Page 424 - A Little Life: A Novel

were. (“When an actor talks and there’s no one to hear him, is he still an
actor?” his friend Roman had once asked. He sometimes wondered.)
But to Jude, he wasn’t an actor: he was his friend, and that identity

supplanted everything else. It was a role he had inhabited for so long that it
had become, indelibly, who he was. To Jude, he was no more primarily an
actor than Jude was primarily a lawyer—it was never the first or second or
third way that either of them would describe the other. It was Jude who
remembered who he had been before he had made a life pretending to be
other people: someone with a brother, someone with parents, someone to
whom everything and everyone seemed so impressive and beguiling. He

knew other actors who didn’t want anyone to remember them as they’d
been, as someone so determined to be someone else, but he wasn’t that
person. He wanted to be reminded of who he was; he wanted to be around
someone for whom his career would never be the most interesting thing
about him.
And if he was to be honest, he loved what came with Jude as well:

Harold and Julia. Jude’s adoption had been the first time he had ever felt
envious of anything Jude had. He admired a lot of what Jude had—his
intelligence and thoughtfulness and resourcefulness—but he had never been
jealous of him. But watching Harold and Julia with him, watching how they
watched him even when he wasn’t looking at them, he had felt a kind of
emptiness: he was parentless, and while most of the time he didn’t think
about this at all, he felt that, for as remote as his parents had been, they had

at least been something that had anchored him to his life. Without any
family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and
tossed aloft with every gust. He and Jude had been united in this.
Of course, he knew this envy was ridiculous, and beyond mean: he had
grown up with parents, and Jude hadn’t. And he knew that Harold and Julia
felt an affection for him as well, as much as he did for them. They had both

seen every one of his films, and both sent him long and detailed reviews of
them, always praising his performance and making intelligent comments
about his costars and the cinematography. (The only one they had never
seen—or at least never commented on—was The Prince of Cinnamon,
which was the film he had been shooting when Jude had tried to kill
himself. He had never seen it himself.) They read every article about him—
like his reviews, he avoided these articles—and bought a copy of every

magazine that featured him. On his birthday, they would call and ask him