The Art of Fielding: A Novel (39 page)

She knew he meant it: he didn’t believe her. “It’s true.”

“I don’t believe you,” he repeated. “I don’t even know why you’d say that. What about us?”

“What
about
us? It’s not like
we’re
sleeping together. We haven’t had sex in a year.”

He glared at her. “That’s not true.”

“Of course it’s true,” Pella said. “A year at least.”

“Bella. You don’t remember the last time we made love?”

Pella tried to remember. But why should she remember? They’d made love less frequently, and then they’d stopped. It wasn’t like there’d been some kind of ceremony, or even a conscious decision.

“It was Christmas Day,” David said. “The day I gave you these.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny manila envelope. He undid the flap and shook out onto the tablecloth two gorgeous teardrop earrings, sapphire and platinum. Pella had never seen them before. Or had she?

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“I thought you might want to keep them. I don’t have much use for them myself.”

Pella resisted the urge to pick one up. “We did not have sex on Christmas,” she said.

David fixed her with a calm, pitying expression, the kind that usually preceded some calmly phrased suggestion—that she should
calm down,
or
drink some water,
or
consider seeing someone.
“Bella,” he said reprovingly. “You know I hate it when you do this.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend that you don’t remember things. As if memories were just a matter of convenience, and you could throw them away if you didn’t want them. Although why you wouldn’t want such pleasant memories is beyond me. We woke up. It was sunny. I cooked breakfast. We listened to Krebenspell’s Second. We made love. We went to dinner at Trisquette. I gave you these.” His voice was obnoxiously calm. Pella’s need for a sky-blue pill was through the roof, but she wasn’t sure where her purse had gone. She looked for the bottle of wine, but it was gone too, hauled off by the waiter with the hairless hands. She’d probably drunk the whole thing herself. David always stopped at two glasses. She’d have to be crazy not to remember those earrings, and she was clearly not crazy. Opaquely not crazy. Not not not crazy. She vaguely remembered dinner in late December, an awful afternoon walled in by the platinum sun, the bizarre creakings of Deskin Krebenspell, whom David regarded as the quote “only living composer.” No making love—no way. But people believed what they wanted to believe. She’d told David that she was sleeping with Mike, and he refused to believe it, had forgotten it instantly, because his brain couldn’t stand to know such a thing. If he wanted to believe they’d slept together on Christmas, let him believe it.

But the earrings were something else. The earrings
existed.
They lay there on the table. They did look vaguely familiar—no doubt they’d seen them in some boutique in Hayes Valley, and Pella had oohed and ahhed, and David, having taken note of her oohing and ahhing—he’d never been stingy with gifts—bought them before flying out here. And now was pretending that he’d given them to her before. She picked one up to put it back in its manila envelope. A nice touch, that: to hand them over in their brand-new box would make them seem brand-new. It was a classic David maneuver to try to win her back this way, by making her think she was crazy.
He
made her crazy, no one else. He did have good taste, though. The earring squirted from her hand and landed in her empty wineglass amid the pale grit. She should drink it, swallow it—now
that
would make her crazy. And it would make him crazy too.

She lifted the wineglass, clicked it against David’s, which was still half full. She met his eyes meanly, lifted the glass to her lips.
Fuck Mike Schwartz
was the toast that arose in her mind.
Fuck Mike Schwartz, whom I live to fuck.
Never too drunk to use
whom.
Funny that she’d thought
live to fuck
instead of
love to fuck
or
like to fuck. Like to fuck
would have been the most accurate, but it didn’t make much difference. David was speaking and reaching. She leaned away. She had the wineglass nearly inverted, but the earring hung up in the little hollow that led down to the stem. She tapped the glass with her injured hand. The earring rattled free and skied down the goblet’s concavity into her mouth. She rolled it around, cold metal and stone. She tested it with her teeth, slipped it under her tongue. It felt right.

“Spit that out,” David said, alarmed.

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“You could be seriously injured.”

A thousand-dollar dinner. A piece of performance art.

“You’re acting like a five-year-old,” David said. “It’s not becoming.”

“You said you had no use for them.”

