He won the next two, heart pounding, stomach heaving. He eked out the next one by a nose. Henry nine, Starblind eight, with one tie. Starblind looked bleach-pale, his footsteps wobbly and erratic as they headed toward the next starting line. Henry almost asked if he was okay, if maybe they shouldn’t quit early—but that wasn’t how the game worked. Starblind could take care of Starblind.
Henry lost the nineteenth race on purpose. Tie score. That way Starblind would still have a chance to win and would have to push himself to the last. They walked up to the line. Henry summoned every bit of strength he had left, pounded down the track with a spent-but-still-game, far-from-giving-up Starblind right alongside him. Empty yourself completely, Henry could hear Schwartz saying. Empty yourself.
He unleashed a war cry and accelerated, outran his breath. He left a dark gap between himself and Starblind. Starblind slowed a few yards short of the finish, coughing hard. He staggered forward, planted his hands on his thighs, spilled his stomach onto the track. Henry, light-headed, hands on hips, was trying to ward off nausea himself. He wandered away to give Starblind some privacy. Out over the lake a hard white spray kicked high off the breakers and caught some source of light. A moth banged against Henry’s arm, banged against his shoulder, finally lit on his wet chest. He cupped a hand over it. Furry wings fluttered against his palm. Starblind was still crouched down, making piteous puppyish noises. It felt good to make somebody else puke for a change.
32
Are you okay?”
“Sure.”
“No, really. You look stricken. Like you might be ill.”
“I’m fine,” Affenlight said. He and Owen were side by side on the love seat now, Owen’s left leg flipped over Affenlight’s right, their arms curled around each other’s shoulders.
“If you’re not okay just tell me.”
“Shhh.” Affenlight’s stomach did feel a little funny, but he wasn’t about to say so.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” Affenlight said. “Not at all.” But he wasn’t displeased when Owen withdrew his leg and arm to leave a space between them on the love seat. He even felt relieved. He didn’t want Owen to leave, but he didn’t really want him there either.
Owen eyed him warily, tied the drawstring on his martial artist’s pants. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“I’m fine,” Affenlight said. “Just give me a second.”
“I don’t want you to do things you don’t want to do. I don’t want to force you.”
“You didn’t. You aren’t.” Affenlight’s stomach grumbled nastily. He felt confused and inarticulate. He wished Owen would go, just for a little while, but he couldn’t stand to see him walk out the door.
“If you’re straight, you’re straight,” Owen said. “C’est la vie.”
Well, wasn’t he? It was true that Affenlight thought of himself as straight. Or, at least, he didn’t think of himself as gay. But he also knew he’d never be with a woman again. Or another man either. He was only so old, but it seemed he’d reached the final movement of his sexual life—from here on out, he’d be with Owen or no one. No one or Owen.
“Say something,” Owen said.
“I’m not sure what to say.” Affenlight noticed his right hand clutching his stomach in a way that indicated discomfort. He tucked the hand under his thigh. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Well, sure,” Owen said. “That’s obvious.”
Affenlight blanched. Not only was what he was doing strange and shameful and somehow wrong—wrong not in any conventional ethical sense but simply because he felt so strange and scraped and speechless now—not only all that, but he wasn’t any good at it either. “It was that bad?”
“It was fine.”
“Fine?”
“Better than fine. It was wonderful. Are you sure you’re okay?”
Affenlight nodded, looked at Owen beseechingly. He wanted Owen to comprehend everything he lacked the courage or clarity of mind to say outright right now, to read it in his eyes without being told, to comprehend it without getting mad, but that was too much to ask of anyone, even Owen. Or maybe Owen understood precisely how he felt, and that was the problem. Owen stood up, patted Affenlight’s shoulder consolingly, and walked out of the room.
After a few minutes Affenlight’s stomachache passed. He went to the window. Dusk was falling. A soft spring rain was filling the flower beds, a soft wind trembling the new-leafed trees. No lights came on in Phumber 405. Where had Owen gone if not to his room? To dinner, perhaps. Or the library. Or the arms of another, better, more appropriate lover. Affenlight missed him already. Why couldn’t he have acted more normal, hid his confusion until it passed? Why couldn’t he have explained himself to Owen? Didn’t love sometimes have to explain itself?
