“Well,” said Jude, seriously, “in the extraordinarily unlikely event that you never act again, then you’ll do something else. And while you figure it out, you’ll move in with me.”
He knew, of course, that he would work again: he had to believe it. Every actor did. Acting was a form of grifting, and once you stopped believing you could, so did everyone else. But he still liked having Jude reassure him; he liked knowing he had somewhere to go just in case it really did end. Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly, uncharacteristically self-pitying, he would think of what he would do if it ended: he thought he might work with disabled children. He would be good at it, and he would enjoy it. He could see himself walking home from an elementary school he imagined might be on the Lower East Side, west to SoHo, toward Greene Street. His apartment would be gone, of course, sold to pay for his master’s program in education (in this dream, all the millions he’d earned, all the millions he had never spent, had somehow vanished), and he would be living in Jude’s apartment, as if the past two decades had never happened at all.
But after The Sycamore Court, these mopey fantasies had diminished in frequency, and he spent the latter half of his thirty-seventh year feeling closer to confidence than he ever had before. Something had shifted; something had cemented; somewhere his name had been tapped into stone. He would always have work; he could rest for a bit if he wanted to.
It was September, and he was coming back from a shoot and about to embark upon a European publicity tour; he had one day in the city, just one, and Jude told him he’d take him anywhere he wanted. They’d see each other, they’d have lunch, and then he’d get back into the car and go straight to the airport for the flight to London. It had been so long since he had been in New York, and he really wanted to go somewhere cheap and downtown and homey, like the Vietnamese noodle place they had gone to when they were in their twenties, but he instead picked a French restaurant known for its seafood in midtown so Jude wouldn’t have to travel far.
The restaurant was filled with businessmen, the kinds of people who telegraphed their wealth and power with the cut of their suits and the subtlety of their watches: you had to be wealthy and powerful yourself in order to understand what was being communicated. To everyone else, they were men in gray suits, indistinguishable from one another. The hostess brought him to Jude, who was there already, waiting, and when Jude stood, he reached over and hugged him very close, which he knew Jude didn’t like but which he had recently decided he would start doing anyway. They stood there, holding each other, surrounded on either side by gray-suited men, until he released Jude and they sat.
“Did I embarrass you enough?” he asked him, and Jude smiled and shook his head.
There were so many things to discuss in so little time that Jude had actually written an agenda on the back of a receipt, which he had laughed at when he had seen it but which they ended up following fairly closely. Between Topic Five (Malcolm’s wedding: What were they going to say in their toasts?) and Topic Six (the progression of the Greene Street apartment, which was being gutted), he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, and as he walked back to the table, he had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched. He was of course used to being appraised and inspected, but there was something different about the quality of this attention, its intensity and hush, and for the first time in a long time, he was self-conscious, aware of the fact that he was wearing jeans and not a suit, and that he clearly didn’t belong. He became aware, in fact, that everyone was wearing a suit, and he was the only one not.
“I think I’m wearing the wrong thing,” he said quietly to Jude as he sat back down. “Everyone’s staring.”
“They’re not staring at you because of what you’re wearing,” Jude said. “They’re staring at you because you’re famous.”
He shook his head. “To you and literally dozens of other people, maybe.”
“No, Willem,” Jude had said. “You are.” He smiled at him. “Why do you think they didn’t make you wear a jacket? They don’t let just anyone waltz in here who’s not in corporate mufti. And why do you think they keep bringing over all these appetizers? It’s not because of me, I guarantee you.” Now he laughed. “Why did you choose this place anyway? I thought you were going to pick somewhere downtown.”
He groaned. “I heard the crudo was good. And what do you mean: Is there a dress code here?”
Jude smiled again and was about to answer when one of the discreet gray-suited men came over to them and, vividly embarrassed, apologized for interrupting them. “I just wanted to say that I loved The Sycamore Court,” he said. “I’m a big fan.” Willem thanked him, and the man, who was older, in his fifties, was about to say something else when he saw Jude and blinked, clearly recognizing him, and stared at him for a bit, obviously recategorizing Jude in his head, refiling what he knew about him. He opened his mouth and shut it and then apologized again as he left, Jude smiling serenely at him the entire time.
“Well, well,” said Jude, after the man had hurried away. “That was the head of the litigation department of one of the biggest firms in the city. And, apparently, an admirer of yours.” He grinned at Willem. “Now are you convinced you’re famous?”
“If the benchmark for fame is being recognized by twentysomething female RISD graduates and aging closet cases, then yes,” he said, and the two of them started snickering, childishly, until they were both able to compose themselves again.