THERE HAD BEEN a day, about a month after he turned thirty-eight, when Willem realized he was famous. Initially, this had fazed him less than he would have imagined, in part because he had always considered himself sort of famous—he and JB, that is. He’d be out downtown with someone, Jude or someone else, and somebody would come over to say hello to Jude, and Jude would introduce him: “Aaron, do you know Willem?” And Aaron would say, “Of course. Willem Ragnarsson. Everyone knows Willem,” but it wouldn’t be because of his work—it would be because Aaron’s former roommate’s sister had dated him at Yale, or he had two years ago done a reading for Aaron’s friend’s brother’s friend who was a playwright, or because Aaron, who was an artist, had once been in a group show with JB and Asian Henry Young, and he’d met Willem at the after-party. New York City, for much of his adulthood, had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn. The four of them talked to the same—well, if not the same people, the same types of people at least, that they had in college, and in that realm of artists and actors and musicians, of course he was known, because he always had been. It wasn’t such a vast world; everyone knew everyone else.
Of the four of them, only Jude, and to some degree Malcolm, had experience living in another world, the real world, the one populated with people who did the necessary stuff of life: making laws, and teaching, and healing people, and solving problems, and handling money, and selling and buying things (the bigger surprise, he always thought, was not that he knew Aaron but that Jude did). Just before he turned thirty-seven, he had taken a role in a quiet film titled The Sycamore Court in which he played a small-town Southern lawyer who was finally coming out of the closet. He’d taken the part to work with the actor playing his father, who was someone he admired and who in the film was taciturn and casually vituperative, a man disapproving of his own son and made unkind by his own disappointments. As part of his research, he had Jude explain to him what, exactly, he did all day, and as he listened, he found himself feeling slightly sad that Jude, whom he considered brilliant, brilliant in ways he would never understand, was spending his life doing work that sounded so crushingly dull, the intellectual equivalent of housework: cleaning and sorting and washing and tidying, only to move on to the next house and have to begin all over. He didn’t say this, of course, and on one Saturday he met Jude at Rosen Pritchard and looked through his folders and papers and wandered around the office as Jude wrote.
“Well, what do you think?” Jude asked, and leaned back in his chair and grinned at him, and he smiled back and said, “Pretty impressive,” because it was, in its own way, and Jude had laughed. “I know what you’re thinking, Willem,” he’d said. “It’s okay. Harold thinks it, too. ‘Such a waste,’ ” he said in Harold’s voice. “ ‘Such a waste, Jude.’ ”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” he protested, although really, he had been: Jude was always bemoaning his own lack of imagination, his own unswervable sense of practicality, but Willem had never seen him that way. And it did seem a waste: not that he was at a corporate firm but that he was in law at all, when really, he thought, a mind like Jude’s should be doing something else. What, he didn’t know, but it wasn’t this. He knew it was ridiculous, but he had never truly believed that Jude’s attending law school would actually result in his becoming a lawyer: he had always imagined that at some point he’d give it up and do something else, like be a math professor, or a voice teacher, or (although he had recognized the irony, even then) a psychologist, because he was such a good listener and always so comforting to his friends. He didn’t know why he clung to this idea of Jude, even after it was clear that he loved what he did and excelled at it.
The Sycamore Court had been an unexpected hit and had won Willem the best reviews he’d ever had, and award nominations, and its release, paired with a larger, flashier film that he had shot two years earlier but had been delayed in postproduction, had created a certain moment that even he recognized would transform his career. He had always chosen his roles wisely—if he could be said to have superior talent in anything, he always thought it was that: his taste for parts—but until that year, there had never been a time in which he felt that he was truly secure, that he could talk about films he’d like to do when he was in his fifties or sixties. Jude had always told him that he had an overdeveloped sense of circumspection about his career, that he was far better along than he thought, but it had 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?”