Affenlight resolved, there at the window in his darkening office, to take himself out of the running for Owen’s affections. Not that he was in the running, after today. Owen wouldn’t be back, and that was for the best. Owen would be happier with someone his own age, someone better at being gay. Affenlight would call Pella, take her to Maison Robert for dinner—that was the sort of thing he should be doing anyway. The two of them had spent so little time together. His stomachache had been a sign.
He went to his desk, dialed the phone upstairs to see if Pella was there, listened to the first two rings. The office door reopened. There stood Owen, his damaged face bathed in lamplight, his soft, one-sided smile more saintly than anything an old master ever did. Affenlight placed the phone back on the hook just as Pella said hello. “I thought you’d gone,” he said.
“Gone? Without my shoes?” Owen nodded toward his saddlebacks, which were right there beside the love seat, heels aligned. Stupid, foolish Affenlight! “I went to make some coffee.” He handed Affenlight a steaming mug. IF MOMMA AIN’T HAPPY, AIN’T NO ONE HAPPY, read its weathered pink lettering. “Should we have a cigarette?”
Affenlight smiled. This was the thought that had been eluding him, the little switch deep in his head that needed to be flipped to restore him from his vague fears to his actual physical life: after sex, after oral sex, with your saintly lover, your saintly twenty-one-year-old lover, your saintly twenty-one-year-old male lover, you should get to smoke a cigarette. Of course! Things were simpler than they seemed. Repeat it like a mantra, Guert: Things are simpler than they seem.
“Smoking in the parlor,” he said, nodding up at the hand-painted sign as he slapped his overcoat pockets for his cigarettes, “is expressly prohibited.”
The routine became entrenched: After they did whatever they did that day, Owen would go out into the hallway and return eight minutes later, always bearing the same two steaming mugs from the particleboard shelf above the coffeemaker: KISS ME, I’M IRISH for himself, IF MOMMA AIN’T HAPPY for Affenlight. They sipped their coffee and smoked a cigarette, chatted, read Chekhov together, passing the book back and forth once Owen’s headaches subsided. The kitschy mugs had been culled, over the years, from Mrs. McCallister’s home kitchen cupboards. It might have sounded silly, but Affenlight loved the way Owen always picked these same two mugs and even, presumably, went so far as to rinse them in the sink when they were dirty. Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.
Affenlight told Mrs. McCallister that he’d resumed a daily exercise regimen and so needed to keep the late-afternoon hours clear of appointments. He laid awake nights thinking of Owen, half listening for Pella to come home from Mike Schwartz’s house, always relieved when he heard the clap of her flip-flops on the stairs. He arose before dawn, walked his usual route along the lake he loved, went to the office to plow through the work he’d been neglecting. He rarely slept and he rarely tired. His heart in his chest felt dangerously full, swollen and tender, like a fruit so ripe it thr
eatens to split its skin. He wanted every day and every moment, the moments with Owen, the moments between Owen, to last and last and last. In his life he’d passed through long periods of gratefulness and good cheer, but he’d scarcely even imagined this level of thorough contentment with things as they were. His chronic restlessness had fled. He wanted nothing new. He wanted only to hang on to what he had. It was almost excruciating. Everything that floated through his life’s width—a sunny day or a sudden cloudburst, an e-mail from an old colleague, a conversation with Pella that didn’t turn into a fight—seemed loaded with such poignance that he found himself on the verge of country-music tears, and could cope with his own ridiculousness only by making fun of himself. Affenlight, you maudlin old coot. Affenlight, you fool.
33
On the ferry ride back from Wainwright, Schwartz sat by himself, listening to the battered old tape of carefully chosen Metallica and Public Enemy songs he listened to before every game. The game had ended, ended badly—he was listening not to pump himself up but to drown out his thoughts. The sun was down, and a cold steady wind flowed through the unsealed joints of the old ferry cabin. He’d popped three Vikes with a handful of Advil, bundled up as best he could, and was preparing to recede from consciousness.
