“That’s a perfect example of a non-beautiful proof. Because while it was important that it was solved, it was, for a lot of people—like my adviser—a disappointment. The proof went on for hundreds of pages, and drew from so many disparate fields of mathematics, and was so—tortured, jigsawed, really, in its execution, that there are still many people at work trying to prove it in more elegant terms, even though it’s already been proven. A beautiful proof is succinct, like a beautiful ruling. It combines just a handful of different concepts, albeit from across the mathematical universe, and in a relatively brief series of steps, leads to a grand and new generalized truth in mathematics: that is, a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” He stopped to take a breath, aware, suddenly, that he had been talking and talking, and that the others were silent, watching him. He could feel himself flushing, could feel the old hatred fill him like dirtied water once more. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ramble on.”
“Are you joking?” said Laurence. “Jude, I think that was the first truly revelatory conversation I’ve had in Harold’s house in probably the last decade or more: thank you.”
Everyone laughed again, and Harold leaned back in his chair, looking pleased. “See?” he caught Harold mouthing across the table to Laurence, and Laurence nodding, and he understood that this was meant about him, and was flattered despite himself, and shy as well. Had Harold talked about him to his friend? Had this been a test for him, a test he hadn’t known he was to take? He was relieved he had passed it, and that he hadn’t embarrassed Harold, and relieved too that, as uncomfortable as it sometimes made him, he might have fully earned his place in Harold’s house, and might be invited back again.
With each day he trusted Harold a little more, and at times he wondered if he was making the same mistake again. Was it better to trust or better to be wary? Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal? He felt sometimes as if he was taking advantage of Harold’s generosity, his jolly faith in him, and sometimes as if his circumspection was the wise choice after all, for if it should end badly, he’d have only himself to blame. But it was difficult to not trust Harold: Harold made it difficult, and, just as important, he was making it difficult for himself—he wanted to trust Harold, he wanted to give in, he wanted the creature inside him to tuck itself into a sleep from which it would never wake.
Late one night in his second year of law school he was at Harold’s, and when they opened the door, the steps, the street, the trees were hushed with snow, and the flakes cycloned toward the door, so fast that they both took a step backward.
“I’ll call a cab,” he said, so Harold wouldn’t have to drive him.
“No, you won’t,” Harold said. “You’ll stay here.”
And so he stayed in Harold and Julia’s spare bedroom on the second floor, separated from their room by a large windowed space they used as a library, and a brief hallway. “Here’s a T-shirt,” Harold said, lobbing something gray and soft at him, “and here’s a toothbrush.” He placed it on the bookcase. “There’s extra towels in the bathroom. Do you want anything else? Water?”
“No,” he said. “Harold, thank you.”
“Of course, Jude. Good night.”
“Good night.”
He stayed awake for a while, the feather comforter wadded around him, the mattress plush beneath him, watching the window turn white, and listening to water glugging from the faucets, and Harold and Julia’s low, indistinguishable murmurs at each other, and one or the other of them padding from one place to another, and then, finally, nothing. In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents.
The summer after that second year, Harold invited him to their house in Truro, on Cape Cod. “You’ll love it,” he said. “Invite your friends. They’ll love it, too.” And so on the Thursday before Labor Day, once his and Malcolm’s internships had ended, they all drove up to the house from New York, and for that long weekend, Harold’s attention shifted to JB and Malcolm and Willem. He watched them too, admiring how they could answer every one of Harold’s parries, how generous they were with their own lives, how they could tell stories about themselves that they laughed at and that made Harold and Julia laugh as well, how comfortable they were around Harold and how comfortable Harold was around them. He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved. The house had a private walk down to a private spit of beach, and in the mornings the four of them would troop downhill and swim—even he did, in his pants and undershirt and an old oxford shirt, which no one bothered him about—and then lie on the sand baking, the wet clothes ungluing themselves from his body as they dried. Sometimes Harold would come and watch them, or swim as well. In the afternoons, Malcolm and JB would pedal off through the dunes on bicycles, and he and Willem would follow on foot, picking up bits of shaley shells and the sad carapaces of long-nibbled-away hermit crabs as they went, Willem slowing his pace to match his own. In the evenings, when the air was soft, JB and Malcolm sketched and he and Willem read. He felt doped, on sun and food and salt and contentment, and at night he fell asleep quickly and early, and in the mornings he woke before the others so he could stand on the back porch alone looking over the sea.
What is going to happen to me? he asked the sea. What is happening to me?