“Well,” said Harold. “That’s a relief. But Jude, what could you possibly need so much money for, besides an apartment, which Julia and I will help you buy, do you hear me?”
He sometimes found himself both frustrated and fascinated by Harold’s lack of imagination: in Harold’s mind, people had parents who were proud of them, and saved money only for apartments and vacations, and asked for things when they wanted them; he seemed to be curiously unaware of a universe in which those things might not be givens, in which not everyone shared the same past and future. But this was a highly ungenerous way to think, and it was rare—most of the time, he admired Harold’s steadfast optimism, his inability or unwillingness to be cynical, to look for unhappiness or misery in every situation. He loved Harold’s innocence, which was made more remarkable considering what he taught and what he had lost. And so how could he tell Harold that he had to consider wheelchairs, which needed to be replaced every few years, and which insurance didn’t wholly cover? How could he tell him that Andy, who didn’t take insurance, never charged him, had never charged him, but might want to someday, and if he did, he certainly wasn’t not going to pay him? How could he tell him that this most recent time his wound had opened, Andy had mentioned hospitalization and, maybe, someday in the future, amputation? How could he tell him that if his leg was amputated, it would mean a hospital stay, and physical therapy, and prostheses? How could he tell him about the surgery he wanted on his back, the laser burning his carapace of scars down to nothing? How could he tell Harold of his deepest fears: his loneliness, of becoming the old man with a catheter and a bony, bare chest? How could he tell Harold that he dreamed not of marriage, or children, but that he would someday have enough money to pay someone to take care of him if he needed it, someone who would be kind to him and allow him privacy and dignity? And then, yes, there were the things he wanted: He wanted to live somewhere where the elevator worked. He wanted to take cabs when he wanted to. He wanted to find somewhere private to swim, because the motion stilled his back and because he wasn’t able to take his walks any longer.
But he couldn’t tell Harold any of this. He didn’t want Harold to know just how flawed he was, what a piece of junk he’d acquired. And so he said nothing, and told Harold he had to go, and that he would talk to him later.
Even before he had talked to Harold, he had prepared himself to be resigned to his new job, nothing more, but to first his unease, and then his surprise, and then his delight, and then his slight disgust, he found that he enjoyed it. He’d had experience with pharmaceutical companies when he was a prosecutor, and so much of his initial caseload concerned that industry: he worked with a company that was opening an Asia-based subsidiary to develop an anticorruption policy, traveling back and forth to Tokyo with the senior partner on the case—this was a small, tidy, solvable job, and therefore unusual. The other cases were more complicated, and longer, at times infinitely long: he mostly worked on compiling a defense for another of the firm’s clients, this a massive pharmaceutical conglomerate, against a False Claims Act charge. And three years into his life at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, when the investment management company Rhodes worked for was investigated for securities fraud, they came to him, and secured his partnership: he had trial experience, which most of the other associates didn’t, but he had known he would need to bring in a client eventually, and the first client was always the hardest to find.
He would never have admitted it to Harold, but he actually liked directing investigations prompted by whistle-blowers, liked pressing up against the boundaries of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, liked being able to stretch the law, like a strip of elastic, just past its natural tension point, just to the point where it would snap back at you with a sting. By day he told himself it was an intellectual engagement, that his work was an expression of the plasticity of the law itself. But at night he would sometimes think of what Harold would say if he was honest with him about what he was doing, and would hear his words again: Such a waste, such a waste. What was he doing?, he would think in those moments. Had the job made him venal, or had he always been so and had just fancied himself otherwise?
It’s all within the law, he would argue with the Harold-in-his-head.
Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, Harold-in-his-head would shoot back at him.