A Little Life (35 page)

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

They’re both quiet for a long time, listening to the click of the metronome, which is faulty and sometimes starts ticking spontaneously, even after he’s stopped it. “You’re going to make friends, Felix,” he says, finally. “You will. You won’t have to work as hard at finding them as you will at keeping them, but I promise, it’ll be work worth doing. Far more worth doing than, say, Latin.” And now Felix looks up at him and smiles, and he smiles back. “Okay?” he asks him.

“Okay,” Felix says, still smiling.

“What do you want to do next, German or math?”

“Math,” says Felix.

“Good choice,” he says, and pulls Felix’s math book over to him. “Let’s pick up where we left off last time.” And Felix turns to the page and they begin.

T
HEIR NEXT-DOOR SUITEMATES
their second year in Hood had been a trio of lesbians, all seniors, who had been in a band called Backfat and had for some reason taken a liking to JB (and, eventually, Jude, and then Willem, and finally, reluctantly, Malcolm). Now, fifteen years after the four of them had graduated, two of the lesbians had coupled up and were living in Brooklyn. Of the four of them, only JB talked to them regularly: Marta was a nonprofit labor lawyer, and Francesca was a set designer.

“Exciting news!” JB told them one Friday in October over dinner. “The Bitches of Bushwick called—Edie is in town!” Edie was the third in the lesbians’ trio, a beefy, emotional Korean American who shuttled back and forth between San Francisco and New York, and seemed always to be preparing for one improbable job or another: the last time they had seen her, she was about to leave for Grasse to begin training to become a professional nose, and just eight months before that, she had finished a cooking course in Afghani cuisine.

“And why is this exciting news?” asked Malcolm, who had never quite forgiven the three of them for their inexplicable dislike of him.

“Well,” said JB, and paused, grinning. “She’s transitioning!”

“To a
man
?” asked Malcolm. “Give me a break, JB. She’s never exhibited any gender dysphoric ideations for as long as we’ve known her!” A former coworker of Malcolm’s had transitioned the year before and Malcolm had become a self-anointed expert on the subject, lecturing them about their intolerance and ignorance until JB had finally
shouted at him, “Jesus, Malcolm, I’m far more trans than Dominic’ll ever be!”

“Well, anyway, she is,” JB continued, “and the Bitches are throwing her a party at their house, and we’re all invited.”

They groaned. “JB, I only have five weeks before I leave for London, and I have so much shit to get done,” Willem protested. “I can’t spend a night listening to Edie Kim complaining out in Bushwick.”

“You can’t
not
go!” shrieked JB. “They
specifically
asked for you! Francesca’s inviting some girl who knows you from something or other and wants to see you again. If you don’t go, they’re all going to think you think you’re too good for them now. And there’s going to be a ton of other people we haven’t seen in forever—”

“Yeah, and maybe there’s a reason we haven’t seen them,” Jude said.

“—and besides, Willem, the pussy will be waiting for you whether you spend an hour in Brooklyn or not. And it’s not like it’s the end of the world. It’s
Bushwick
. Judy’ll drive us.” Jude had bought a car the year before, and although it wasn’t particularly fancy, JB loved to ride around in it.

“What? I’m not going,” Jude said.

“Why not?”

“I’m in a wheelchair, JB, remember? And as I recall, Marta and Francesca’s place doesn’t have an elevator.”

“Wrong place,” JB replied triumphantly. “See how long it’s been? They moved. Their new place definitely has one. A freight elevator, actually.” He leaned back, drumming his fist on the table as the rest of them sat in a resigned silence. “And off we go!”

So the following Saturday they met at Jude’s loft on Greene Street and he drove them to Bushwick, where he circled Marta and Francesca’s block, looking for a parking space.

“There was a spot right back there,” JB said after ten minutes.

“It was a loading zone,” Jude told him.

“If you just put that handicapped sign up, we can park wherever we want,” JB said.

“I don’t like using it—you know that.”

