The Art of Fielding: A Novel (23 page)

“Oh, stop,” said Genevieve, with a wave of her book-holding arm. Affenlight thought about snatching the book back, but it was way too late. “You used to
love
Whitman.”

“Sure, when I was twelve.” Owen glanced at Affenlight. “Whitman appeals to the newly gay. He’s like a gateway drug.”

“I’m sure he appeals to all kinds of people,” Genevieve said. “He’s the poet of democracy.”

The unhurt corner of Owen’s mouth turned upward in a smile. “Is that what they’re calling it now?”

Affenlight needed a cigarette more than he ever had when he smoked half a pack a day. What year did they finally ban smoking in hospitals? What happened if you did it anyway? He both did and didn’t want Owen to figure him out—like that dirty picture on Owen’s laptop, the possibility of being figured out made things more real, more thrilling and terrifying—but what he certainly did not want was for Owen to figure him out in front of his mother. Affenlight was glad that Genevieve had said what she said about the poet of democracy; otherwise he would have said it, or something like it, and felt like a fool.

“All through high school you loved Whitman,” Genevieve said. “What’s the one about the tree? The oak tree?” She opened the book and began to scan the table of contents.

“Please, put that thing away,” said Owen as if it were a soiled diaper. He coughed and, avoiding as well as possible the blood-stiffened, drug-slackened side of his mouth, began carefully to declaim the poem: “I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, / All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches…”

Affenlight’s heart grew calm at the sound of Owen’s voice reciting the familiar words. So much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone. And he’d always loved the poem, admired in the narrator exactly what the narrator admires in the oak tree—manifest independence—even while the narrator insists on his thorough dependence on his friends.

Halfway through, Owen broke off. “Bah,” he said. “My head.”

Affenlight couldn’t help himself. He cleared his throat and picked up where Owen left off, stumbling over only the phrase “manly love.” “For all that,” he concluded, unable to keep from shifting into a slightly higher oratorical gear, “and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space, / Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near, / I know very well I could not.”

“Bravo,” cheered Genevieve. She handed Affenlight his book.

Affenlight smiled sheepishly. He felt both good and exposed. He wondered briefly about the precise etymology of the word
flush:
you flushed when you were happy and exhilarated, you flushed when you were humiliated, and you flushed a bird from cover before you shot it. He looked at Owen to see if he could see what Owen thought of his recitation, but Owen’s eyes were closed, not in a sleepy way but like Sherlock Holmes at the opera, ears alert, a gentle smile on his lips.

“Well,” said Affenlight, “I suppose I’d better be off. Pella and I will see you tonight.”

“What a lovely name.” Genevieve clasped Affenlight’s hands warmly in farewell. “Who knows, O? Maybe this Pella Affenlight will turn out to be your ideal woman. She certainly has a dashing enough father.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Owen said, eyes still closed. “It hurts my face.”

23

T
here were no more than two hundred people in the Opentoe ballpark, players and scouts included, but they made a lot of noise. They stood and stomped the bleachers, the cheers grew louder instead of dying out, and he realized they weren’t going to stop. He lifted his head guardedly and looked at Schwartzy, who was standing on the lip of the dugout, his expression drained and pissed but not unhappy, clapping his Schwartz-sized hands together. Henry blinked hard a few times. Elastic PE equals one-half K L squared, he thought. Gravitational PE equals mgh.

Schwartz pointed to the brim of his cap. Henry looked at him dumbly. Schwartz did it again, and this time Henry understood. He lifted one hand and tipped his cap. The cheering swelled and peaked and ended. Schwartz trudged back to the bus. Arsch hurriedly put on pads and a chest protector and lumbered out to take his place behind the plate.

Two innings later, Henry made another error. It resembled the first one: he fielded a routine grounder, double-pumped, and pulled Rick off the bag with a low wide throw. He pounded his fist in his glove, pulled his hat down as low as it would go. What the heck was happening? Was there something wrong with his arm? No, his arm felt strong, his arm felt fine. Don’t overthink it. Just let it fly.

After the game ended—the Harpooners won 8 to 1—he headed toward the bus to talk to Schwartz, but he was intercepted by a broad-shouldered blond guy in a dress shirt with a Cardinals logo. His nostrils were rimmed by a rheumy pink glow. “Henry,” he said as they shook hands, “Dwight Rogner. We spoke on the phone. Nice game out there.”

“Wish I could’ve played a little better.”

“Don’t sweat those errors,” Dwight said. “Gosh, you’ve made two mistakes in two and a half years? We all should be so lucky. I played in the minors for nine years, batted twice in the majors. And I’ll tell you something—pretty much every guy I ever shared a locker room with wound up becoming either an alcoholic or a born-again Christian. Booze or God. That’s what this game does to you. The name of the game is failure, and if you can’t handle failure you won’t last long. Nobody’s perfect.”

Henry nodded. Dwight, his rheumy eyes twinkling merrily in the cloud-strafed sunlight, shook his hand again. “So we’ll talk again soon,” he said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Henry said.

A few other scouts—Orioles, Phillies, Cubs—stopped over to say hello, and then Henry joined his teammates, who were arranged on the grass in a rough circle, relaxed and cheerful after the win, eating turkey sandwiches. Rick O’Shea lifted his valve-topped sports drink above his head. “To the Skrimmer,” he said, “whose name shall be listed alongside that of the great Aparicio, for as long as we all shall live.”

