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.
55
He 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.
His teacher said that St. Peter was a real person, first of all, and in any case being Jewish wasn’t something you could put on and take off like a sweater. This ended the discussion, but it didn’t satisfy Henry. He didn’t see how a religion, which was a freely chosen thing, could mark people so irreparably.
It wasn’t clear why he’d woken up thinking about that—the remnant of some bad dream, no doubt. If it meant anything, it seemed to mean that he was who he was and there was nowhere to go but back to Phumber Hall. The bus would be leaving for Coshwale soon. He could go to his room, take the phone off the hook, and sleep. Coach Cox would suspend him from the team, but that didn’t matter because Schwartzy was going to kill him, and that didn’t matter either because Henry was tired and he deserved it.
Now that it was nearly light he could see that during his swim he’d drifted a hundred yards south of the lighthouse. He bent down, scooped up a handful of greenish water, tasted it, spat it out. Then he trudged back to the lighthouse, collected his bag, and departed. The two miles to campus seemed like twenty. He was barefoot, having lost his plastic sandals in the lake. Every rock or root that forced him to lift his heels felt like a hardship. He hadn’t eaten since Thursday, not that he wanted to eat.
When he got home, he unplugged the blinking answering machine, poured himself a glass of water, and went to sleep.
He was awakened in full daylight by a frantic drumming on the door. He pulled the covers over his head—This too shall pass—but the drumming didn’t stop, and a female voice yelled his name as an angry question. He stumbled to the door in his boxer shorts, fumbled with the knob. There stood Pella Affenlight. “Henry,” she said. “You look terrible.”
You don’t look so good yourself, Henry thought, and she did look bleary, like she’d been up all night, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to people.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Mike’s furious, you know. He’s been calling me every ten minutes, not to talk to me, of course, but hey… let’s see. What am I supposed to tell you? His keys are in his car and his car’s at the VAC. Pump the gas if the engine won’t turn over. What else? Oh yeah. Directions to wherever you’re supposed to be right now, on the front seat.”
Henry nodded. “Thanks.”
“Oh, many welcomes. What else would I do with my Sunday morning? Messenger to the stars.” She looked down at Henry’s feet, which were still pruned and past white. “Sorry about the game. That was rough luck.”
“Luck,” Henry repeated.
“I guess luck’s the wrong word. Anyway, I just… if you ever want to talk, I’m around.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re fairly monosyllabic, you know that?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s better.”
Henry expected her to leave, but instead she just stood there fooling with her sweatshirt strings, alternately looking down at his feet and past him into the room. He tried to come up with something polite and polysyllabic to say. “Would you like some tea?”
Pella shrugged. “You’re probably in a hurry. Directions on the seat and all that.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Oh. Well. In that case. Sure. I’ll have tea.”
Henry had never made tea before; that was Owen’s department. He tried to arrest the electric kettle at the proper gurgle, and he tried to add the right amount of English Breakfast to the porcelain pot, not that he knew what the right amount would be. Pella stood in the middle of the rug and looked around. “This place is pretty nice,” she said. “For a dorm room.”
“It’s mostly Owen’s stuff.”
“Did Owen paint this?” She pointed to the green-and-white painting that hung over Henry’s bed, the one Henry liked because it resembled a smeary baseball diamond.
“When I first moved in I asked Owen that same question, and he said, ‘Sort of, but I stole it from Rothko.’ I thought Rothko was like Shopko—that he’d really stolen it, from a store. I was amazed, because it’s so big. How would you steal it? Then I took Art 105.”
Pella laughed. Henry regretted the anecdote, which made him seem dumb. The effort required to speak was immense, like hauling stones up out of a well, but he’d decided to try his best. At least she seemed cheered up a little.
“You really like it here,” she said, “don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, all of you guys—you, Mike, my dad. Maybe Owen too, though I don’t really know Owen. You all just seem to love it here. Like you never want to leave. Part of me suspects that Mike didn’t want to get into law school, that he sabotaged himself in some subconscious way, so that he has no reason to leave this place, the only place he ever felt happy. I mean, why’d he only apply to six schools? The six best schools in the country? It makes no sense.”
“He’s graduating either way,” Henry pointed out. “He can??
?t stay here.”
“He can’t stay but he can’t leave, not without a destination. And, well, maybe it’s the same for you. Maybe you’re just not ready.”
Henry looked at her.
