Page 21 of A Little Life
The generosity of Harold’s gift unsettled him. First, there was the matter of the gift itself: he had never, never received anything so grand. Second, there was the impossibility of ever adequately repaying him. And third, there was the meaning behind the gesture: he had known for some time that Harold respected him, and even enjoyed his company. But was it possible that he was someone important to Harold, that Harold liked him more than as just a student, but as a real, actual friend? And if that was the case, why should it make him so self-conscious?
It had taken him many months to feel truly comfortable around Harold: not in the classroom or in his office, but outside of the classroom, outside of the office. In life, as Harold would say. He would return home after dinner at Harold’s house and feel a flush of relief. He knew why, too, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself: traditionally, men—adult men, which he didn’t yet consider himself among—had been interested in him for one reason, and so he had learned to be frightened of them. But Harold didn’t seem to be one of those men. (Although Brother Luke hadn’t seemed to be one of those men either.) He was frightened of everything, it sometimes seemed, and he hated that about himself. Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.
He had known of Harold before he met him, for Harold was known. He was a relentless questioner: every remark you made in his class would be seized upon and pecked at in an unending volley of Whys. He was trim and tall, and had a way of pacing in a tight circle, his torso pitched forward, when he was engaged or excited.
To his disappointment, there was much he simply couldn’t remember from that first-year contracts class with Harold. He couldn’t remember, for example, the specifics of the paper he wrote that interested Harold and which led to conversations with him outside the classroom and, eventually, to an offer to become one of his research assistants. He couldn’t remember anything particularly interesting he said in class.But hecouldremember Harold on that first day of the semester, pacing and pacing, and lecturing them in his low, quick voice.
“You’re One Ls,” Harold had said. “And congratulations, all of you. As One Ls, you’ll be taking a pretty typical course load: contracts; torts; property; civil procedure; and, next year, constitutional and criminal law. But you know all this.
“What you may not know is that this course load reflects—beautifully, simply—the very structure of our society, the very mechanics of what a society, our particular society, needs to make it work. To have a society, you first need an institutional framework: that’s constitutional law. You need a system of punishment: that’s criminal. You need to know that you have a system in place that will make those other systems work: that’s civil procedure. You need a way to govern matters of domain and ownership: that’s property. You need to know that someone will be financially accountable for injuries caused you by others: that’s torts. And finally, you need to know that people will keep their agreements, that they will honor their promises: andthatis contracts.”
He paused. “Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, therichestfield of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily.
“In this class, you will of course learn the mechanics of contracts—how one is created, how one is broken, how binding one is and how tounbind yourself from one—but you will also be asked to consider law itself as a series of contracts. Some are more fair—and this one time, I’ll allow you to say such a thing—than others. But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life—all of our lives—as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.”
He had been thrilled by Harold’s speech, and in the coming weeks, by how differently Harold thought, by how he would stand at the front of the room like a conductor, stretching out a student’s argument into strange and unimaginable formations. Once, a fairly benign discussion about the right to privacy—both the most cherished and the foggiest of constitutional rights, according to Harold, whose definition of contracts often ignored conventional boundaries and bounded happily into other fields of law—had led to an argument between the two of them about abortion, which he felt was indefensible on moral grounds but necessary on social ones. “Aha!” Harold had said; he was one of the few professors who would entertain not just legal arguments but moral ones. “And, Mr. St. Francis, what happens when we forsake morals in law for social governance? What is the point at which a country, and its people, should start valuing social control over its sense of morality?Isthere such a point? I’m not convinced there is.” But he had hung in, and the class had stilled around them, watching the two of them debate back and forth.
Harold was the author of three books, but it was his last,The American Handshake: The Promises and Failures of the Declaration of Independence, that had made him famous. The book, which he had read even before he met Harold, was a legal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence: Which of its promises had been kept and which had not, and were it written today, would it be able to withstand trends in contemporary jurisprudence? (“Short answer: No,” read theTimesreview.) Now he was researching his fourth book, a sequel of sorts toThe American Handshake, about the Constitution, from a similar perspective.
“But only the Bill of Rights, and the sexier amendments,” Harold told him when he was interviewing him for the research assistant position.
“I didn’t know some were sexier than others,” he said.
“Of coursesome are sexier than others,” said Harold. “Only the eleventh, twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth are sexy. The rest are basically the dross of politics past.”
“The thirteenth is garbage?” he asked, enjoying himself.
“I didn’t say it wasgarbage,” Harold said, “just not sexy.”
