The Art of Fielding: A Novel (13 page)

He poured them each a whiskey, his with water, Pella’s without. “I suppose this is legal now,” he said as he handed her the glass.

“Takes half the fun out of it.” Pella arranged herself in a square leather chair, drew her knees up to her chest. “So how’s business?”

Affenlight shrugged. “Business is business,” he said. “I don’t know why they keep hiring English professors for these jobs. They should get guys from Goldman Sachs or something. If I have ten minutes a day to think about something besides money, I consider myself lucky.”

“How’s your health?”

He drummed on his sternum. “Like a bull,” he said.

“You’re taking your medicine?”

“I take my walk by the lake every day,” Affenlight said. “That’s better than medicine.”

Pella gave him a distressed maternal look.

“I take them,” he said. “I take them and take them. Though you know how I feel about pills.”

“Take them,” Pella said. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“Oh. Well…”
Seeing,
actually, was just the word for it. “Let’s just say there aren’t many enthralling women in this part of the world.”

“If there are any, I’m sure you’ll hunt them down.”

“Thanks,” Affenlight said dryly. “And you? How’s David?”

“David’s fine. Although he’ll be less so when he finds out I’m gone.”

“He doesn’t know you’re here?” This revelation trumped the lack of luggage; Affenlight resisted the urge to stand and pump his fist.

“He’s in Seattle. On business.”

“I see.”

Lately it seemed to Affenlight that the students were growing younger; maybe he was just getting old, or maybe adolescence was stretching out longer and longer, in proportion with the growing life span. Colleges had become high schools; grad schools, colleges. But Pella, as always, seemed intent on shooting ahead of her peers. She looked older than he remembered, of course—her cheeks less round, her features more pronounced—but she also looked older than twenty-three. She looked like she’d been through a lot.

“Are you tired?” he asked, remembering not to say
You look tired.

She shrugged. “I haven’t been sleeping much.”

“Well, the bed in the guest room is great.” Mistake: he should have said
your room.
Or would that have seemed too eager? Anyway, onward: “And the darkness out here is something to behold. Totally different from Boston. Or San Francisco.”

“Great.”

“You can stay as long as you like. Of course.”

“Thanks.” Pella finished her whiskey, peered into the bottom of her glass. “Can I ask one more favor?”

“Shoot.”

“I’d like to start taking classes.”

“You would?” Affenlight stroked his chin and considered this happy news. “That should work out fine,” he said, trying to keep his tone as neutral as possible; to betray too much enthusiasm might backfire. “The deadlines for the fall have passed, of course, but you can register for the summer session as a visitor, and if we sign you up for the next SAT date, I’m sure I could convince Admissions—”

“No no,” Pella said quietly. “Right away.”

“What’s that?”

“I… I was hoping I could start right away.”

“But, Pella, the summer
is
right away. It’s already April.”

Pella chuckled nervously. “I was thinking about tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Every nerve in Affenlight’s spine quivered, half with love of his daughter, half with indignation at her presumption. “But, Pella, we’re halfway through the semester. Surely you can’t expect to hop right in.”

“I could catch up.”

Affenlight set down his drink, drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “I don’t doubt that you could. You’re an excellent student when you choose to be. But it’s not simply a matter of catching up. It’s a matter of courtesy. As a professor, I can tell you I wouldn’t be pleased to be suddenly told—”

“Please,” Pella said. “I could just audit. I know it’s not ideal.”

Those first two years after Pella’s mother died: call them an adjustment period. He tried day care—expensive day care—but as soon as Affenlight grew accustomed to the fact that Pella was
his,
the sons and daughters of his fellow professors seemed like wan, elitist company. Better to throw her in with hoi polloi, to let her lift them up—but no, that would be even worse. He’d wanted to take her to another country, Italy, or Uganda, or
somewhere,
where it might be possible to raise her properly; he wanted to buy a tract of land in Idaho or Australia, with hills and streams and trees and rocks and birds and mammals, where Pella could roam and explore and he could trail behind, watching her grow; alternately he wanted to drop her at an orphanage and get back his life.

