The Art of Fielding: A Novel (46 page)

His teacher said that St. Peter
was
a real person, first of all, and in any case being Jewish wasn’t something you could put on and take off like a sweater. This ended the discussion, but it didn’t satisfy Henry. He didn’t see how a religion, which was a freely chosen thing, could mark people so irreparably.

It wasn’t clear why he’d woken up thinking about that—the remnant of some bad dream, no doubt. If it meant anything, it seemed to mean that he was who he was and there was nowhere to go but back to Phumber Hall. The bus would be leaving for Coshwale soon. He could go to his room, take the phone off the hook, and sleep. Coach Cox would suspend him from the team, but that didn’t matter because Schwartzy was going to kill him, and that didn’t matter either because Henry was tired and he deserved it.

Now that it was nearly light he could see that during his swim he’d drifted a hundred yards south of the lighthouse. He bent down, scooped up a handful of greenish water, tasted it, spat it out. Then he trudged back to the lighthouse, collected his bag, and departed. The two miles to campus seemed like twenty. He was barefoot, having lost his plastic sandals in the lake. Every rock or root that forced him to lift his heels felt like a hardship. He hadn’t eaten since Thursday, not that he wanted to eat.

When he got home, he unplugged the blinking answering machine, poured himself a glass of water, and went to sleep.

He was awakened in full daylight by a frantic drumming on the door. He pulled the covers over his head—
This too shall pass—
but the drumming didn’t stop, and a female voice yelled his name as an angry question. He stumbled to the door in his boxer shorts, fumbled with the knob. There stood Pella Affenlight. “Henry,” she said. “You look terrible.”

You don’t look so good yourself,
Henry thought, and she did look bleary, like she’d been up all night, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to people.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Mike’s furious, you know. He’s been calling me every ten minutes, not to talk to me, of course, but hey… let’s see. What am I supposed to tell you? His keys are in his car and his car’s at the VAC. Pump the gas if the engine won’t turn over. What else? Oh yeah. Directions to wherever you’re supposed to be right now, on the front seat.”

Henry nodded. “Thanks.”

“Oh, many welcomes. What else would I do with my Sunday morning? Messenger to the stars.” She looked down at Henry’s feet, which were still pruned and past white. “Sorry about the game. That was rough luck.”

“Luck,” Henry repeated.

“I guess
luck
’s the wrong word. Anyway, I just… if you ever want to talk, I’m around.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re fairly monosyllabic, you know that?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s better.”

Henry expected her to leave, but instead she just stood there fooling with her sweatshirt strings, alternately looking down at his feet and past him into the room. He tried to come up with something polite and polysyllabic to say. “Would you like some tea?”

Pella shrugged. “You’re probably in a hurry. Directions on the seat and all that.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh. Well. In that case. Sure. I’ll have tea.”

Henry had never made tea before; that was Owen’s department. He tried to arrest the electric kettle at the proper gurgle, and he tried to add the right amount of English Breakfast to the porcelain pot, not that he knew what the right amount would be. Pella stood in the middle of the rug and looked around. “This place is pretty nice,” she said. “For a dorm room.”

“It’s mostly Owen’s stuff.”

“Did Owen paint this?” She pointed to the green-and-white painting that hung over Henry’s bed, the one Henry liked because it resembled a smeary baseball diamond.

“When I first moved in I asked Owen that same question, and he said, ‘Sort of, but I stole it from Rothko.’ I thought Rothko was like Shopko—that he’d really stolen it, from a store. I was amazed, because it’s so big. How would you steal it? Then I took Art 105.”

Pella laughed. Henry regretted the anecdote, which made him seem dumb. The effort required to speak was immense, like hauling stones up out of a well, but he’d decided to try his best. At least she seemed cheered up a little.

