A Little Life (21 page)

Laurence smiled back at him and nodded. “Very good,” he said.

“Well,
I
have a question,” said Harold, who’d been quiet, listening to them. “How and why on earth did you end up in law school?”

Everyone laughed, and he did, too. He had been asked that question often (by Dr. Li, despairingly; by his master’s adviser, Dr. Kashen, perplexedly), and he always changed the answer to suit the audience, for the real answer—that he wanted to have the means to protect himself; that he wanted to make sure no one could ever reach him again—seemed too selfish and shallow and tiny a reason to say aloud (and would invite a slew of subsequent questions anyway). Besides, he knew enough now to know that the law was a flimsy form of protection: if he
really
wanted to be safe, he should have become a marksman squinting through an eyepiece, or a chemist in a lab with his pipettes and poisons.

That night, though, he said, “But law isn’t so unlike pure math, really—I mean, it too in theory can offer an answer to every question, can’t it? Laws of anything are meant to be pressed against, and stretched, and if they can’t provide solutions to every matter they claim to cover, then they aren’t really laws at all, are they?” He stopped to consider what he’d just said. “I suppose the difference is that in law, there are many paths to many answers, and in math, there are many paths to a single answer. And also, I guess, that law isn’t actually about the truth: it’s about governance. But math doesn’t have to be convenient, or practical, or managerial—it only has to be true.

“But I suppose the other way in which they’re
alike
is that in mathematics, as well as in law, what matters more—or, more accurately, what’s more memorable—is not that the case, or proof, is won or solved, but the beauty, the economy, with which it’s done.”

“What do you mean?” asked Harold.

“Well,” he said, “in law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we’re recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its … elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability.”

“What about something like Fermat’s last theorem?” asked Julia.

“That’s a perfect example of a non-beautiful proof. Because while it was important that it was solved, it was, for a lot of people—like my adviser—a disappointment. The proof went on for hundreds of pages, and drew from so many disparate fields of mathematics, and was so—tortured,
jigsawed
, really, in its execution, that there are still many people at work trying to prove it in more elegant terms, even though it’s already been proven. A beautiful proof is succinct, like a beautiful ruling. It combines just a handful of different concepts, albeit from across the mathematical universe, and in a relatively brief series of steps, leads to a grand and new generalized truth in mathematics: that is, a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” He stopped to take a breath, aware, suddenly, that he had been talking and talking, and that the others were silent, watching him. He could feel himself flushing, could feel the old hatred fill him like dirtied water once more. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ramble on.”

“Are you joking?” said Laurence. “Jude, I think that was the first truly revelatory conversation I’ve had in Harold’s house in probably the last decade or more: thank you.”

Everyone laughed again, and Harold leaned back in his chair, looking pleased. “See?” he caught Harold mouthing across the table to Laurence, and Laurence nodding, and he understood that this was meant about him, and was flattered despite himself, and shy as well. Had Harold talked about him to his friend? Had this been a test for him, a test he hadn’t known he was to take? He was relieved he had passed it, and that he hadn’t embarrassed Harold, and relieved too that, as uncomfortable as it sometimes made him, he might have fully earned his place in Harold’s house, and might be invited back again.

With each day he trusted Harold a little more, and at times he wondered if he was making the same mistake again. Was it better to trust or better to be wary? Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal? He felt sometimes as if he was taking advantage of Harold’s generosity, his jolly faith in him, and sometimes as if his circumspection was the wise choice after all, for if it should end badly, he’d have only himself to blame. But it was difficult to not trust Harold: Harold made it difficult, and, just as important, he was making it difficult for himself—he
wanted
to trust Harold, he
wanted
to give in,
he
wanted
the creature inside him to tuck itself into a sleep from which it would never wake.

Late one night in his second year of law school he was at Harold’s, and when they opened the door, the steps, the street, the trees were hushed with snow, and the flakes cycloned toward the door, so fast that they both took a step backward.

“I’ll call a cab,” he said, so Harold wouldn’t have to drive him.

“No, you won’t,” Harold said. “You’ll stay here.”

And so he stayed in Harold and Julia’s spare bedroom on the second floor, separated from their room by a large windowed space they used as a library, and a brief hallway. “Here’s a T-shirt,” Harold said, lobbing something gray and soft at him, “and here’s a toothbrush.” He placed it on the bookcase. “There’s extra towels in the bathroom. Do you want anything else? Water?”

“No,” he said. “Harold, thank you.”

“Of course, Jude. Good night.”

“Good night.”

He stayed awake for a while, the feather comforter wadded around him, the mattress plush beneath him, watching the window turn white, and listening to water glugging from the faucets, and Harold and Julia’s low, indistinguishable murmurs at each other, and one or the other of them padding from one place to another, and then, finally, nothing. In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents.

The summer after that second year, Harold invited him to their house in Truro, on Cape Cod. “You’ll love it,” he said. “Invite your friends. They’ll love it, too.” And so on the Thursday before Labor Day, once his and Malcolm’s internships had ended, they all drove up to the house from New York, and for that long weekend, Harold’s attention shifted to JB and Malcolm and Willem. He watched them too, admiring how they could answer every one of Harold’s parries, how generous they were with their own lives, how they could tell stories about themselves that they laughed at and that made Harold and Julia laugh as well, how comfortable they were around Harold and how comfortable Harold was around them. He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved. The
house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim—even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about—and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea.