“Sorry,” Pella said.
“Everybody else thinks I wanted to go pro too much. You think I didn’t want it at all.”
“What do you think?”
“I think you should all go fuck yourselves.”
Pella grinned. “That’s the first step to recovery.” She walked over to the mantel, where a baseball, Owen’s lone bottle of scotch, and a slim, leather-bound navy book Henry didn’t recognize sat in close proximity. “There’s not even any dust in this place,” she said. She unsheathed the amber bottle from its cardboard cylinder. “May I?”
Henry nodded. Pella poured some into a tumbler, took a sip, rolled it in her mouth appraisingly. “Mm. Not bad.” She held it out toward Henry.
Henry took the glass and sipped the light-shot fluid, which perfectly matched the color of Schwartzy’s eyes. The taste overwhelmed his sleep-deprived senses; he coughed and spit it out on the rug.
“Hey, don’t waste that.” Pella arranged herself cross-legged on Owen’s bed. She pulled down the navy book—it looked like an old register—and opened it. After a moment she looked up at Henry, her eyes inscrutable. “My dad and Owen are sleeping together.”
“Your dad?” Henry said. “President Affenlight?”
Pella handed him the open book. “Top left.” It looked like a youthful shot of some now-famous poet or playwright, the kind of thing Owen might frame to fill one of the few empty spots on their walls. Then Henry noticed that the pair of maple trees in the midground looked familiar; and the building behind the tree, if you ignored the pale shade of paint on the front door, could easily be Phumber Hall. And then the facial features of the tall man walking the bicycle coalesced into something familiar too. A torn strip of purple Post-it marked the page.
“Your dad went to school here?”
“Class of seventy-one. So be cheery, my lads and all that jazz.”
Henry thought of the time he’d come upstairs carrying two glasses of milk, and President Affenlight was in their room.
“What’s that look?” Pella said. “You knew about this?”
“No… no.”
“But.”
“But… your dad’s been at a lot of our games this year.”
Pella nodded. “I told myself it was all in my head. But here’s this yearbook, right on cue. And look at you—you’re not even surprised. How much proof do I need?”
She took the register from Henry’s hands and flopped down on the bed, her head on Owen’s pillow. She looked at the photograph for a long time, saying nothing. Beneath the window the quad lay in the soundless trough of a late Sunday morning. No birds, no crickets, no rustle of breeze in the mitt-sized leaves of the maples. When Henry’s throw hit Owen in the face, his teammates, the fans, the umps, even the Milford players, fell totally silent, as if their silence might help Owen or undo his injuries. And then again yesterday, when he handed Starblind the ball and walked back to the dugout, there wasn’t a sound in the park, not even a You suck, Henry! from the Coshwale fans. His teammates couldn’t even look at him, pretended to be engrossed in the smashed paper cups and sunflower-seed shells on the dugout floor. Why not say something, something rude or obtuse or irrelevant? If the silence was for his benefit, it wasn’t helping. He wanted to scream and wail his way through these false silences, wanted to put an end to them forever. Yet here he was, trapped in another such silence, a tiny two-person silence, and he couldn’t even put an end to that.
One stray strand of Pella’s wine-colored hair stretched out across the pale-green pillow, like a flattened sine curve or a trail that ants might follow. He reached out and touched it with his fingers, a weird thing to do.
Pella’s whole body tensed, then relaxed.
“It’s a great photograph,” she said. “I’d like a copy for myself.”
Henry could see, beneath the loose waist of her jeans, a thin shiny sliver of snow-blue fabric. His fingers wavered a little as they left her hair and traced the soft line of her cheek. She tilted back her chin to see him from the tops of her eyes. “Nervous?”
“No.”
“Don’t be.” She grasped his wrist and guided his hand down the front of her body, toward the icy blue. “Tell me what it felt like, when you were walking off the field.”
56
A trace of afternoon light still hung in the sky when Henry awoke. Cold air flooded the room from the wide-open window. His penis hurt, up near the root. He reached down under the blankets and found the lip of a condom digging into his skin. The rolling coastline of Pella’s leg and hip lay alongside his own, radiating warmth. He tried to unroll the condom—it had been in his desk drawer for a year, two years, more—but it stuck to him like a Band-Aid. Finally he shut his eyes and ripped it free.
Pella, he realized as he opened his eyes and flicked the spent condom down between his legs, was awake and watching him. And now she probably thought he was playing with himself. He met her eyes, and she smiled a rueful knowing fraction of a smile.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… now what happens?”
