
might work with disabled children. He would be good at it, and he would
enjoy it. He could see himself walking home from an elementary school he
imagined might be on the Lower East Side, west to SoHo, toward Greene

Street. His apartment would be gone, of course, sold to pay for his master’s
program in education (in this dream, all the millions he’d earned, all the
millions he had never spent, had somehow vanished), and he would be
living in Jude’s apartment, as if the past two decades had never happened at
all.
But after The Sycamore Court, these mopey fantasies had diminished in

frequency, and he spent the latter half of his thirty-seventh year feeling
closer to confidence than he ever had before. Something had shifted;
something had cemented; somewhere his name had been tapped into stone.
He would always have work; he could rest for a bit if he wanted to.
It was September, and he was coming back from a shoot and about to
embark upon a European publicity tour; he had one day in the city, just one,
and Jude told him he’d take him anywhere he wanted. They’d see each

other, they’d have lunch, and then he’d get back into the car and go straight