But something happened, to her and to him, when Pella learned to read. He would struggle out of bed after a late night’s work to find her already awake and dressed, in the breakfast nook of their townhouse on Shepard Street, reading from some or another novel—Judy Blume, Trixie Belden, her abridged
Moby-Dick—
or else some picture-laden science book culled from the stacks of Widener. She read with colored pencil in hand, copying the best sentences and sketching members of her favorite phyla onto sheets of construction paper. A few last Cheerios, floating in a bowl beside her elbow, impressed Affenlight as symbols of utter independence.

When interrupted by a polite paternal throat-clearing, Pella would look up from her book and wipe a coppery curl from her eyes, her expression oddly reminiscent of the one Affenlight’s dissertation adviser would assume when Affenlight appeared unannounced at his office door, and that Affenlight always thought of as
studius interruptus.
Still groggy and somewhat cowed by his daughter’s industry, he would tousle her hair, start the coffee, and head back to bed. If the school authorities wanted her that badly, he reasoned, they could come a-knocking.

The next half dozen years were halcyon ones for Affenlights
père et fille. The Sperm-Squeezers
went through several reprints. Pella became a perpetual truant from the Cambridge public schools, and a kind of Harvard celebrity. She wandered the Yard with her backpack, handing out sketches and poems to the students who stopped to chat. The members of each new freshman class, neurotically eager to compete with one another in any and all endeavors, fought mightily for Pella’s affection, and within the Freshman Union it became a mark of status to have her at your lunch table. She sat quietly through Affenlight’s packed lectures on the American 1840s, as well as his graduate seminar on Melville and Nietzsche, and she seemed to draw few distinctions between herself and the graduate students, except that the graduate students were forever eager to please Affenlight, whereas she did so without effort, and so could afford to think for herself.

When Affenlight took the job at Westish, he and Pella decided that she would not come with. Instead she enrolled at Tellman Rose, an unconscionably expensive boarding school in Vermont. Academically, this made sense; Pella was finishing eighth grade at the time—around age eleven she’d started attending Graham & Parks every day—and Tellman Rose was far superior to any high school in northern Wisconsin. But beneath that rationale lay the obvious, unspoken truth that the two of them, by that point, could barely coexist in Boston, and Affenlight shuddered to think what would happen in a foreign, isolated place like Westish. Most of Pella’s friends were older, and she claimed their freedoms for herself. She came home later and later at night, sometimes so late that Affenlight couldn’t stay awake to see what was on her breath.

One day during that eighth-grade spring, Pella mentioned that she was thinking about getting a tattoo.

“Of what?” Mistake: it didn’t matter.

“The Chinese character for nothingness. Right here.” She pointed to one of her coltish hip bones.

“No tattoos until you’re eighteen.”

“
You
have one.”

“I’ve been eighteen for a while,” Affenlight countered. “Besides, tattoo parlors are illegal in Massachusetts.” This wasn’t a great argument, depending as it did on a geographical contingency—what if they’d lived someplace else?—but at least it posed a logistical difficulty.

Two weeks later, he walked into the kitchen and found Pella standing before the sink, rather pointedly wearing a tank top in chilly March weather. “Hi,” she said.

On her left arm was a black-ink tattoo of a sperm whale rising from the water. Its long square head twisted back toward its tail, as if it were in the process of thrashing some helpless whaling boat. The surrounding skin was pink and splotchy. “Where did you get that?” he asked.

“Providence.”

“How did you get to Providence?” Affenlight was shocked. Not by the fact that she’d defied him—as soon as she’d said the word
tattoo
he’d known she would defy him—but by the tattoo itself. It was a perfect mirror image of his own. Even the dimensions were identical, uncannily so. They could have stood side by side, pressed their upper arms together, and the ink would have lined up perfectly.

