Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life

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 the Times review.) Now he was researching his fourth book, a sequel of sorts to The 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 course some 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 was garbage ,” 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 — the remains of 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 Tuedays 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, like mace 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.

“Jude!” she said. “Finally! I’ve heard so much about you; I’m so happy to be meeting you at last.” It sounded, he thought, like she really was.

Over dinner, they talked. Julia was from an academic family from Oxford and had lived in America since graduate school at Stanford; she and Harold had met five years ago through a friend. Her lab studied a new virus that appeared to be a variant of H5N1 and they were trying to map its genetic code.

“Isn’t one of the concerns in microbiology the potential weaponization of these genomes?” he asked, and felt, rather than saw, Harold turn toward him.

“Yes, that’s right,” Julia said, and as she explained to him the controversies surrounding her and her colleagues’ work, he glanced over at Harold, who was watching him, and who raised an eyebrow at him in a gesture that he couldn’t interpret.

But then the conversation shifted, and he could almost watch as the discussion moved steadily away from Julia’s lab and inexorably toward him, could see how good a litigator Harold would be if he wanted to, could see his skill in redirecting and repositioning, almost as if their conversation were something liquid, and he was guiding it through a series of troughs and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape, until it reached its inevitable end.