Page 155 - A Little Life: A Novel

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YOU ASKED ME once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had
always known. But that wasn’t true, and I knew it even as I said it—I said it
because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a
movie, and because we were both feeling so wretched, and helpless, and
because I thought if I said it, we both might feel better about the situation
before us, the situation that we perhaps had been capable of preventing—
perhaps not—but at any rate hadn’t. This was in the hospital: the first time,

I should say. I know you remember: you had flown in from Colombo that
morning, hopscotching across cities and countries and hours, so that you
landed a full day before you left.
But I want to be accurate now. I want to be accurate both because there is
no reason not to be, and because I should be—I have always tried to be, I

always try to be.
I’m not sure where to begin.
Maybe with some nice words, although they are also true words: I liked
you right away. You were twenty-four when we met, which would have
made me forty-seven. (Jesus.) I thought you were unusual: later, he’d speak
of your goodness, but he never needed to explain it to me, for I already
knew you were. It was the first summer the group of you came up to the

house, and it was such a strange weekend for me, and for him as well—for
me because in you four I saw who and what Jacob might have been, and for
him because he had only known me as his teacher, and he was suddenly
seeing me in my shorts and wearing my apron as I scooped clams off the
grill, and arguing with you three about everything. Once I stopped seeing
Jacob’s face in all of yours, though, I was able to enjoy the weekend, in

large part because you three seemed to enjoy it so much. You saw nothing
strange in the situation: you were boys who assumed that people would like
you, not from arrogance but because people always had, and you had no
reason to think that, if you were polite and friendly, then that politeness and
friendliness might not be reciprocated.
He, of course, had every reason to not think that, although I wouldn’t
discover that until later. Then, I watched him at mealtimes, noticing how,