“You’re a Kantian to the core.” Julian laced his fingers and stretched his limbs like a cat; for the barest moment Paul could feel the light pressure of Julian’s leg brushing his. “I do like your paintings, by the way,” he added carelessly. “I don’t understand why you don’t just major in art, you’re good at it.”
The compliment burned in his face, then at the outer edges of his ears. He didn’t dare acknowledge it.
“It’s like you said,” he answered after a moment. “I don’t want other people telling me what to do.”
Julian liked that, enough that he let Paul see that he did.
“So what are you telling yourself to do?” asked Julian.
That was something else Paul had been holding back, at once less personal and far more intimate than the mere physical spaces of his life. He had no name yet for what he was trying to become, nothing he wanted to be able to call himself—no “renowned conservationist,” no “famous painter.” The early sprouts of his ambition were still so deep under the earth that he couldn’t say for sure what it was.
“Whatever I do has to mean something.” He hugged his knees and stared at them; it took all his nerve to raise his voice above a mumble. “I need to make something beautiful, something that lasts. I don’t know what, but I have to, if I want my life to matter at all.”
When he finally made himself meet Julian’s eyes, he couldn’t find any doubt or ridicule in his face. Julian believed him, and his respect was so consequential that it felt like Paul’s first step toward mattering. Paul wasn’t sure he would ever grow used to it—this precipitous thrill of being seen and known and understood.
“Surely it can matter even if it doesn’t last,” said Julian—not disagreeing, just prompting, the way he did with all their other thought experiments. “If you painted a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts? Après toi, le déluge.”
“I like it better the other way,” said Paul. “Where it means you’re leaving the flood in your wake.”
Julian smiled; it was a private, elusive smile, almost as if he thought this were funny.
“You would, wouldn’t you?” was all he said.
They left soon after, at Paul’s insistence. It was getting dangerously close to the time his mother tended to drift back from her weekly appointment with Dr. Greenbaum. She was what he wanted to hold back the most, for as long as he could get away with.
“They can’t possibly be that embarrassing,” Julian said as Paul hurried them to the far end of the block. “And even if they were, I’d never hold it against you.”
“It’s not that,” said Paul. He couldn’t think of a way to articulate the real reason, which felt far more complex. He liked how clean the boundary was between what his family knew about him and what belonged to him alone. He had spent his entire life in a house whose doors had keyholes but no keys. It was a new sensation for him to have a secret, and he wasn’t ready to relinquish it.
They made their way to the nearest deli. Paul was worried about the venue at first—it had been his grandparents’ lunch spot for decades—but it was off-hours and mostly empty, and Paul didn’t particularly recognize anyone, aside from the bored-looking girl behind the counter with whom he’d taken a civics class.
Paul took a while to decide on what he wanted, while Julian quickly loaded his tray with soup and cookies and cake slices and went to claim them a table. By the time Paul had selected his meal (turkey sandwich, French fries, ginger ale, a single deviled egg), Julian had nearly finished his first cup of coffee.
He had also retrieved one of the plastic mat chessboards from their shelf over by the napkins, and was arranging the pieces—not into their starting configuration, but an elegant midgame chaos. The positions looked familiar. Paul had seen something like them on the portable chess set in Julian’s room.
“Pop quiz,” said Julian as Paul arrived. “Say you’re playing black. What’s your next move?”
It took Paul longer to contemplate this than he would have preferred; he was distracted by the belated realization that there wasn’t any dignified way to eat his egg. But Julian appeared content to let the silence linger. He poured Paul a cup of coffee and placidly dropped his crackers into his soup one by one.
Finally, Paul moved one of his knights to threaten the white bishop. When Julian didn’t visibly react, he began to doubt his instincts. “Is that right?” he asked too quickly. “I’m not going to pretend I’m, you know, great at it—”
“It’s a solid move. Maybe a little conservative, but it’s solid.” Julian reached to return the knight to its previous place. “But watch this.”
He picked up the black queen and pulled her across the board to check the king. It was an option Paul had immediately written off as suicidal, positioning the queen such that white had no choice but to capture her. Only after he saw the aftermath did he understand the beauty of it—the way the sacrifice burned the path clear, so that no matter how white chose to reply, he would find himself in checkmate two turns later.
Julian was watching him, grinning. Paul looked between him and the board in disbelief.
“Did you . . . ?”
Julian gave a sudden, dismissive laugh.
“God, no,” he said, so ruefully that he sounded almost defensive. “I had nothing to do with this, trust me.”
Julian rifled through his satchel and produced a cheap paperback, battered and dog-eared and creased sharply along the spine. He opened to a page in the middle and handed it over. U.S. Open 1970—Kazlauskas v. Kaplan—Championship Final. Paul’s knowledge of chess notation had atrophied since junior-high chess club, but the queen sacrifice was easy enough to find because white had immediately resigned. The transcriptionist gave the move a double exclamation mark.
“The whole game was like that,” said Julian. “I was there. I’ll never forget that moment—the way the whole room drew a deep breath at the same time as they realized.”
“What were you doing at the U.S. Open?”
Paul had never seen Julian look embarrassed before.
“Ugh—I had no business being there. I was barely in the Juniors section, I was cannon fodder for the cannon fodder. All I really got for my trouble was a few days away from boarding school.”
He picked up the black queen and left the piece lying on its side next to the salt shaker. Paul waited for him to speak again; it felt wiser and more honest than offering an uninformed reassurance.
“It was a beautiful game. Even between grandmasters, that’s not a given, there’s plenty of ugly chess even at the highest levels. But this game, this goddamn game—the whole time you could see the players trying to take each other apart and push each other as far as they could go. And it’s gorgeous—when chess is played at its best, by two genuinely great players, it’s a work of art made from pure reason. It was . . . Watching them build that game together—and after I’d spent the whole tournament proving my own absolute mediocrity—but anyway, how beautiful it was, and how far it was from anything I’d ever be able to do, it broke my heart a little, is all.” He pulled a face. “God, sorry about that, that sounds so mawkish.”