This question—not the question itself, but Arthur’s tone, its carelessness and derision—irritated him anew, but he didn’t show it. “Well,” he said slowly, “they’re mostly indies. I did something last year called The Kingdom of Frankincense, and I’m leaving next month to shoot The Unvanquished, based on the novel?” Arthur looked blank. Willem sighed; he had won an award for The Kingdom of Frankincense. “And something I shot a couple of years ago’s just been released: this thing called Black Mercury 3081.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Arthur, looking bored. “I don’t think I’ve heard of it, though. Huh. I’ll have to look it up. Well, good for you, Willem.”
He hated the way certain people said “good for you, Willem,” as if his job were some sort of spun-sugar fantasy, a fiction he fed himself and others, and not something that actually existed. He especially hated it that night, when not fifty yards away, framed clearly in the window just behind Arthur’s head, happened to be a spotlit billboard mounted atop a building with his face on it—his scowling face, admittedly: he was, after all, fighting off an enormous mauve computer-generated alien—and BLACK MERCURY 3081: COMING SOON in two-foot-high letters. In those moments, he would be disappointed in the Hoodies. They’re no better than anyone else after all, he would realize. In the end, they’re jealous and trying to make me feel bad. And I’m stupid, because I do feel bad. Later, he would be irritated with himself: This is what you wanted, he would remind himself. So why do you care what other people think? But acting was caring what other people thought (sometimes it felt like that was all it was), and as much as he liked to think himself immune to other people’s opinions—as if he was somehow above worrying about them—he clearly wasn’t.
“I know it sounds so fucking petty,” he told Jude after that party. He was embarrassed by how annoyed he was—he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else.
“It doesn’t sound petty at all,” Jude had said. They were driving back to the city from Red Hook. “But Arthur’s a jerk, Willem. He always has been. And years of studying Herodotus hasn’t made him any less of one.”
He smiled, reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I feel there’s something so … so pointless about what I do.”
“How can you say that, Willem? You’re an amazing actor; you really are. And you—”
“Don’t say I bring joy to so many people.”
“Actually, I wasn’t going to say that. Your films aren’t really the sorts of things that bring joy to anyone.” (Willem had come to specialize in playing dark and complicated characters—often quietly violent, usually morally compromised—that inspired different degrees of sympathy. “Ragnarsson the Terrible,” Harold called him.)
“Except aliens, of course.”
“Right, except aliens. Although not even them—you kill them all in the end, don’t you? But Willem, I love watching them, and so do so many other people. That’s got to count for something, right? How many people get to say that, that they can actually remove someone from his daily life?” And when he didn’t answer: “You know, maybe we should stop going to these parties; they’re becoming unhealthy exercises in masochism and self-loathing for us both.” Jude turned to him and grinned. “At least you’re in the arts. I might as well be working for an arms dealer. Dorothy Wharton asked me tonight how it felt waking up each morning knowing I’d sacrificed yet another piece of my soul the day before.”
Finally, he laughed. “No, she didn’t.”
“Yes, she did. It was like having a conversation with Harold.”
“Yeah, if Harold was a white woman with dreadlocks.”
Jude smiled. “As I said, like having a conversation with Harold.”
But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same.
It also provided them an excuse to pretend that everything was fine with JB, when they all three knew that something wasn’t. Willem couldn’t quite identify what was wrong with him—JB could be, in his way, almost as evasive as Jude when it came to certain conversations—but he knew that JB was lonely, and unhappy, and uncertain, and that none of those sensations were familiar ones to him. He sensed that JB—who had so loved college, its structures and hierarchies and microsocieties that he had known how to navigate so well—was trying with every party to re-create the easy, thoughtless companionship they had once had, when their professional identities were still foggy to them and they were united by their aspirations instead of divided by their daily realities. So he organized these outings, and they all obediently followed as they had always done, giving him the small kindness of letting him be the leader, the one who decided for them, always.