Somehow, despite the blaring music and his closed eyes, he sensed a presence at his shoulder. He thought it would be Henry, but it turned out to be Coach Cox.
“You seen the Skrimmer?” Coach Cox asked.
“I think he’s out on deck.”
“On deck? It’s frickin’ freezing out there.” Coach Cox sat down, rubbed his hands together, blew into his cupped palms. Schwartz took off his headphones and shut the book he hadn’t been reading. The rest of the team was belowdecks by the snack bar, playing poker for packets of salt. “You talk to him?” Coach Cox asked.
“A little.”
“He’s hanging in there?”
Schwartz shrugged. “Seems like it.”
“His wing’s okay?”
“Wing’s fine.”
Coach Cox stroked his mustache, pondered the situation for a while. “Well, hell.”
Bottom of the ninth. Two outs, runner on second. Westish ahead 7 to 6. Loondorf threw a good heavy curve, and the batter rapped a ground ball right at Henry. All he had to do was throw it to first and the game was over. Instead he patted the ball into the palm of his glove once, twice, again, side-skipping toward first as if not-so-secretly wishing he could side-skip all the way there and hand the ball to Rick. He patted the glove a fourth time and, needing to hurry because the runner was nearing first, uncorked a way-too-high, way-too-hard throw that Rick barely bothered to leap for. It cleared the low fence behind first base and, because there weren’t any bleachers or fans to stop it, skidded across the street that abutted the park and rattled into the wheel well of somebody’s truck. The tying run scored. The next batter singled to end the game, the Harpooners’ first loss in weeks.
“He looked good before that last throw,” Coach Cox said. “I thought he had it turned around.”
“Me too.”
“Listen.” Coach Cox’s gruff voice sanded the gaps in the wind. “I heard you were low on cash.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me. Something I heard.”
“Did Henry say that?”
Coach Cox shrugged. “Let me loan you a few bucks,” he said. “Man’s gotta eat.”
Schwartz had a ten-meal-a-week pass for the dining hall. Lately he’d been eating ten meals a week, plus whatever he could sneak out in his backpack, which wasn’t much. The check-in ladies had never warmed to his charms—his size, an asset in other situations, roused their suspicion. Pella brought him ham-and-cheese sandwiches after her dishwashing shifts. She also offered to take him to dinner on her father’s credit card. Schwartz gobbled down the sandwiches but declined the dinners out. It was embarrassing, having your girlfriend provide for you. Mostly their dates consisted of holing up in Schwartz’s room, eating saltines and drinking Lipton tea while they read their books. Sometimes on dollar-pitcher night they went to Bartleby’s. Now that they’d started having sex he was spending a couple bucks a day on condoms. Condoms were expensive. Not that he was complaining.
“I don’t need any money,” he said.
“Bullshit.” Coach Cox began peeling hundreds off a fat wad held folded by a rubber band. He slipped some number of them against Schwartz’s palm.
“I can’t,” Schwartz said.
“The heck you can’t. Stick it in your pocket.”
Since long before Schwartz’s time, it had been rumored that Coach Cox had a couple million dollars socked away somewhere. “He fits the profile,” Tennant used to say. “Never wears anything but free WAD gear. Eats all his meals at McDonald’s. Drives a car with three hundred thousand miles on it. I’m telling you, the guy’s loaded.”
Schwartz had never been sure one way or the other. Coach Cox hardly ever talked about anything but baseball. A third baseman in high school, he was drafted by the Cubs and played a few years in the low minors, retired at twenty-two because, as he put it, “I didn’t have the stuff. Hell, I couldn’t even fake the stuff.” He moved to Milwaukee, became a line repairman for the phone company, got married, had a kid, became the Westish baseball coach, had another kid, got divorced, quit the phone company, and opened his own two-truck operation. Which, if you believed Harpooner lore, had netted him millions.
