by Chad Harbach
When he and Schwartzy arrived at St. Anne’s, President Affenlight was pacing up and down the ER waiting room, head bowed. He devoured the checkerboard floor with six strides, turned, and did it again. Schwartz cleared his throat to announce their entrance. Affenlight’s expression, weary and disarmed when he thought he was alone, changed instantly to a bright presidential smile. “Michael,” he said. “Henry. Glad to see you.”
Henry hadn’t expected President Affenlight to know his name. They passed each other often on the sidewalks of the Small Quad, because Phumber Hall was right beside the president’s quarters, but they’d spoken only once, on Henry’s very first day at Westish, while Henry was blending in with the tent poles at the Freshperson Barbecue, nibbling his fourth or fifth hot dog:
“Guert Affenlight.” The older man sipped his drink, held out a hand.
“Henry Skrimshander.”
“Skrimshander?” Affenlight smiled. “It’ll be the seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay for you, I’m afraid.” He was wearing a silver tie that matched his hair. His sleeves were rolled midway up his forearms—the way they hung unwrinkled from shoulder to cuff, their lines crisp and pristine, suggested a man at ease with his surroundings. When Sophie had asked Henry to describe Westish, the first image that came to mind was that of Affenlight’s perfectly rolled-up sleeves.
“Any news?” Schwartz asked now.
“He woke up for a moment in the ambulance,” Affenlight said. “Out cold, and then suddenly his eyes popped open. He said, April.”
“April?”
“April.”
“April,” Henry repeated.
“The cruelest month,” Schwartz said. “Especially in Wisconsin.”
“April.” Henry parsed the word into sounds so small their sense disappeared, as if he’d wandered into the wide spaces that separate the solid parts of a molecule. “Starts tomorrow.”
Coach Cox walked into the waiting room. Like Henry and Schwartz, he hadn’t changed out of his Harpooner pinstripes. He carried, two to a hand, bulging white bags that bore the golden arches. “Any word?”
“He’s in having a CAT scan,” Affenlight told him. “They want to make sure there’s no bleeding in the brain.”
“Goddamn Dunne.” Coach Cox shook his head. “If anything happens to him I’ll kill him.” He plunked the bags down on the round faux-wood table in the corner. “I brought dinner.”
Schwartz and Coach Cox settled in at the faux-wood table and unwrapped their Big Macs. Henry loved fast food, but tonight the smell made him queasy. He sank down on a stiff couch and looked up at the TV bolted high on the wall. On-screen a statuary Christ, shot tight in a bright swath of light, hung upon the cross. His chin slumped against a bony, toga-sashed shoulder. ORGAN MUSIC, read the closed-captioning. Cut to biplane angles of an equatorial island: sapphire water, pink beach, the firework tops of palm trees. ISLAND DRUMBEAT.
“Here,” said Coach Cox. “Keep your strength up.”
Henry let the french fries sit there in his hand. The televised colors, the swift jolting movements from shot to shot, didn’t help his stomach. He hadn’t seen a TV since October, when the World Series ended.
President Affenlight stopped pacing and sat down on the couch. Henry tipped the flimsy red carton toward him. Affenlight, with a nod of thanks, drew out a fry. The gesture reminded him of his smoking days, which had—more or less—ended with his return to Westish. Upon taking the job, he’d come to this very hospital for a checkup, his first in fifteen years, as was required by his new insurance. He’d expected accolades and hushed admiration from the doctor; he’d recently guest-rowed on a Harvard varsity eight at practice and hardly cost the team a beat. What he got instead was a vehement, statistics-laden lecture. His family history—his father had suffered two heart attacks; his older brother George had died of a so-called coronary event at sixty-three—was as cautionary as they come. His LDL of 200 placed him squarely in the danger zone. His age-old three-pack-a-week smoking habit amounted to a suicide note. The doctor, having played up the pathos of all this to extract from Affenlight a promise not only to quit smoking but to cut back on red meat and alcohol, sent him away with prescriptions for Lipitor, TriCor, and Toprol-XL. Sentenced to a life of pills. He was also supposed to take a baby aspirin every day.
