The Art of Fielding: A Novel (58 page)

A
ffenlight rapped on the door. No answer. He pulled the pilfered key from his pocket, slipped it into the lock.

A dense stench, like that of a fetid locker room, assailed him before he could cross the threshold. He retreated to the stairwell, sucked in a breath of clean air, and entered the room, which was shrouded in evening gloom. No Henry. He raised the drawn shades and threw open the windows. Scattered across Henry’s blond-wood desk were several cylindrical plastic tubs of the kind yogurt or margarine comes in. Dotlike fruit flies buzzed about the lidless ones. They looked to be full of different kinds of congealed soup. Affenlight shooed the flies, picked up two of the containers, and carried them toward the checkerboard-floored bathroom, intending to dump them down the toilet.

The bathroom lights were out, but there in the tub lay Henry, naked, submerged to his neck in water tinged a pale unpleasant yellow. His diaphragm rose and fell, trembling the water. He was asleep.

Affenlight glanced down at the soup in his hands. Chicken noodle on the left, with a thin scrim of fat on the surface, split pea on the right. Henry looked ghastly pale, except for his scruffy brown beard and matching pubic hair. His slack hands were shriveled like white-grape raisins, his internal liquids leached out into the larger body of the tub. His jaw clenched and unclenched. Crammed inside that undersize tub, his cheeks drawn, flaccid muscles submerged in the stagnant water, he seemed both too large and too small for himself, precisely the wrong size.

Affenlight stealthily exited the bathroom, set the soup on the desk, and lit a cigarette. The pain had vanished for a while, but now it returned, this time in his chest. He sat down on the arm of the rose-colored chair to smoke and wait it out. It was strong, but not especially worrisome—he’d had a similar sensation a few times lately after serious exertion, whether with Owen or on the treadmill upstairs, and he knew that it would pass. When it did he tried to decide what to do about Henry.

There seemed to be no clean clothes in Henry’s dresser, so he opened Owen’s and pulled out the most masculine-looking pair of briefs. He dug around further until he found a clean white T-shirt and a pair of drawstring pants. He took a towel from the closet shelf, wrapped the clothes in it, and, having removed his shoes so as to make less noise, slipped into the bathroom to set the bundle on the checkerboard floor beside the tub. Then he shut the bathroom door and knocked on it. “Henry?” he called. “Are you there?”

Sloshing noises came from behind the door.
“Minit,”
Henry groaned, sounding weakened and annoyed. Affenlight heard water draining from the tub, gurgling through the pipes and finishing with a slurping flourish. He stubbed out his cigarette and flicked it through the open window. A minute later Henry came through the bathroom door, dressed in Owen’s clothes. His eyes looked sullen and uncommunicative, as if trapped behind thick glass. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” replied Affenlight with false chipperness conjured from who knew where. “I hope I didn’t disturb your bath. I just wanted to let you know that—” How to phrase it? The Harpooners? The baseball team? You? We? Affenlight was even less a part of the
we
than Henry now, though Henry didn’t know that. “—we won today.”

“I know.” Henry’s voice was flat and dull, like hammered steel. “Owen called.”

“Oh. You spoke to Owen?”

“He left a message.”

“Ah.” He looked awful, emaciated, his cheeks concave and gray above his beard. “When did you last eat?” Affenlight asked.

Henry thought about it. “I don’t know.”

“What about the soup?”

He shrugged. “Pella leaves it.”

“But you don’t eat it.”

“No.”

The Westish payroll was packed with professional counselors, people schooled in the art of connecting with students who were bulimic, anorexic, alcoholic, depressed, distressed, drug-addicted, suicidal. Presumably the proper course would be to deliver Henry to such a counselor. There had to be a campus hotline, someone on call around the clock at whatever they called the infirmary nowadays. A Person To Talk To. An impartial person: Affenlight had spent maybe ten minutes total with Henry, but their lives were too entwined. Owen. Pella. Henry’s parents. All that knowing filled the room and threatened to make talking impossible.

