Page 108 - A Little Life: A Novel

interspersed with frequent pauses, as if his clerks were not lawyers but
scriveners, and should be writing down his words. But no one did, not even
Kerrigan, who was a true believer and the most conservative of the three of

them.
After the judge left, he would grin across the room at Thomas, who
would raise his eyes upward in a gesture of helplessness and apology.
Thomas was a conservative, too, but “a thinking conservative,” he’d remind
him, “and the fact that I even have to make that distinction is fucking
depressing.”
He and Thomas had started clerking for the judge the same year, and

when he had been approached by the judge’s informal search committee—
really, his Business Associations professor, with whom the judge was old
friends—the spring of his second year of law school, it had been Harold
who had encouraged him to apply. Sullivan was known among his fellow
circuit court judges for always hiring one clerk whose political views
diverged from his own, the more wildly, the better. (His last liberal law

clerk had gone on to work for a Hawaiian rights sovereignty group that
advocated for the islands’ secession from the United States, a career move
that had sent the judge into a fit of apoplectic self-satisfaction.)
“Sullivan hates me,” Harold had told him then, sounding pleased. “He’ll
hire you just to spite me.” He smiled, savoring the thought. “And because
you’re the most brilliant student I’ve ever had,” he added.
The compliment made him look at the ground: Harold’s praise tended to

be conveyed to him by others, and was rarely handed to him directly. “I’m
not sure I’m liberal enough for him,” he’d replied. Certainly he wasn’t
liberal enough for Harold; it was one of the things—his opinions; the way
he read the law; how he applied it to life—that they argued about.
Harold snorted. “Trust me,” he said. “You are.”
But when he went to Washington for his interview the following year,

Sullivan had talked about the law—and political philosophy—with much
less vigor and specificity than he had anticipated. “I hear that you sing,”
Sullivan said instead after an hour of conversation about what he had
studied (the judge had attended the same law school), and his position as
the articles editor on the law review (the same position the judge himself
had held), and his thoughts on recent cases.
“I do,” he replied, wondering how the judge had learned that. Singing

was his comfort, but he rarely did it in front of others. Had he been singing