The Art of Fielding: A Novel (54 page)

“Yes please.” Affenlight lay on his side, one hip rolled over on top of Owen’s thigh, one cheek on Owen’s shoulder. It was a quintessentially feminine posture, or had been throughout his forty years of sharing beds—the man on his back with hands behind his head, the woman nestled against him—and yet he slipped into it naturally now. With his free hand he caressed Owen’s belly, which itself felt almost feminine, not muscled but soft with the strong, invulnerable softness of youth. His senses remained on high alert, but for the moment the quad had slipped into silence. It was too late for the students to go out to the bars, too early for them to come home.

Owen assumed his lecturer’s tone. “That’s easy, Guert. What you so blithely call a house would better be termed an ecological disaster. How many barrels of oil does it take to heat a big old place like that through a bad winter, not that we have bad winters anymore? Just to keep a couple of bodies warm?”

Affenlight couldn’t help wondering which couple of bodies he meant. Two Affenlights? An Affenlight and a Dunne? “ ‘I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls,’ ” he said, quoting Emerson’s
The Conduct of Life.

“I’d hardly describe you as a stiff person.” Owen slid a hand down between Affenlight’s legs, toyed with him gently. “At least not right now.”

“We just finished,” Affenlight protested, not wanting to be mentioned even jokingly in the same breath as that particular ailment of age, but in fact he was already thickening under Owen’s touch.

“Thoreau’s journals,” Owen said. “ ‘When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside.’ He doesn’t buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter. And to cool in the summer—let’s not even talk about air-conditioning. Why not just buy a McMansion out by the freeway, install a helicopter pad in back? Do you think you get a free pass because the house is old and lovely? It doesn’t work that way, Guert. Waste is waste, sprawl is sprawl. Your good taste doesn’t count. If there’s any kind of exclusionary, private-club-style afterlife, St. Peter won’t be asking questions at the gate. You’ll just be lugging all the coal and oil you’ve burnt in your life, that’s been burnt on your behalf, and if it fits through the gate you’re in. And the gate’s not big. It’s like eye-of-a-needle-sized. That’s what constitutes ethics these days—not who screwed or got screwed by whom.

“Perhaps you’re better off here, Guert. This place suits your spartan tendencies, which I much admire. You’re an especially unencumbered type of soul.”

“Jeez, O,” said Affenlight glumly. “You didn’t have to do quite such a good job.”

“Sorry.” Owen released Affenlight’s half-hard penis, kissed him on the forehead. “I get worked up.”

Sometimes Affenlight worried that Owen dallied with him solely so that he could whisper in Affenlight’s ear about campus-wide environmental initiatives. But that was probably reductive, if not downright paranoid, and anyway such things were worth being whispered to about. The schools Affenlight had been affiliated with—Westish in the late sixties and recently; Harvard in the eighties and nineties—were places where environmentalism had a modest presence, academically and publicly, and his work had tended in other directions, toward questions of political and social selfhood, male identity mixed with sex and a smidgen of Marx. But he was a farmer by birth, a biologist by undergraduate degree, a hippie by year of birth, and a diligent student of Emerson and Thoreau, and so Owen’s growing and insistent interest in ecology was easy for him to assimilate. Perhaps he was a trend jumper, in terms of intellectual preoccupations, a humanist back when humanity was popular, now moved on to bigger things, but certain trends were better jumped late than never.

“Now that I think about it,” Owen said, “this whole building’s on one thermostat, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So every night and all weekend, when there’s nobody downstairs, the whole building gets heated just for you. And for me, sometimes. Which must be terrifically wasteful, given how drafty this place is and how old the furnace must be. You’d be better off with the house.”

“Yeah,” said Affenlight, “but they’d probably leave the heat on all the time anyway.”

“Who’s
they?
It’s your college.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, but Affenlight couldn’t disagree with the principle. Owen began enthusiastically concocting plots for the further greening of Westish, and for the installation of solar panels on Affenlight’s new house. Affenlight loved it when Owen grew enthusiastic, he even loved the plots, but his mind kept drifting away, away, away. Away to Pella. He was buying the house for her, in hopes that she would stay with him for four years. Or three—she might want to graduate in three. And then she could move on to grad school at Harvard or Yale, or even Stanford if she wished. Affenlight disliked the thought of sending her back to California, against which he harbored a grudge even though it was the source of Owen, because California had already once swallowed up Pella and kept her for four long years.

Not that grad school was the only respectable path in life; perhaps Pella would devise other plans. Affenlight, for his part, planned only to not be overbearing. She could visit the house whenever she liked—could come over for dinner, for pumpkin soup. Her rooms upstairs, should she choose to use them; his rooms down. Owen was right, it was a lot of space for two people, one of whom didn’t even live there, but the solar panels! He would install the solar panels, cost be damned, even if the cost-benefit analysis declared that they wouldn’t pay off until long after his projected life span had expired. He would outlive the actuaries’ projections, would leave the actuaries dejected and abashed at their own uselessness, would remain on this marvelous earth until his ingenious, responsible, not-quite-prohibitively-expensive solar panels had done the work of a thousand, of ten thousand, barrels of criminal oil. And by that time Owen and Pella would be nearing middle age themselves, and global warming—as Owen was now saying, though Affenlight was no longer more than half listening—would have accelerated its decimation of the world’s poor equatorial regions, and the true geopolitical shitstorm—as Owen was now saying, and Affenlight’s ears perked up because Owen rarely cursed—would be under way. Even as sleep closed in on Affenlight and expanded the realm of what was possible to include the stuff of dreams, there was no real way to incorporate Owen’s words into a rosy picture of what the world would be like after he, Affenlight, was gone, a world in which Pella and Owen, and any children Pella might someday have, would have to live, but at least he could bequeath to her (and maybe to them both, to share in some way, because who knew but that they’d eventually become close friends) a pretty white solar-paneled house near the lake in northeastern Wisconsin, and as the summers spoiled and the coasts flooded and the monocrops failed and the powers that be squabbled and panicked, as Owen was now describing in fearsome detail in his sonorous butterscotch voice, northeastern Wisconsin would probably not be the worst place to be.