“You really like it here,” she said, “don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all of you guys—you, Mike, my dad. Maybe Owen too, though I don’t really know Owen. You all just seem to love it here. Like you never want to leave. Part of me suspects that Mike didn’t
want
to get into law school, that he sabotaged himself in some subconscious way, so that he has no reason to leave this place, the only place he ever felt happy. I mean, why’d he only apply to six schools? The six best schools in the country? It makes no sense.”

“He’s graduating either way,” Henry pointed out. “He can’t stay here.”

“He can’t stay but he can’t leave, not without a destination. And, well, maybe it’s the same for you. Maybe you’re just not ready.”

Henry looked at her.

“Sorry,” Pella said.

“Everybody else thinks I wanted to go pro too much. You think I didn’t want it at all.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think you should all go fuck yourselves.”

Pella grinned. “That’s the first step to recovery.” She walked over to the mantel, where a baseball, Owen’s lone bottle of scotch, and a slim, leather-bound navy book Henry didn’t recognize sat in close proximity. “There’s not even any
dust
in this place,” she said. She unsheathed the amber bottle from its cardboard cylinder. “May I?”

Henry nodded. Pella poured some into a tumbler, took a sip, rolled it in her mouth appraisingly. “Mm. Not bad.” She held it out toward Henry.

Henry took the glass and sipped the light-shot fluid, which perfectly matched the color of Schwartzy’s eyes. The taste overwhelmed his sleep-deprived senses; he coughed and spit it out on the rug.

“Hey, don’t waste that.” Pella arranged herself cross-legged on Owen’s bed. She pulled down the navy book—it looked like an old register—and opened it. After a moment she looked up at Henry, her eyes inscrutable. “My dad and Owen are sleeping together.”

“Your dad?” Henry said. “President Affenlight?”

Pella handed him the open book. “Top left.” It looked like a youthful shot of some now-famous poet or playwright, the kind of thing Owen might frame to fill one of the few empty spots on their walls. Then Henry noticed that the pair of maple trees in the midground looked familiar; and the building behind the tree, if you ignored the pale shade of paint on the front door, could easily be Phumber Hall. And then the facial features of the tall man walking the bicycle coalesced into something familiar too. A torn strip of purple Post-it marked the page.

“Your dad went to school here?”

“Class of seventy-one. So be cheery, my lads and all that jazz.”

Henry thought of the time he’d come upstairs carrying two glasses of milk, and President Affenlight was in their room.

“What’s that look?” Pella said. “You knew about this?”

“No… no.”

“But.”

“But… your dad’s been at a lot of our games this year.”

Pella nodded. “I told myself it was all in my head. But here’s this yearbook, right on cue. And look at you—you’re not even surprised. How much proof do I need?”

She took the register from Henry’s hands and flopped down on the bed, her head on Owen’s pillow. She looked at the photograph for a long time, saying nothing. Beneath the window the quad lay in the soundless trough of a late Sunday morning. No birds, no crickets, no rustle of breeze in the mitt-sized leaves of the maples. When Henry’s throw hit Owen in the face, his teammates, the fans, the umps, even the Milford players, fell totally silent, as if their silence might help Owen or undo his injuries. And then again yesterday, when he handed Starblind the ball and walked back to the dugout, there wasn’t a sound in the park, not even a
You suck, Henry!
from the Coshwale fans. His teammates couldn’t even look at him, pretended to be engrossed in the smashed paper cups and sunflower-seed shells on the dugout floor. Why not say something, something rude or obtuse or irrelevant? If the silence was for his benefit, it wasn’t helping. He wanted to scream and wail his way through these false silences, wanted to put an end to them forever. Yet here he was, trapped in another such silence, a tiny two-person silence, and he couldn’t even put an end to that.

One stray strand of Pella’s wine-colored hair stretched out across the pale-green pillow, like a flattened sine curve or a trail that ants might follow. He reached out and touched it with his fingers, a weird thing to do.

Pella’s whole body tensed, then relaxed.

