Students don’t like this case. I don’t teach it that often—its extremity makes it more flashy than it is instructive, I believe—but whenever I did, I would always hear a voice in the auditorium say, “But it’s not fair!” And as annoying as that word is—fair—it is important that students never forget the concept. “Fair” is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration.

He never mentioned whether something was fair, however. Fairness itself seemed to hold little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what’s fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields. Jacob, back when he was able to go to school and learn things and think and speak, knew what fairness was and that it was important, something to be valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.

Or am I just thinking this now?

“So were the plaintiffs successful?” I asked. That year, his first year, I had in fact taught that case.

“Yes,” he said, and he explained why: he knew instinctively why they would have been. And then, right on cue, I heard the tiny “But it’s not fair!” from the back of the room, and before I could begin my first lecture of the season—“fair” is never an answer, etc., etc.—he said, quietly, “But it’s right.”

I was never able to ask him what he meant by that. Class ended, and everyone got up at once and almost ran for the door, as if the room was on fire. I remember telling myself to ask him about it in the next class, later that week, but I forgot. And then I forgot again, and again. Over the years, I would remember this conversation every now and again, and each time I would think: I must ask him what he meant by that. But then I never would. I don’t know why.

And so this became his pattern: he knew the law. He had a feeling for it. But then, just when I wanted him to stop talking, he would introduce a moral argument, he would mention ethics. Please, I would think, please don’t do this. The law is simple. It allows for less nuance than you’d imagine. Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law—although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.

I was worried he’d make it harder for himself, that he’d complicate the real gift he had with—as much as I hate to have to say this about my profession—thinking. Stop! I wanted to tell him. But I never did, because eventually, I realized I enjoyed hearing him think.

In the end, of course, I needn’t have worried; he learned how to control it, he learned to stop mentioning right and wrong. And as we know, this tendency of his didn’t stop him from becoming a great lawyer. But later, often, I was sad for him, and for me. I wished I had urged him to leave law school, I wished I had told him to go to the equivalent of Drayman 241. The skills I gave him were not skills he needed after all. I wish I had nudged him in a direction where his mind could have been as supple as it was, where he wouldn’t have had to harness himself to a dull way of thinking. I felt I had taken someone who once knew how to draw a dog and turned him into someone who instead knew only how to draw shapes.

I am guilty of many things when it comes to him. But sometimes, illogically, I feel guiltiest for this. I opened the van door, I invited him inside. And while I didn’t drive off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.

3

THREE WEEKS BEFORE he left for Thanksgiving in Boston, a package—a large, flat, unwieldy wooden crate with his name and address written on every side in black marker—arrived for him at work, where it sat by his desk all day until he was able to open it late that night.

From the return address, he knew what it was, but he still felt that reflexive curiosity one does when unwrapping anything, even something unwanted. Inside the box were layers of brown paper, and then layers of bubble wrap, and then, wrapped in sheets of white paper, the painting itself.

He turned it over. “To Jude with love and apologies, JB,” JB had scribbled on the canvas, directly above his signature: “Jean-Baptiste Marion.” There was an envelope from JB’s gallery taped to the back of the frame, inside of which was a letter certifying the painting’s authenticity and date, addressed to him and signed by the gallery’s registrar.

He called Willem, who he knew would have already left the theater and was probably on his way home. “Guess what I got today?”

There was only the slightest of pauses before Willem answered. “The painting.”

“Right,” he said, and sighed. “So I suppose you’re behind this?”

Willem coughed. “I just told him he didn’t have a choice in the matter any longer—not if he wanted you to talk to him again at some point.” Willem paused, and he could hear the wind whooshing past him. “Do you need help getting it home?”

“Thanks,” he said. “But I’m just going to leave it here for now and pick it up later.” He re-clad the painting in its layers and replaced it in its box, which he shoved beneath his console. Before he shut off his computer, he began a note to JB, but then stopped, and deleted what he’d written, and instead left for the night.

He was both surprised and not that JB had sent him the painting after all (and not at all surprised to learn that it had been Willem who had convinced him to do so). Eighteen months ago, just as Willem was beginning his first performances in The Malamud Theorem, JB had been offered representation by a gallery on the Lower East Side, and the previous spring, he’d had his first solo show, “The Boys,” a series of twenty-four paintings based on photographs he’d taken of the three of them. As he’d promised years ago, JB had let him see the pictures of him that he wanted to paint, and although he had approved many of them (reluctantly: he had felt queasy even as he did so, but he knew how important the series was to JB), JB had ultimately been less interested in the ones he’d approved than in the ones he wouldn’t, a few of which—including an image in which he was curled into himself in bed, his eyes open but scarily unseeing, his left hand stretched open unnaturally wide, like a ghoul’s claw—he alarmingly had no memory of JB even taking. That had been the first fight: JB wheedling, then sulking, then threatening, then shouting, and then, when he couldn’t change his mind, trying to convince Willem to advocate for him.

“You realize I don’t actually owe you anything,” JB had told him once he realized his negotiations with Willem weren’t progressing. “I mean, I don’t technically have to ask your permission here. I could technically just paint whatever the fuck I want. This is a courtesy I’m extending you, you know.”

He could’ve swamped JB with arguments, but he was too angry to do so. “You promised me, JB,” he said. “That should be enough.” He could have added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t, and he had decided to accept it, although recently, the work it took to accept JB and his limitations had begun to feel more enraging and wearisome and arduous than seemed necessary.

In the end, JB had had to admit defeat, although in the months before his show opened, he had made occasional allusions to what he called his “lost paintings,” great works he could’ve made had he, Jude, been less rigid, less timid, less self-conscious, and (this was his favorite of JB’s arguments) less of a philistine. Later, though, he would be embarrassed by his own gullibility, by how he had trusted that his wishes would be respected.