“But I think that’s what dross means.”
Harold sighed dramatically, grabbed the dictionary off his desk, flipped it open, and studied it for a moment. “Okay, fine,” he said, tossing it back onto a heap of papers, which slid toward the edge of the surface. “The third definition. But I meant the first definition: the leftovers, the detritus—theremainsof politics past. Happy?”
“Yes,” he said, trying not to smile.
He began working for Harold on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons and evenings, when his course load was lightest—on Tuesdays and Thursdays he had afternoon seminars at MIT, where he was getting his master’s, and worked in the law library at night, and on Saturdays he worked in the library in the morning and in the afternoons at a bakery called Batter, which was near the medical college, where he had worked since he was an undergraduate and where he fulfilled specialty orders: decorating cookies and making hundreds of sugar-paste flower petals for cakes and experimenting with different recipes, one of which, a ten-nut cake, had become the bakery’s best seller. He worked at Batter on Sundays as well, and one day Allison, the bakery’s owner, who entrusted him with many of the more complicated projects, handed him an order form for three dozen sugar cookies decorated to look like various kinds of bacteria. “I thought you of all people might be able to figure this out,” she said. “The customer’s wife’s a microbiologist and he wants to surprise her and her lab.”
“I’ll do some research,” he said, taking the page from her, and noting the customer’s name: Harold Stein. So he had, asking CM and Janusz for their advice, and had made cookies shaped like paisleys, likemace balls, like cucumbers, using different-colored frosting to draw their cytoplasms and plasma membranes and ribosomes and fashioning flagella from strands of licorice. He typed up a list identifying each and folded it into the box before closing it and tying it with twine; he didn’t know Harold very well then, but he liked the idea of making something for him, of impressing him, even if anonymously. And he liked wondering what the cookies were meant to celebrate: A publication? An anniversary? Or was it simple uxoriousness? Was Harold Stein the sort of person who showed up at his wife’s lab with cookies for no reason? He suspected he perhaps was.
The following week, Harold told him about the amazing cookies he’d gotten at Batter. His enthusiasm, which just a few hours ago in class had been directed at the Uniform Commercial Code, had found a new subject in the cookies. He sat, biting the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t smile, listening to Harold talk about how genius they’d been and how Julia’s lab had been struck speechless by their detail and verisimilitude, and how he had been, briefly, the hero of the lab: “Not an easy thing to be with those people, by the way, who secretly think everyone involved in the humanities is something of a moron.”
“Sounds like those cookies were made by a real obsessive,” he said. He hadn’t told Harold he worked at Batter, and didn’t plan on doing so, either.
“Then that’s an obsessive I’d like to meet,” said Harold. “They were delicious, too.”
“Mmm,” he said, and thought of a question to ask Harold so he wouldn’t keep talking about the cookies.
Harold had other research assistants, of course—two second-years and a third-year he knew only by sight—but their schedules were such that they never overlapped. Sometimes they communicated with one another by notes or e-mail, explaining where they’d left off in their research so the next person could pick it up and carry it forward. But by the second semester of his first year, Harold had assigned him to work exclusively on the fifth amendment. “That’s a good one,” he said. “Incredibly sexy.” The two second-year assistants were assigned the ninth amendment, and the third-year, the tenth, and as much as he knew it was ridiculous, he couldn’t help but feel triumphant, as if he had been favored with something the others hadn’t.
The first invitation to dinner at Harold’s house had been spontaneous, at the end of one cold and dark March afternoon. “Are you sure?” he asked, tentative.
Harold had looked at him, curiously. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just dinner. You have to eat, right?”
Harold lived in a three-story house in Cambridge, at the edge of the undergraduate campus. “I didn’t know you lived here,” he said, as Harold pulled into the driveway. “This is one of my favorite streets. I used to walk down it every day as a shortcut to the other side of campus.”
“You and everybody else,” Harold replied. “When I bought it just before I got divorced, all these houses were occupied by grad students; all the shutters were falling off. The smell of pot was so thick you could get stoned just driving by.”
It was snowing, just lightly, but he was grateful that there were only two steps leading up to the door, and that he wouldn’t have to worry about slipping or needing Harold’s help. Inside, the house smelled of butter and pepper and starch: pasta, he thought. Harold dropped his briefcase on the floor and gave him a vague tour—“Living room; study behind it; kitchen and dining room to your left”—and he met Julia, who was tall like Harold, with short brown hair, and whom he liked instantly.
