And then it was December. His run finished. They went to India on holiday, the four of them: the first trip they’d taken as a unit in years. In February, he began filming Uncle Vanya. The set was the kind he treasured and sought but only rarely found—he had worked with everyone before, and they all liked and respected one another, and the director was shaggy and mild and gentle, and the adaptation, which had been done by a novelist Jude admired, was beautiful and simple, and the dialogue was a pleasure to get to speak.
When Willem was young, he had been in a play called The House on Thistle Lane, which had been about a family that was packing up and leaving a house in St. Louis that had been owned by the father’s family for generations, but which they could no longer afford to maintain. But instead of a set, they had staged the play on one floor of a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem, and the audience had been allowed to wander between the rooms as long as they remained outside a roped-off area; depending on where you stood to watch, you saw the actors, and the space itself, from different perspectives. He had played the eldest, most damaged son, and had spent most of the first act mute and in the dining room, wrapping dishes in pieces of newspaper. He had developed a nervous tic for the son, who couldn’t imagine leaving his childhood house, and as the character’s parents fought in the living room, he would put down the plates and press himself into the far corner of the dining room near the kitchen and peel off the wallpaper in shreds. Although most of that act took place in the living room, there would always be a few audience members who would remain in his room, watching him, watching him scraping off the paper—a blue so dark it was almost black, and printed with pale pink cabbage roses—and rolling it between his fingers and dropping it to the floor, so that every night, one corner would become littered with little cigars of wallpaper, as if he were a mouse inexpertly building its tiny nest. It had been an exhausting play, but he had loved it: the intimacy of the audience, the unlikeliness of the stage, the small, detailed physicality of the role.
This production felt very much like that play. The house, a Gilded Age mansion on the Hudson, was grand but creaky and shabby—the kind of house his ex-girlfriend Philippa had once imagined they’d live in when they were married and ancient—and the director used only three rooms: the dining room, the living room, and the sunporch. Instead of an audience, they had the crew, who followed them as they moved through the space. But although he relished the work, part of him also recognized that Uncle Vanya was not exactly the most helpful thing he could be doing at the moment. On set, he was Dr. Astrov, but once he was back at Greene Street, he was Sonya, and Sonya—as much as he loved the play and always had, as much as he loved and pitied poor Sonya herself—was not a role he had ever thought he might perform, under any circumstance. When he had told the others about the film, JB had said, “So it’s a gender-blind cast, then,” and he’d said, “What do you mean?” and JB had said, “Well, you’re obviously Elena, right?” and everyone had laughed, especially him. This was what he loved about JB, he had thought; he was always smarter than even he knew. “He’s far too old to play Elena,” Jude had added, affectionately, and everyone had laughed again.
Vanya was an efficient shoot, just thirty-six days, and was over by the last week in March. One day shortly after it had ended, he met an old friend and former girlfriend of his, Cressy, for lunch in TriBeCa, and as he walked back to Greene Street in the light, dry snow, he was reminded of how much he enjoyed the city in the late winter, when the weather was suspended between one season and the next, and when Jude cooked every weekend, and when you could walk the streets for hours and never see anyone but a few lone people taking their dogs out for a stroll.
He was heading north on Church Street and had just crossed Reade when he glanced into a café on his right and saw Andy sitting at a table in the corner, reading. “Willem!” said Andy, as he approached him. “What’re you doing here?”
“I just had lunch with a friend and I’m walking home,” he said. “What’re you doing here? You’re so far downtown.”
“You two and your walks,” Andy said, shaking his head. “George is at a birthday party a few blocks from here, and I’m waiting until I have to go pick him up.”
“How old is George now?”
“Nine.”
“God, already?”
“I know.”
“Do you want some company?” he asked. “Or do you want to be alone?”
“No,” said Andy. He tucked a napkin into his book to mark his place. “Stay. Please.” And so he sat.
They talked for a while of, of course, Jude, who was on a business trip in Mumbai, and Uncle Vanya (“I just remember Astrov as being an unbelievable tool,” Andy said), and his next project, which began shooting in Brooklyn at the end of April, and Andy’s wife, Jane, who was expanding her practice, and their children: George, who had just been diagnosed with asthma, and Beatrice, who wanted to go to boarding school the following year.
And then, before he could stop himself—not that he felt any particular need to try—he was telling Andy about his feelings for Jude, and how he wasn’t sure what they meant or what to do about them. He talked and talked, and Andy listened, his face expressionless. There was no one else in the café but the two of them, and outside, the snow fell faster and thicker, and he felt, despite his anxiety, deeply calm, and glad he was telling somebody, and that that somebody was a person who knew him and Jude both, and had for many years. “I know this seems strange,” he said. “And I’ve thought about what it could be, Andy, I really have. But part of me wonders if it was always meant to be this way; I mean, I’ve dated and dated for decades now, and maybe the reason it’s never worked out is because it was never meant to, because I was supposed to be with him all along. Or maybe I’m telling myself this. Or maybe it’s simple curiosity. But I don’t think it is; I think I know myself better than that.” He sighed. “What do you think I should do?”