“You have to do something,” Andy said. He could tell Andy was trying to remain calm, and failing, and that too he found heartening: a sign of a certain return to normalcy. “Willem thinks so too, right, Willem? You can’t just keep going on like this! You’ve had a major trauma in your life! You have to start discussing things with someone!”

“Fine,” said Jude, looking tired. “I’ll tell Willem.”

“Willem’s not a health-care professional!” said Andy. “He’s an actor!” And at that, Jude had looked at him and the two of them had started laughing, so hard that they had to put their drinks down, and Andy had finally stood and said that they were both so immature he didn’t know why he bothered and had left, Jude trying to call after him—“Andy! We’re sorry! Don’t leave!”—but laughing too hard to be intelligible. It was the first time in months—the first time since even before the attempt—that he had heard Jude laugh.

Later, when they had recovered, Jude had said, “I thought I might, you know, Willem—start telling you things sometimes. But do you mind? Is it going to be a burden?” And he had said of course it wouldn’t be, that he wanted to know. He had always wanted to know, but he didn’t say this; he knew it would sound like criticism.

But as much as he was able to convince himself that Jude had returned to himself, he was also able to recognize that he had been changed. Some of these changes were, he thought, good ones: the talking, for example. And some of them were sad ones: although his hands were much stronger, and although it was less and less frequent, they still shook occasionally, and he knew Jude was embarrassed by it. And he was more skittish than ever about being touched, especially, Willem noticed, by Harold; a month ago, when Harold had visited, Jude had practically danced out of the way to keep Harold from hugging him. He had felt bad for Harold, seeing the expression on his face, and so had gone over and hugged him himself. “You know he can’t help it,” he told Harold quietly, and Harold had kissed him on the cheek. “You’re a sweet man, Willem,” he’d said.

Now it was October, thirteen months after the attempt. During the evening he was at the theater; two months after his run ended in December, he’d start shooting his first project since he returned from Sri Lanka, an adaptation of Uncle Vanya that he was excited about and was being filmed in the Hudson Valley: he’d be able to come home every night.

Not that the location was a coincidence. “Keep me in New York,” he’d instructed his manager and his agent after he’d dropped out of the film in Russia the previous fall.

“For how long?” asked Kit, his agent.

“I don’t know,” he’d said. “At least the next year.”

“Willem,” Kit had said, after a silence, “I understand how close you and Jude are. But don’t you think you should take advantage of the momentum you have? You could do whatever you wanted.” He was referring to The Iliad and The Odyssey, which had both been enormous successes, proof, Kit liked to point out, that he could do anything he wanted now. “From what I know of Jude, he’d say the same thing.” And then, when he didn’t say anything, “It’s not like this is your wife, or kid, or something. This is your friend.”

“You mean ‘just your friend,’ ” he’d said, testily. Kit was Kit; he thought like an agent, and he trusted how Kit thought—he had been with him since the beginning of his career; he tried not to fight with him. And Kit had always guided him well. “No fat, no filler,” he liked to brag about Willem’s 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 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.