“Quit performing. Spit it out.”

She showed him the inside of her mouth, like a five-year-old who’s finished her spinach: clean. When she’d gone to swallow she felt a thrill and then a fear—what if it stuck in her throat? But it was small and went down without a problem.

David looked terrified. He pulled out his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling an ambulance. That thing will shred your intestines.”

“Oh, relax.” Pella shoved back her chair, a bit unsteadily, and walked away from the table. Relying on yourself wasn’t easy; it could involve strong measures. There were two stalls in the women’s bathroom, both vacant. She’d never really been bulimic, but it was one of those things a girl just knew how to do. The earring came up in a tide of pink wine and snail sauce. She held her hair with her left hand and fished the beautiful blue teardrop out of the toilet with her right. She went to the sink to rinse her mouth and then the earring. A wicker basket of woodchip potpourri sat beside the basin. In the mirror she looked blanched and haggard, thirty at least, but the wine was gone from her stomach and she was starting to feel better already. She wouldn’t even have a hangover tomorrow.

43

S
chwartz, still wet from his post-practice shower, was standing in his weirdly clean kitchen, chasing a couple Vicodin with some flat ginger ale, when he heard the gate’s jingle and footsteps on the front porch. The bell rang.
Pella,
he thought wishfully, but she was off somewhere with The Architect. Schwartz had fantasized about hunting them down, about putting a scare into The Architect if not pummeling him into submission, but Pella didn’t have a cell phone, he didn’t know where to find her, and he needed to get some sleep before tomorrow’s games.

“Gentlemen.” He nodded, shaking Starblind’s hand and then Rick’s. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No thanks,” said Starblind. Rick shook his head solemnly, his pink anvil chin describing a long slow arc.

“Something wrong?” Schwartz asked. “O’Shea looks ready for a funeral.”

Rick stared down at his Birkenstocks. Starblind gave the lid of the mailbox a few apprehensive flips, not meeting Schwartz’s eye. “There’s something we wanted to talk to you about.”

“Well, here I am.”

“Right.” Starblind sucked in a breath and steeled himself. “We talked it over at practice today, and we think that Henry should sit out tomorrow.”

Schwartz’s whole big body tensed. “Who’s
we?
”

“Rick and myself. Boddington and Phlox. Jensen. Ajay. Meat.” Starblind glanced at Rick. “Who else?”

Rick looked like Starblind had just asked him to name a Jew. “Sooty Kim,” he muttered.

“Right. Sooty was there.”

“You had a meeting,” Schwartz said.

Starblind shrugged. “Not officially. It was just the juniors and seniors. No need to get the younger guys involved.”

“Was the Buddha there?”

“Buddha hasn’t been around much lately.”

“What about me? Was I there?”

“No,” Starblind conceded. “You weren’t.”

“Sounds like some meeting.” A dangerous calm suffused Schwartz’s voice. “What else did you geniuses do? Elect yourselves captains?”

“Schwartzy, please. Hear us out.” Rick’s normally ruddled face was drained of color. His left thumb flicked at an imaginary lighter, tapped at the filter end of an imaginary cigarette. “It wasn’t a meeting. How could we have a team meeting about this? What would we do, get everyone together to talk about what’s wrong with the Skrimmer? With him sitting right there?”

“So you did it on the sly,” Schwartz said. “Behind my back.”

“It wasn’t like that. It was an impromptu discussion that led to a consensus. And here we are right afterward to tell you about it. As our captain.”

“How big of you.”

“I’ll tell you what’s big,” Starblind said. “This weekend. These four games. We beat Coshwale, we win UMSCACs. We go to the regional tournament.”

“You think we’re gonna beat Coshwale without Henry?” Schwartz said. “Even if we could, you want to go into regionals with him riding the bench? You’re nuts.”

“He cost us that game yesterday,” Starblind said.

“The whole team played like shit the whole game! Rick here dropped a pop-up, Boddington booted two grounders, I struck out with a runner on third. That play of Henry’s was one play. We should have been up by twelve by then.”

“We should’ve been,” said Starblind, “but we weren’t.”

