The Art of Fielding: A Novel (52 page)

The hollandaise turned out perfectly, creamy and smooth but not too heavy. Pella plated the finished product and shared it out among the dinner shift’s workers, who nodded approvingly. She wanted to take some home for Henry, but she knew he wouldn’t touch anything so rich. He’d barely been eating. Instead she filled an empty plastic tub with soup from the salad bar’s big crock and stuck it in her backpack.

When she arrived home, Henry was sitting on the living room couch, the television off, the remote control by his side, no book or magazine in sight. Pella touched the top of the TV to see if it was warm—yes. What kind of weird pride was that, that let you sit around someone else’s house all day long, doing nothing, but kept you from wanting to be caught watching TV?

“Anybody home?” she asked peppily.

“Just me.”

“How was your day?”

“Not bad.”

“That’s good.”

She was the wrong caretaker, or coach, for someone so depressed: she was too indulgent, too empathetic. He’d be better off with someone tougher, someone who’d never really been depressed and didn’t know what it was like. At least he’d managed to get his clothes from the washer to the dryer and back on his body. That was something.

His caved, vacant expression reminded her of all the days she’d spent pinned to her and David’s bed by the white sunlight that streamed through the high windows of their loft
(There’s a certain slant of light… ).
Bad days, those. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I brought some soup.”

He hesitated, weighing his aversion to food against the mild censure he’d face if he declined. “I’ll heat it up,” Pella said, and headed for the kitchen. She dumped the soup in a saucepan, cranked the gas, waited for the pilot to catch.

Henry, having followed her into the kitchen, went to the sink and filled his Gatorade bottle with water. He carried that thing everywhere. Or at least he carried it from the bedroom to the bathroom to the living room to the kitchen—those, as far as Pella could tell, were the only places he went. He took a long gulp that drained the bottle, refilled it, and screwed the orange plastic cap back on. The scruff was thickening on his face and neck. Men and their beards. “You did the dishes,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.” He unscrewed the cap and took another gulp. “Your dad called.”

“When?”

“While I was at class. He left a message.”

Pella doubted that Henry had gone to class—in fact, she realized, it was Saturday. Which meant tomorrow was Sunday, her day off. She swirled a spoon through the bubbling soup and headed for the living room to check the voice mail.

“I erased it,” Henry said. “Like you told me to.”

“Oh.” It was true she’d told Henry to do that, days ago—she wanted not to think about her dad for a little while, and she didn’t want Noelle and Courtney to hear any forlorn messages that might lead them to gossip about their school’s president—but it seemed presumptuous and maybe even cruel of Henry to have actually
done
it. “Okay.”

“He said he wanted to talk to you about something. He said he was going to the baseball game tonight, but he’d have his cell.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Henry’s fingers twisted the orange lid back and forth on its threads. Something had occurred to him. “What day is it?”

“Saturday.”

“Oh. Wow. Really?”

“Does that surprise you?”

He sank down at the table, twisted the orange lid. “Saturday night’s when they play the final. They made the final. They could go to nationals.”

There was little Pella could say to that. She set out two bowls from the wire dish rack and tried to pour the soup over the lip of the pot without spilling. There was probably a ladle in one of the drawers, but she didn’t know which. It was annoying to live in a place where nothing was yours, where every move you made felt like thievery. Noelle was already annoyed with Henry’s constant presence; kept making pointed jokes about splitting the rent four ways. Pella needed to talk to Henry about that, but it could wait till morning.

Even after the eggs Benedict, Pella was ravenous; she’d been eating more lately, a side effect of all the work and exercise. The soup was mulligatawny. It tasted delicious, and it would have been useful to try to parse the ingredients, but her first thought was that it would be too rich and spicy for Henry. Sure enough, he sipped a few mouthfuls and laid the spoon down beside his bowl. Something like chicken noodle would have been better, blander. Not that she’d had a choice: the soup of the day was the soup of the day. Something like Stockholm syndrome was going on here, or reverse Stockholm syndrome, depending on whom you considered the captive and whom the captor—she couldn’t even taste the soup for herself but imagined it on Henry’s tongue.

