The Art of Fielding: A Novel (37 page)
Owen plugged in the electric teapot that sat above the squat refrigerator, set about making tea.
“I tried to call,” Affenlight said. This was somewhere between an accusation and an apology for showing up unannounced. “You didn’t pick up.”
“I just got home a few minutes ago.”
“I saw you in the window while I was dialing.”
Owen’s eyebrows lifted in what Affenlight hoped was genuine puzzlement. “You did?”
“Yes.”
Owen snapped his fingers. “Henry.” He walked over to the phone, inspected the console, flipped a switch. “He’s been turning off the ringer. He comes home and doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Not the scouts, not his parents, not even Mike. It’s worrisome.”
“Mm.” Affenlight didn’t want to talk about Henry, not right now.
“I went to practice today,” Owen said.
“You did?”
“I’m going to play tomorrow against Coshwale. Or rather, it’s unlikely I’ll play, because I’ve missed so much time, but I’ll wear my pinstripes and warm the bench. Dr. Collins cleared me this afternoon.”
“You went to St. Anne’s?” Affenlight said. “I would have driven you.”
“That’s why I didn’t ask. I take up enough of your time. You have a college to run.”
“Bah.” Affenlight’s knees wobbled, and he sank into the plushy rose chair. “This place runs itself.” It was dawning on him that they’d reached the end of something, something that began when that errant baseball hit Owen in the face, and would end now that he’d rejoined the team. They’d had their time together, the time of Owen’s convalescence, his holiday from baseball. Their time out of time. And now that time was over. And he had stupidly turned up here to speed things along. “That’s great news,” he said. “About being cleared to play.”
Owen smiled gently. “Then why do you look so glum?”
“No reason. I just missed you today.”
“I missed you too.”
Owen handed Affenlight a cup of tea, tousled his hair, leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. Affenlight couldn’t help feeling consoled, like a child whose goldfish has died. “I wish you had told me,” he said.
“Told you what?”
“That you were going to practice. You must have known ahead of time.”
“I didn’t know the doctor would clear me. And then Mike and I went straight to practice.”
“Mike took you to the hospital.”
“Yes.”
There was nothing especially interesting about that bit of information, but every syllable Owen spoke felt portentous. “You come every day,” Affenlight said. “It makes me expect you’ll keep coming.”
“It’s just one day.”
“Well, carpe diem, as they say. A day is a day. There are only so many of them.”
“Guert, don’t get upset. I mean, why be upset? Because there was one afternoon when my schedule didn’t conform to yours? You’ve never visited
me,
you know. This is the first time you’ve even called, and you only called to chastise me.”
“I’m not chastising you. That’s not—”
“Are you under the impression that this is really what I want? Covert oral sex in an office, like some scene from a seedy movie?”
Affenlight was baffled. “I hardly think it’s like that.”
“What do you think it’s like?” Owen was standing in front of his desk, his tailbone and the heels of his hands resting against its wooden edge, his long legs crossed at the ankles. Affenlight recognized the posture: that of the lecturer in command. Which made Affenlight, fidgety and underprepared in his borrowed chair, the student. “I show up, we read and make small talk, we suck each other off, we smoke a cigarette, I leave. You wash the couch with Windex and we do it again. It’s like a gay-porn
Groundhog Day.
”
“We… I don’t wash the couch,” protested Affenlight. “I… we drink
coffee.
” He sounded pleading and inane, trying to imbue these three simple words, this one banal act, with all the import and sentiment it held for him.
“Everybody drinks coffee,” Owen said.
Affenlight, as he glanced longingly toward the bottle of scotch on the mantel of the deactivated fireplace, noticed a familiar navy volume propped beside it. That damned register, he thought. That damned twenty-year-old me. He imagined his junior-year self strolling the crosshatched walkways with Owen’s fingers entwined in his, the two of them sharing a joint on the library steps, pouring out cuplets of tea for each other at Café Oo, basking in the cinematic light of their campus celebrity. It was hard to imagine, but painfully easy to imagine Owen imagining it.
“Guert? Are you hearing anything I’m saying?”
“Yes,” said Affenlight gloomily.
“And?”
“And I’m sixty years old. I’ll be sixty-one next week.”
“That’s true,” said Owen. “But I’m not sure how it relates to what we’re talking about.”
“Which is?”
“Which is the fact that we have nothing resembling a normal relationship. We’ve never been to dinner. We’ve never been to a movie. We’ve never even
rented
a movie.”
“I don’t like movies.”
Owen smiled. “That’s because you’re an Americanist and a philistine. But I feel like a prostitute, showing up at your office every afternoon. A poorly paid one, to boot.”
“It’s not like I don’t
want
those things,” said Affenlight. “I do.”
“But?”
“But… it’s delicate.”
“I know it’s delicate. I know we can’t just walk around holding hands. There are restrictions. My worry is that you find these restrictions convenient. Or even necessary. What if we were in New York, or San Francisco, or even down the road in Door County? What if you came to Tokyo with me? Would you walk down the street with me then? Could you look in a store window and see us holding hands? Or would that be too gay for you? Better to stay right here, in the heart of the problem, where your restrictions will protect you.”
“You’ve been reading too much Foucault,” Affenlight said.
“That’s impossible. And anyway don’t be glib.”