What proved hardest about forgoing his vices wasn’t the loss of the vices themselves but the fact that some young punk of a doctor had insisted he forgo them. Baby aspirin indeed. Apparently this was how a man got treated after fifty, even if he was the picture of health. George’s death had saddened Affenlight without frightening him much; George was eighteen years his senior, and their relationship had always been removed and avuncular. But it was true that they shared their genetic predispositions, and after a stint of somewhat juvenile resistance Affenlight resolved to comply, or mostly comply, with the doctor’s regimen, while making sure to preserve a margin for his freedoms. He took his meds and his baby Asa five days a week, with longer breaks in the summer, as if they were a job from which he required time off; he’d kicked the cigarettes except for the occasional sneaky singleton; and he thought twice before ordering a steak or a second scotch, though especially in the case of the scotch, thinking twice and declining were different things. Whether he was better off for all that was an open question, but he certainly felt fine.
On the TV, young men wearing short-sleeved black shirts and clerical collars filed down the steps of a turboprop, squinting into brilliant sunlight. WELCOME TO TEST OF FAITH, said the program’s host, his hands thrust pensively in his clam diggers’ pockets. BEFORE THESE TWELVE MEN ARE ORDAINED AS PRIESTS, THEY’LL HAVE TO GO THROUGH SOMETHING A LOT MORE TEMPTING THAN FORTY DAYS IN THE DESERT. Cut to drab yearbook photos of girls in plaid jumpers with braces, bangs. THESE YOUNG LADIES ALL WENT TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL. THEY ALL LIST “FAITH” AS AN IMPORTANT QUALITY IN A FUTURE HUSBAND. OH, AND ONE MORE THING—color-soaked flash-cut montage of tanned and sweat-beaded stomachs, cleavage, thighs—THEY’RE ALL REALLY, REALLY HOT.
Are they? Affenlight wondered. The girl-women scampered around a beach house in various states of preparative undress, wriggled into sundresses, shook out their hair. He took another fry. They possessed a veneer of hotness, certainly, a sheen of sexual health. You could call them clean, chromatic, shapely, sun-kissed, and, yes, even hot—but you could never call them lovely, not in the way that Owen was lovely.
A baby-faced novitiate sat in the interview chair and thumbed through a well-thumbed Bible. His sad Hispanic eyes found the lens. RODERIGO: WHY? I FEEL THAT THE LORD HAS SENT ME HERE. THAT HE MEANS TO TEST MY FAITH, JUST AS HE TESTED HIS SON. Cut to ice-blue kidney-shaped swimming pool. Roderigo playing water volleyball with three women: peach bikini, striped bikini, cream bikini. Roderigo’s necklace’s gold crucifix swinging toward his shoulder as he rises for a spike.
“TV’s strange,” Henry said.
Affenlight slid out another fry, wondering what else Henry found strange. Was it strange for a college president to show so much concern for a student? To run out onto a baseball field? To ride in the back of an ambulance? To watch bad TV, chain-munching french fries, waiting for news?
“How long have you known Owen?” he asked.
Henry stared up at the screen. “We’ve been roommates since freshperson year.”
Roommates! Yes, of course, Affenlight remembered now: how he’d been enlisted by Admissions and Athletics, three years ago, to convince Owen to take on a roommate. The roommate was a late admit and supposedly some kind of baseball phenom. Affenlight had rolled his eyes and complied; he didn’t like special treatment for athletes, and he didn’t see how one player could help such a bungling baseball program. Now the phenom was Henry, being courted by the St. Louis Cardinals.
Back then Affenlight knew of Owen only because he’d chaired the selection committee for the Maria Westish Award. He admired the elegance of the young man’s essays, the breadth of his reading; he championed his application, though other candidates
had higher test scores and GPAs. But that had been strictly business, or had seemed so at the time. He’d always avoided entanglements with students, and entangling with a male student had never crossed his mind.
