The Art of Fielding: A Novel (45 page)
“Sorry,” Pella said, sounding more sullen than sorry. “After dinner we bumped into Adam, and I asked where the hotel was, and he said he was headed that way, he’d walk Sophie back. And why wouldn’t I believe him? And then I came to your place to see you.” She paused and, when Schwartz didn’t fill the void with yelling, ventured a change of subject. “Still no word from Henry?”
“Nope.”
“Now what?”
“I don’t know,” Schwartz said. “First I have to put Sophie somewhere. I can’t take her back to her parents like this.”
“Do they know Henry’s still missing?”
“I’m going to call them now. I’m going to tell them both their children are sleeping sweetly.”
“Okay.” Pella sighed that wounded-kitten sigh into the phone again. “Mike, I know it’s not a good time, but I really need to talk to you. It’s about my dad.”
“I’ll be there,” Schwartz said. “Just hang tight.”
By the time he phoned the Skrimshanders and climbed behind the wheel of the Buick, Sophie was curled up asleep on the queen-size backseat, site of most of Schwartz’s high school conquests. Her knees were drawn close to her chest, sunlight-white calves flashing out beneath the hem of her rumpled dress. If she wasn’t sucking her thumb, she at least had her thumbnail hooked thoughtfully between her teeth. Drunk and asleep, her face drained of its teenage-girl defiance and willful sophistication, she looked even more like her brother. Schwartz fired the engine as softly as possible, tried to get into gear without creating the usual impression of the undercarriage dropping out, and nosed away from the curb.
“I’m worried,” he said.
Owen nodded. They idled down Groome Street, Schwartz’s foot never touching the gas, silently scanning the bushes like a couple of cops who’ve been partners forever.
“We’ll take Sophie back to your room, if that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
Schwartz parked in the service bay of the dining hall. Sophie showed no signs of waking as he scooped her weightless bird body into his arms and carried her across the Small Quad, the heels of her laced-up sandals banging gently against his thigh. The front door of Phumber Hall was propped open by a crate of art-history books, causing the swipe-card box to twinkle an inviting green. The hip-hop anthem of the moment blared from a ground-floor window, accompanied by a chorus of blurred and delirious voices. The song faded out and immediately began again, the bass line kicking in.
“Beer?” Owen offered.
“I don’t see why not.”
Owen ducked into the party and returned with two bright-blue plastic cups topped by foam. “Naked,” he reported.
“Girls too?”
“Everyone.”
Owen carried the beer upstairs. Schwartz followed with Sophie. The unspoken hope was that Henry would be there, lying in bed reading back issues of
Sports Illustrated.
Whereupon Schwartz would lace into him like never before—he’d been scripting the tongue-lashing in his mind all night, phrase by delectable phrase—and everything would be fine. But the room was dark and empty. All the anger leaked from Schwartz’s body, taking what remained of energy and hope along with it. He lay Sophie down on Henry’s unmade bed, covered her with a quilt, and folded back its bottom edge so that he could unlace her complicated sandals and set them by the door. Owen handed him a warm, overly frothy beer, which he accepted wordlessly and drank in one long slow gulp. The ten blocks back to Grant Street, where Pella was, might as well have been a thousand miles. He lay flat on his back on the blood-colored rug and dreamed about God-knows-what.
A
fter the game ended, Henry briefly joined his teammates’ celebration at home plate. Meanwhile he kept one eye on the first-base bleachers, where Aparicio was signing an autograph for Sal’s little brother. He, Aparicio, who might soon become the president of Venezuela, was wearing a coat and tie, had come all the way from St. Louis, had put on a coat and tie to watch Henry humiliate himself once and for all. He looked just as Henry had imagined, as trim and fit as during his playing days, his neck long and regal, his skin almond brown, his shoulders no wider than Henry’s own. Dwight Rogner stood nearby, speaking into his cell phone, and Henry didn’t need lip-reading skills to know what he was saying: “Forget the Skrimshander kid.”
Henry grabbed his bag and slipped into the crowd, ostensibly to shake the hand of President Affenlight, who was standing there alone, and who gave him the sort of commiserative look he’d need to spend the rest of his life avoiding. When President Affenlight looked away, Henry scuttled around the backstop and safely traversed the no-man’s-land between Westish Field and the football stadium. There, in the shadow of an arch, amid the cool, sweet smells of moss and rot, he sat and cried.
Afterward he felt much worse. What at the diamond had been a sharp adrenal anxiety, fueled by purpose—
Get me out of here, away from everyone—
was settling into a flat, sullen expanse of awfulness. A moment would come, and then another, and then another. These moments would be his life.
