He stood on the sidewalk and watched Harold’s car drive away, and then went up to his apartment, which was on the second floor of a brownstone adjacent to an MIT fraternity house. The brownstone’s owner, a retired sociology professor, lived on the ground floor and leased out the remaining three floors to graduate students: on the top floor were Santosh and Federico, who were getting their doctorates in electrical engineering at MIT, and on the third floor were Janusz and Isidore, who were both Ph.D. candidates at Harvard—Janusz in biochemistry and Isidore in Near Eastern religions—and directly below them were he and his roommate, Charlie Ma, whose real name was Chien-Ming Ma and whom everyone called CM. CM was an intern at Tufts Medical Center, and they kept almost entirely opposite schedules: he would wake and CM’s door would be closed and he would hear his wet, snuffly snores, and when he returned home in the evenings at eight, after working with Harold, CM would be gone. What he saw of CM he liked—he was from Taipei and had gone to boarding school in Connecticut and had a sleepy, roguish grin that made you want to smile back at him—and he was a friend of Andy’s friend, which was how they had met. Despite his perpetual air of stoned languor, CM was tidy as well, and liked to cook: he’d come home sometimes and find a plate of fried dumplings in the center of the table, with a note beneath that read EAT ME, or, occasionally, receive a text instructing him to rotate the chicken in its marinade before he went to bed, or asking him to pick up a bunch of cilantro on his way home. He always would, and would return to find the chicken simmered into a stew, or the cilantro minced and folded into scallop pancakes. Every few months or so, when their schedules intersected, all six of them would meet in Santosh and Federico’s apartment—theirs was the largest—and eat and play poker. Janusz and Isidore would worry aloud that girls thought they were gay because they were always hanging out with each other (CM cut his eyes toward him; he had bet him twenty dollars that they were sleeping together but were trying to pretend they were straight—at any rate, an impossible thing to prove), and Santosh and Federico would complain about how stupid their students were, and about how the quality of MIT undergraduates had really gone downhill since their time there five years ago.
His and CM’s was the smallest of the apartments, because the landlord had annexed half of the floor to make a storage room. CM paid significantly more of the rent, so he had the bedroom. He occupied a corner of the living room, the part with the bay window. His bed was a floppy foam egg-carton pallet, and his books were lined up under the windowsill, and he had a lamp, and a folding paper screen to give him some privacy. He and CM had bought a large wooden table, which they placed in the dining-room alcove, and which had two metal folding chairs, one discarded from Janusz, the other from Federico. One half of the table was his, the other half CM’s, and both halves were stacked with books and papers and their laptops, both emitting their chirps and burbles throughout the day and night.
People were always stunned by the apartment’s bleakness, but he had mostly ceased to notice it—although not entirely. Now, for example, he sat on the floor before the three cardboard boxes in which he stored his clothes, and lifted his new sweaters and shirts and socks and shoes from their envelopes of white tissue paper, placing them in his lap one at a time. They were the nicest things he had ever owned, and it seemed somehow shameful to put them in boxes meant to hold file folders. And so finally, he rewrapped them and returned them carefully to their shopping bags.
The generosity of Harold’s gift unsettled him. First, there was the matter of the gift itself: he had never, never received anything so grand. Second, there was the impossibility of ever adequately repaying him. And third, there was the meaning behind the gesture: he had known for some time that Harold respected him, and even enjoyed his company. But was it possible that he was someone important to Harold, that Harold liked him more than as just a student, but as a real, actual friend? And if that was the case, why should it make him so self-conscious?
It had taken him many months to feel truly comfortable around Harold: not in the classroom or in his office, but outside of the classroom, outside of the office. In life, as Harold would say. He would return home after dinner at Harold’s house and feel a flush of relief. He knew why, too, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself: traditionally, men—adult men, which he didn’t yet consider himself among—had been interested in him for one reason, and so he had learned to be frightened of them. But Harold didn’t seem to be one of those men. (Although Brother Luke hadn’t seemed to be one of those men either.) He was frightened of everything, it sometimes seemed, and he hated that about himself. Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.
He had known of Harold before he met him, for Harold was known. He was a relentless questioner: every remark you made in his class would be seized upon and pecked at in an unending volley of Whys. He was trim and tall, and had a way of pacing in a tight circle, his torso pitched forward, when he was engaged or excited.
To his disappointment, there was much he simply couldn’t remember from that first-year contracts class with Harold. He couldn’t remember, for example, the specifics of the paper he wrote that interested Harold and which led to conversations with him outside the classroom and, eventually, to an offer to become one of his research assistants. He couldn’t remember anything particularly interesting he said in class. But he could remember Harold on that first day of the semester, pacing and pacing, and lecturing them in his low, quick voice.
“You’re One Ls,” Harold had said. “And congratulations, all of you. As One Ls, you’ll be taking a pretty typical course load: contracts; torts; property; civil procedure; and, next year, constitutional and criminal law. But you know all this.
“What you may not know is that this course load reflects—beautifully, simply—the very structure of our society, the very mechanics of what a society, our particular society, needs to make it work. To have a society, you first need an institutional framework: that’s constitutional law. You need a system of punishment: that’s criminal. You need to know that you have a system in place that will make those other systems work: that’s civil procedure. You need a way to govern matters of domain and ownership: that’s property. You need to know that someone will be financially accountable for injuries caused you by others: that’s torts. And finally, you need to know that people will keep their agreements, that they will honor their promises: and that is contracts.”
He paused. “Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily.