The Art of Fielding: A Novel (3 page)

Henry had been reading Aparicio on the overnight bus. Or at least he’d kept the book open on his lap as the dreary slabs of interstate rolled by. By this point in his life, reading Aparicio no longer really qualified as reading, because he had the book more or less memorized. He could flip to a chapter, any chapter, and the shapes of the short, numbered paragraphs were enough to trigger his memory. His lips murmured the words as his eyes, unfocused, scanned the page:

26.   
The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.

59.   
To field a ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.

147.
Throw with the legs.

Aparicio played shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals for eighteen seasons. He retired the year Henry turned ten. He was a first-ballot Hall of Famer and the greatest defensive shortstop who ever lived. As a ballplayer, Henry had modeled himself after his hero in every particular, from the gliding, two-handed way he fielded grounders, to the way he wore his cap pulled low to shield his eyes, to the three taps he gave his heart before stepping into the batter’s box. And of course the jersey number. Aparicio believed that the number 3 had deep significance.

  3.   
There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.

33.   
Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.

There were, admittedly, many sentences and statements in
The Art
that Henry did not yet understand. The opaque parts of
The Art,
though, had always been his favorites, even more than the detailed and extremely helpful descriptions of, say, how to keep a runner close to second base (
flirtation,
Aparicio called it) or what sort of cleats to wear on wet grass. The opaque parts, frustrating as they could be, gave Henry something to aspire to. Someday, he dreamed, he would be enough of a ballplayer to crack them open and suck out their hidden wisdom.

213.
Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does.

The bleepy, bloopy music lulled. Henry became aware of a murmurous sound that seemed to be coming from behind a closed door in the corner of the room. He’d thought it was a closet, but now he pressed his ear to it and heard a rush of running water. He knocked softly.

No response. He twisted the knob, and a sharp yelp rang out as the door struck something solid. Henry jerked the door shut. But that was a foolish thing to do—it wasn’t as if he could run away. He opened the door again, and again it cracked against something solid.

“Ow!” came a cry from inside. “Please stop!”

The room turned out to be a bathroom, and a person about Henry’s age was lying on the black-and-white checkerboard tile, clutching the top of his head. His ashen hair was cropped close, and between the fingers of his canary-yellow rubber gloves Henry could see a cut edged with blood. Water ran in the tub, and a toothbrush lay at his side, frothing with grainy, aqua-flecked cleanser. “Are you okay?” Henry asked.

“This grout is filthy.” The young man sat up, rubbed his head. “You’d think they would clean the grout.” His skin was the color of weak coffee. He put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and surveyed Henry from head to toe. “Who are you?”

“I’m Henry,” Henry said.

“Really?” The young man’s lunular eyebrows lifted. “Are you sure?”

Henry looked down at the palm of his right hand, as if that might be the place to find some irrefutable sign of Henryness. “Pretty sure.”

The young man rose to his feet and, after peeling off one of his bright-yellow gloves, pumped Henry’s hand warmly. “I was expecting someone larger,” he explained. “Because of the baseball factor. My name’s Owen Dunne. I’ll be your gay mulatto roommate.”

Henry nodded in a way he hoped was appropriate.

“I was supposed to have this room to myself.” Owen swept one hand before him, as if spanning a broad vista. “It was part of my scholarship package, as the winner of the Maria Westish Award. I’ve always dreamed of living alone. Haven’t you?”

Henry, actually, had always dreamed of living with someone who owned a copy of Aparicio’s book. “Do you play baseball?” he asked, turning Owen’s hardback
Art
in his hands.

“I’ve dabbled in the game,” Owen said, and added somewhat mysteriously, “But not like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Last week I received a call from President Affenlight. Are you familiar with his
Sperm-Squeezers
?”

Henry was not. Owen nodded sympathetically. “Not surprising,” he said. “It doesn’t have much academic traction these days, though it was a seminal—ha!—work in its field. It was a great inspiration to me when I was fourteen, fifteen years old. Anyway, President Affenlight phoned me at my mother’s house in San Jose and said that a student of considerable talents had been added to the freshperson class, and that though this was excellent news for the college as a whole, it posed a dilemma for the Housing office. Since I was the only member of the class with a single room, he wondered if I might be willing to forgo one of my scholarship’s privileges and take on a roommate.

“Affenlight’s a smooth talker,” Owen continued. “He spoke so highly of you, and of the more abstract virtues of roommatehood, that I almost forgot to negotiate. Frankly, I find the professionalization of collegiate sport to be a rather despicable phenomenon. But if the administration was willing to buy me that”—he pointed a yellow-gloved finger at the sleek computer that sat atop his desk—“and to throw in a handsome book allowance just to persuade me to live with you, then you must be quite a ballplayer. I’d be honored to throw the ball around sometime.”

“They’re giving you money to be my roommate?” Henry asked, so incredulous and confused that he barely registered Owen’s offer. What could Mike Schwartz have possibly said or done to produce a situation in which the president of Westish called people on the phone and spoke highly of
him?
“Would it be rude… I mean… do you mind if I ask…?”

Owen shrugged. “Probably nowhere near what they’re paying you. But enough to buy that rug out there, which is an expensive rug, so please do not put your shoes on it. And enough to keep me in high-quality marijuana for the year. Well, maybe for the semester. Till Halloween, at least.”

After that first encounter, Henry scarcely saw Owen. Most afternoons Owen would sweep into the room, remove certain notebooks from his satchel and replace them with certain other notebooks, or remove his handsome gray sweater and replace it with his handsome red sweater, and then sweep back out again with a word: “Rehearsal.” “Protest.” “Date.” Henry would nod and, for however many seconds Owen was in the room, devote himself deeply to whatever assignment lay open in front of him, so as not to seem entirely useless and adrift.

The date was with Jason Gomes, a senior who starred in all of the campus plays. Before long Owen’s notebooks and sweaters had migrated to Jason’s room. In the mornings, as Henry walked to class, he would see them reading together at the campus coffee shop, Café Oo, Jason’s hand laid atop Owen’s as they lingered over their espresso and their books, some of whose titles were French. At dinnertime, as Henry sat alone in a dim alcove of the dining hall, trying to look both inconspicuous and content, Owen and Jason would wander in, gather fruit and crackers to sustain them through rehearsals, and wander back out again. After midnight, as Henry drew the shades to go to sleep, he would see them sharing a joint on the opposite stoop, Owen’s head tipped sideways to rest on his lover’s shoulder. They didn’t need to bother with food or sleep, or so it seemed to Henry: they were too busy, too happy, for such trivial concerns. Owen had written a three-act play, “a kind of neo-Marxian
Macbeth
set in an open-plan office,” as he once described it, and Jason was playing the lead.

On a couple of weekends that fall, Jason drove home to Chicago or some suburb thereof. For Henry these weekends were a source of relief and joy. He had a friend, at least till Sunday night. Owen would spend the morning reading and drinking tea in his plaid pajamas, sometimes smoking a joint or staring idly at the face of his silent BlackBerry, until Henry, with careful nonchalance, asked whether he might like to go get brunch. Owen would look up over his round-rimmed glasses and sigh, as if Henry were an annoying child. But as soon as they got outside in the autumn air, Owen—usually still in his pajamas, with a sweater over the top—would begin to talk, answering questions Henry would never think to ask.

“It’s with my full permission that he goes,” he said, looking again at his phone that hadn’t made a peep. “My full permission and understanding. We’ve established parameters for what’s allowable behavior, and I’m quite certain that he abides by those parameters. We communicate openly, like adults. And I know that if I went along, it would change the entire nature of the experience.”

Henry, who understood who
he
was and not much else, nodded thoughtfully.