“It’s a great photograph,” she said. “I’d like a copy for myself.”

Henry could see, beneath the loose waist of her jeans, a thin shiny sliver of snow-blue fabric. His fingers wavered a little as they left her hair and traced the soft line of her cheek. She tilted back her chin to see him from the tops of her eyes. “Nervous?”

“No.”

“Don’t be.” She grasped his wrist and guided his hand down the front of her body, toward the icy blue. “Tell me what it felt like, when you were walking off the field.”

56

A
trace of afternoon light still hung in the sky when Henry awoke. Cold air flooded the room from the wide-open window. His penis hurt, up near the root. He reached down under the blankets and found the lip of a condom digging into his skin. The rolling coastline of Pella’s leg and hip lay alongside his own, radiating warmth. He tried to unroll the condom—it had been in his desk drawer for a year, two years, more—but it stuck to him like a Band-Aid. Finally he shut his eyes and ripped it free.

Pella, he realized as he opened his eyes and flicked the spent condom down between his legs, was awake and watching him. And now she probably thought he was playing with himself. He met her eyes, and she smiled a rueful knowing fraction of a smile.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… now what happens?”

“Nothing happens. I go home. You stay here. Maybe you’ll do your roommate a favor and change his sheets.”

“Oh.”

“Were you expecting something else?” she said. “Some kind of sex-induced apocalypse?”

“No.” Henry thought about how far he’d gone out into the lake in his flak jacket, how long he’d stayed there, treading water with thirty pounds of lead and nylon strapped to his chest, listening to his own breathing. He’d swum out where nobody had ever been before, but it didn’t matter because
he’d
been there. “You’re not going to tell Mike, are you?”

“God, no. I’ll have to keep my distance for a while, though. You bruised the hell out of me.”

“Me?” Henry said, alarmed. “No I didn’t.”

She pushed aside the duvet and pointed to the front of her shoulder: a coppery, greening mark, almost literally a thumbprint. Henry’s stomach did a queasy flip.

“I’ve got a few more, I’m sure.” She twisted away, and Henry saw the corresponding fingerprints near her shoulder blade. “And this big one on my hip.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Henry.

“Don’t worry about it. Part of the social contract, right?”

Owen’s sheets felt silky and rich. Henry wasn’t sure whether he had the strength to stand. His swim, his night in the cold, had exhausted him like never before. Pella climbed over him, out of bed, and poured a finger of scotch into each of two tumblers. “When will they be back?” she asked.

To judge by the windowlight, it was nearing six o’clock. “Coshwale’s pretty far,” he said. “Probably two or three hours. More, even.” He let the scotch scorch his throat and warm his empty stomach.

“Well, you can’t be too careful these days.” Pella already had her jeans and flip-flops on. Now she knelt down and felt around beneath the foot of Owen’s bed. She lifted her T-shirt into view and shimmied inside. “Look how white this still is,” she said. “There’s not even any dust under the
beds.
”

“There might be some under mine,” Henry said. “But I think Owen cleans there too.”

“What a guy.” Pella half zipped her sweatshirt and began pacing around the room. “I don’t know what I’m so worked up about,” she said. “I mean, if my dad’s gay, and he’s happy, then it’s no big deal, right? Or even if he’s gay and unhappy, it’s still not that big a deal. A certain number of people are gay, just like a certain number of people have blue eyes. Or lupus. Don’t ask me why I just said lupus. I barely know what it is. And I know being gay’s not a disease. The point is, it’s all just probabilities. Numbers. How can I be upset about numbers?”

“You can’t,” Henry said.

“He’s a grown man who can do what he wants. And actually, it might be worse if Owen were a girl. If he were a girl he might turn my dad in for harassment, and it’d turn into a scandal and my dad would lose his job.
That
would be bad.” She poured herself another finger’s worth of scotch. “I guess Owen could turn him in too. But it seems less likely somehow. Maybe that’s sexist of me.