The Art of Fielding

  14

  Before Pella had lain down, she’d taken her swimsuit from her wicker bag and spread it on the David side of the bed, a reminder of what this day would contain. Now she undressed, put on the suit, dressed again. She hadn’t really slept; it was three thirty in the morning, San Francisco time. The suit was a little snug—okay, it was a lot snug—but it was what she had. She twisted quickly past the bureau mirror, timing the movement to a blink. If no one saw her, including herself, it didn’t matter what she looked like.

  She could hear footsteps in the kitchen, the protest of the espresso machine as it pressed a few last drops, but it was too early even to exchange pleasantries with her dad. She slipped down the stairs and onto the quad, where a heavy, soggy snow was beginning to collect on the grass. She put up the hood of her sweatshirt and, in a gesture that seemed downright exuberant, since it wasn’t strictly necessary, tied the strings into a bow.

  Pella hadn’t been in the water in forever, and yet, when she’d contemplated the possibility of coming to Westish to stay with her dad, the one agreeable thought that kept popping into her head was of swimming laps at dawn. She’d been a varsity swimmer, specializing in the butterfly, at Tellman Rose. During school vacations, while visiting her dad, she worked out at the VAC in the early mornings, when the only other people in the pool were old guys whose hairless legs poked out of their short piped trunks. Science professors, she assumed; the kind of lovably obdurate old men who bicycled everywhere, ate seven small meals a day, and were plotting to live to a hundred twenty. Her dad, though not a habitual swimmer, was a little like that too. At sixty, he seemed no more than halfway finished with this world.

  Pella shuffled across the parking lot with her head down, trying to keep the wind-angled snow out of her eyes. As she climbed the steps of the VAC, she stumbled over what turned out to be a leg—the bare hairy leg of an enormous, almost naked person. Sleep deprivation, apparently, had caused her to hallucinate a naked lumberjack. The lumberjack was sitting on the steps in a snow-white towel, staring sadly ahead as wet snow gathered in his hair, his beard, his chest hair. Even when Pella tripped over his leg and had to plant her hands on the concrete to keep from planting her face, he didn’t acknowledge her presence. She rolled over onto her butt, wound up sitting beside him on the steps.

  “Nice towel.”

  No response.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  The massive shoulders shrugged up and down. Pella had never seen, nor hallucinated, so much flesh at such close range.

  “Are you locked out?” she said. “Because I think they’re supposed to open at six. It must be just about—”

  “Door’s open.” The lumberjack heaved a heavy sigh. “You don’t look familiar,” he said wearily, still staring straight ahead. “Are you a freshperson?”

  “No. Although I guess, in a way, you could kind of say—I’m just visiting,” Pella concluded. “What about you?”

  “Mike Schwartz.” His right hand reached across his body for her to shake, though his head stayed turned toward the parking lot, the stone bowl of the football stadium, the darkness of the lake beyond.

  “Pella,” she said, leaving off her surname. She felt a pleasant anonymity, born of the swirling snow and Mike Schwartz’s apparent indifference to her presence, which she was afraid her father’s name might dispel.

  “Like the city,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “Sacked by the Romans in 168 BC.”

  “Somebody’s been doing his homework.”

  Like an apparition—everything looked like an apparition in this weather, in this hoary predawn light—an elderly man rode up on a bicycle, dismounted niftily, and docked the bike in a skeletal rack at the foot of the stairs. His wispy hair was dusted with snow. He unhooked a small canvas duffel from his handlebars and trotted up the VAC stairs, nodding as he passed. To judge by the old man’s affably neutral expression, you’d think Mike Schwartz sat on these steps in a towel every morning, greeting industrious gym-goers. Which was true, for all Pella knew. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked.

  “Cold is a state of mind.”

  “Well, my state of mind is freezing.” Pella stood and brushed the snow from her thighs. “It was nice to meet you, Mike.”

  That was when he finally turned his head and looked at her for the first time. Pella saw that his eyes were a lovely, light-bearing color, like the lucid amber in which prehistoric insects were preserved. They contained a look of injured confusion, as if she had promised to sit there all day and was suddenly reneging on the deal. She felt, for a moment, as if her soul were being evaluated in some unusually profound way. Then he glanced down at her breasts. Pella crossed her arms. She felt annoyed that he’d looked, ruining the moment; doubly annoyed that she was wearing her unflattering flattening suit beneath her hoodie.

  “I didn’t get in,” he said heavily.

  “Get in what?”

  He pointed between his shower-thonged feet, where an envelope was being buried by the snow. “Law school.”

  “That’s why you’re sitting here in a blizzard? Because you got rejected from law school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your loincloth’s kind of riding up, there.”

  “Sorry.” He adjusted the towel. “You know, you’re the only person I’ve told about this. It’s a confidence. You should pat me on the shoulder and say, There, there.”

  “Sorry.” She patted him on the shoulder. “There, there. So why would you want to go to law school anyway? Law school people are the dullest of the dull.”

  “I was thinking of becoming governor.”

  “Of Wisconsin?”

  “Illinois. I’m from Chicago.”

