A Little Life (39 page)

“I will,” he said.

And he did. He didn’t discuss it with Citizen or Rhodes—or Harold, because he knew what he’d say—but he did discuss it with Willem, and together they debated the obvious benefits of the job against the obvious drawbacks: the hours (but he never left work as it was, Willem argued), the tedium, the high probability he’d be working with assholes (but Citizen and Rhodes aside, he already worked with assholes, Willem argued). And, of course, the fact that he would now be defending the people he’d spent the past six years prosecuting: liars and crooks and thieves, the entitled and the powerful masquerading as victims. He wasn’t like Harold or Citizen—he was practical; he knew that making a career as a lawyer meant sacrifices, either of money or of moralities, but it still troubled him, this forsaking of what he knew to be just. And for what? So he could insure he wouldn’t become that old man, lonely and sick? It seemed the worst kind of selfishness, the worst kind of self-indulgence, to disavow what he knew was right simply because he was frightened, because he was scared of being uncomfortable and miserable.

Then, two weeks after his meeting with Voigt, he had come home one Friday night very late. He was exhausted; he’d had to use his wheelchair that day because the wound on his right leg hurt so much, and he was so relieved to get home, back to Lispenard Street, that he had felt himself go weak—in just a few minutes, he would be inside, and he would wrap a damp washcloth, hot and steamed from the microwave, around his calf and sit in the warmth. But when he tried the elevator button, he heard nothing but a grinding of gears, the faint winching noise the machine made when it was broken.

“No!” he shouted. “No!” His voice echoed in the lobby, and he smacked his palm against the elevator door again and again: “No, no, no!” He picked up his briefcase and threw it against the ground, and papers spun up from it. Around him, the building remained silent and unhelpful.

Finally he stopped, ashamed and angry, and gathered his papers back into his bag. He checked his watch: it was eleven. Willem was in a play,
Cloud 9
, but he knew he’d be off stage by then. But when he called
him, Willem didn’t pick up. And then he began to panic. Malcolm was on vacation in Greece. JB was at an artists’ colony. Andy’s daughter, Beatrice, had just been born the previous week: he couldn’t call him. There were only so many people he would let help him, whom he felt at least semi-comfortable clinging to like a sloth, whom he would allow to drag him up the many flights.

But in that moment, he was irrationally, intensely desperate to get into the apartment. And so he stood, tucking his briefcase under his left arm and collapsing his wheelchair, which was too expensive to leave in the lobby, with his right. He began to work his way up the stairs, cleaving his left side to the wall, gripping the chair by one of its spokes. He moved slowly—he had to hop on his left leg, while trying to avoid putting any weight on his right, or letting the wheelchair bang against the wound. Up he went, pausing to rest every third step. There were a hundred and ten steps from the lobby to the fifth floor, and by the fiftieth, he was shaking so badly he had to stop and sit for half an hour. He called and texted Willem again and again. On the fourth call, he left the message he hoped he would never have to leave: “Willem, I really need help. Please call me. Please.” He had a vision of Willem calling him right back, telling him he’d be right there, but he waited and waited and Willem didn’t call, and finally he managed to stand again.

Somehow he made it inside. But he can’t remember anything else from that night; when he woke the next day, Willem was asleep on the rug next to his bed, and Andy asleep on the chair they must have dragged into his room from the living room. He was thick-tongued, fogged, nauseated, and he knew that Andy must have given him an injection of pain medication, which he hated: he would feel disoriented and constipated for days.

When he woke again, Willem was gone, but Andy was awake, and staring at him.

“Jude, you’ve got to get the fuck out of this apartment,” he said, quietly.

“I know,” he said.

“Jude, what were you thinking?” Willem asked him later, after he had returned from the grocery store and Andy had helped him into the bathroom—he couldn’t walk: Andy had had to carry him—and then put him back into bed, still in his clothes from the day before, and left. Willem had gone to a party after the show and hadn’t heard his
phone ring; when he had finally listened to his messages, he had rushed home and found him convulsing on the floor and had called Andy. “Why didn’t you call Andy? Why didn’t you go to a diner and wait for me? Why didn’t you call Richard? Why didn’t you call Philippa and make her find me? Why didn’t you call Citizen, or Rhodes, or Eli, or Phaedra, or the Henry Youngs, or—”

“I don’t know,” he said, miserably. It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.

