The Art of Fielding: A Novel (17 page)

P
ella 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

T
he 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. Understood?”

“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?”

“No,” Starblind said sullenly.

“Then you’d better give me twenty shuttle drills after practice. Get that equilibrium unkinked.”

Starblind groaned.

“Groan some more, it’ll be thirty.” Coach Cox motioned to Henry. “You got a minute?”

“Sure, Coach.”

They stepped out into the hallway. “I got a call from the UMSCAC commissioner,” Coach Cox said. “Apparently the league wants to make a little fuss over your streak.”

“Oh,” Henry said. “That’s not necessary.”

“Goddamn right it’s not. But Dale seemed set on it. Publicity opportunity and all that.” Coach Cox stroked his mustache and fixed Henry with a big-news kind of expression. “Somebody over there managed to get Aparicio Rodriguez on the phone, and he said he’d be willing to be here for it.”

“Aparicio?” Henry whispered. “You’re joking.”

“He said he’d like to meet the man who’s tied his record.”

Henry’s ears began to ring. Aparicio, his hero, winner of fourteen Gold Gloves, two World Series. The greatest shortstop who ever lived.

“Apparently he comes to the States every year about this time, to work with the Cards’ infielders. And he’s offered to come up here before he heads back to Venezuela. Which’ll probably be the last weekend of the season, against Coshwale.”

Coach Cox caught Henry’s eye and looked at him sternly. “Now, I don’t want this to be a distraction, for you or anybody else. If we stay in the hunt, those Coshwale games are going to be huge.”

“Don’t worry,” Henry assured him. “Nothing distracts me.”

“I know.” A smile crossed Coach Cox’s face. “Things are happening for you, Skrimmer. Things are goddamn happening.”

After practice, Schwartz and Henry headed up to the makeshift, nylon-netted batting cage in the gym on the VAC’s fourth floor. Schwartz filled the pitching machine and then stood behind Henry with crossed arms, grunting, harrumphing, occasionally offering a word of instruction. Henry drove ball after ball through the middle of the cage. His goal, as always, was to meet the ball so squarely that it retraced its path and reentered the mouth of the pitching machine, sending the big rubber wheels spinning in the opposite direction, as if reversing time. He’d never quite done it, in all these hundreds of sessions, but he continued to believe it was possible.

“Hips,” Schwartz said.

Ping.

“That’s it.”

Ping.

“Don’t drift.”

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

Every Friday after their BP session, in season and out, Henry and Schwartz drove to Carapelli’s, sat in their usual booth, and ate whatever appetizers Mrs. Carapelli brought them, followed by an extra-large house special pizza with extra sauce, extra cheese, and extra meat. Afterward Schwartz nursed a single slim glass of beer, Henry a mammoth SuperBoost shake, and they talked about baseball until Carapelli’s closed.

But tonight Schwartzy turned on foot toward his and Arsch’s house. “Where’re you going?” Henry said.

“Home.”

“But it’s Friday.”

Schwartz stopped, looked down at his gnarled fingers. His mitt hand’s forefinger nail, nipped by a Milford player’s backswing last night, had turned purple-black and would soon fall off. He’d run out of money, but that wasn’t the reason he didn’t want to go to Carapelli’s. The last thing he wanted to do was sit there acting happy about the Skrimmer’s impending fame. He still hadn’t told him about Yale. And Harvard. And Columbia. And NYU. And Stanford. And U of C. “I’d better stay in tonight,” he said. “Thesis crunch.”

“Oh,” Henry said. “Okay.” He’d been waiting to deliver the news about Aparicio until they arrived at Carapelli’s, where it could be savored properly. But it could wait until tomorrow—and it would have to, because Schwartz was already moving across the lot, his collar turned up against the cold.

17

A
ffenlight climbed the stairs of Phumber Hall, nervously fingered the key in his jacket pocket. His quarters were next door in Scull Hall, an almost identical building in many respects, same warping stairs and latticed windows on the landings, same hard-to-describe odor of lake water soaked into hundred-year-old stone, but he felt a world from home. Loud music played behind several of the doors. Presumably the students were at dinner, but they let the music play anyway. The proctors needed to emphasize conservation—talk to Dean Melkin about that. Dirty dishes sat on the windowsills. White dry-erase boards hung on the doors, black markers attached by corkscrewing cords. The boards were filled with scrawled phone numbers, quotes, directions. On one, a stick-figure man faced a stick-figure woman. An arrow pointed to his shoulder-high tumescence—
THESIS
, it read. Another pointed to the blacked-in hair between her legs—
ANTITHESIS
. Well, thought Affenlight, that about covers it.