He opened the crate where he stored the weighted vest he wore to run stadiums, put it on over his Cards shirt, buckled the straps over his sternum. The game had ended near dusk, and now it was dark. He cinched the straps tighter until the vest dug into his chest.
He left the stadium and walked eastward across the practice fields toward the lake. The wind came straight off the water, stiff and chill. He scrambled down the little scree-clotted slope to the beach, clutching at scraggly bushes for balance, and started north along the water’s edge.
Where the beach ended a path began, cutting through thatchy rain-flattened grasses humming with insects. After two miles the path ended in a kind of meadow, mowed by the county during the summer months, out of which the lighthouse rose. On his usual weight-vested jog, Henry circled the lighthouse, slapping the repoussé letters of the plaque the Historical Society had fixed into the stucco, before returning the way he came. Farther north lay only a high razor-wire fence that ran from the water’s edge all the way back to the highway, however far west. On the other side of the fence was a privately owned forest. On the other side of the forest lay the next town north. Henry didn’t know the town’s name; he’d never been there.
The lighthouse was a tall white tapering cylinder, no longer in use but kept in good repair. Paintings and photographs of it hung in every shop and restaurant in Westish. The wide-planked doors sat back in an alcove. He pulled at the arrow-shaped iron handles, but the place was locked tight. He dropped his bag in the alcove and waded out into the chilly water.
Just as the slow rolling waves touched his chin he reached a sandbar that exposed him to his hips again. The wind bit through his wet shirt and flak jacket. His teeth chattered loudly. The water, though freezing, felt more comforting than the wind. He sank to dunk his head. His Cards cap stayed on the surface when he went under, as if refusing to participate in whatever asinine shit he was getting into; the waves carried it beyond arm’s reach, into the darkness. He leveled his body to the water and began to swim.
The first dozen strokes felt hard, almost impossible, because of the drag of the vest. But once he’d reached a good speed the vest didn’t hamper him much. He swam past the first buoy, past the second buoy. The campus lights receded behind him. He kept swimming.
When he’d gone what felt like halfway across the lake he slowed to a paddle, his chin atop the dark water, atop of which was dark air. All he could see were stars. There were no gulls out here and nothing to listen to. It seemed possible no one had ever swum to this spot before, so far from shore. Or maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago people did it all the time. Maybe that was their sport. The water seemed to groan beneath the weight of itself, the weight of other water.
He turned around to face the campus, those few little lights pricking the distance. He let his bladder go, peed into the water. It calmed his whole body, if only for a moment.
All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, woke up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts—whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.
He knew it sounded crazy when you put it like that. To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he’d ever craved since he’d been born. Maybe it wasn’t even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen. Could have made that happen. It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the premise on which you’d based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put it in words? It meant you were crazy.
When the season ended, his teammates, even Schwartzy, gorged themselves on whatever was handy—cigarettes, beer, coffee, sleep, porn, video games, girls, dessert, books. It didn’t matter what they gorged on as long as they were gorging. Gorging didn’t make them feel good, you’d see them wandering around, dazed and bleary, but they were free to gorge and that was what mattered.
Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense. You ate till you were full and then you drank SuperBoost, because every ounce of muscle meant something. You stoked the furnace, fed the machine. No matter how hard you worked, you could never feel harried or hurried, because you were doing what you wanted and so one moment simply produced the next. He’d never understood how his teammates could show up late for practice, or close enough to late that they had to hurry to change clothes. In three years at Westish he’d never changed clothes in a hurry.
He treaded water for a long long while, feeling an endless spontaneous power unspooling from his limbs. It seemed he could do it forever. Finally he turned toward the shore and let his limbs swim him in, aided by the waves that lapped at his back. When he reached the shore he knelt on all fours and slurped at the funky algal water like an animal. He couldn’t see the lighthouse, and he wasn’t sure whether it lay to the north or the south. His body gave out all at once. His teeth were chattering, really clacking away. His shoulders convulsed, his lungs heaved. He had his whole life ahead of him; it wasn’t a comforting thought. He peeled off his wet clothes, nestled into the sand as deeply as he could, and fell asleep.
H
e awoke with the birds before the sun could breast the water. The low clouds made the dawn all the more beautiful, catching and spreading the soft colors across the sky. He watched it dumbly, his body shaking. Sometime in elementary school his class had read Anne Frank’s diary, and Henry, terribly alarmed, asked why Anne hadn’t simply pretended not to be Jewish. The way Peter escaped from the Romans by pretending not to be Christian. Peter got in trouble for that in the Bible, but if you put it in the context of poor Anne, who was not only real but also a kid, didn’t it make sense? What difference did it make what religion you were if you were dead? So said a very alarmed Henry, in what remained the most passionate and probably the longest speech of his academic career.