The following week, he contacted Lucien Voigt and finalized the terms of the job with him. And once he had signed the contract, he called Harold, who was silent for a long five seconds before taking a deep breath and beginning.

“I just don’t get this, Jude,” he said. “I don’t. You’ve never struck me as a money-grubber. Are you? I mean, I guess you are. You had—you have—a great career at the U.S. Attorney’s. You’re doing work there that matters. And you’re giving it all up to defend, who? Criminals. People so entitled, so certain they won’t be caught that being caught—that very concern—doesn’t even occur to them. People who think the laws are written for people who make less than nine figures a year. People who think the laws are applicable only by race, or by tax bracket.”

He said nothing, just let Harold become more and more agitated, because he knew Harold was right. They had never explicitly discussed it, but he knew Harold had always assumed that he would make his career in public service. Over the years, Harold would talk with dismay and sorrow about talented former students he admired who had left jobs—at the U.S. Attorney’s, at the Department of Justice, at public defender offices, at legal aid programs—to go to corporate firms. “A society cannot run as it should unless people with excellent legal minds make it their business to make it run,” Harold often said, and he had always agreed with him. And he agreed with him still, which was why he couldn’t defend himself now.

“Don’t you have anything you want to say for yourself?” Harold asked him, finally.

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said. Harold said nothing. “You’re so angry at me,” he murmured.

“I’m not angry, Jude,” Harold said. “I’m disappointed. Do you know how special you are? Do you know what a difference you could make if you stayed? You could be a judge if you wanted to—you could be a
justice someday. But you’re not going to be now. Now you’re going to be another litigator in another corporate firm, and all the good work you could have done you’ll instead be fighting against. It’s just such a waste, Jude, such a waste.”

He was silent again. He repeated Harold’s words to himself:
Such a waste, such a waste
. Harold sighed. “So what is this about, really?” he asked. “Is it money? Is this what this is about? Why didn’t you tell me you needed money, Jude? I could’ve given you some. Is this all about money? Tell me what you need, Jude, and I’m happy to help you out.”

“Harold,” he began, “that’s so—that’s so kind of you. But—I can’t.”

“Bullshit,” said Harold, “you
won’t
. I’m offering you a way to let you keep your job, Jude, to not have to take a job you’re going to hate, for work you
will
hate—and that’s not a maybe, that’s a fact—with no expectations or strings attached. I’m telling you that I’m
happy
to give you money for this.”

Oh, Harold, he thought. “Harold,” he said, wretchedly, “the kind of money I need isn’t the kind of money you have. I promise you.”

Harold was silent, and when he spoke next, his tone was different. “Jude, are you in any kind of trouble? You can tell me, you know. Whatever it is, I’ll help you.”

“No,” he said, but he wanted to cry. “No, Harold, I’m fine.” He wrapped his right hand around his bandaged calf, with its steady, constant ache.

“Well,” said Harold. “That’s a relief. But Jude, what could you possibly need so much money for, besides an apartment, which Julia and I will help you buy, do you hear me?”

He sometimes found himself both frustrated and fascinated by Harold’s lack of imagination: in Harold’s mind, people had parents who were proud of them, and saved money only for apartments and vacations, and asked for things when they wanted them; he seemed to be curiously unaware of a universe in which those things might not be givens, in which not everyone shared the same past and future. But this was a highly ungenerous way to think, and it was rare—most of the time, he admired Harold’s steadfast optimism, his inability or unwillingness to be cynical, to look for unhappiness or misery in every situation. He loved Harold’s innocence, which was made more remarkable considering what he taught and what he had lost. And so how could he tell Harold that he had to consider wheelchairs, which needed to
be replaced every few years, and which insurance didn’t wholly cover? How could he tell him that Andy, who didn’t take insurance, never charged him, had never charged him, but might want to someday, and if he did, he certainly wasn’t not going to pay him? How could he tell him that this most recent time his wound had opened, Andy had mentioned hospitalization and, maybe, someday in the future, amputation? How could he tell him that if his leg was amputated, it would mean a hospital stay, and physical therapy, and prostheses? How could he tell him about the surgery he wanted on his back, the laser burning his carapace of scars down to nothing? How could he tell Harold of his deepest fears: his loneliness, of becoming the old man with a catheter and a bony, bare chest? How could he tell Harold that he dreamed not of marriage, or children, but that he would someday have enough money to pay someone to take care of him if he needed it, someone who would be kind to him and allow him privacy and dignity? And then, yes, there were the things he wanted: He wanted to live somewhere where the elevator worked. He wanted to take cabs when he wanted to. He wanted to find somewhere private to swim, because the motion stilled his back and because he wasn’t able to take his walks any longer.

