Page 119 - A Little Life: A Novel

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