The Art of Fielding: A Novel (35 page)
Chef Spirodocus clomped out of the kitchen in his backache-relieving clogs, frowning down at his clipboard. “Pella,” he said. “You’re still here.” He pronounced it as a great truth of which she might be unaware.
“Still here.” Pella slid the check off the table with her good hand, tapped its edge against the table’s underside. Chef Spirodocus sat down across from her. “You should go home,” he said. “You look tired.”
In Pella’s experience this was a way of telling a woman she looked bad, old, past her prime. “You mean I have bags under my eyes.”
Chef Spirodocus looked up from his clipboard. “Bags? What bags? I mean you worked hard and became tired. Go home. Drink a glass of wine with your boyfriend.”
“My
boyfriend,
” Pella said, “is at baseball practice.”
Chef Spirodocus waved his stubby fingers. “So find a new one. A girl like you can choose.” He set down his clipboard and looked at her with a solemn expression. “You’re a fine employee,” he said, his voice thick with feeling.
“Thank you.”
He waved his fingers again, as if to brush away the casualness of her response. “Listen to me. You care about the kitchen. You dry the spots from the glasses. You think nobody notices”—he tapped himself on the temple, near the eye—“but I notice. A fine employee.”
Pella felt her own eyes getting moist. Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought, or maybe it’s just me: a purportedly intelligent person, purportedly aware of the ways in which women and wage laborers have been oppressed for millennia—and I get choked up because somebody tells me I’m good at washing dishes. “Thank you,” she said again, this time with earnest emotion that easily matched Chef Spirodocus’s own.
He dropped an elbow onto the table, squished his supple chin against his stubby-fingered hand, eyed her with a melancholy squint. “The god is in the detail, as they say. You understand this. I think you would make a good chef.”
“Really?”
Chef Spirodocus shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was what you wanted.”
“Huh.” Pella imagined in a flash the restaurant she would own: small and white, all painted white but warmly so. And every so often she would take a white chair or a white table and paint it according to her mood, paint a door frame or a section of filigreed molding, hang a canvas on the white wall, so that bit by bit the whiteness of the restaurant would emerge into color. So as customers sat there over the course of weeks and months and years the place would slowly bloom and change before their eyes, sliding from whiteness into something ingeniously raucous, a riot of green and mango and orange. And then when the job was finished she’d obliterate what she’d done with a blizzard of white paint and start again. That was the kind of restaurant she’d like to own. The food being served was fuzzier in her mind: she saw the white plates move and clatter but couldn’t tell what was on them. She could see the clean sharp arrangements on the plates, the contrasts of color and texture, but not the foods themselves. She’d have to learn a lot about food. And really when the restaurant actually opened she’d be so busy cooking, running the kitchen, that she wouldn’t have time to paint. So really she’d have to develop a whole new idea of restaurants and how they worked, not an interior decorator’s idea but a chef’s idea, and this was an idea she didn’t yet have, but would maybe someday like to have. Or maybe she didn’t want to be a chef at all, but the possibility of doing
something,
pursuing something, seemed, for the first time in a long time, not only appealing but real.
“Now go home,” ordered Chef Spirodocus. He pushed back his chair and resumed glaring at his clipboard. “And if you don’t quit after a month, the way all these children quit, maybe I can teach you something about food. I’m not some hack, after all.”
O
wen hadn’t come. Had not yet come. Had not yet executed his light backhanded
tap tap tap
against the presidentially heavy walnut of Affenlight’s door, slipped into the room and locked the door behind him, slid out from under his messenger bag and clasped Affenlight’s hands and planted an ironically chaste peck on his lips.
It was 4:44 according to Affenlight’s watch, 4:42 by the clock on the wall. Had Owen ever come this late before? Affenlight didn’t think so. He yanked open the central drawer of his desk. The drawer’s wheels jerked and screeched on their ill-fitting tracks. He rummaged through a scatter of pens and staples, cigarette boxes, neglected silver sheets of Lipitor and Toprol, and pulled out a wallet-size trifold Westish Baseball schedule with a picture of Henry on the front.
Affenlight had the schedule nearly memorized; had become the Harpooners’ most ardent fan after a lifetime of benevolent indifference to the game. He went to watch Owen, of course, but the team as a whole, led by the dogged Mike Schwartz, had an aura of competence that might have been unknown in the history of Westish sports. And what absorbed Affenlight most, during his hours at the diamond, was the hope that Henry Skrimshander would get better.
Would get better—
that phrasing said it all, as if Henry had some terrible malady that might never lift. The empathy Affenlight felt for him surpassed anything he’d ever felt for a character in a novel. It rivaled, in fact, the empathy he’d ever felt for anyone. We all have our doubts and fragilities, but poor Henry had to face his in public at appointed times, with half the crowd anxiously counting on him and the other half cheering for him to fail. Like an actor in a play, his inner turmoil was on display for everyone to observe; unlike an actor in a play, he didn’t get to go home and become someone else. So raw were his struggles that it felt like an invasion of privacy to go to the games, and at the worst moments Affenlight felt guilty for being there and wondered whether spectators should even be allowed.
Affenlight flipped over the schedule.
HOME
games in bold caps, Away games in a regular roman font. He was hoping to find a
HOME
game today, a game he’d failed to note before, because that would explain Owen’s absence, which otherwise couldn’t be explained, and Affenlight could hustle over to the diamond and settle in for a few innings. But today was the last day of April and it wasn’t listed at all. No reason for Owen not to come. Affenlight folded the schedule and shoved it back in the drawer.