But he couldn’t tell Harold any of this. He didn’t want Harold to know just how flawed he was, what a piece of junk he’d acquired. And so he said nothing, and told Harold he had to go, and that he would talk to him later.

Even before he had talked to Harold, he had prepared himself to be resigned to his new job, nothing more, but to first his unease, and then his surprise, and then his delight, and then his slight disgust, he found that he enjoyed it. He’d had experience with pharmaceutical companies when he was a prosecutor, and so much of his initial caseload concerned that industry: he worked with a company that was opening an Asia-based subsidiary to develop an anticorruption policy, traveling back and forth to Tokyo with the senior partner on the case—this was a small, tidy, solvable job, and therefore unusual. The other cases were more complicated, and longer, at times infinitely long: he mostly worked on compiling a defense for another of the firm’s clients, this a massive pharmaceutical conglomerate, against a False Claims Act charge. And three years into his life at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, when the investment management company Rhodes worked for was investigated for securities fraud, they came to him, and secured his
partnership: he had trial experience, which most of the other associates didn’t, but he had known he would need to bring in a client eventually, and the first client was always the hardest to find.

He would never have admitted it to Harold, but he actually liked directing investigations prompted by whistle-blowers, liked pressing up against the boundaries of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, liked being able to stretch the law, like a strip of elastic, just past its natural tension point, just to the point where it would snap back at you with a sting. By day he told himself it was an intellectual engagement, that his work was an expression of the plasticity of the law itself. But at night he would sometimes think of what Harold would say if he was honest with him about what he was doing, and would hear his words again:
Such a waste, such a waste
. What was he doing?, he would think in those moments. Had the job made him venal, or had he always been so and had just fancied himself otherwise?

It’s all within the law
, he would argue with the Harold-in-his-head.

Just because you
can
do it doesn’t mean you should
, Harold-in-his-head would shoot back at him.

And indeed, Harold hadn’t been completely wrong, for he missed the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He missed being righteous and surrounded by the passionate, the heated, the crusading. He missed Citizen, who had moved back to London, and Marshall, whom he occasionally met for drinks, and Rhodes, whom he saw more frequently but who was perpetually frazzled, and gray, and whom he had remembered as cheery and effervescent, someone who would play electrotango music and squire an imaginary woman around the room when they were at the office late and feeling punchy, just to get him and Citizen to look up from their computers and laugh. They were getting older, all of them. He liked Rosen Pritchard, he liked the people there, but he never sat with them late at night arguing about cases and talking about books: it wasn’t that sort of office. The associates his age had unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends at home (or were themselves unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends); the ones older than he were getting married. In the rare moments they weren’t discussing the work before them, they made small talk about engagements and pregnancies and real estate. They didn’t discuss the law, not for fun or from fervor.

The firm encouraged its attorneys to do pro bono work, and he began volunteering with a nonprofit group that offered free legal advice
to artists. The organization kept what they called “studio hours” every afternoon and evening, when artists could drop by and consult with a lawyer, and every Wednesday night he left work early, at seven, and sat in the group’s creaky-floored SoHo offices on Broome Street for three hours, helping small publishers of radical treatises who wanted to establish themselves as nonprofit entities, and painters with intellectual property disputes, and dance groups, photographers, writers, and filmmakers with contracts that were either so extralegal (he was presented with one written in pencil on a paper towel) that they were meaningless or so needlessly complicated that the artists couldn’t understand them
—he
could barely understand them—and yet had signed them anyway.