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 a sticky glop, or I’d forget to turn the carrots in their puddle of olive oil and come back to find them seared to the bottom of the pan. (So much of cooking, it seemed, was petting and bathing and monitoring and flipping and turning and soothing: demands I associated with human infancy.) My other problem, I was told, was my insistence on innovating, which is apparently a guarantee of failure in baking. “It’s chemistry, Harold, not philosophy,” he kept saying, with that same half smile. “You can’t cheat the specifed amounts and hope it’s going to come out the way it should.”
“Maybe it’ll come out better,” I said, mostly to entertain him—I was always happy to play the fool if I thought it might give him some pleasure—and now he smiled, really smiled. “It won’t,” he said.
But finally, I actually did learn how to make some things: I learned how to roast a chicken and poach an egg and broil halibut. I learned how to make carrot cake, and a bread with lots of different nuts that I had liked to buy at the bakery he used to work at in Cambridge: his version was uncanny, and for weeks I made loaf after loaf. “Excellent, Harold,” he said one day, after tasting a slice. “See? Now you’ll be able to cook for yourself when you’re a hundred.”
“What do you mean, cook for myself?” I asked him. “You’ll have to cook for me,” and he smiled back at me, a sad, strange smile, and didn’t say anything, and I quickly changed the subject before he said something that I would have to pretend he didn’t. I was always trying to allude to the future, to make plans for years away, so that he’d commit to them and I could make him honor his commitment. But he was careful: he never promised.
“We should take a music class, you and I,” I told him, not really knowing what I meant by that.
He smiled, a little. “Maybe,” he said. “Sure. We’ll discuss it.” But that was the most he’d allow.
After our cooking lesson, we walked. When we were at the house upstate, we walked the path Malcolm had made: past the spot in the woods where I had once had to leave him propped against a tree, jolting with pain, past the first bench, past the second, past the third. At the second bench we’d always sit and rest. He didn’t need to rest, not like he used to, and we walked so slowly that I didn’t need to, either. But we always made a ceremonial stop, because it was from here that you had the clearest view of the back of the house, do you remember? Malcolm had cut away some of the trees here so that from the bench, you were facing the house straight on, and if you were on the back deck of the house, you were facing the bench straight on. “It’s such a beautiful house,” I said, as I always did, and as I always did, I hoped he was hearing me say that I was proud of him: for the house he built, and for the life he had built within it.
Once, a month or so after we all returned home from Italy, we were sitting on this bench, and he said to me, “Do you think he was happy with me?” He was so quiet I thought I had imagined it, but then he looked at me and I saw I hadn’t.
“Of course he was,” I told him. “I know he was.”
He shook his head. “There were so many things I didn’t do,” he said at last.
I didn’t know what he meant by this, but it didn’t change my mind. “Whatever it was, I know it didn’t matter,” I told him. “I know he was happy with you. He told me.” He looked at me, then. “I know it,” I repeated. “I know it.” (You had never said this to me, not explicitly, but I know you will forgive me; I know you will. I know you would have wanted me to say this.)
Another time, he said, “Dr. Loehmann thinks I should tell you things.”
“What things?” I asked, careful not to look at him.
“Things about what I am,” he said, and then paused. “Who I am,” he corrected himself.
“Well,” I said, finally, “I’d like that. I’d like to know more about you.”
Then he smiled. “That sounds strange, doesn’t it?” he asked. “ ‘More about you.’ We’ve known each other so long now.”
I always had the sense, during these exchanges, that although there might not be a single correct answer, there was in fact a single incorrect one, after which he would never say anything again, and I was forever trying to calculate what that answer might be so I would never say it.
“That’s true,” I said. “But I always want to know more, where you’re concerned.”
He looked at me quickly, and then back at the house. “Well,” he said. “Maybe I’ll try. Maybe I’ll write something down.”
“I’d love that,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready.”