The Art of Fielding: A Novel (15 page)

No one from the school commented on his absence until the following August, when football season rolled around. A gentle drizzle dampened the pavement as he left work and headed for his car—an expansive, rust-eaten Buick without a rear bumper, which he’d bought with his first few paychecks. Work covered him with sweat and metallic soot. He climbed into the Buick and dug under the seat for a beer. It was Thursday, just shy of the weekend. He pulled out a warm, linty can. As he cracked it, one of the assistant coaches of his high school team rapped on the passenger’s-side window. Schwartz leaned over and unlocked the door. The coach wedged himself into the seat and asked Schwartz what the hell he was doing. Didn’t he think he should quit acting like a goddamn spic and get his ass back in school?

Schwartz was looking at the pouch of the coach’s sweatshirt, which sagged with the sharp weight of what was obviously a gun. He sat up tall behind the steering wheel and eyed the coach steadily. “That place is a prison,” he said.

“And this isn’t?” The coach chuckled and jerked a thumb toward the long low foundry building. He was one of the varsity assistants; Schwartz, who’d captained the JV the year before, couldn’t even remember his name.

“This is just a shithole,” Schwartz said. “Not a prison.”

The coach shrugged. The gun-form rose and fell on his gut. “Have it your way,” he said. “But this shithole doesn’t have a football team.” He climbed out of the car and was gone. Schwartz finished his beer as his crappy wipers slashed through the beading rain.

The next day, he went to school and then to practice. He hadn’t been afraid of the gun. But the gun as a gesture impressed him. It seemed to indicate, if not love, at least the possibility of such a thing. The coach hadn’t left him alone; hadn’t assumed that he knew what he was doing. Instead he bothered to get in Schwartz’s face, to tell him exactly what he thought of him, in the most forceful way he knew how. Nobody else—relatives, teachers, friends—had ever done such a thing for Schwartz, before or since. He’d vowed to do it for other people.

But lately he’d been lying, even to Henry. Especially to Henry, since Henry kept asking. Zipped tightly into the inside pocket of Schwartz’s backpack were five torn envelopes he’d already received from law schools. Each contained a letter that began with a terrible phrase:
We regret to inform you… We cannot at this time… Unfortunately, our applicant pool…

Schwartz turned on the hallway light and held up the envelope, but it was made of quality paper, the fibers thickly woven, and he couldn’t see a thing. Maybe a quality envelope meant good news; maybe they sent thin translucent ones to the losers who didn’t get in. He rested it on his palm, gauged its weight, though he’d heard that the thick/thin envelope test was mostly bullshit. He tapped it against his palm to see if he could sense the shifting of a reply postcard—
I,
Mike Schwartz
, humbly accept your kind offer.
Impossible to tell.

This envelope contained his final hope. If you wanted to use a trite analogy, he was oh for five, and now, with two down in the ninth, he had one last chance to redeem himself. Yale had the most competitive admissions in the country, but the other schools he’d applied to were nearly as exclusive, and his thesis adviser was an honored alumna. Schwartz, at all other times in his life, did not believe in fate, but maybe fate was on his side. Maybe those five rejections were a ruse to ratchet up the suspense.

At any rate, it was absurd to stand here wondering. The decision had been made weeks ago by a bunch of deans; it could not be changed.
Open the envelope, you putz,
Schwartz thought.
See what’s inside, react, get back to work.

He slid a fingernail under a corner of the glue, but that was as far as he could force himself to go. He sat down against the wall, let the letter fall between his thighs. The cartilage in his knees was torn to shreds, the result of too many hours behind home plate, too many sets of squats with too much weight, the bar bowed over his shoulders like a comma. The muscles in his back clenched and pulsed in painful, unpredictable rhythms. He unclasped his backpack, fished for his bottle of Vicoprofen, tossed three in his mouth. He tried to avoid Vikes while thesis-writing, but tonight was a special occasion. The whirlpool was what he needed; a good soak would soothe him and give him strength. He stepped back onto the elevator and pressed B2, the letter clenched between his teeth.

There was a brand-new whirlpool on the second floor, for which Schwartz had raised the funds, but still he preferred this one, a battered iron contraption in the subbasement beside the locker room. It was pitch-black down there, but his feet led him straight to his locker. As he twisted his combination lock in its casing, right left right, he could sense a gentle depression, like the hollow of a girl’s neck, each time he reached the right number. He pulled a towel down from the top shelf—it smelled almost clean—and lowered himself to the splintered bench behind him. He laid the letter at his right hand. The cold-water pipes dripped; the hot-water pipes reeked of singed grime. He bent down slowly, like an old man, to remove his pants and boots and socks. The concrete floors, which sloped gently to grated drains, felt slick beneath his bare feet from dozens of coats of paint.

Locker rooms, in Schwartz’s experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after. (And halfway through, if the game was football.) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between, you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn’t carry your game-time emotions out into the world—you’d be put in an asylum if you did—so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven.

Schwartz wrapped the towel around his waist, found the letter—it radiated energy into the darkness—and wended his way around lockers and benches to the whirlpool room. He flipped a switch: a bare, cord-dangled bulb cast wobbling dusty light into the room. He preferred total darkness in the whirlpool, but he needed to be able to see his fate. He flipped another switch. After a beat the whirlpool gave a reluctant shudder and groan, and the water began to churn, kicking up an odor of stagnant chlorine.

He dropped his towel and climbed gingerly into the tub, positioning his lower back before the push of a jet. His chest hair waved to the surface like marine flora straining toward the light. What this school needs, he thought, is a full-time masseuse. He allowed himself a brief understanding of the masseuse: her merciless hands probed his neck muscles; her breath fluttered warmly in his ear; through the thin fabric of her blouse a nipple pressed, perhaps on purpose, against his shoulder blade. The fantasy went nowhere; his penis stayed dormant beneath the water, curled in on itself like a small brown snail.