The mention of Tokyo, those words in that order—
What if you came with me?
—scrambled Affenlight’s thoughts. It was possible, really it was. He could take a year’s sabbatical, pretend to be writing a book, wander around Japan with Owen as his fearless guide, Buddhist temples, neon kittens, tea, Mt. Fuji, the tiny island where two of his uncles died. Bill Murray in that movie he’d never seen, just like he’d never seen
Groundhog Day,
the one with the curvy blonde and the hotel bar, May–December in a far-off land.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Owen added. “I’m not trying to stake some ominous claim. I’m not even saying I like you. But why would I want to be with someone, for whatever length of time, with whom I can’t go
anywhere?
I want to live, Guert. I don’t want to hide in your office. It was fun the first week.”
He folded his slender arms, to indicate that he had finished steering the discussion and was willing to wait for Affenlight’s response. He would make a first-rate pedagogue if he chose that route; then again he would make a first-rate anything. All that remained of his injury was a makeup-like swipe of steel blue that traced the outer and under curve of his eye socket. Affenlight shifted in the rose-colored chair. He knew that this was his exam, he was supposed to be answering questions and not asking them, but he felt exhausted, buried in his chair, and he couldn’t help it. “What should I do?”
Owen uncrossed his arms, unfurled himself from his lecturer’s perch. His eyes flashed darkly. “If I were you I’d ask me out to dinner. I’d put on a nice shirt that matched my eyes and I’d pick me up in my silver Audi and teach me about opera while I drove me out through the dark countryside to some Friday-night fish fry in some little town in the middle of nowhere.”
“You don’t eat fish,” Affenlight said.
“I know. But I’d be so smitten by the invitation that I wouldn’t care. And then I’d take me to a motel and turn off the heat and crawl into bed with me and watch cable television into the wee hours, the way that consenting adults are sometimes entitled to do, even if they normally detest television. And I’d hold me all night and kiss me on the ear and recite whatever poems I knew by heart and feed me awful processed snacks from the vending machine, since I wouldn’t have touched the fish. And then in the morning I’d have me back nice and early, so I could make team breakfast before the game.”
P
ella, having showered and dressed, dried her hair and done her makeup, was pacing the apartment waiting for David to return. Amid the scatter of papers on her dad’s desk in the study lay a half-f pack of Parliaments. He really was smoking again, as she’d suspected; something was up with him. She needed to make him stop, even if that meant calling his doctor and tattling on him; smoking was
streng verboten
in the Affenlight family.
She’d never smoked much herself, not since junior high anyway, but a cigarette right now would calm her nerves. She tapped one out with her uninjured hand and managed to light it with a match without smearing her still-wet nails. She opened the study window. No sooner had she leaned out to exhale than her father emerged from the front door of the building kitty-corner to Scull Hall. She didn’t have a very good handle on the campus layout—the buildings all looked alike, with their weathered gray stone—but she was pretty sure that one was a dorm, the same dorm Henry pointed to last night when he offered to go get her ice. Her dad looked left, right, left, like a noir character who thought somebody might be tailing him. Then he headed across the quad toward the alley behind the dining hall, where he kept his car.
Three and a half minutes later, as she stubbed out the cigarette on the window frame, Owen Dunne emerged from the same door—which made sense, since Henry and Owen were roommates, though it didn’t explain why her dad had been in there. Maybe it was a mixed-use building; maybe he’d needed that ice machine.
The downstairs buzzer rang; David was here. Cue ominous music. She ran to the bathroom to gargle some mouthwash.
T
hey drove in David’s rented hybrid to Maison Robert, the upscale, slightly flagging French place she used to go with her father during her vacations from Tellman Rose. It felt nice to be among adults, even if the adults in question were David and a bunch of past-their-prime-if-they’d-ever-had-a-prime academics bleached white by one too many northern Wisconsin winters. Maison Robert served as a kind of de facto Westish faculty club. Bald pates shone in the yellow-puddled lights, wire-rimmed glasses peered at the immutable black menus, snifters of amber brandy clicked against bulbous goblets of deep red wine. Pella’s oral history professor, the preposterously chic, thoroughly un-Wisconsiny Judy Eglantine, dined alone in one corner, dressed in narrow black, an open book before her. A feathery lime-green boa flopped over the opposite chair in place of a companion. Pella caught her eye and waved shyly as David pulled back her chair with his usual wooden courtesy. Professor Eglantine smiled.
David beckoned the waiter with an impatient gesture and, without having looked at the list, began quizzing him about the wines. The waiter was Pella’s age but had wispy albino-blond hair, as if the winters had aged and bleached him too. He mumbled
oaky
and
spicy
a few times. David ordered a red Bordeaux.
“How do you know what I want?” Pella said. “Maybe I’d rather have white.”
“It’s good.” David glanced up at the hurriedly approaching waiter, whom he’d already frightened into submission.
“Ah, merci—la dame le goûtera,”
he said, though there was little chance the poor guy spoke French.
Pella leaned back so the waiter could pour, let the wine’s oaky spices roll around in her mouth. David knew wine the way he knew architecture and Ancient Greek, the way he knew how to wire a kitchen and choose a mutual fund. She nodded at the waiter. “It’s good,” she said.
“That’s a lovely dress,” David said.