Something happened yesterday. At least now, in retrospect, it seemed like something happened yesterday. At the time it hadn’t seemed like much, certainly not a turning point—just one of those moments that force you to admit, because you’re not insane or utterly fanatical, that you and your lover are different people whose views of the world will sometimes differ. But maybe it was more than that, maybe Affenlight had erred badly somehow, because here it was 4:49 by his watch, 4:47 by the wall clock, and Owen had not yet come.
Yesterday Owen discovered the long row of Westish Registers that spanned the length of the bottom shelf behind the love seat. They were arranged by year, their navy spines growing less faded, their gold-leafed letters richer, as you scanned from left to right. The registers were like furniture to Affenlight—not since his first nostalgic days as president, nearly eight years ago, had it occurred to him to look at one. Until Owen, sprawled idly on the love seat while Affenlight finished a memo, plucked out the ’69–’70 edition and flipped to a half-page photo of a tall young man walking a bicycle across the quad. The young man’s shoulders were broad. He wore pleated gray-wool pants and a wide-collared dress shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled in a recognizably dapper way, the only sign of rebellion his hair, which was far enough removed from two years’ worth of Coach Gramsci–mandated crew cuts to have reached a suitably leonine, collar-brushing length. Leaves lay underfoot, their robust crackle almost audible in the photograph as the young man steered the bicycle down a path not fifty yards from where they were sitting now. The young man wasn’t smiling, but he looked quite pleased to be free, free of football practice on a fall afternoon. He’d not yet begun his beard.
“Hubba hubba,” said Owen. “Who’s
that?
”
“Ha-ha.” Affenlight shifted in his chair. He realized that Owen was using a different one of Mrs. McCallister’s coffee mugs:
DON’T TAKE YOUR ORGANS TO HEAVEN—GOD KNOWS WE NEED THEM HERE.
“What happened to
KISS ME, I’M IRISH
?” he asked, taking care to sound nonchalant.
Owen glanced up from the photo, his expression not unkind. “I just grabbed this one,” he said. “I can wash it when I’m done.”
“No, no. No need,” Affenlight said. “You just seemed to be growing attached to that
IRISH
mug, that’s all.”
“Mm-mm-
mm.
” Owen pointed to the photograph, just below the roll of Affenlight’s sleeves. “Check out those forearms.”
“That’s just because I’m gripping the handlebars.” Affenlight couldn’t resist glancing down at the current version of those same forearms: not nearly as impressive.
“This is what, your senior year?”
“Junior.”
“Junior year. My goodness. You must have had the whole campus in a kind of choreographed group swoon. Boys and girls alike.”
“Not really,” Affenlight said. “I was awkward, behind the times. A bit of a loner.” It sounded like false modesty, considering the stately swagger of the kid in the photo, but it was true.
“Sure you were.” Owen flipped to the back, failed to find an index. “Are there any more like this?”
“I don’t think so.”
Owen, hungry for more, paged through the entire register. Then he pulled down the registers from Affenlight’s other three years and piled them in his lap. He smiled at Affenlight’s football pictures, his crew cut and shoulder pads and tight pants; chuckled at the Whitmanesque beard he began to cultivate senior year; couldn’t resist returning, in the end, to the photo with the bicycle. On most occasions Affenlight sensed a hint of irony in Owen’s attentions; now he seemed thoroughly absorbed. Affenlight sipped his cooling coffee and shifted in his spindle-backed chair. Why was Owen using a different mug? Why was he staring at pictures, when the real-life Affenlight was right there? Maybe he should have been flattered by Owen’s oohing and ahhing, but instead he felt cut out of whatever emotional transaction was passing between Owen and the young man on the page. “I wish I’d known you then,” Owen said wistfully.
“Then instead of now?”
Owen, eyes still on the page, reached out to give Affenlight’s socked ankle a squeeze. “Then
and
now,” he said. “Always.”
“I was different then. You might not have liked me.”
“I’m sure I would have liked you plenty. What’s not to like?”
“I was different,” Affenlight repeated. For some reason he felt keen to get this point across. The kid in the photograph wasn’t simply his current self with better forearms and flowing hair. Hell, he could grow that hair now, and it’d look all the more striking for being flecked with silver. But the hair was not the point. “Back then,” he said, “I wasn’t
me.
Not like this. I… I could never have fallen in love.”
“Well, sure.” Owen, still looking at the photo, continued absently to caress Affenlight’s ankle. “Look at you. Why would someone like that bother to fall in love?”
Why indeed. Owen asked if he could borrow that junior-year register, said he’d like to try making a copy of the photograph, and Affenlight had little choice but to say sure, why not, go right ahead. And they smooched awhile and read aloud a bit from Lear, and Owen left. And that was yesterday. And now today the chapel bells were tolling five, with no Owen. Affenlight stared again at the bold type on the baseball schedule, hoping in vain that another home game would materialize. He pushed back his heavy chair and went to the window, looked up toward Phumber 405. It had begun to rain in fierce sheets, a potent spring storm. Affenlight saw no movement behind the herbs and twisting miniature cacti that lined the sills of Owen’s room. He pulled open his office door—he would make the coffee himself, Owen be damned. Standing there in the hall, sopping wet, fist poised to knock, was a bearded man Affenlight had never met before but recognized instantly, from the photograph on his firm’s website.