When next he glanced at his watch, it read 3:09. He liked it to run forty-two minutes fast—a gently irrational habit, like wearing your watch into the whirlpool—which meant it was nearly 2:30. If he wanted some good working hours before dawn, he needed to head upstairs, throw in a dip, start writing. Heat and steam were loosening the envelope glue; all he needed to do was flick up the flap and peek inside. Instead he leaned out of the tub and turned on the old paint-splattered radio that rested on the cracked tile floor. He sank back into the water and listened to classic rock as the corners of the envelope softened and curled.

It’s no big deal, he thought. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always next year. A year means nothing in the long haul. You’ll go back to Chicago, work as a paralegal, volunteer at the circuit court. Sure, you studied for the LSAT for two full years, but you can always study more. You’ll scrape together the cash for a rich kids’ prep course and nail the goddamned thing to the wall. You’ll win in the end, because you’ll refuse to lose. You’re Mike Schwartz.

But that was precisely the problem: he was Mike Schwartz. Everyone expected him to succeed, no matter what the arena, and so failure, even temporary failure, had ceased to be an option. No one would understand, not even Henry. Especially Henry. The myth that lay at the base of their friendship—the myth of his own infallibility—would be shattered.

“Looks like April’s comin’ in like a lion,” the wee-hours DJ was saying. “Heavy snowfall in Ogfield and Yammersley counties right now. It should reach the Westish area within the hour, so plan on a messy commute. So much for global warming, hey?”

Schwartz checked his watch, subtracted forty-two: almost five o’clock. He hadn’t wasted so many good hours, at least while sober, in years. Seized by a sudden, overwhelming urge to talk to Henry, he hauled himself from the tub, felt his way through the dark locker room to his stack of folded clothes, and pulled his phone from the pocket of his jeans.

“G’mornin’.” Henry picked up on the second ring, sounding only a little groggy. It was part of their routine; Schwartz could call Henry at any time, or vice versa, and the other would answer quickly and casually, ready for whatever, never mentioning the oddness of the hour. Because what was sleep, what was time, what was darkness, compared to the work they had to do? Usually, of course, it was Schwartz who did the calling.

He settled back into the tub. “Skrimmer,” he said. “Feeling better?”

Henry stifled a yawn. “I guess so. Where are you?”

“At the VAC, soaking my back. There’s a snowstorm moving in. I thought you might like to get your stadium in before it hits.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Schwartz glanced down at the letter in his hand. When he dialed the phone, he’d been unsure why he wanted Henry on the line; now he realized he wanted to tell him the whole story. Then they could open the envelope together, share the agony or the ecstasy or whatever. Let the Skrimmer prop
him
up for once. “Listen,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to—”

“Hey!” Henry sounded suddenly wide awake. “Something weird happened when I got home last night.” He began to recount his conversation with Miranda Szabo.

“Third round?” Schwartz repeated. “She said third round?”

“That’s what she said.
Third round or higher.
Do you think it was a prank call? I kept imagining one of the softball players on the other end, with Rick and Starblind sitting in the background laughing.”

Schwartz held the letter up to eye level, turned it in his hand. He brought it to his nose and sniffed the loosening glue. He knew what Henry expected of him right now, but it took a good half minute to find words that sounded like words he might say. “It’s real, Skrimmer. This is what life’s going to be like from now on. This is what we’ve been working toward for the past four years.”

“Three years.”

“Right. Three years.” Humidity had detached the flap from the envelope. Schwartz lifted it gently, until he could see the handsome, promising ecru of the paper folded inside. “So the key,” he continued, “is to stick to the plan. You can’t control the draft. And if you can’t control it, it’s not worth your time. You can only control how hard you work today.”

“Right,” Henry said.

“If it happens this year,” he said, “great. If not, it’ll happen next year.” Schwartz let his eyelids fall shut before reaching into the envelope: the trifolded letter, protected from the room’s moisture, felt crisp and promising. Henry was saying something about Peter Gammons, the baseball analyst, but his voice sounded far away. The metal walls of the tub shuddered against Schwartz’s shoulders. He undid the folds of the letter.

“Hello?” Henry said. “Schwartzy?”

13

H
enry’s breath clouded faintly before his face. Beneath his windbreaker and sweatshirt and thermal top, over his T-shirt, he was wearing his weighted vest. No snow yet, but the clouds sagged low, like an awning about to collapse. He switched from a walk to a trot and passed from the Small Quad to the Large. Here the buildings were bigger, especially the tinted-glass library and the chapel, which loomed at the north end. The stripped trees shivered in the wind. A single light shone from an upper-floor window of the VAC: Schwartzy’s office.

The stadium, a cavernous stone horseshoe with Roman arches, was built a century ago, and its size indicated some strange ambition. Even for the homecoming game, it was never more than a quarter full. Four mornings a week, Henry came here and charged up the deep, wide concrete steps that served as bleachers, down the shallower ones that served as stairs.

Inside the stadium’s near-enclosure, the silence smelled different. He didn’t bother to stretch—just bounced on his toes a few times, rocked back and forth, and charged up through the dark. The stone bleachers were knee-high and deep, and each step required a leap. A leap of faith, since it was so dark he could barely see the next one. The cold air shocked his lungs. The first time he ever did this, a few months after his arrival at Westish, he slipped and chipped a tooth on Section 3, then sank to the ground after Section 9, wishing he could puke, while Schwartz whispered unflattering remarks in his ear. That was when Schwartz still ran stadiums, the big guy surprisingly nimble. Before his knees got too bad.