“Not that I even
want
to go along, mind you. I really don’t. I’ve said as much and I meant it. And I appreciate his honesty about what he wants at this stage of life. We’re both young, he says, and I can’t argue with that. But it bothers me nonetheless. For two reasons. Both of them indications of my retrograde sentimentality and general unfitness for modern life, I’m afraid. The first is that his family is there, his parents, his brother, his sister. He ate dinner with them last night. Can you imagine, four other humans who look and act anything like
that?
I want to meet them, I admit it. I want to meet them quite badly. Which is perhaps embarrassing given that it’s only been seven… six weeks since we met. God, six weeks. I’m so pathetic. But I know that if my mom lived within driving distance of here, I’d already have forced the two of them into a room together, just for the sake of my own stupid pleasure. You know?”

Henry nodded again, loaded his plate with pancakes.

“You shouldn’t eat so much flour,” Owen said, taking a single pancake for himself. “Even when I’m stoned I don’t eat much flour. The other reason, of course, is that I’m a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can’t help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There’s probably some sort of way in which that’s not a paradox. Maybe I believe in love. Maybe I just badly crave my mother’s approval. Hang on a sec.” Owen jogged back to the hot-food line, spatulaed up four more flapjacks, and slid them onto his plate. “Sorry to babble on like this, Henry. I think I’m immoderately stoned.”

After brunch they went to the union to play Ping-Pong. Owen, even immoderately stoned, proved to be a surprisingly good player. His swings were gentle, but he never missed the table, and Henry, who hated to lose at Ping-Pong, had to hustle and grunt and sweat to stay ahead. All the while Owen spoke steadily about love and Jason and the contradictions of monogamy, paying no discernible attention to the game but still carving out subtle drop shots that sent Henry sprawling across the table. Occasionally Henry would interject a comment, to show that he was listening and interested, but for him monogamy was less a contradiction than a glamorous, possibly unattainable goal, the flip side of his virginity, and he kept his comments vague. Inexperience hadn’t bothered him much in high school—he was only seventeen, after all—but here at Westish, where everyone was so much more sophisticated, not to mention older, it had already come to seem a rare affliction, one that, though not terribly hard to live with, would be both shameful to reveal and hard to remedy.

Still it felt beautiful to move, to play, and soon Henry was down to his T-shirt, leaking sweat. After each game he felt painfully sure that Owen would put down his paddle—he seemed gently bored, Owen did—but Owen, his high forehead dry, still wearing his sweater over his pjs, would merely murmur, “Well done, Henry,” and deliver another cottony serve. They played until it was time for dinner, and afterward they returned to the union to watch the World Series, Henry leaning close to the screen to study the shortstops’ moves, Owen lounging on the couch with an open book. Occasionally, roused by a gloomy thought, Owen would pull out his phone and gaze into its face, then tuck it away again.

Henry slept well that night, tired from four hours of Ping-Pong and somehow calmed by the soft snuffle of Owen’s breathing. On Sunday evening Owen’s phone finally buzzed, and he vanished again.

Even in Owen’s absence, Phumber 405 suggested his whole existence so palpably that Henry, as he sat alone and bewildered on his bed, was often struck by the eerie thought that Owen was present and he himself was not. Owen’s books filled the bookshelves, his bonsai trees and potted herbs lined the windowsills, and his sparse angular music played around the clock on his wireless stereo system. Henry could have changed the music, but he didn’t own any music of his own, so he let it play on. Owen’s expensive rug covered the floor, his abstract paintings the walls, his clothes and towels the closet shelves. There was one painting in particular that Henry liked, and he was glad that Owen had happened to hang it over his bed—it was a large rectangle, smeary and green, with thin white streaks that could easily have marked the foul lines of a baseball diamond. Owen’s pot smoke hung in the air, mingled with the bracing citrus-and-ginger smells of his organic cleaning products, though Henry couldn’t figure out when he smoked or cleaned, since he came home so rarely.