“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.
At seventeen he’s accepted into the University of Toronto. He fills out the student-loan applications, his parents scrape up the money for the plane ticket and he’s gone. He thought he wanted to study economics, but when he arrives in Toronto he discovers that he wants to do almost anything else. He worked hard in high school, but he’s an indifferent student at the university. The classes are tedious. The point of coming to this city wasn’t school, he decides. School was just his method of escape. The point was the city of Toronto itself. Within four months he’s dropped out and is going to acting auditions, because some girl in his Commerce 101 class told him he should be an actor.
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.
In Hollywood he goes to parties and lands a small part in a movie, a soldier with three lines who gets blown up in the first ten minutes, but this leads to a much bigger movie part, and this is when the parties begin in earnest—cocaine and smooth girls with perfect skin in houses and hotel rooms, a number of years that come back to him later in strobelike flashes: sitting by a pool in Malibu drinking vodka and talking to a girl who says she came here illegally from Mexico, crossed the border lying under a load of chili peppers in the back of a truck when she was ten; he’s not sure whether to believe her but he thinks she’s beautiful so he kisses her and she says she’ll call but he never sees her again; driving in the hills with friends, a passenger in a convertible with the top down, his friends singing along with the radio while Arthur watches the palm trees slipping past overhead; dancing with a girl to “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—secretly his favorite song—in some guy’s basement tiki bar and then it seems like a miracle when he sees her at someone else’s party a week later, the same girl at two parties in this infinite city, she smiles at him with half-closed eyes and takes his hand, leads him out to the backyard to watch the sun rise over Los Angeles. The novelty of this town is starting to wear a little thin by then, but up there by Mulholland Drive he understands that there’s still some mystery here, still something in this city he hasn’t seen, a sea of lights fading out in the valley as the sun rises, the way she runs her fingernails lightly over the skin of his arm.
“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.