Rick sighed miserably, riffling his ginger hair. “Schwartzy, you know how I feel about the little guy. I love him and I’d go to war for him. He’s like the brother I never had, and I have four brothers. But what’s going on with him is messing with all of our heads. Why do you think we looked so shaky yesterday? I’m not saying it’s Henry’s fault, but…”

Rick lifted his arms and let them drop. Schwartz stayed silent, waiting for him to finish. “Nobody knows how to talk to him anymore. It changes the whole atmosphere. When we win nobody wants to celebrate, because Henry’s our leader, you and him are our leaders, and obviously he’s hurting. And when we lose… well, we shouldn’t lose. We shouldn’t have lost to Wainwright. We’re too good a team.”

“Izzy looks sharp at practice,” Starblind added. “He could step right in. We’d barely miss a beat.”

A pickup rolled by with two kegs in the bed, blasting the rap anthem of the moment. Friday night, for nonathletes, was under way. Schwartz felt a splinter from a cracked porch board pierce the meat of his foot. “Tomorrow’s the Skrimmer’s day,” he said. “His family’ll be here. Aparicio’ll be here. You think he’s just going to take a seat?”

“He might not want to,” Starblind said. “But he should. For the team.”

“Hell, he can play first base if he wants,” Rick said. “
I’ll
sit. Anything so he doesn’t have to make that throw from short to first. It’s killing him, Schwartzy. You know that. Anyone can see it.”

“He’s just pressing. He’ll be fine.”

“If he was pressing before,” Starblind said, “what do you think’s going to happen tomorrow?”

It wasn’t like it had never occurred to Schwartz. It hadn’t escaped his notice how smooth Izzy looked at practice, how confident an athlete he was, how much he’d already learned from Henry about playing shortstop. Izzy couldn’t hit like Henry, not even close, but on defense it would actually be—Schwartz felt like a traitor to think it—an improvement. And maybe Starblind was right; maybe it would be not just foolish but cruel, sadistic, to send Henry out there tomorrow when the pressure would be cranked up ten times higher than ever before. Maybe the kid would crack wide open. Maybe it was Schwartz’s job to head that off before it happened.

“Why are you coming to me with this?” he said. “Coach Cox decides who plays and who doesn’t.”

“You know Coach Cox,” Rick said. “Loyal to a fault.”

Starblind nodded. “Remember Two Thirty? Guy was a head case. But Coach Cox wouldn’t bench him. He was convinced Toovs would suddenly start crushing in games the way he did in practice. How many wins did
that
cost us over two years?”

“Hardly the same situation,” Schwartz said.

“Skrimmer’s lost his confidence. Toovs never had any to begin with.” Starblind shrugged dismissively, thrust his hands into the pockets of his shiny track jacket. “They’re both fucked.”

“So you want me to decide that Henry can’t play tomorrow.”

“You’re the captain,” Starblind said, a hint of snideness in his voice. Schwartz squeezed his right hand into a fist, then uncurled his fingers slowly, like a man warding off a heart attack. Thinking of cracking a few of Starblind’s blinding arctic teeth.

“Just one day off might do the Skrimmer good,” Rick said. “He could relax, take it easy, come back stronger on Sunday. He might even feel relieved.”

Starblind eyed Schwartz levelly. “Just don’t forget what you’re supposed to put first, Schwartzy. It’s not Henry, and it’s not Henry’s pro career.”

It’s this team.

It wasn’t a given that sitting Henry would be the best thing for this team—how far could they possibly go without their best player?—but Starblind’s words gave Schwartz pause. It was true that he’d gotten locked on Henry, Henry’s feelings, Henry redeeming himself to the scouts. Not necessarily to the detriment of the team thus far—Henry’s success and the Harpooners’ had always gone hand in hand—but it was possible, it could happen. It was possible that the younger Schwartz, the hard-ass sophomore who’d galled Lev Tennant into punching him to get Henry into the lineup, would now decide to do what it took to get Henry back out of it. Sometimes you needed a rupture; sometimes you had to clean house. The younger Schwartz had known that. It was easy to know that when you weren’t in charge.