Page 166 - A Little Life: A Novel

season—“fair” is never an answer, etc., etc.—he said, quietly, “But it’s
right.”
I was never able to ask him what he meant by that. Class ended, and

everyone got up at once and almost ran for the door, as if the room was on
fire. I remember telling myself to ask him about it in the next class, later
that week, but I forgot. And then I forgot again, and again. Over the years, I
would remember this conversation every now and again, and each time I
would think: I must ask him what he meant by that. But then I never would.
I don’t know why.
And so this became his pattern: he knew the law. He had a feeling for it.

But then, just when I wanted him to stop talking, he would introduce a
moral argument, he would mention ethics. Please, I would think, please
don’t do this. The law is simple. It allows for less nuance than you’d
imagine. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law—although not
in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not
help us apply them.

I was worried he’d make it harder for himself, that he’d complicate the
real gift he had with—as much as I hate to have to say this about my
profession—thinking. Stop! I wanted to tell him. But I never did, because
eventually, I realized I enjoyed hearing him think.
In the end, of course, I needn’t have worried; he learned how to control
it, he learned to stop mentioning right and wrong. And as we know, this
tendency of his didn’t stop him from becoming a great lawyer. But later,

often, I was sad for him, and for me. I wished I had urged him to leave law
school, I wished I had told him to go to the equivalent of Drayman 241. The
skills I gave him were not skills he needed after all. I wish I had nudged
him in a direction where his mind could have been as supple as it was,
where he wouldn’t have had to harness himself to a dull way of thinking. I
felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him

into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes.
I am guilty of many things when it comes to him. But sometimes,
illogically, I feel guiltiest for this. I opened the van door, I invited him
inside. And while I didn’t drive off the road, I instead drove him
somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there,
where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with
color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.