“Hear! Hear!”

“Go Henry.”

“Attaboy, Skrim.”

Instead of occupying the center of the circle, as he usually did, Schwartz lay a little ways off, doing stretches for his back—either he didn’t want to be bothered or he only wanted to be bothered by Henry. Henry, not sure which was the case, approached with hunterly care.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Schwartz said.

“Sorry you got tossed.”

“Bastard spit on me.” Schwartz swung his knees to the other side of his body. “Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner about my apps.”

“Maybe there was some mistake,” Henry suggested. “Maybe they messed up your LSAT scores or something.”

Schwartz shook his head. “I’m the only one who messed up my LSAT scores.”

“You did well, I thought.”

“I did okay.”

“And your extracurriculars, captain of two teams. Everything you’ve done for Westish. Everything you’ve done for
me.
”

Schwartz stretched his legs out, massaged his kneecaps. “I don’t think they give me credit for that.”

They sat there for a while, saying nothing, the day cool and blue around them.

Schwartz hauled himself up from the grass, his ligaments popping and creaking in protest. “Let’s go,” he said. “Get a new streak started.”

T
HE
H
ARPOONERS WON
the second game 15 to 6. Only two balls were hit to Henry. Both times he double-clutched and made a soft, hesitant throw. Instead of rifle shots fired at a target, they felt like doves released from a box. He didn’t know which way they’d go, and he watched in suspense as each, somehow, found its way into the distant nest of Rick’s first-baseman’s glove.

That evening, on the long ride back to Westish, he dozed against the shimmying side of the bus, a sweatshirt tucked beneath his cheek against the cold. His teammates bounced from seat to seat, gleefully scheming, poised between a successful day and what promised to be, since tomorrow was a rare day off, a successful night.

“Melanie Quong,” somebody said.

“Kim Enderby.”

“Hannah Szailes.”

The names were plans and prayers and poems all at once. Henry’s right arm reeked of Icy Hot. An image surged into his mind and repeated itself at a rate both dizzying and monotonous—an image of a white ball veering off course and drilling Owen in the cheekbone, and of Owen’s white startled eyes as he stared out at Henry before slumping to the dugout floor. He did some math. In the space of fifteen innings he’d made the five worst throws of his college career—the one that hit Owen, the two errors in the first game today, and the two ungainly throws in the second game. All five came on routine and in fact almost identical plays: hard-hit balls more or less right at him, so that he had plenty of time to plant his feet and find Rick’s glove before making the throw. Simple plays, of a kind he hadn’t botched since puberty. Clearly there was something wrong with his mechanics. Tomorrow he’d sleep in, catch up on the homework he’d neglected since Owen’s injury. Monday at practice he’d work out the kinks in his delivery. The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork.

24

P
ella leaned closer to the bureau mirror, planting her elbows as she forced a silver earring—bought by her dad this afternoon—through the thin slit where her piercing used to be. She hadn’t bothered to wear earrings in many months or to bring any with her from San Francisco. A minim of bright blood cradled the edge of the slit and then subsided. She felt almost lovely, in her new lilac-colored dress, which was scoop-necked and sleeveless, and hung very simply and straight. She’d been admiring it this afternoon, at a little shop in Door County; her dad offered to pay for it, a sweet gesture marred only by the shame Pella felt at her own utter lack of resources. She needed to figure out how to fend for herself. Still, she felt pretty good. The eggplant bags beneath her eyes were shrinking. Her hair shone in the lamplight and, freshly washed, felt soft against her neck.

Her father’s face appeared beside hers in the mirror, as if they were posing for a family portrait, except that the elder Affenlight looked distinctly agitated. “Is this tie okay?” he asked, fiddling with the flat taper of his half Windsor. The familiar burnt apple butter scent of his cologne filled the room.

“Sure,” Pella said. “All of your ties are nice.”

Affenlight frowned and continued improving the already perfect knot. “But maybe I have a nicer one. Look”—he lifted the tie with a spindled finger so its silver-and-burgundy stripes hung beside his face—“see how the color brings out these capillaries in my cheeks? I look like a washed-up alcoholic.”

“Oh, you do not.” Pella forced the second post through and turned to eye her dad directly. “You have the skin of a ten-year-old. Not to mention the brain. Since when are you quite
this
vain?”

Affenlight pretended to pout. “I’m an emissary of the college. It’s my duty to make a good impression on the tuition-paying parents.”

“Mm-hm. Single female parents in particular.”

Before he could respond, his phone trilled. He pulled it from his pocket and two-stepped into the hallway. “Genevieve, hello!”

Pella went back to the mirror. David would return from Seattle tonight. How long would it take him to figure out where she was? Not long—she had no friends, no other relatives, just these two looming figures, her dad and David, to bounce between. David’s first impulse would be to think that she had run off with someone her own age, just as he’d always believed she would do, and he’d ransack the loft for clues. But there were no clues. When he picked up the phone to find her, there would be only one number to dial.

She could hear her dad on the phone in the hall, bantering. Ten to one when this Genevieve showed up she’d be a lot hotter than your average mom of a twenty-one-year-old. Pella wasn’t sure why she had to be dragged along on what seemed like a double date, but she wanted to indulge her dad, to prove that they could be friends again. Plus, of course, he’d bought her this dress.