She finished her bowl. Then she finished Henry’s. They put the unwashed bowls in the sink and walked to the bedroom. Pella stood on one side of the floor-bound futon and stripped down to her underwear, while Henry did the same on the other side. Her arms were growing less flabby from swimming and scrubbing pots; it made the lines of her tattoo look sharper, better drawn. Someday soon she would make up with her father once and for all. They’d been fighting half her life, and yet the fights always felt like aberrations. No matter how bad things got between them, she could always reach forward through time and grasp the moment, however distant, when they’d be as close as they were when she was six or ten.

She lowered herself to the futon from one side, Henry from the other. They faced each other under the cool dry sheets, their heads on separate pillows. They were the previous tenant’s sheets and pillows, left in the hall closet: Pella had washed them twice instead of buying new ones. Part of the new frugality. She lay on her left side, facing Henry, her body pressing into the mattress with a pleasant weary weight. She knew that his stifled yawns meant something different from hers, were the signs of a caged, stymied energy turned inward and devouring itself, and she felt for him. They were like children or invalids, in bed at seven o’clock. Her hand slid onto his hip. He flinched and then relaxed.

Tonight was different, stranger than the first time, a kind of surrender to the tender meaninglessness of adulthood. She wasn’t going to let him kiss her, with that beard, and he didn’t try. Apart from the beard his body was like a Platonic ideal of a body, a smooth white marble statue, though already a little less muscular than she remembered. Like a statue, he didn’t smell like much of anything. They clung together loosely, eyelids open, watching each other. He came quietly, with just a hint of a whimper. People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.

Outside a springtime Saturday evening was just beginning—crickets chirped, speakers thumped, frat boys shouted from porch to porch. Pella reached down and felt for her book on the rug. She was reading Proust, something she’d never done before. For years she’d been planning to get her French in shape to read him in the original. But who knew when that would happen.

Henry pulled on his boxers beneath the covers, part of their weird routine of modesty, and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. As sleep closed over her Pella heard water running in the tub. He’d lie there until he heard Noelle or Courtney come in, which, tonight being Saturday, might be in six or seven hours or not at all.

65

A
ffenlight’s meeting with the trustees ran long, and the drive, even at dangerous speed, took more than two hours, so he didn’t arrive at Grand Chute Stadium until the top of the eighth inning. Beer, no matter how fervently one wished for it, was not being sold at the concession stand. He bought two hot dogs, applied mustard and relish, and found an available seat—not a swatch of corrugated bleacher but an actual flip-down seat—behind home plate. The UW–Chute Titans’ colors were navy and gold, with emphasis on the navy, so that when Affenlight looked straight at the field and squinted, the seas of people filling his peripheral vision could easily be mistaken for Westish fans.

The Harpooners were trailing by the very respectable score of 3 to 0. They had played admirably to reach this, the regional championship game, winning three of their first four games in the double-elimination tournament, far exceeding the expectations of everyone involved, especially their opponents, who’d expected to crush them—and yet, as Owen told Affenlight on the phone this morning, to dream of winning this game was probably folly. The University of Wisconsin–Chute was on another level, a state-funded university with an enrollment of fifteen thousand and an extraordinary investment of pride and money in their baseball program, as evidenced by their lush, cozy, pro-style ballpark, suitable for hosting a regional tournament. Not to mention, Owen added, that this would basically be a home game for them.

“Excuses, excuses,” said Affenlight, half joshing.

“Oh, we’ll come to play,” replied Owen. “Mike wouldn’t have it otherwise. The real problem is pitching. We’ve never played so many games in so few days. Remember the old poem
Spahn and Sain and pray for rain
? For us it’s
Starblind and Phlox and then get rocked.
”

“And lots of walks.”

