Wait’s WONDERFUL LIFE
I PICK UP JAKE GYLLENHAAL IN LOWER MANHATTAN, NOT OUT side his building, a redbrick factory converted into luxury condos designed for discretion, but instead at a hotel taxi stand three blocks south. We set out for Monticello Motor Club, a members-only racetrack in the southern Catskill Mountains, two hours north, in my beat-up Jeep.
He volunteers to take the wheel—“I’m a good driver, you’ll see!”—then to navigate, and he sounds a little aggrieved when he’s upstaged by Waze. “I want to be a good copilot here,” he says as we creep toward the Lincoln Tunnel. The traffc is bad, but he doesn’t complain. He’s been looking forward to leaving town, away from the endless obligations and the hounding tabloids. This day is work, too, of course, but at least it will be offset by adrenaline-inducing fun. His incoming calls go ignored, his texts unread. As we climb the New Jersey Palisades, and the city passes from view, his shoulders seem to slacken under his comically puffy coat.
He rifles through his backpack and pulls out an energy bar. “I brought this for you,” he says. “I’ve got a bag of nuts, if you want to share them later.” He’s really into food. On Thanksgiving, he spatchcocked his first turkey—“a very intense spatchcocking.” He’s working his way through a list of recipes he always figured would be diffcult, but none so far have been the catastrophe he’d presumed. Crème brûlée? Not that hard. He asks about my job, my wife, our book club. Can he join? We’re reading Gary Shteyngart’s new novel? He loves Gary! “We’re very good friends.” Gary loves Chekhov. And what’s the deal with the durable literary influence of the Russians? “Let’s have fun,” he says as we leave the highway for the county roads. “Fuck it.” Near the foothills of the Catskills, he reaches toward me with an offering in the palm of his hand: “Tic Tac?”
He’s a youthful forty-one, slim and fit and energetic. He says he feels agile. As strong as he ever has. His age shows in only the minutest of ways. His hair, long and brown and fully accounted for, is studded with gray. His eyes, the clear blue of a butane flame, are still equine in their expressiveness. But now, when he smiles, wrinkles run radially toward their edges.
Once we arrive, Gyllenhaal ducks into the restroom in the collector-car gallery and returns gushing about the sink fixtures. “Think it’s a bad sign that it took me fifteen minutes to turn off the waterspout?” he asks the small crew who’ve come in for the day. He turns to me. “You’ve got to see those spouts.”
“I just watched The Guilty,” says Ionel, the club’s general manager. “I’m watching all your movies.”
“Oh, thanks,” Gyllenhaal says, bowing his head.
“Like, every single one of them.”
“Thank you, man.” He glances up from his shoes. “But don’t watch them all.” He laughs—staccato, open-mouthed, infectious. Ionel laughs. We all laugh.
This is not the Jake Gyllenhaal I expected. For