  “Aren’t you Jewish?”

  “There are currently three Jewish governors,” he said solemnly. “But yes.”

  His tone, as he’d announced this lofty ambition, didn’t seem ironic. In fact, it didn’t seem to admit the possibility of the existence of irony. “Well,” she said, “there’s always next year.”

  “Yeah.”

  Pella couldn’t stop shivering—she hadn’t even brought any socks from San Francisco—but for some reason she didn’t want to leave. The sky was lightening beneath the clouds, and the snow had buried the muddled browns of early spring. Mike, his elbows planted on his knees, gazed down glumly at his clasped hands.

  “So how do you like Westish?” she asked.

  “I love it,” he said. “It’s my home.”

  He was so ingenuous, so honest, so physically massive—somehow the combination was wildly endearing. She sat down again. She felt moved to make a counter-confession, to distract him from his sorrow. “My dad’s the school president,” she said.

  “Affy? He’s your dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I guess you heard what happened at our game yesterday.”

  Pella had not. Mike recounted the story. “Your dad even rode with Owen in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” he said. “He really helped calm Henry down.”

  Pella didn’t know who Owen and Henry were. “I guess that’s why my dad was so late to the airport last night.”

  “He didn’t tell you why? Hm. Maybe he likes to perform his Good Samaritan duties on the sly.”

  “I thought you were Jewish.”

  “So are the Samaritans. More or less.”

  The lumberjack governor was proving less stupid than Pella initially guessed. He was still staring out into the parking lot. “I can’t believe Affenlight’s your dad,” he mused. “That guy gives a hell of a speech.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s the reason I came to school here. Not that I had a lot of options. But I drove up here for prefrosh weekend, and he gave a speech I’ll never forget. About Emerson.”

  Pella nodded. She knew the Emerson riff by heart, but Mike clearly wanted to tell it, and if that would cheer him up she was willing to listen.

  “His first wife died young, of tuberculosis.
Emerson was shattered. Months later, he went to the cemetery, alone, and dug up her grave. Opened the coffin and looked inside, at what was left of this woman he loved. Can you imagine? It must have been terrible. Just a terrible thing to do. But the thing is, Emerson had to do it. He needed to see for himself. To understand death. To make death real. Your dad said that the need to see for yourself, even in the most difficult circumstances, was what educa—”

  “Ellen was nineteen,” Pella interrupted to say. She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights. “One of the cures the doctors prescribed for tuberculosis back then was ‘jolting.’ Which meant going for high-speed carriage rides on deeply rutted roads. Months, weeks before she died. Coughing up blood all the way.”

  “Wow,” Mike said. “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah, right?” Pella stood again, repeated the motion of brushing the snow from her thighs. “Well, I’d better go swim my lap.” She turned toward the door, more or less expecting Mike to follow, but he stayed put, staring out at the gathering snow. “Hey,” she called back. “Maybe you should put some pants on.”

  He nodded absently, absorbed in some thought she couldn’t decipher, about law school, or her father’s speeches, or his injured teammate. “I might do that.”

  15

  Pella wasn’t in the guest room when Affenlight, post-espresso, peeked in. Perhaps this should have seemed worrisome—he expected her to vanish for good at any moment—but mainly he felt relieved not to have to explain or lie about where he was going. Which was to the hospital.

  It was early, a thick snow was falling, and the hallways of St. Anne’s were quiet. Affenlight obtained the room number from a nurse and knocked softly on the jamb. No response. Tentatively, he pushed open the door. Owen seemed half asleep; his eyes lazily followed Affenlight into the room. Two narrow tubes snaked up his ashen arm.

  “Hi,” Affenlight said.

  Owen lifted his eyebrows in reply. He looked beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, in the way that a shattered dynastic vase might be beautiful, the ivory pieces unearthed and glued so the delicate plum filigree once again retraced its original circling paths after a lapse of centuries. Or was that an awful analogy? Owen did seem strangely ancient, after all, and possessed of an Asian delicacy, though not of Asian descent; the colors of plum and ivory could have come from his bruises and blood-sapped skin; and of course he’d been damaged now, and this evidence of his fragility could only increase his beauty…

  At any rate, he somehow managed to look quite beautiful, even with the left side of his face grotesquely swollen and distended. Affenlight hesitated. His impulse to move toward the bed and offer some kind of comforting touch, to bless and thank Owen for being okay, was counteracted by the fear that whatever gesture he made might seem exaggerated and artificial. Finally he walked past the bed, feeling as if he were committing some tiny but still unforgivable crime of caution, and sat down in the chair beside the window.

  Owen began to open his mouth, then grimaced and stopped. On the second try he carefully parted his lips and breathed the words through a slim gap between his teeth, without his usual elocutionary precision: “Guert. How did the meeting with the trustees go?”

  Affenlight smiled. “Pretty well,” he said. “I think we’re on track.”

  “My hero.” Owen winced with every word. He was looking toward Affenlight, but his eyes didn’t seem to focus properly.

