Page 238 - A Little Life: A Novel

Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, Harold-in-his-head
would shoot back at him.
And indeed, Harold hadn’t been completely wrong, for he missed the

U.S. Attorney’s Office. He missed being righteous and surrounded by the
passionate, the heated, the crusading. He missed Citizen, who had moved
back to London, and Marshall, whom he occasionally met for drinks, and
Rhodes, whom he saw more frequently but who was perpetually frazzled,
and gray, and whom he had remembered as cheery and effervescent,
someone who would play electrotango music and squire an imaginary
woman around the room when they were at the office late and feeling

punchy, just to get him and Citizen to look up from their computers and
laugh. They were getting older, all of them. He liked Rosen Pritchard, he
liked the people there, but he never sat with them late at night arguing about
cases and talking about books: it wasn’t that sort of office. The associates
his age had unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends at home (or were themselves
unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends); the ones older than he were getting

married. In the rare moments they weren’t discussing the work before them,
they made small talk about engagements and pregnancies and real estate.
They didn’t discuss the law, not for fun or from fervor.
The firm encouraged its attorneys to do pro bono work, and he began
volunteering with a nonprofit group that offered free legal advice to artists.
The organization kept what they called “studio hours” every afternoon and
evening, when artists could drop by and consult with a lawyer, and every

Wednesday night he left work early, at seven, and sat in the group’s creaky-
floored SoHo offices on Broome Street for three hours, helping small
publishers of radical treatises who wanted to establish themselves as
nonprofit entities, and painters with intellectual property disputes, and
dance groups, photographers, writers, and filmmakers with contracts that
were either so extralegal (he was presented with one written in pencil on a

paper towel) that they were meaningless or so needlessly complicated that
the artists couldn’t understand them—he could barely understand them—
and yet had signed them anyway.
Harold didn’t really approve of his volunteer work, either; he could tell
he thought it frivolous. “Are any of these artists any good?” Harold asked.
“Probably not,” he said. But it wasn’t for him to judge whether the artists
were good or not—other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He

was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as