Page 278 - A Little Life: A Novel

professor at Northeastern.
“Jude,” she says, “it’s lovely to see you. Thank you for coming.” She
holds his hand. “My brother always talked about you, you know.”

“He was a wonderful teacher,” he tells her. “He gave me so much. I’m so
sorry.”
“Yes,” she says. “It was very sudden. And poor Leo”—they look at Leo,
who is gazing at nothing—“I don’t know how he’s going to deal with this.”
She kisses him goodbye. “Thank you again.”
Outside, it is fiercely cold, and the windshield is sticky with ice. He
drives slowly to Harold and Julia’s, letting himself in and calling their

names.
“And here he is!” says Harold, materializing from the kitchen, wiping his
hands on a dish towel. Harold hugs him, which he had begun doing at some
point, and as uncomfortable as it makes him, he thinks it’ll be more
uncomfortable to try to explain why he’d like Harold to stop. “I’m so sorry
about Kashen, Jude. I was shocked to hear it—I ran into him on the courts

about two months back and he looked like he was in great shape.”
“He was,” he says, unwinding his scarf, as Harold takes his coat. “And
not that old, either: seventy-four.”
“Jesus,” says Harold, who has just turned sixty-five. “There’s a cheery
thought. Go put your stuff in your room and come into the kitchen. Julia’s
tied up in a meeting but she’ll be home in an hour or so.”
He drops his bag in the guest room—“Jude’s room,” Harold and Julia call

it; “your room”—and changes out of his suit and heads toward the kitchen,
where Harold is peering into a pot on the stove, as if down a well. “I’m
trying to make a bolognese,” he says, without turning around, “but
something’s happening; it keeps separating, see?”
He looks. “How much olive oil did you use?”
“A lot.”

“What’s a lot?”
“A lot. Too much, obviously.”
He smiles. “I’ll fix it.”
“Thank god,” says Harold, stepping away from the stove. “I was hoping
you’d say that.”
Over dinner, they speak of Julia’s favorite researcher, who she thinks
might be trying to jump to another lab, and of the latest gossip circulating

through the law school, and of the anthology of essays about Brown versus