  “Don’t talk if it’s painful,” Affenlight told him. “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “I like talking.” He paused with the obvious pain of talking. “What happened to me?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “The doctor said a ball hit me. But I don’t remember batting.”

  “You were in the dugout. Henry made a bad throw.”

  “Henry did? Really? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s always the ones you least suspect.” Owen let his eyes fall shut. “I don’t remember anything at all. Was I reading?”

  Affenlight nodded. “I warned you. It’s a dangerous pastime.”

  The side of Owen’s mouth farther from his injury lifted into something resembling a smile.

  “It’s good to see you,” Affenlight said.

  “I can’t imagine why. I’m sure I look abysmal.”

  “No.”

  “It’s good to see you too. Though I can’t, really. Are my glasses around?”

  Affenlight realized that this, more than the swelling and bruising, more than the slash of black stitches where the seams of the ball sliced his cheek, was what made Owen look so different, so vulnerable and lovely: for the first time in their acquaintance, he wasn’t wearing his glasses. “They didn’t make it into the ambulance,” he said. “Most likely they’re broken.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you have another pair?”

  Owen nodded. “Back in my room.”

  “I’ll bring them to you,” Affenlight offered.

  “No, no,” Owen said. “You’re busy. I’ll have Henry do it.”

  “It’s no trouble. I need to swing back this way anyway.” Affenlight fished for something else to say, before Owen could remark on the obvious falseness of this statement. St. Anne’s lay five empty miles from Westish. “I’ll get a key from Infrastructure. Is there anything else you need?”

  Owen thought about it. “I have a bit of pot. In my top dresser drawer.”

  Affenlight laughed. “I doubt I could get it past the guards.” He pulled himself up out of his chair—he could bear to do so now that he’d scheduled a return visit. On the way to the door a wave of courage swept over him, and he pressed his hand to Owen’s smooth forehead, above his bandages and bruises. Owen’s eyes stayed closed. His flesh felt surprisingly warm, and Affenlight’s first impulse was to call the nurse. Then he realized that it wasn’t the heat of a fever, just the average animal warmth of youth. Embarrassed, he removed his hand and thrust it in his jacket pocket. He didn’t want to know how his touch felt to Owen—cold and stale, no doubt. No wonder he’d finally fallen in love—now that he had so little warmth of his own left to give. He truly was a fool. He moved toward the door, feeling defeated.

  “You’ll bring my glasses?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s pretty boring here. And I’m having trouble focusing. A thought slides into my head, it slides right out again. Perhaps when you come you could read me something.”

  And just that easily, Affenlight was renewed.

  16

  The plows had been working since before sunrise, and the midday sun was warm. The roads were nearly clear. Henry had brought everything he could think of that Owen might need: schoolbooks, spare glasses, red sweater.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said in the car. “I was freaked out about what would happen next year, after you left. But now I might not be here either.” He hesitated, glanced at Schwartz, and brought out the thought that had been working on his mind all day. “I was thinking, if I did wind up getting a good signing bonus, like Ms. Szabo said, we could use it to pay your law school tuition. So you wouldn’t have to go any further into debt.”

  Schwartz white-knuckled the steering wheel. “Skrimmer…”

  “It wouldn’t be a loan,” Henry said. “More like an investment. After law school, you’ll be making serious money. So we could just—”

  “Henry. How much money do you have in the bank?”

  Henry tried to remember what he’d spent on his last SuperBoost run. “I don’t know. Four hundred?”

  “Then that’s what you’ve got.” Schwartz swung the huge hood of the Buick around a snowbank and into the hospital parking lot. “No matter what some hotshot agent says.”

  “Sure,” Henry said. “I was just thinking—”

  “Don’t think.” Schwartz, bleary and beleaguered, cut the engine. “If anybody else calls you, agents, scouts, whoever, tell them to call Coach Cox. Un
derstood?”

  “Sure,” Henry said.

  When they found the room, Owen was asleep. “He’s on a lot of meds,” the nurse told them. “Even if he was awake he wouldn’t be making much sense.” The left side of his face, from the undercurve of his eye socket down, was hugely swollen. Henry stared at the blooming bruises, the ugly muddy mix of purples and browns and greens. He’d done that to his friend. Either the swelling or the broken cheekbone was interfering with Owen’s breathing, and he sucked in air with a gasping honk. Henry left the stack of belongings beside the bed.

  When they arrived at practice, Coach Cox was yelling at Starblind.

  “Starblind!”

  “Yes, Coach?”

  “Did you get a haircut?”

  “Uh, no, Coach.”

  “Don’t pull that crap with me. I saw you at eight o’clock last night. You were shaggy as a dog.”

  Coach Cox had only two hard-and-fast rules: (1) show up on time, and (2) don’t get your hair cut the day before a game. Haircuts threw off a ballplayer’s equilibrium, because they subtly altered the weight and aerodynamicity of his head. It took, according to Coach Cox, two days to adjust. This posed a problem for Starblind, whose extreme sensitivity to the smallest fluctuations in his own attractiveness led to frequent emergency visits to his stylist.

  “You want to ride the bench tomorrow?”