The Art of Fielding: A Novel (55 page)

“Sure,” he said. Bubbles scudded down the backs of his hands. “Let’s talk.”

“Good.” She gestured toward the Formica table with its three matching chairs. “Sit down.”

Henry sat down. Pella took a mug from the cupboard and poured herself coffee. She sat down at the table, cupped her mug with two hands. Her face looked leaner than when Henry first met her, leaner but also healthier. He thought of asking her to marry him. The thought came idly, in a what-if way, the way that sometimes when his face came close to Owen’s he wondered what would happen if they kissed.

“Henry, what are you doing here? And don’t say the dishes.”

He looked at the sink, the sponge, the still-dripping faucet. “I like it here.”

“No, you don’t,” Pella said. “But that’s not the point. We talked about this, remember? We agreed that you can’t hang out here all day. You’re going to get us kicked out. And then where’ll we be?”

Henry nodded.

“Why are you nodding?” Pella said, her voice rising. “It wasn’t a yes-or-no question.”

He stopped nodding. Pella looked down at her coffee. “Sorry,” she said. “What I meant to say was, I talked to Chef Spirodocus today, and he said it would be great if you wanted to come back to work. You know how much he likes you. And you know how everybody quits this time of year. Nice weather. Finals.”

Henry looked at her.

“It wasn’t even my idea. Chef Spirodocus brought it up.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“I know you don’t want to bump into anyone. But you wouldn’t have to. We’d be on shift together. I’d take care of the salad bar and the juice machines and all the other dining room stuff. You could just stay in the back and do dishes. Get a little exercise. Make a little money.”

“I can’t,” Henry said. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” Pella said. “Okay. Then I have one other suggestion. Hear me out, okay?” She reached into her sweatshirt pocket and pulled out her little vial of sky-blue pills, removed the cap, and tapped one into her hand.

Henry shook his head.

“They work,” Pella said. “I should know.”

“I don’t want them to work.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It doesn’t, like, change your personality or anything. You’re still you. You’re
more
like you.” Christ, Pella thought, I should be in a commercial.

“It does something.”

It was getting dark in the kitchen. Pella got up, brought over the coffee pot, refilled both their cups, sat back down.

A pill was the opposite of what he wanted. A pill was an answer that somebody else had worked hard to come up with. He didn’t want that. A pill was small and potent. He wanted something huge and empty. He’d decided not to drink coffee anymore and just like that the smell of it wafting up from the mug nauseated him. He covered the mug’s opening with his hand, let the steam condense on his palm.

“Say something.” Pella rested her cheek on her hand, looked at him. “Talk to me.”

He’d never been able to talk to anyone, not really. Words were a problem,
the
problem. Words were tainted somehow—or no,
he
was tainted somehow, damaged, incomplete, because he didn’t know how to use words to say anything better than “Hi” or “I’m hungry” or “I’m not.”

Everything that had ever happened was trapped inside him. Every feeling he’d ever felt. Only on the field had he ever been able to express himself. Off the field there was no other way than with words, unless you were some kind of artist or musician or mime. Which he wasn’t. It wasn’t that he wanted to die. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t what not eating was about. It wasn’t about perfection either.

What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you
knew
no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words.

Pella was sipping her coffee, watching him, waiting. You couldn’t predict what she’d look like in three or thirteen or thirty-three years. Maybe she’d sprout a third eye, or the strange purply hue of her hair would turn paper white overnight. More likely she would just become more weirdly beautiful with each passing year, though it was impossible, at least for him, to predict what path that beauty would take. Which made her different from all the other girls at Westish, all the other girls he knew. Not that he loved Pella. He didn’t. But he could imagine how someone could love her, and that someone was Schwartzy. They were pretty much perfect for each other. If he, Henry, way back in the days before he arrived on campus, had been able to picture what the women of Westish would look like—twelve hundred girls of the sort Mike Schwartz would date—he would have pictured twelve hundred Pella Affenlights.

But if Pella and Schwartz made a perfect whole, like the yin and yang on Owen’s favorite pajamas, or the two halves of a baseball’s cover, two infinity-shaped pieces of leather stitched together with love’s red thread, then there was no room for Henry. If you were a boy and you loved a girl, you could make plans together. And if you were a boy and you loved a boy—he thought of Owen and Jason Gomes on the steps of Birk Hall, heads bowed together, sharing a joint; he had no comparable image of Owen and President Affenlight to call upon—then you could make plans together too. The world would be against you, would threaten you and call you names, but at least it would understand. It had words for what you were doing. But if you were Henry and you needed Mike you were simply screwed. There were no words for that, no ceremony that would guarantee your future. Every day was just that: a day, a blank, a nothing, in which you had to invent yourself and your friendship from scratch. The weight of everything you’d ever done was nothing. It could all vanish, just like that. Just like this.

“I told myself,” Pella said softly, “that if you wouldn’t come back to work, and you wouldn’t try the pills, and you wouldn’t agree to see someone, then I was going to kick you out.”

Henry nodded, stared at the back of his hand, the hand that was blocking the coffee smell.

“And you’re not going to do any of those things. Am I right?”

He moved his hand, looked at the trembling surface of the coffee. He thought,
I’m not going to drink coffee anymore.
It was too dark, too dirty. Too much like food. The thought of no more coffee and no more food made him momentarily happy. He wanted to follow that happiness where it led—wanted to and would. It was a journey he was embarking on. Had already embarked on: how many days since he’d eaten more than a spoonful of soup? And each day, each hour, each minute furthered the journey. He knew what would happen if he ate: his body would churn up the food, piss it and sweat it and shit it out, stack little segments of protein on his shoulders till he looked like the guy on the SuperBoost jar. He knew how to participate in that whole cycle. But not-eating was new. It was new and just for him: he couldn’t tell Pella about it. She wouldn’t understand.

