Station Eleven
“It was,” he tells them, “it is,” and then finds a way to change the subject because it’s difficult to explain this next part. Yes, it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.
His parents are horrified. There are tearful phone calls on calling cards late at night. “The point was to get off the island,” he tells them, but this doesn’t help, because they love the island and they live there on purpose. But two months after leaving school he gets a bit part in an American movie filming locally, and then a one-line role in a Canadian TV show. He doesn’t feel that he really has any idea how to act, so he starts spending all his money on acting classes, where he meets his best friend, Clark. There is a magnificent year when they are inseparable and go out four nights a week with fake IDs, and then when both of them are nineteen Clark succumbs to parental pressure and returns to England for university while Arthur auditions successfully for a theater school in New York City, where he works for cash in a restaurant and lives with four roommates above a bakery in Queens.
He graduates from the theater school and marks time for a while, auditioning and working long hours as a waiter, then a job on Law & Order—is there an actor in New York who hasn’t worked on Law & Order?—that lands him an agent and turns into a recurring role on a different Law & Order, one of the spin-offs. A couple of commercials, two television pilots that don’t get picked up—“But you should totally come out to L.A.,” the director of the second one says when he calls Arthur with the bad news. “Crash in my guesthouse for a few weeks, do some auditions, see what happens”—and Arthur’s sick of eastern winters by then, so he does it, he gets rid of most of his belongings and boards a westbound plane.
“I love this place,” he says, but six months later when they’re breaking up she throws the line back at him—“You love this place but you’ll never belong here and you’ll never be cast as the lead in any of your stupid movies”—and by this point he’s twenty-eight, time speeding up in a way that disconcerts him, the parties going too late and getting too sloppy, waiting in the ER on two separate occasions for news of friends who’ve OD’d on exotic combinations of alcohol and prescription medications, the same people at party after party, the sun rising on scenes of tedious debauchery, everyone looking a little undone. Just after his twenty-ninth birthday he lands the lead in a low-budget film about a botched bank robbery and is pleased to learn that it’s filming in Toronto. He likes the idea of returning to Canada in triumph, which he’s aware is egotistical but what can you do.