Their palms were pressed together, neither of them holding the bills that were in between. It was a risky standoff, given the wind. Schwartz wavered. With money, he could take Pella to dinner tomorrow night. He could make up for all the tea-and-cracker meals they’d had, not to mention the nights he’d canceled their tea-and-cracker plans to go hit ground balls to Henry under the lights of Westish Field. He could take her to Maison Robert, the overpriced French place he’d only ever been to with his history adviser. They could drink wine. He closed his hand, just a little.
Coach Cox stood up and exited the forecabin. The bills threatened to slide out of Schwartz’s grasp; he slipped them into the pocket of his windbreaker, riffling their edges with his fingers to get a sense of his newfound wealth. There were a lot: nine or ten. He closed his eyes and surrendered to the slow roll of the waves like liquid Vicodin.
It might’ve been a few seconds later, or an hour, but suddenly Henry stood in front of him, his pale-blue eyes filled with what could only be called anguish. His lower lip quivered and his soft chin squinched into a web of small rolling lines as he tried to keep from crying. “Skrimmer,” Schwartz said.
“Hey.” Henry’s voice cracked miserably; he coughed to clear his throat.
“You okay?”
Henry nodded. “Yeah.”
“You played well today.” Schwartz removed his headphones from around his neck and tucked them into his jacket pocket. “Arm looked strong, everything looked strong. We’re right where we need to be.”
“I cost us the game.”
“One lousy play,” Schwartz said. “We should have been up twelve by then.”
“But we weren’t.” Henry sat down beside Schwartz, bounced back up as if the aluminum scorched his ass. He clapped both hands to the top of his age-blackened Cardinals cap like a long-distance runner warding off a cramp. “What can I do?” he said. “What can I do?” His voice was quiet and disbelieving; awed, even, at the circumstances in which he found himself.
He bent his head back toward the ceiling and breathed out a short pained sigh or moan. He dropped his hands, worried them in quick circles, clapped them to the top of his head again. His movements were spastic and strange, the movements of a person whose thoughts have become toxic.
“It’s okay,” Schwartz said, “we’re okay,” but Henry’s feet had already carried him through the cabin’s rickety metal storm door, which banged behind him, and out onto the deck. Schwartz hauled himself to his feet to follow. By the time he got outside Henry was out of sight. Schwartz leaned heavily against t
he railing. The darkness was total, neither a star nor a sliver of moon alive in the sky. The Vicodin, though it did almost nothing to mute the pain in his shins and knees, coursed through his brain in a wonderfully gentle way. All he wanted was to be home, off his feet, curled like a child in bed with one hand on the soft little swell of Pella’s belly.
A cabin door opened, and the dark outline of a person appeared. The figure yawned loudly, muttered a few pleasant curses, and, using the still-open door as a shield against the wind, struck a match, revealing the meaty, splotchy, amiably dissolute face of Rick O’Shea, his lips cupped around a home-rolled cigarette. “Schwartzy?” he puffed, squinting into the darkness and letting the door bang shut behind him. “That you, pal?”
“It’s me.”
Rick ambled over and leaned against the railing, blew a pensive smoke-shape into the night. “Bitch-tit of a game.”
Schwartz nodded.
“You talk to Skrim?”
Before Schwartz could decide how to answer, a patter of footsteps became audible in the distance and another figure hove into view, this one with its silhouetted hands atop its head, silhouetted elbows spread like wings. The head nodded up and down, keeping time with unheard music. As it drew closer, Schwartz could hear short sharp breathing that bordered on hyperventilation.
“Skrimmer.” Schwartz laid a hand on the slick fabric of Henry’s warm-up jacket, but Henry kept moving without slowing down. “I’m just walking,” he said breathlessly, still nodding. “I’ll just walk.”
“You okay, Skrim?” Rick asked. “You got a cramp or something?”
“Just walking,” Henry said. “I’ll keep walking.”
He continued down the deck toward the stern and was absorbed into the darkness.
Rick took one last drag before flicking his cigarette butt over the rail. The orange flame bounced once, twice, against the hull and vanished. “Panic attack,” he said.
“What do we do?”