“If you’re not going to use it, then what’s the point of having a car?”

“Jude, I think that’s a space,” said Willem, ignoring JB.

“Seven blocks from the apartment,” muttered JB.

“Shut up, JB,” said Malcolm.

Once inside the party, they were each tugged by a different person to a separate corner of the room. Willem watched as Jude was pulled firmly away by Marta:
Help me
, Jude mouthed to him, and he smiled and gave him a little wave.
Courage
, he mouthed back, and Jude rolled his eyes. He knew how much Jude hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t wanted to explain again and again why he was in a wheelchair, and yet Willem had begged him: “Don’t make me go alone.”

“You won’t be alone. You’ll be with JB and Malcolm.”

“You know what I mean. Forty-five minutes and we’re out of there. JB and Malcolm can find their own way back to the city if they want to stay longer.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Thirty.”

“Fine.”

Willem, meanwhile, had been ensnared by Edie Kim, who looked basically the same as she had when they were in college: a little rounder, maybe, but that was it. He hugged her. “Edie,” he said, “congratulations.”

“Thanks, Willem,” said Edie. She smiled at him. “You look great. Really, really great.” JB had always had a theory that Edie had a crush on him, but he’d never believed it. “I really loved
The Lacuna Detectives
. You were really great in it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” He had hated
The Lacuna Detectives
. He had despised the production of it so much—the story, which was fantastic, had concerned a pair of metaphysical detectives who entered the unconscious minds of amnesiacs, but the director had been so tyrannical that Willem’s costar had quit two weeks into the shoot and had to be recast, and once a day, someone had run off the set crying—that he had never actually seen the film itself. “So,” he said, trying to redirect the conversation, “when—”

“Why’s Jude in a wheelchair?” Edie asked.

He sighed. When Jude had begun using the wheelchair regularly two months ago, the first time he’d had to in four years, since he was thirty-one, he had prepped them all on how to respond to this question. “It’s not permanent,” he said. “He just has an infection in his leg and it makes it painful for him to walk long distances.”

“God, poor guy,” said Edie. “Marta says he left the U.S. Attorney’s and has a huge job at some corporate firm.” JB had also always suspected
Edie had a crush on Jude, which Willem thought was fairly plausible.

“Yeah, for a few years now,” he said, eager to move the subject away from Jude, for whom he never liked to answer; he would have loved to talk about Jude, and he knew what he could and couldn’t say about him, or on his behalf, but he didn’t like the sly, confiding tone people took when asking about him, as if he might be cajoled or tricked into revealing what Jude himself wouldn’t. (As if he ever would.) “Anyway, Edie, this is really exciting for you.” He stopped. “I’m sorry—I should’ve asked—do you still want to be called Edie?”

Edie frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well—” He paused. “I didn’t know how far into the process you were, and—”

“What process?”

“Um, the transition process?” He should’ve stopped when he saw Edie’s befuddlement, but he didn’t. “JB said you were transitioning?”

“Yeah, to Hong Kong,” said Edie, still frowning. “I’m going to be a freelance vegan consultant for medium-size hospitality businesses. Wait a minute—you thought I was transitioning genders?”

“Oh god,” he said, and two thoughts, separate but equally resonant, filled his mind:
I am going to
kill
JB
. And:
I can’t wait to tell Jude about this conversation
. “Edie, I’m so, so sorry.”

He remembered from college that Edie was tricky: little, little-kid things upset her (he once saw her sobbing because the top scoop of her ice cream cone had tumbled onto her new shoes), but big things (the death of her sister; her screaming, snowball-throwing breakup with her girlfriend, which had taken place in the Quad, and which everyone at Hood had leaned out of their windows to witness) seemed to leave her unfazed. He wasn’t sure into which category his gaffe fell, and Edie herself appeared equally uncertain, her small mouth convoluting itself into shapes in confusion. Finally, though, she started laughing, and called across the room at someone—“Hannah! Hannah! Come here! You’ve got to hear this!”—and he exhaled, apologized to and congratulated her again, and made his escape.