“
And poor Coach Cox.
I don’t know how long we can keep it up. Adam has already pitched two complete games. His eye contains that crazed I-can-do-anything look, but I don’t know if he can lift his hand above his shoulder.”

For as many games as Affenlight had attended this season, he’d yet to see Owen actually
play.
Now, as he settled into his seat, that beautiful creature was settling into the left-handed batter’s box, a clear plastic face-mask attached to his batting helmet to protect his damaged cheek from further injury. Owen had complained vociferously about the contraption, which he considered unflattering and potentially performance-disrupting, but Coach Cox—good man—turned a deaf ear.

Whereas some hitters twitched and stomped while awaiting the pitch, chopping their bats into the strike zone, Owen exuded a listless calm. He might have been standing in the quad, pursuing a postlecture discussion, holding an umbrella against a light spring rain. The first pitch blazed past the inside corner, inches from his hip, and struck the catcher’s glove with a sound more powerfully percussive than any Affenlight had heard at Westish Field, even when Adam Starblind was pitching. Affenlight flinched in fear for Owen’s safety, leaving fingerprints in his hot-dog bun; Owen merely turned to watch the pitch go by, cocking his head in contemplative disagreement when the umpire called it a strike.

The second pitch came in just as fast but more toward the center of the plate. Owen, after waiting what seemed to be far too long, dropped his hands and swung. It was a baseball commonplace, dimly remembered from Affenlight’s childhood days as a halfhearted Braves fan, that left-handed batters had more graceful swings than righties, long effortless swings that swooped down through the strike zone and greeted shoe-top pitches sweetly. Affenlight didn’t see why this should be so, unless the right and left sides of the bodies possessed inherently different properties, something to do with the halves of the brain, but Owen’s languid, elliptical swing did nothing to deflate the hypothesis.

The ball looped over the third baseman’s head and landed squarely on the left-field line, kicking up a puff of chalk. Fair ball. The home crowd let out an anguished sigh that seemed all out of keeping with an empty-bases hit in a three-run game. As Owen loped safely into second base, they rose, almost in unison, and began to clap. Affenlight thought them very magnanimous to cheer so heartily for an opponent; somehow Owen inspired that kind of behavior in people.

Affenlight stood to clap as well, but it was the pitcher who, as the noise continued to mount, sheepishly tipped his cap. Affenlight, flummoxed, asked the woman beside him, who was wearing a gold-and-navy
CHUTE YOUR ENEMIES
sweatshirt, what happened. “That lucky twit,” she said, indicating Owen, “just broke up Trevor’s no-hitter.”

Out on the electronic scoreboard in center field, the 0 in the Westish hit column had changed to a 1. Affenlight reproached himself; a real fan would have noticed that immediately. He reproached himself again; he’d gotten a dab of mustard on his Harpooner tie. Not that he didn’t have three dozen more at home. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it a rather skillful play.”

The woman chuckled. “I’m pretty sure his eyes were closed.”

The next batter, Adam Starblind, drew a walk. “Your pitcher seems a bit rattled,” Affenlight noted.

“Trevor? Please. These rich preppy kids couldn’t hit him with a ten-foot pole.”

Affenlight wanted to point out that several of the Harpooners came from extremely modest or even straitened circumstances, and that the team didn’t have a baseball facility anywhere near this luxurious—how on earth did a public school afford it?—but it would be hard to make the case while wearing his best Italian suit, and anyway the game had reached a critical moment, two runners on, the tying run at the plate. The batter was the Harpooners’ replacement for Henry Skrimshander at shortstop—Affenlight prided himself on knowing the students’ names, but the freshpersons often eluded him. The Latino non-Henry, whatever his name, performed several rapid signs of the cross as he stepped into the batter’s box. He took one strike, then another. He gamely fouled off two tough pitches, then slapped a ground ball that glanced off the fingertips of the second baseman’s glove. Bases loaded.