What is going to happen to me?
he asked the sea.
What
is
happening to me?

The holiday ended and the fall semester began, and it didn’t take him long to realize that over that weekend, one of his friends must have said something to Harold, although he was certain it wasn’t Willem, who was the only one to whom he’d finally told something of his past—and even then, not very much at all: three facts, each more slender than the last, all meaningless, all of which combined to make not even a beginning of a story. Even the first sentences of a fairy tale had more detail than what he had told Willem:
Once upon a time, a boy and a girl lived with their father, a woodcutter, and their stepmother, deep in a cold forest. The woodcutter loved his children, but he was very poor, and so one day
 … So whatever Harold had learned had been speculation, buttressed by their observations of him, their theories and guesses and fictions. But whatever it was, it had been enough to make Harold’s questions to him—about who he had been and where he had come from—stop.

As the months and then the years passed, they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the manufacturer’s box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life. He knew that those blank years were filled in by Harold’s own imaginings, and that some of those imaginings were worse than what
had actually happened, and some were better. But Harold never told him what he supposed for him, and he didn’t really want to know.

He had never considered their friendship contextual, but he was prepared for the likelihood that Harold and Julia did. And so when he moved to Washington for his clerkship, he assumed that they would forget him, and he tried to prepare himself for the loss. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they sent e-mails, and called, and when one or the other was in town, they would have dinner. In the summers, he and his friends visited Truro, and over Thanksgiving, they went to Cambridge. And when he moved to New York two years later to begin his job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Harold had been almost alarmingly excited for him. They had even offered to let him live in their apartment on the Upper West Side, but he knew they used it often, and he wasn’t sure how real their offer was, and so he declined.

Every Saturday, Harold would call and ask him about work, and he’d tell him about his boss, Marshall, the deputy U.S. Attorney, who had the unnerving ability to recite entire Supreme Court decisions from memory, closing his eyes to summon a vision of the page in his mind, his voice becoming robotic and dull as he chanted, but never dropping or adding a word. He had always thought he had a good memory, but Marshall’s amazed him.

In some ways, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reminded him of the home: it was largely male, and the place fizzed with a particular and constant hostility, the kind of hissing acrimony that naturally arises whenever a group of highly competitive people who are all evenly matched are housed in the same small space with the understanding that only some of them would have the opportunity to distinguish themselves. (Here, though, they were matched in accomplishments; at the home, they were matched in hunger, in want.) All two hundred of the assistant prosecutors, it seemed, had attended one of five or six law schools, and virtually all of them had been on the law review and moot court at their respective schools. He was part of a four-person team that worked mostly on securities fraud cases, and he and his teammates each had something—a credential, an idiosyncrasy—that they hoped lifted them above the others: he had his master’s from MIT (which no one cared about but was at least an oddity) and his circuit court clerkship with Sullivan, with whom Marshall was friendly. Citizen, his closest friend at the office, had a law degree from Cambridge and had practiced as
a barrister in London for two years before moving to New York. And Rhodes, the third in their trio, had been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina after college. (The fourth on their team was a profoundly lazy guy named Scott who, it was rumored, had only gotten the job because his father played tennis with the president.)

He was usually at the office, and sometimes, when he and Citizen and Rhodes were there late, eating takeout, he was reminded of being with his roommates in their suite at Hood. And although he enjoyed Citizen’s and Rhodes’s company, and the specificity and depth of their intelligence, he was in those moments nostalgic for his friends, who thought so differently than he did and who made him think differently as well. In the middle of one conversation with Citizen and Rhodes about logic, he recalled, suddenly, a question Dr. Li had asked him his freshman year, when he was auditioning to be accepted into his pure math seminar:
Why are manhole covers round?
It was an easy question, and easy to answer, but when he’d returned to Hood and had repeated Dr. Li’s question to his roommates, they were silent. And then finally JB had begun, in the dreamy tones of a wandering storyteller, “Once, very long ago, mammoths roamed the earth, and their footprints left permanent circular indentations in the ground,” and they had all laughed. He smiled, remembering it; he sometimes wished he had a mind like JB’s, one that could create stories that would delight others, instead of the mind he did have, which was always searching for an explanation, an explanation that, while perhaps correct, was empty of romance, of fancy, of wit.

“Time to whip out the credentials,” Citizen would whisper to him on the occasions that the U.S. Attorney himself would emerge onto the floor and all the assistant prosecutors would buzz toward him, mothlike, as a multitude of gray suits. They and Rhodes would join the hover, but even in those gatherings he never mentioned the one credential he knew could have made not only Marshall but the U.S. Attorney as well stop and look at him more closely. After he’d gotten the job, Harold had asked him if he could mention him to Adam, the U.S. Attorney, with whom Harold was, it happened, longtime acquaintances. But he’d told Harold he wanted to know he could make it on his own. This was true, but the greater reason was that he was tentative about naming Harold as one of his assets, because he didn’t want Harold to regret his association with him. And so he’d said nothing.