68

H
enry was standing in Pella and Noelle and Courtney’s kitchen, washing the dishes, drinking the first cup from a pot of coffee he’d made. He’d started drinking coffee since he’d been here. It was something to do. When he’d finished the dishes—there were just a few glasses and mugs; Pella ate at work, and Noelle and Courtney subsisted on red wine and Red Bull—he sprayed down the sink with a bleachy cleanser and wiped it with a sponge. Through the window the late-afternoon light was dimming steadily but still more gold than tea colored. This was the fragile hour of the day when he felt okay. The hour when he got out of bed and, if he sensed that Noelle and Courtney weren’t home, out of Pella’s room entirely.

He wrung out the sponge, propped it on the sink’s back. Only a few minutes left before the light would fade. If he’d begun his day earlier—at eight, say, or even ten or noon—he might have felt all right today. It would be smart to get up early tomorrow.
Tomorrow I’ll get up early,
he thought, and then smiled to himself, because the coffee was making him feel okay, and because he’d promised himself the same thing yesterday and the day before and the day before that, so that it had become a private running joke.

He cleaned the coagulated orange soap out of the little crown top of the dish-soap bottle. When Noelle and Courtney were home, or when he sensed they might be home, he stayed in Pella’s room, lying low, peeing in a Gatorade bottle. Pella didn’t seem to mind. Not about the pee—she didn’t know about that—but about his presence in general. She seemed okay with it. He thought of the
Odyssey,
which he’d half read in Professor Eglantine’s class—Ulysses trapped on Calypso’s island, wasting time, but he was no Ulysses, had no Ithaca to get home to, even though his beard had come in darker and fuller than he’d expected, a harsh brown beard that after a month or two would be the sort you might see on a statue of Ulysses, or that you did see on the statue of Melville that stood in the corner of the Small Quad, peering out to sea.

He opened the pantry out of boredom. There wasn’t much there. Olive oil, salt and pepper, girlie protein bars in pastel foil. Protein-enhanced whole-wheat vermicelli. Four-packs of sugar-free Red Bull. A can of black beans. There used to be two cans of black beans: in his first days here, when he was still adapting to his lack of appetite, he’d eaten the other can. He’d also eaten a girlie protein bar. Once he’d even tried to cook vermicelli on the stove. He’d never cooked pasta before, and the job was made more difficult by the fact that he had to keep running to the living room window to make sure that Courtney and Noelle weren’t about to come in and catch him stealing their food. He didn’t boil enough water; then he put in way too much vermicelli; then he cooked it way too long. The water evaporated from the pot, and the pasta sat there in a dull lump like an animal’s brain. Now he preferred not eating. Not because not eating meant not stealing, not because not eating meant not cooking, but just because.

I should stop drinking coffee too, he thought. He’d almost thought
give up
coffee, but that was a misleading phrase. There seemed to be meaning in it, meaning that didn’t exist. When you gave something up, who or what did you give it up
to?
Giving something up implied that your sacrifice made sense, and Henry knew that this was untrue. The days did not accumulate and turn into something better than days, no matter how well you used them. The days could not be used. He did not have a plan. He’d stopped playing baseball and eating beans and now he would stop drinking coffee. That was all.

The front door opened.

Henry froze, listened to his heart. He was a rat or a roach in this house—owned the place when he was alone, roamed the rooms like a roach god, and then scurried to safety when one of the humans walked in. Now he was trapped. He grabbed a pot he’d already washed, sudsed the sponge, and began to wash it again. It was too early to be Pella, who was working the dinner shift, and even Pella might be a mixed blessing. She’d urged him to go out more during the daytime, and he’d nodded in agreement. He never knew what to say to her.

He kept scrubbing the clean pot, pretending not to be able to hear footsteps in the living room over the running water, pretending not to feel the heat of the eyes of the person who stood in the doorway.

“Henry.”

He could plausibly ignore a soft voice like that.

“Henry.”

He could not-so-plausibly ignore a not-so-soft voice like that.

“HENRY.”

He left the water on, turned around, his hands covered with suds. Pella’s hair was pulled back and her ears were flushed pink. She sighed and let her wicker bag full of soup and swim gear bang down on the linoleum.

“We need to talk.”

Maybe he’d left a pee-filled Gatorade bottle next to the bed. He’d tried to be careful about that, tried to remember to dump the bottles in the toilet and rinse them every day, but part of him, the truest Henry-part, didn’t
want
to remember, wanted to keep the pee forever, and maybe he’d let that part get the best of him. It was the one real freedom he had, waking at noon with his bladder full of water and coffee and pissing a long clear stream into the bottle in the bedroom without having to go down the hall and worry that someone would be in the bathroom, or would knock on the bathroom door while he was peeing and be annoyed with him because it wasn’t his bathroom at all.

It was a three-year-old’s freedom, yes, he recognized that. Like peeing in the lake on those August evenings after Schwartz had worked him like a dog and he’d swum way out and turned back to look at the few lights winking on the Westish shore. He didn’t want to rinse out the Gatorade bottle, okay? He wanted a permanent collection of all his pee and shit, not that he ever shat anymore, now that he’d stopped eating.