Page 117 - A Little Life: A Novel

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