Then, two months ago, the campus environmental group had requested a meeting. A dozen students crowded into Affenlight’s office. They lectured him on the evils of global warming. They presented a ten-page list of colleges that had pledged to become carbon neutral by 2020. They demanded energy-efficient lighting, facility upgrades, a biomass plant built out beyond the practice fields, fired by woodchips. “You’re getting me too late,” he said when they’d finished. “Where were you back when we had money?” Three-quarters of those schools would renege on their pledge; the other quarter were filthy rich. Besides, a dozen students—was that all they could muster? Where were the petitions, the rallies, the outrage? A biomass plant for a dozen students? The trustees would giggle.
While thinking these things, he’d been riveted by Owen, who leaned against the door, hands in the pockets of his baggy sweatpants, while his cohorts gesticulated and shouted. When he spoke his voice was soft, pacific, but the others fell silent; even in their most strident moments they were waiting for him to intervene.
Later that night, while still thinking about Owen, thinking about why he was thinking about Owen, he received an e-mail:
Dear Guert,
Thank you very kindly for meeting with us today. I found it edifying but more cacophonous than might have been maximally productive. I don’t wish to impose on your busy schedule, but perhaps we could schedule a smaller meeting to determine which initiatives might be fiscally possible?
Sincerely,
O.
A Dear Guert and a one-initial signature, coming from a student, would normally have annoyed Affenlight. In this case, for whatever reason, it felt more like intimacy than presumption. Since then he and Owen had met several times, had put together a plan, and a plan for achieving the plan. Owen’s group would collect the student signatures; Affenlight would rally the faculty and lobby the trustees.
Had Owen caught him staring and known what it meant? Was that why he’d written that e-mail? The eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses seemed to miss nothing. In their subsequent meetings, Owen was self-assured and patient and sometimes teasing; Affenlight was rapt and eager to please. After nearly thirty years of student-teacher interactions, he’d found himself on the wrong end of a crush. After a few weeks the word crush no longer covered it.
Affenlight drew another fry from the carton. Henry’s eyes were squeezed shut—he wasn’t asleep but seemed rather to be wincing, perhaps in memory of his errant throw. His face was ghostly pale, still dusted with infield dirt. He was in full uniform, except for his cap. His glove sat on one knee. “It’ll be okay,” Affenlight said. “He’ll be okay.”
Henry nodded, unconvinced.
“He’s a wonderful young man,” said Affenlight.
Henry’s chin squinched, as if he might cry. “Schwartzy,” he said, “do you have a ball on you?”
Schwartz, having finished his dinner, had pulled out his laptop and begun typing away, a stack of note cards at his elbow. Now he reached down into his backpack and flipped a baseball to Henry. Henry spun the ball in his right hand, slapped it into the glove. The gesture seemed to enable him to speak. “I keep seeing it over and over in my head,” he said miserably. “I’ve never made a throw like that. A throw that bad. I don’t know how it happened.”
Schwartz stopped typing and looked up, his face bathed in the cool submarine glow of his laptop screen. “Not your fault, Skrimmer.”
“I know.”
“The Buddha’s going to be okay,” Schwartz said. “He’s already okay.”
Henry nodded, unconvinced. “I know.”
“Goddamn Dunne.” Coach Cox kept his eyes on the bikini-clad Catholic girls on TV, who were testing the novitiates’ faith with back rubs. “I’m going to wring his scrawny neck.”
A door opened. “Guert Affenlight?” called a young woman in pale-blue scrubs, reading the name off her clipboard.
“Yes.” Affenlight stood and straightened his Harpooner tie.
“My name is Dr. Collins. Are you a relative of Owen Dunne?”
“Oh, no,” Affenlight said. “His family, actually, is from, um…”
“San Jose,” Henry said.
“Right,” Affenlight said quickly. “San Jose.” He’d felt such stupid pride at having the doctor call his name, as if he were the person nearest to Owen. The doctor turned to address herself to Henry:
“Your friend isn’t doing too badly, all in all. The CT showed no epidural bleeding, which is what we worry about in this kind of case. He has a severe concussion and a fractured zygomatic arch—that is, a cheekbone. His functions appear normal. The arch will require reconstructive surgery, which I imagine we’ll try to do right away, as long as we’ve got him here.” Dr. Collins, who despite the purple fatigue marks under her eyes looked no older than twenty-five, paused to pluck at the V of her scrub top, above which her skin was Irishly pink and mottled. Affenlight saw, or imagined he saw, her tired eyes settle on Henry in an interested way.