“Nothing happens. I go home. You stay here. Maybe you’ll do your roommate a favor and change his sheets.”
“Oh.”
“Were you expecting something else?” she said. “Some kind of sex-induced apocalypse?”
“No.” Henry thought about how far he’d gone out into the lake in his flak jacket, how long he’d stayed there, treading water with thirty pounds of lead and nylon strapped to his chest, listening to his own breathing. He’d swum out where nobody had ever been before, but it didn’t matter because he’d been there. “You’re not going to tell Mike, are you?”
“God, no. I’ll have to keep my distance for a while, though. You bruised the hell out of me.”
“Me?” Henry said, alarmed. “No I didn’t.”
She pushed aside the duvet and pointed to the front of her shoulder: a coppery, greening mark, almost literally a thumbprint. Henry’s stomach did a queasy flip.
“I’ve got a few more, I’m sure.” She twisted away, and Henry saw the corresponding fingerprints near her shoulder blade. “And this big one on my hip.”
“I’m really sorry,” said Henry.
“Don’t worry about it. Part of the social contract, right?”
Owen’s sheets felt silky and rich. Henry wasn’t sure whether he had the strength to stand. His swim, his night in the cold, had exhausted him like never before. Pella climbed over him, out of bed, and poured a finger of scotch into each of two tumblers. “When will they be back?” she asked.
To judge by the windowlight, it was nearing six o’clock. “Coshwale’s pretty far,” he said. “Probably two or three hours. More, even.” He let the scotch scorch his throat and warm his empty stomach.
“Well, you can’t be too careful these days.” Pella already had her jeans and flip-flops on. Now she knelt down and felt around beneath the foot of Owen’s bed. She lifted her T-shirt into view and shimmied inside. “Look how white this still is,” she said. “There’s not even any dust under the beds.”
“There might be some under mine,” Henry said. “But I think Owen cleans there too.”
“What a guy.” Pella half zipped her sweatshirt and began pacing around the room. “I don’t know what I’m so worked up about,” she said. “I mean, if my dad’s gay, and he’s happy, then it’s no big deal, right? Or even if he’s gay and unhappy, it’s still not that big a deal. A certain number of people are gay, just like a certain number of people have blue eyes. Or lupus. Don’t ask me why I just said lupus. I barely know what it is. And I know being gay’s not a disease. The point is, it’s all just probabilities. Numbers. How can I be upset about numbers?”
“You can’t,” Henry said.
&nbs
p; “He’s a grown man who can do what he wants. And actually, it might be worse if Owen were a girl. If he were a girl he might turn my dad in for harassment, and it’d turn into a scandal and my dad would lose his job. That would be bad.” She poured herself another finger’s worth of scotch. “I guess Owen could turn him in too. But it seems less likely somehow. Maybe that’s sexist of me.
“But even if Owen doesn’t turn him in, they still might get caught. What would happen then? All hell would break loose.”
“I don’t think they’ll get caught,” Henry said. “Besides, Owen’s going to Japan.”
Pella was still pacing the room, looking distressed. Even if she’d been sitting next to him on the bed, he probably wouldn’t have had the guts to hug her, or to pat her on the shoulder and say, There, there. They barely knew each other. He’d probably never touch Pella Affenlight again.
“Maybe you should talk to your dad.” Henry hauled himself to his feet, tugged on warm-up pants and a T-shirt. He was shivering. “It seems like the two of you are pretty close.”
“Close,” she said, spitting the word like a curse. “We’re close, all right.”
Having lived in Phumber Hall for three years, Henry had become expert at distinguishing among different people’s footsteps. As soon as these passed the second-floor landing, he knew that they didn’t belong to any of the girls on the third floor, nor to either of the Asian Steves across the hall. Owen was back. But there was a second set of footsteps too. Henry stood up. Pella stopped pacing and looked at him, puzzled by what had no doubt become a very grave expression on his face. If he’d had more energy he might have shoved her into the shower or under his bed, which might have led to an even stupider sort of farce.
What really happened was that he was standing dumbly in the center of the room when Owen’s key scraped in the lock. Pella flopped down into the overstuffed armchair, her legs hooked over one side, and plucked a book from the shelf beside her. Henry looked down at his feet and thought, I’m not wearing socks. I always wear socks.