Page 687 - A Little Life: A Novel

And I don’t want you to think that there weren’t happy moments as well,
happy days, after you left. They were fewer, of course. They were harder to
find, harder to make. But they existed. After we came home from Italy, I

began teaching a seminar at Columbia, one open to both law school
students and graduate students from the general population. The course was
called “The Philosophy of Law, the Law of Philosophy,” and I co-taught it
with an old friend of mine, and in it we discussed the fairness of law, the
moral underpinnings of the legal system and how they sometimes
contradicted our national sense of morality: Drayman 241, after all these
years! In the afternoon, I saw friends. Julia took a life-drawing class. We

volunteered at a nonprofit that helped professionals (doctors, lawyers,
teachers) from other countries (Sudan, Afghanistan, Nepal) find new jobs in
their fields, even if these jobs bore only a tangential resemblance to what
they had done before: nurses became medical assistants; judges became
clerks. A few of them I helped apply to law school, and when I saw them,
we would talk about what they were learning, how different this law was

from the law they had known.
“I think we should work on a project together,” I told him that fall (he
was still doing pro bono work with the artist nonprofit, which—when I
went to volunteer there myself—was actually more moving than I had
thought it would be: I had thought it would just be a bunch of untalented
hacks trying to make creative lives for themselves when it was clear they
never would, and although that was in fact what it was, I found myself

admiring them, much as he did—their perseverance, their dumb, hardy
faith. These were people no one and nothing could ever dissuade from life,
from claiming it as theirs).
“Like what?” he asked.
“You could teach me to cook,” I told him, as he gave me that look he had,
in which he was almost smiling but not quite, amused but not ready to show

it. “I’m serious. Really cook. Six or seven dishes I could have in my
arsenal.”
And so he did. Saturday afternoons, after he’d finished work or visiting
with Lucien and the Irvines, we’d drive to Garrison, either alone or with
Richard and India or JB or one of the Henry Youngs and their wives, and on
Sunday we’d cook something. My main problem, it emerged, was a lack of
patience, my inability to accept tedium. I’d wander away to look for

something to read and forget that I was leaving the risotto to glue itself into