Page 128 - A Little Life: A Novel

Washington for his clerkship, he assumed that they would forget him, and
he tried to prepare himself for the loss. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they
sent e-mails, and called, and when one or the other was in town, they would

have dinner. In the summers, he and his friends visited Truro, and over
Thanksgiving, they went to Cambridge. And when he moved to New York
two years later to begin his job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Harold had
been almost alarmingly excited for him. They had even offered to let him
live in their apartment on the Upper West Side, but he knew they used it
often, and he wasn’t sure how real their offer was, and so he declined.
Every Saturday, Harold would call and ask him about work, and he’d tell

him about his boss, Marshall, the deputy U.S. Attorney, who had the
unnerving ability to recite entire Supreme Court decisions from memory,
closing his eyes to summon a vision of the page in his mind, his voice
becoming robotic and dull as he chanted, but never dropping or adding a
word. He had always thought he had a good memory, but Marshall’s
amazed him.

In some ways, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reminded him of the home: it
was largely male, and the place fizzed with a particular and constant
hostility, the kind of hissing acrimony that naturally arises whenever a
group of highly competitive people who are all evenly matched are housed
in the same small space with the understanding that only some of them
would have the opportunity to distinguish themselves. (Here, though, they
were matched in accomplishments; at the home, they were matched in

hunger, in want.) All two hundred of the assistant prosecutors, it seemed,
had attended one of five or six law schools, and virtually all of them had
been on the law review and moot court at their respective schools. He was
part of a four-person team that worked mostly on securities fraud cases, and
he and his teammates each had something—a credential, an idiosyncrasy—
that they hoped lifted them above the others: he had his master’s from MIT

(which no one cared about but was at least an oddity) and his circuit court
clerkship with Sullivan, with whom Marshall was friendly. Citizen, his
closest friend at the office, had a law degree from Cambridge and had
practiced as a barrister in London for two years before moving to New
York. And Rhodes, the third in their trio, had been a Fulbright Scholar in
Argentina after college. (The fourth on their team was a profoundly lazy
guy named Scott who, it was rumored, had only gotten the job because his

father played tennis with the president.)