The Art of Fielding: A Novel (16 page)
Each step sent a frozen jolt up Henry’s spine. Step. Step. Step. What was Schwartz thinking, sending him out here at this hour, in this weather? He liked rising early but this was absurd, more night than morning, no flicker of dawn or stirring of birds to keep him company. Just black cold and those clouds pressing down. He’d hardly slept, worrying about Owen, replaying that throw in his head. Of course if Owen’d been watching the game instead of reading, it wouldn’t have happened, but that didn’t stop Henry from feeling responsible. Then, beyond what he’d done to Owen, there was the simple frustration of messing up in the field, something he hadn’t done in so long he’d forgotten that it was possible. Perfection was what he was after out there. At least those scouts had left before it happened.
After an interminable ascent, he reached the top row and slammed a gloved hand against the big aluminum 1 bolted to the back wall. He gave it a good whack, but the frigid atoms barely resounded at all. When he turned, he was standing atop a steep precipice that fell off into darkness. He kept his back against the wall as he edged, as quickly as his quivering legs would let him, toward the staircase between Sections 1 and 2. He could practically touch the rumpled quilt of cloud overhead.
He minced quickly down the stairs between sections—the descent, though easier on the legs, was the scary part—using his windbreaker sleeve to wipe his nose. His ears burned. At the bottom he turned and gave a little skip and duck, like a high jumper beginning the approach. “Come on!” he growled aloud in Schwartz’s voice, trying to rally himself as he shoved off and headed grimly back to the top, dragging one weary leg before the other, slamming a squeezed fist into the frozen metal 2.
Just do half,
he told himself on the way down, shaking his limbs in a full-body shiver. Half a stadium, seventeen sections, and then home to a hot shower, so hot it’d feel cold on his numb skin, and some hot chocolate from Owen’s hot pot, and anything else that’s hot. And then burrowing back beneath the sheets, the warm hot sheets, until physics class, which was still five hours away.
But then around Section 5, his legs began to loosen, his lungs to unclench. Better thoughts flowed through his brain. He picked up the pace. The blood worked through his body, trapping warmth between the layers of his clothes. His feet landed more lightly on the stone.
First he took off his gloves and flung them aside. Two sections later, he grabbed his Cardinals cap in one hand so he could peel off his windbreaker with the other, jamming the cap back on as he tossed the windbreaker. It floated up, bloated by the wind, before settling on the steps. Heat radiated off Henry’s face. Salty snot ran down over his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium’s curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teammate. It gave back a game shudder. He was cruising now, darkness be damned, stripping off his sweatshirt and his long underwear top without breaking stride. He moved through the dark, glad of the dark, part of the dark. He was down to his vest and T-shirt, wielding his own heat. A warm pocket of dark in the large cold dark.
B
efore 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.”