“Am I right?” Pella repeated.

Henry nodded. “I can’t.”

“Okay.” He watched her gather her resolve. He felt bad that he was making her do this. “Okay,” she said. “Then I think you should probably go.”

Henry shoved back his chair and stood. His knees wobbled a little, not in an unpleasant way: he felt loose and light, like a parade balloon. When he got back to the room Owen wasn’t home.

69

P
ractice had ended an hour before, and now it was just the two of them together in the dimness of the third-floor gym, the smaller man crouched in the batting cage, unleashing swing after swing like a repeatable toy, the other standing behind the cage’s netting with his chin declined and his arms crossed over his chest. After a dozen line drives in a row, Izzy fouled one straight back. Schwartz reached out and snared it barehanded, strands of nylon netting between the ball and his hand.

“Keep your hands up,” he said.

“Aye aye,
Abuelo.
”

Schwartz didn’t mind the nickname, which all the freshpersons had adopted. It referred to his widow’s peak and his creaky knees, his crotchetiness, his penchant for dispensing pearls of wisdom like an old man on a porch, but there was a more interesting meaning in there too. For Izzy and the other young players, Henry was the father figure, the guy who’d harassed and cajoled and counseled them day by day, bucked them up and called them out, made them memorize passages of Aparicio—taught them, in his own imperturbable way, the lessons Schwartz had taught to Henry and Rick and Starblind. Henry was their father and Schwartz was
abuelo.
But now their father had abandoned them, as fathers often did, and the old man was back in charge.

“Keep your weight back,” he said. “You’re lunging.”

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

“Goddamnit, Izzy. Quit slapping at the ball like that. This isn’t a catfight.”

Ping.

Actually, the kid looked good. He wasn’t Henry, but he was going to be one hell of a college ballplayer. Better than Starblind, most likely. Better than Schwartz, for sure.

His batting stance was pure Skrimmer: the easy sink of the knees, the sense of prevailing silence, the dart of the hands to the ball. Good players tended to be good mimics; old footage of Aparicio, if you were as familiar as Schwartz with Henry’s movements and mannerisms, was downright eerie to watch. And now, in a similar way, it was eerie to watch Izzy. The lineage was clear.

Duane Jenkins, the school’s AD, was standing at the far end of the gym, hands in his khaki pockets. “Hey Mike,” he called. “You got a sec?”

Schwartz gave Izzy a fist bump through the nylon. “Strong work,” he said. “We’re going to need that this weekend.”

“I’m done,
Abuelo?
”

“You’re never done. Go get dinner.”

Schwartz followed Jenkins up to the AD’s office, tried to arrange himself in a tiny cloth-covered chair. If big men ran the world, as was often supposed, you’d think they could get the furniture right.

“Nationals.”
Jenkins shook his head in wonderment. “How’s it feel?”

“It’ll feel pretty good if we win.”

Jenkins smiled. “Win or lose, it’s been a heck of a year. Especially for you. Conference champs in football. A regional title in baseball. Academic all-conference. School record for home runs.”

Schwartz looked at his watch. He wasn’t in the mood for a Mike Schwartz retrospective.

“Westish sports are having an unprecedented amount of success across the board, Mike, and that’s mostly your doing. Coach Cox’s been here for thirteen years, Coach Foster for ten. Somehow I don’t think they suddenly turned into geniuses four years ago. And I can’t say I’m getting a heck of a lot smarter either. You’ve changed the culture of this entire program.”

“What’s your point, Duane?” Schwartz liked Jenkins, he’d always liked Jenkins, because even though Jenkins didn’t know what he was doing, he tended not to bullshit. But this sounded suspiciously like bullshit.

Jenkins smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I was trying to lead into this slowly, but I should know better by now, with you.

“I don’t know if you’ve locked in any plans for next year, but I’ve been authorized to offer you a job.”

Schwartz’s back spasmed, just above his ass. He squeezed the arms of the too-small chair and lifted himself a few inches off the cloth, grimacing.

“Assistant football coach, assistant baseball coach, and assistant athletic director in charge of recruiting and raising funds. Basically you’d be doing what you’ve been doing for the past four years. Except instead of paying for the privilege, you’d be getting paid.” Jenkins opened a folder on his desk, took out a sheet of paper covered in tiny type, and handed it to Schwartz. Circled in ink, halfway down the page, was a number.

Schwartz had spent enough time trying to finagle money for the football and baseball programs that he knew the AD’s budget down to the dollar. “You can’t afford this.”

Jenkins smiled, shrugged. “It’s authorized.”

It wasn’t graduate-of-Yale-Law money, it wasn’t first-round-draft-pick money, but it was okay. Surprisingly okay. A person could pay his rent, his Visa bill. He could even, before too long, put down a payment on a car that could hold a quart of oil, get the Buddha off his back about his carbon footprint.

“The funding’s locked in for three years minimum,” Jenkins was saying. “But if you wanted to leave sooner, to go back to school or to do whatever, you’d be free to do so. I’d say however many years we could keep you around, whether one or three or thirty, would be a blessing for us.”

Schwartz wondered where he’d gotten the money. Jenkins wasn’t the kind of mover-shaker who could drum up funds where there weren’t any. That was why he was the athletic director of a school that had always taken pride in the mediocrity of its athletics: he wasn’t a mover-shaker.