In the meantime, he still more or less lived with Jude, into whose apartment on Greene Street he’d moved directly after he and Philippa had broken up. He used his unfinished apartment, and the promise he’d made to Andy, as the reasons for his apparently interminable occupancy of Jude’s extra bedroom, but the fact was that he needed Jude’s company and the constancy of his presence. When he was away in England, in Ireland, in California, in France, in Tangiers, in Algeria, in India, in the Philippines, in Canada, he needed to have an image of what was waiting for him back home in New York, and that image never included Perry Street. Home for him was Greene Street, and when he was far away and lonely, he thought of Greene Street, and his room there, and how on weekends, after Jude finished working, they would stay up late, talking, and he would feel time slow and expand, letting him believe the night might stretch out forever.
And now he was finally going home. He ran down the stairs and out the front door and onto Perry Street. The evening had turned cold, and he walked quickly, almost trotting, enjoying as he always did the pleasure of walking by himself, of feeling alone in a city of so many. It was one of the things he missed the most. On film sets, you were never alone. An assistant director walked you to your trailer and back to the set, even if the trailer and the set were fifty yards away. When he was getting used to sets, he was first startled, then amused, and then, finally, annoyed by the culture of actor infantilization that moviemaking seemed to encourage. He sometimes felt that he had been strapped, upright, to a dolly and was being wheeled from place to place: he was walked to the makeup department and then to the costume department. Then he was walked to the set, and then he was walked back to his trailer, and then, an hour or two later, he would be collected from the trailer and escorted to the set once again.
“Don’t let me ever get used to this,” he’d instruct Jude, begging him, almost. It was the concluding line to all his stories: about the lunches at which everyone segregated themselves by rank and caste—actors and the director at one table, cameramen at another, electricians at a third, the grips at a fourth, the costume department at a fifth—and you made small talk about your workouts, and restaurants you wanted to try, and diets you were on, and trainers, and cigarettes (how much you wanted one), and facials (how much you needed one); about the crew, who both hated the actors and yet were embarrassingly susceptible to even the slightest attention from them; about the cattiness of the hair and makeup team, who knew an almost bewildering amount of information about all the actors’ lives, having learned to keep perfectly quiet and make themselves perfectly invisible as they adjusted hairpieces and dabbed on foundation and listened to actresses screaming at their boyfriends and actors whisperingly arranging late-night hookups on their phones, all while sitting in their chairs. It was on these sets that he realized he was more guarded than he’d always imagined himself, and also how easy, how tempting, it was to begin to believe that the life of the set—where everything was fetched for you, and where the sun could literally be made to shine on you—was actual life.
Once he had been standing on his mark as the cinematographer made a last adjustment, before coming over and cupping his head gently—“His hair!” barked the first assistant director, warningly—and tilting it an inch to the left, and then to the right, and then to the left again, as if he was positioning a vase on a mantel.
“Don’t move, Willem,” he’d cautioned, and he’d promised he wouldn’t, barely breathing, but really he had wanted to break into giggles. He suddenly thought of his parents—whom, disconcertingly, he thought of more and more as he grew older—and of Hemming, and for half a second, he saw them standing just off the set to his left, just far enough out of range so he couldn’t see their faces, whose expressions he wouldn’t have been able to imagine anyway.
He liked telling Jude all of these things, making his days on set something funny and bright. This was not what he thought acting would be, but what had he known about what acting would be? He was always prepared, he was always on time, he was polite to everyone, he did what the cinematographer told him to do and argued with the director only when absolutely necessary. But even all these films later—twelve in the past five years, eight of them in the past two—and through all of their absurdities, he finds most surreal the minute before the camera begins rolling. He stands at his first mark; he stands at his second mark; the cameraman announces he’s ready.
“Vanities!” shouts the first assistant director, and the vanities—hair, makeup, costume—hurry over to descend upon him as if he is carrion, plucking at his hair and straightening his shirt and tickling his eyelids with their soft brushes. It takes only thirty seconds or so, but in those thirty seconds, his lashes lowered so stray powder doesn’t float into his eyes, other people’s hands moving possessively over his body and head as if they’re no longer his own, he has the strange sensation that he is gone, that he is suspended, and that his very life is an imagining. In those seconds, a whirl of images whips through his mind, too quickly and jumblingly to effectively identify each as it occurs to him: there is the scene he’s about to shoot, of course, and the scene he’d shot earlier, but also all the things that occupy him, always, the things he sees and hears and remembers before he falls asleep at night—Hemming and JB and Malcolm and Harold and Julia. Jude.
Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).
I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.
As Vanities tug and yank at him, it occurs to him that he should have asked Jude what he meant by that: why it was for him and not for Jude. But by the time he’s finished shooting the scene, he won’t remember the question, or the conversation that inspired it.
“Roll sound!” yells the first A.D., and Vanities scatter.
“Speed,” the sound person answers, which means he’s rolling.
“Roll camera,” calls the cameraman, and then there’s the announcement of the scene, and the clap.
And then he opens his eyes.
2
ONE SATURDAY MORNING shortly after he turns thirty-six, he opens his eyes and experiences that strange, lovely sensation he sometimes has, the one in which he realizes that his life is cloudless. He imagines Harold and Julia in Cambridge, the two of them moving dozily through the kitchen, pouring coffee into their stained and chipped mugs and shaking the dew off of the plastic newspaper bags, and, in the air, Willem flying toward him from Cape Town. He pictures Malcolm pressed against Sophie in bed in Brooklyn, and then, because he feels hopeful, JB safe and snoring in his bed on the Lower East Side. Here, on Greene Street, the radiator releases its sibilant sigh. The sheets smell like soap and sky. Above him is the tubular steel chandelier Malcolm installed a month ago. Beneath him is a gleaming black wood floor. The apartment—still impossible in its vastness and possibilities and potential—is silent, and his.
He points his toes toward the bottom of the bed and then flexes them toward his shins: nothing. He shifts his back against the mattress: nothing. He draws his knees toward his chest: nothing. Nothing hurts, nothing even threatens to hurt: his body is his again, something that will perform for him whatever he can imagine, without complaint or sabotage. He closes his eyes, not because he’s tired but because it is a perfect moment, and he knows how to enjoy them.