He started across the room toward Jude. After years—decades, almost—of these parties, the two of them had worked out their own sign language, a pantomime whose every gesture meant the same thing—
save
me—albeit with varying levels of intensity. Usually, they were able
to simply catch each other’s eye across the room and telegraph their desperation, but at parties like this, where the loft was lit only by candles and the guests seemed to have multiplied themselves in the space of his short conversation with Edie, more expressive body language was often necessary. Grabbing the back of one’s neck meant the other person should call him on his phone right away; fiddling with one’s watch-band meant “Come over here and replace me in this conversation, or at least join in”; and yanking down on the left earlobe meant “Get me out of this
right now
.” He had seen, from the edge of his eye, that Jude had been pulling steadily on his earlobe for the past ten minutes, and he could now see that Marta had been joined by a grim-looking woman he vaguely remembered meeting (and disliking) at a previous party. The two of them were looming interrogatively over Jude in a way that made them appear proprietary and, in the candlelight, fierce, as if Jude were a child who had just been caught breaking a licorice-edged corner off their gingerbread house, and they were deciding whether to broil him with prunes or bake him with turnips.

He tried, he’d later tell Jude, he really did; but he was at one end of the room and Jude was at the other, and he kept getting stopped and tangled in conversations with people he hadn’t seen in years and, more annoyingly, people he had seen just a few weeks ago. As he pressed forward, he waved at Malcolm and pointed in Jude’s direction, but Malcolm gave him a helpless shrug and mouthed “What?” and he made a dismissive gesture back:
Never mind
.

I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, as he pushed through the crowd, but the truth was that he usually didn’t mind these parties, not really; a large part of him even enjoyed them. He suspected the same might be true of Jude as well, though perhaps to a lesser extent—certainly he did fine for himself at parties, and people always wanted to talk to him, and although the two of them always complained to each other about JB and how he kept dragging them to these things and how tedious they were, they both knew they could simply refuse if they really wanted to, and they both rarely did—after all, where else would they get to use their semaphores, that language that had only two speakers in the whole world?

In recent years, as his life had moved further from college and the person he had been, he sometimes found it relaxing to see people from there. He teased JB about how he had never really graduated from
Hood, but in reality, he admired how JB had maintained so many of his, and their, relationships from then, and how he had somehow managed to contextualize so many of them. Despite his collection of friends from long ago, there was an insistent present tenseness to how JB saw and experienced life, and around him, even the most dedicated nostalgists found themselves less inclined to pick over the chaff and glitter of the past, and instead made themselves contend with whoever the person standing before them had become. He also appreciated how the people JB had chosen to remain friendly with were, largely, unimpressed with who he had become (as much as he could be said to have become anyone). Some of them behaved differently around him now—especially in the last year or so—but most of them were dedicated to lives and interests and pursuits that were so specific and, at times, marginal, that Willem’s accomplishments were treated as neither more nor less important than their own. JB’s friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers—he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was
least
likely to make money—and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB’s Hood Hall assortment, wasn’t defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it. (People had actually said that to him at these parties: “Oh, I didn’t see
Black Mercury 3081
. But were you proud of your work in it?” No, he hadn’t been proud of it. He had played a brooding intergalactic scientist who was also a jujitsu warrior and who successfully and single-handedly defeated a gargantuan space monster. But he had been
satisfied
with it: he had worked hard and had taken his performance seriously, and that was all he ever hoped to do.) Sometimes he wondered whether he was being fooled, if this entire circle of JB’s was a performance art piece in itself, one in which the competitions and concerns and ambitions of the real world—the world that sputtered along on money and greed and envy—were overlooked in favor of the pure pleasure of doing work. Sometimes this felt astringent to him, in the best way: he saw these parties, his time with the Hoodies, as something cleansing and restorative, something that returned him to who he once was, thrilled to get a part in the college production of
Noises Off
, making his roommates run lines with him every evening.