There was that damned register, still sitting on the mantel above the fireplace. Affenlight picked up the baseball that was resting against it. The ball’s smooth white flesh was marred by a few scuff marks that gently abraded his fingertips. Amid his confused and wounded thoughts it struck him that a baseball was a beautifully designed thing—it seemed to demand to be thrown, made him want to give it a good strong toss through the open window and across the dove-gray quad. As he bandied it from palm to fingertips and back, he realized that he had spoken.

“You’re flying to South Carolina in the morning.”

Henry looked at him dully.

“I already bought your ticket,” Affenlight said.

Henry lay down on the unmade bed, laid his ear on the pillow. His body was curling and closing into itself, like an old arthritic hand or a daylily at nightfall. “Can’t,” he said. “I’ve got a final tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. Only freshpersons have finals.”

“Today,” Henry said wearily. “I had a final today.”

“You can take it later. When the rest of the team takes theirs.”

It was getting dark. Affenlight stood in his socks in the center of the rug, tossing the baseball from hand to hand. “You can’t stay here forever,” he added sternly. “The dorms have to be clear by next weekend.”

Henry’s face collapsed and he started to sob, so loudly that Affenlight had no choice but to sit down on the bed beside him and pat his shoulder and whisper what he hoped were calming words, words like
sssh
and
hey
and
it’s okay.
Henry slowed to a whimper and seemed on the verge of regaining his breath, but then the sobbing crescendoed again and he became almost hysterical, his head tipped back and his mouth agape. He started to hiccup. Snot bubbled out of his nose as he sucked hard at the air. A dark sheen of sweat arose on the back of his neck. “Sssshh,” Affenlight said softly, rubbing his back in clockwise circles between the shoulder blades. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He felt a coolness in the room, especially on the strip of skin where his pant cuffs had ridden up above his socks.

“Sorry,” Henry said, wiping his eyes, once the several waves of sobbing had passed.

“Hush now,” Affenlight said. “You just take it easy.”

Affenlight brought Henry a wad of toilet paper with which to blow his nose. On the windowsill sat a bunch of bananas, an outsize box of Rice Krispies, and the proper dishware. Affenlight opened the minifridge and found a half gallon of milk—Owen’s way, no doubt, of trying to provide for Henry in his absence. Affenlight poured a bowl of cereal, carved off banana slices with the spoon, added milk. He didn’t quite spoon-feed Henry, but he did sit beside him with a hand on Henry’s shoulder, murmuring his approval at each swallowed bite. With his free hand he lit a cigarette, lit another when it was done. Henry grimaced at the first spoonful, and as it reached his stomach he looked like he might vomit, but after a few bites things went more smoothly. He made it most of the way through the bowl and lay down drowsily.

“You have to leave early to make the flight,” Affenlight said. “I’ll set your alarm.”

Henry nodded.

“I’ll drive you to the airport. Meet me outside by the statue. Six o’clock sharp.”

Henry yawned and nodded again. It wasn’t clear whether he was really listening or whether Affenlight would have to come here tomorrow morning and drag him out of bed; either way was fine. Affenlight took the cereal bowl and the fly-clotted soup containers to the bathroom, dumped them down the sink, rinsed them, and set them on Owen’s desk to dry. On his way out he snapped off the light.

“President Affenlight?” Henry said.

Affenlight paused in the doorway. “Yes?”

“G’night.”

Affenlight smiled. “Don’t forget your uniform.”

73

A
s the door swung shut his foot kicked something, knocking it over—a squat container like the ones he’d just emptied. Luckily the seal on the lid was tight and it didn’t spill. As he picked it up he could feel the heat of the soup through the plastic. He carried it down the stairs with him, lit a cigarette as he stepped outside.

