Page 423 - A Little Life: A Novel

career, reviewing the history of his roles. They both knew that Kit was far
more ambitious for him than he was—he always had been. And yet it had
been Kit who’d gotten him on the first flight out of Sri Lanka after Richard

had called him; Kit who’d had the producers shut down production for
seven days so he could fly to New York and back.
“I don’t mean to offend you, Willem,” Kit had said, carefully. “I know
you love him. But come on. If he were the love of your life, I’d understand.
But this seems extreme to me, to inhibit your career like this.”
And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as
he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of

life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who
could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that
particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades.
Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his
body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of
something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-

colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind
with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there
was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life
of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude
saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him
real.
In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best

actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental,
because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be
subsumed by a character. “If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,”
his teacher had said.
He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self
was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and

further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and
harder it was to find your way back. Was it any wonder that so many of his
peers were such wrecks? They made their money, their lives, their identities
by impersonating others—was it a surprise, then, that they needed one set,
one stage after the next, to give their lives shape? Without them, what and
who were they? And so they took up religions, and girlfriends, and causes
to give them something that could be their own: they never slept, they never

stopped, they were terrified to be alone, to have to ask themselves who they