Page 91 - A Little Life: A Novel

And then, to his astonishment, Felix had begun to cry, and he had tried to
comfort him. “Felix,” he’d said, awkwardly putting his arm around him. He
pretended he was Willem, who would have known exactly what to do and

what to say without even thinking about it. “It’s going to be all right. I
promise you, it will be.” But Felix had only cried harder.
“I don’t have any friends,” Felix had sobbed.
“Oh, Felix,” he’d said, and his sympathy, which until then had been of
the remote, objective kind, clarified itself. “I’m sorry.” He felt then, keenly,
the loneliness of Felix’s life, of a Saturday spent sitting with a crippled
nearly thirty-year-old lawyer who was there only to earn money, and who

would go out that night with people he loved and who, even, loved him,
while Felix remained alone, his mother—Mr. Baker’s third wife—
perpetually elsewhere, his father convinced there was something wrong
with him, something that needed fixing. Later, on his walk home (if the
weather was nice, he refused Mr. Baker’s car and walked), he would
wonder at the unlikely unfairness of it all: Felix, who was by any definition

a better kid than he had been, and who yet had no friends, and he, who was
a nothing, who did.
“Felix, it’ll happen eventually,” he’d said, and Felix had wailed, “But
when?” with such yearning that he had winced.
“Soon, soon,” he had told him, petting his skinny back, “I promise,” and
Felix had nodded, although later, walking him to the door, his little geckoey
face made even more reptilian from tears, he’d had the distinct sensation

that Felix had known he was lying. Who could know if Felix would ever
have friends? Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often
eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar,
the damaged. He waved goodbye at Felix’s small back, retreating already
into the house, and although he would never have said so to Felix, he
somehow fancied that this was why Felix was so wan all the time: it was

because Felix had already figured this out, long ago; it was because he
already knew.

He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table. He knew—as
much as he didn’t care to—large parts of the Bible almost by memory. He
knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the
most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were