The evening was cool and dry. Affenlight sat down on the broad stone base of the Melville statue. The warmth of the soup container felt good between his hands; he peeled off the lid and let the steam waft up to his nose. Chowder, Boston clam. It smelled marvelous. He lifted the container and took a sip, parted his lips to let through a cube of potato, a chewy dollop of clam. The texture, the richness of the cream, the proportions of salt and pepper, which seemed so simple but were often skewed—Affenlight had eaten his share of chowder, and this was a nearly ideal specimen. The lake spread out before him, better than any ocean. Was this what they were serving in the dining hall these days? It couldn’t be. If it was, they should cut costs. If it was, he should have eaten there more often.

When the soup was gone he lit another cigarette. The pain had returned to his chest, and in addition he could feel it in his shoulder, or his collarbone—somewhere around there. Each drag on the Parliament seemed to exacerbate it. If it didn’t pass, if it came back again, he might have to think about calling the doctor.

By the time he entered his office his chest felt better. Contango greeted him warmly. Affenlight scratched the back of the husky’s sugar-furred neck, opened the office door and the outside door so Contango could wander out into the quad. Then he called the airline and converted his plane ticket to Henry’s name, called his car service and scheduled a trip to the airport for six o’clock. There was no need to drive Henry to the airport. Henry could decide whether he wanted to go to South Carolina, just as Mike Schwartz could decide whether he wanted to take the job in the AD’s office. These children weren’t his children; they weren’t children at all.

He loosened his tie, poured a sizable scotch, put Gounod’s
Faust
on the shiny executive stereo that was tucked into the bookshelves. He lit a Parliament and sat down at his computer to write Pella an e-mail.

Dear Pella,

I just wanted to tell you that I saw Henry today. He looks a little rough, but he’ll be fine.

He paused, unsure of what else to say. He wanted to write a truthful message, and yet regarding the biggest, most intractable matter of all he had no intention of telling the truth. If he told Pella the truth, she would leave this place and never forgive it. He wanted her to stay. For practical reasons, he told himself: She had been accepted. Her tuition would be nil, provided Gibbs kept his word. Given her disciplinary record at Tellman Rose, her expired SAT scores, her lack of a high school diploma, it would probably take two years to get her into any other decent school.

But there were selfish reasons too, and maybe those were the ones he really cared about. He needed her here. They’d erase him from the memory of this place as quickly and thoroughly as they could; she was the part of him that would be allowed to stay. That was the deal. Even if he was elsewhere—God knew where he would be—he needed her here. Was that insane? Probably it was, after what had happened today. But he couldn’t change what he wanted just because it was insane. He couldn’t hate this place just because it had cast him out. And he couldn’t have Pella or Owen hating it either. It was no worse than anyplace else, and it was theirs.

Contango wandered back inside, did a lap of the office, and settled down on the rug, head propped on his paws. Affenlight finished his scotch, lit another cigarette. He wasn’t sure what to say to Pella; maybe the safer course, for the moment, would be to say nothing. He’d get his story straight first. With Owen too. That would be even more difficult—how to give up Owen without Owen knowing why? Owen would almost certainly figure it out, there were clues enough to piece it together, but Affenlight couldn’t
let
Owen figure it out. He couldn’t let any of the weight or blame of his banishment settle on Owen’s shoulders. He couldn’t become burdensome or pitiable in Owen’s eyes. The thought of such a thing sent a pain through his chest that was worse than the actual pain, unless that
was
the actual pain and he was confusing the two. In any case he’d have to get his story straight before he talked to Pella. Early retirement, doctor’s orders, stress, a longing to travel, to write, to teach again—some bullshit like that. He closed out of his e-mail and shut down the computer, as he did every night.

When the screen went dark he felt so deeply and sweetly tired that even to walk upstairs seemed impossible. With effort he pushed back his massive chair and made his way over to the love seat. He sat down and laboriously unlaced his wing tips. Contango was asleep on the rug. Affenlight lay down, crossed his long legs at the ankles, and spread his jacket over his torso so as not to get cold. He’d taken to turning the building’s thermostat down, way down, at the end of the working day.