Harold had looked at him, curiously. “Of course,” he said. “It’s just dinner. You have to eat, right?”
Harold lived in a three-story house in Cambridge, at the edge of the undergraduate campus. “I didn’t know you lived here,” he said, as Harold pulled into the driveway. “This is one of my favorite streets. I used to walk down it every day as a shortcut to the other side of campus.”
“You and everybody else,” Harold replied. “When I bought it just before I got divorced, all these houses were occupied by grad students; all the shutters were falling off. The smell of pot was so thick you could get stoned just driving by.”
It was snowing, just lightly, but he was grateful that there were only two steps leading up to the door, and that he wouldn’t have to worry about slipping or needing Harold’s help. Inside, the house smelled of butter and pepper and starch: pasta, he thought. Harold dropped his briefcase on the floor and gave him a vague tour—“Living room; study behind it; kitchen and dining room to your left”—and he met Julia, who was tall like Harold, with short brown hair, and whom he liked instantly.
“Jude!” she said. “Finally! I’ve heard so much about you; I’m so happy to be meeting you at last.” It sounded, he thought, like she really was.
Over dinner, they talked. Julia was from an academic family from Oxford and had lived in America since graduate school at Stanford; she and Harold had met five years ago through a friend. Her lab studied a new virus that appeared to be a variant of H5N1 and they were trying to map its genetic code.
“Isn’t one of the concerns in microbiology the potential weaponization of these genomes?” he asked, and felt, rather than saw, Harold turn toward him.
“Yes, that’s right,” Julia said, and as she explained to him the controversies surrounding her and her colleagues’ work, he glanced over at Harold, who was watching him, and who raised an eyebrow at him in a gesture that he couldn’t interpret.
But then the conversation shifted, and he could almost watch as the discussion moved steadily away from Julia’s lab and inexorably toward him, could see how good a litigator Harold would be if he wanted to, could see his skill in redirecting and repositioning, almost as if their conversation were something liquid, and he was guiding it through a series of troughs and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape, until it reached its inevitable end.
“So, Jude,” Julia asked, “where did you grow up?”
“South Dakota and Montana, mostly,” he said, and he could feel the creature inside of him sit up, aware of danger but unable to escape it.
“So are your parents ranchers?” asked Harold.
He had learned over the years to anticipate this sequence of questioning, and how to deflect it as well. “No,” he said, “but a lot of people were, obviously. It’s beautiful countryside out there; have you spent any time in the West?”
Usually, this was enough, but it wasn’t for Harold. “Ha!” he said. “That’s the silkiest pivot I’ve heard in a long time.” Harold looked at him, closely enough so that he eventually looked down at his plate. “I suppose that’s your way of saying you’re not going to tell us what they do?”
“Oh, Harold, leave him alone,” said Julia, but he could feel Harold staring at him, and was relieved when dinner ended.
After that first night at Harold’s, their relationship became both deeper and more difficult. He felt he had awakened Harold’s curiosity, which he imagined as a perked, bright-eyed dog—a terrier, something relentless and keen—and wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. He wanted to know Harold better, but over dinner he had been reminded that that process—getting to know someone—was always so much more challenging than he remembered. He always forgot; he was always made to remember. He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence—the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts—could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where the relationship was something soft and pliable and comfortable, where both parties’ limits were understood and respected.
Other people might have made a few more attempts at questioning him and then left him alone—other people had left him alone: his friends, his classmates, his other professors—but Harold was not as easily dissuaded. Even his usual strategies—among them, telling his interlocutors that he wanted to hear about their lives, not talk about his: a tactic that had the benefit of being true as well as effective—didn’t work with Harold. He never knew when Harold would pounce next, but whenever he did, he was unprepared, and he felt himself becoming more self-conscious, not less, the more time they spent with each other.
They would be in Harold’s office, talking about something—the University of Virginia affirmative action case going before the Supreme Court, say—and Harold would ask, “What’s your ethnic background, Jude?”
“A lot of things,” he would answer, and then would try to change the subject, even if it meant dropping a stack of books to cause a distraction.
But sometimes the questions were contextless and random, and these were impossible to anticipate, as they came without preamble. One night he and Harold were in his office, working late, and Harold ordered them dinner. For dessert, he’d gotten cookies and brownies, and he pushed the paper bags toward him.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“Really?” Harold asked, raising his eyebrows. “My son used to love these. We tried to bake them for him at home, but we never got the recipe quite right.” He broke a brownie in half. “Did your parents bake for you a lot when you were a kid?” He would ask these questions with a deliberate casualness that he found almost unbearable.
“No,” he said, pretending to review the notes he’d been taking.
He listened to Harold chewing and, he knew, considering whether to retreat or to continue his line of questioning.
“Do you see your parents often?” Harold asked him, abruptly, on a different night.
“They’re dead,” he said, keeping his eyes on the page.
“I’m sorry, Jude,” Harold said after a silence, and the sincerity in his voice made him look up. “Mine are, too. Relatively recently. Of course, I’m much older than you.”
“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said. And then, guessing, “You were close to them.”
“I was,” said Harold. “Very. Were you close to yours?”
He shook his head. “No, not really.”
Harold was quiet. “But I’ll bet they were proud of you,” he said, finally.
Whenever Harold asked him questions about himself, he always felt something cold move across him, as if he were being iced from the inside, his organs and nerves being protected by a sheath of frost. In that moment, though, he thought he might break, that if he said anything the ice would shatter and he would splinter and crack. So he waited until he knew he would sound normal before he asked Harold if he needed him to find the rest of the articles now or if he should do it in the morning. He didn’t look at Harold, though, and spoke only to his notebook.
Harold took a long time to reply. “Tomorrow,” Harold said, quietly, and he nodded, and gathered his things to go home for the night, aware of Harold’s eyes following his lurching progress to the door.