And indeed, Harold hadn’t been completely wrong, for he missed the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He missed being righteous and surrounded by the passionate, the heated, the crusading. He missed Citizen, who had moved back to London, and Marshall, whom he occasionally met for drinks, and Rhodes, whom he saw more frequently but who was perpetually frazzled, and gray, and whom he had remembered as cheery and effervescent, someone who would play electrotango music and squire an imaginary woman around the room when they were at the office late and feeling punchy, just to get him and Citizen to look up from their computers and laugh. They were getting older, all of them. He liked Rosen Pritchard, he liked the people there, but he never sat with them late at night arguing about cases and talking about books: it wasn’t that sort of office. The associates his age had unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends at home (or were themselves unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends); the ones older than he were getting married. In the rare moments they weren’t discussing the work before them, they made small talk about engagements and pregnancies and real estate. They didn’t discuss the law, not for fun or from fervor.
The firm encouraged its attorneys to do pro bono work, and he began volunteering with a nonprofit group that offered free legal advice to artists. The organization kept what they called “studio hours” every afternoon and evening, when artists could drop by and consult with a lawyer, and every Wednesday night he left work early, at seven, and sat in the group’s creaky-floored SoHo offices on Broome Street for three hours, helping small publishers of radical treatises who wanted to establish themselves as nonprofit entities, and painters with intellectual property disputes, and dance groups, photographers, writers, and filmmakers with contracts that were either so extralegal (he was presented with one written in pencil on a paper towel) that they were meaningless or so needlessly complicated that the artists couldn’t understand them—he could barely understand them—and yet had signed them anyway.
Harold didn’t really approve of his volunteer work, either; he could tell he thought it frivolous. “Are any of these artists any good?” Harold asked. “Probably not,” he said. But it wasn’t for him to judge whether the artists were good or not—other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as so many of them lived in a world that was deaf to practicalities. He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at: he considered them such successes, and he was proud of them. Unlike him, they had had no clear path to follow, and yet they had plowed stubbornly ahead. They spent their days making beautiful things.
His friend Richard was on the board of the organization, and some Wednesdays he’d stop by on his way home—he had recently moved to SoHo—and sit and talk with him if he was between clients, or just give him a wave across the room if he was occupied. One night after studio hours, Richard invited him back to his apartment for a drink, and they walked west on Broome Street, past Centre, and Lafayette, and Crosby, and Broadway, and Mercer, before turning south on Greene. Richard lived in a narrow building, its stone gone the color of soot, with a towering garage door marking its first floor and, to its right, a metal door with a face-size glass window cut into its top. There was no lobby, but rather a gray, tiled-floor hallway lit by a series of three glowing bare bulbs dangling from cords. The hallway turned right and led to a cell-like industrial elevator, the size of their living room and Willem’s bedroom at Lispenard Street combined, with a rattling cage door that shuddered shut at the press of a button, but which glided smoothly up through an exposed cinder-block shaft. At the third floor, it stopped, and Richard opened the cage and turned his key into the set of massive, forbidding steel doors before them, which opened into his apartment.
“God,” he said, stepping into the space, as Richard flicked on some lights. The floors were whitewashed wood, and the walls were white as well. High above him, the ceiling winked and shone with scores of chandeliers—old, glass, new, steel—that were strung every three feet or so, at irregular heights, so that as they walked deeper into the loft, he could feel glass bugles skimming across the top of his head, and Richard, who was even taller than he was, had to duck so they wouldn’t scrape his forehead. There were no dividing walls, but near the far end of the space was a shallow, freestanding box of glass as tall and wide as the front doors, and as he drew closer, he could see that within it was a gigantic honeycomb shaped like a graceful piece of fan coral. Beyond the glass box was a blanket-covered mattress, and before it was a shaggy white Berber rug, its mirrors twinkling in the lights, and a white woolen sofa and television, an odd island of domesticity in the midst of so much aridity. It was the largest apartment he had ever been in.
“It’s not real,” said Richard, watching him look at the honeycomb. “I made it from wax.”
“It’s spectacular,” he said, and Richard nodded his thanks.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll give you the tour.”
He handed him a beer and then unbolted a door next to the refrigerator. “Emergency stairs,” he said. “I love them. They’re so—descent-into-hell looking, you know?”
“They are,” he agreed, looking into the doorway, where the stairs seemed to vanish into the gloom. And then he stepped back, suddenly uneasy and yet feeling foolish for being so, and Richard, who hadn’t seemed to notice, shut the door and bolted it.