Even now it was hard to parse what Pella had done. His tattoo, then thirty years old, now close to forty, had always been a secret, sacred, sentimental part of him. Was Pella defying him on the surface while allying herself with him more deeply, more permanently, underneath? She had always loved The Book, as they called it, and she probably loved her father too, somewhere in there. This was a bond the two of them now shared. Their hair, their eyes, their complexions, were nothing alike—Pella looked unreasonably like her mother—but this was proof, proof of something, a kinship even deeper than blood…

Unless she was, for lack of a better phrase, fucking with him. She might have been fucking with him, playing around with things that were terribly, even preposterously, important to him. Pointing out the very preposterousness of his feelings for her, for The Book, for everything.
Everything you’ve ever done is nothing, old man. Anyone could have done it, every bit. I’ve already done it, and I’m fourteen.

Affenlight had never been so angry. When she was young he’d never dreamed of using corporal punishment, but now he wanted to shake her, to shake every bit of insolence and cruelty, if that’s what it was—of course, it might have been something very different—out of her body and onto the floor.

Instead he walked into his study and softly closed the door.

In a sense, that was the end of their relationship. Affenlight went off to Westish, Pella to Tellman Rose. She canceled half of her scheduled visits, claiming school or swimming commitments. Her grades were good, but every few weeks the phone would ring, and it would be an administrator, wanting to discuss some “incident.”

And now here she was, asking to take classes at Westish, to be readmitted to his fatherly care. Affenlight opened his top desk drawer, pulled out his daybook. “What kind of classes did you have in mind?”

“History.” Pella straightened in her chair. She wanted to prove she was serious. “Psychology. Math.”

Affenlight’s eyebrows lifted. “No painting?”

“Dad, please. I gave that up forever ago.”

“No lit classes?”

Pella yawned and fidgeted with her zipper. She looked exhausted—purple circles beneath her eyes, a small tic pulsing at the corner of her mouth. “Maybe one.”

Affenlight made a few notations, clapped the book closed. Pella yawned again. “You should hit the sack,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

11

H
enry flipped the light switch, dropped his equipment on the rug, sank down on the edge of his unmade bed. He kicked off his shoes and almost instantly fell asleep. But the phone was ringing. He had to answer the phone. It might be about Owen.

“Skrimmer.”

“Schwartzy.” They’d last seen each other ten minutes ago, when Schwartz dropped him off by the loading dock of the dining hall.

“Have you eaten?”

“No. Not since lunch.”

Schwartz gave a paternal sigh of reproof. “Gotta eat, Skrimmer.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Doesn’t matter. Have a shake. What time are you running stadiums?”

“Six thirty.” Henry lay on his back, eyes shut. “Hey. I forgot to ask. Any news from schools?” Schwartz was applying to law schools, top-notch places like Harvard and Stanford and Yale. Tucked into Henry’s bag was a bottle of Ugly Duckling, the big guy’s favorite bourbon, to give him when the good news came. Henry hoped it would be soon—the bottle wasn’t all that heavy, but he’d been lugging it around for weeks.

“Mail only comes once a day, Skrimmer. I’ll keep you posted.”

“I heard Emily Neutzel got into Georgetown,” Henry offered. “So maybe soon.”

“I’ll keep you posted,” Schwartz repeated. “Have a shake. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Henry got up—last time, this—and pulled a pitcher of pilfered dining-hall milk out of the fridge, added two scoops of SuperBoost. Ever since he’d arrived at Westish he’d been trying, trying, trying to gain weight. He’d grown an inch and put on thirty pounds; he could do forty pull-ups and bench-press alongside the football players. But still the knock against him was his size. Teams wanted monsters in their middle infields, guys who could blast home runs; the days when you could thrive as a pure defensive genius, an Omar Vizquel or Aparicio Rodriguez, were over. He had to be a genius
and
a monster. He had to eat, and eat, and eat. He lifted weights so he could chug his SuperBoost, so he could lift more weights, so he could chug more SuperBoost, lift, chug, lift, chug, trying to gather as many molecules as possible under the name Henry Skrimshander. An economy like that wasn’t very efficient—it produced, to be honest, an awful lot of foul-smelling waste, which caused Owen to light matches and shake his head in dismay. But it was what he had to do.