“Can I see him?” Henry asked.
Dr. Collins shook her head. “His concussion’s pretty severe, and we’re going to keep him in the ICU tonight. He seems to be suffering some short-term memory loss, which we assume will clear. Tomorrow you can see him all you like.” She patted Henry consolingly on the arm.
Affenlight’s cell phone shivered against his thigh. The number was unfamiliar, with a 312 prefix, but he knew who it would be. He made an apologetic gesture toward the doctor, who didn’t notice, and walked into the hall. “Pella. Kiddo. Where are you?”
“Chicago. I made my connection. We’re about to board, so I should be right on time.” Her voice sounded thin and crackly through the pay-phone static. “I thought maybe we could go to Bau Kitchen.”
This was Pella’s favorite restaurant in Milwaukee, the place where they’d celebrated her sixteenth birthday. If Affenlight had been zipping down I-43 toward the airport, an Italian opera tucked into the Audi’s CD player, he would have been heartened by this suggestion, which seemed like a gesture of peace. Instead he was bound to be late, and he couldn’t help wondering whether Pella had already sniffed out his neglect, or what was bound to seem like neglect, and had decided to punish him with solicitude. “That’s a wonderful idea,” he said. “But I’m afraid I’m running a little late.”
“Oh.”
Disappointment, fragility, the phrase picking up where we left off—these things and more came streaming through the phone line’s silence. “I’m at the hospital,” Affenlight said, trying to ward them off. “We’ve had an accident at the school. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Sure,” Pella said. “Whenever.”
As he hurried out, Affenlight paused long enough to buy a pack of cigarettes—Parliaments, his old standby—from the hospital gift shop. A hospital that sold cigarettes: he rolled this notion in his head, wondering whether it spelled doom or hope, while he thrust a twenty at the gray-haired woman behind the counter. He shoved the pack in his pocket and tried to leave without his change, but she summoned him back and insisted on counting out, with excruciating and perhaps remonstrative slowness, a ten, five ones, and several coins. Coach Cox drove him to his car, and he rocketed down the empty interstate, Le Nozze di Figaro blasting, windows down.
10
Pella left San Francisco with only a floppy, cane-handled wicker bag that contained whatever remained from her last trip to the beach nine months ago, a useless assortment of crap—sunglasses, tampons, gummy worms, sand—to which she’d added nothing but her wallet and a black bathing suit, designed for serious swimming.
As the plane slipped up the narrow industrial corridor that connected Chicago to Milwaukee, the darkness of Lake Michigan spread beyond the starboard windows, she was already beginning to regret not having packed a suitcase. It was the kind of
overly emphatic gesture she was famous for, at least in her own mind, and should have outgrown by now. Maybe she’d thought it would make the break with David cleaner, easier, more decisive: See, I don’t need you. I don’t need anything. Not even underwear. She hadn’t bothered to remember that there was nowhere decent to shop near the so-called city of Westish, Wisconsin.
How stupid she felt, to feel this bad, to feel her life lying around her in ruins, and yet to have no story to tell about it. Sure, in some abstract sense it was a story, or would someday become one… Yes, I was married once. I dropped out of high school, ran off with an architect who’d come to lecture at my prep school. I was a senior, had just turned nineteen. David was thirty-one. At the end of his week at Tellman Rose, I slept with him. One of us was going to sleep with him, and as the reigning alpha female I had first dibs. I had dated older guys—high school guys when I was in junior high, college guys when I was at Tellman Rose, a few starving-artist types on trips to Boston or New York—but David was something new to my experience. A man, full stop.
A bit of a weenie, perhaps—petulant, conniving, prim. But that’s a retrospective analysis. At the time I just saw the charm and cultivation, the dark twinkling eyes above the brown beard, the immense learning. And more than those things, I saw the virtue. He was a man who lived by a code. He thought classical learning was important, and so he’d become an excellent classical scholar, though it was only indirectly useful to his practice. Which was itself a model of virtue: an attempt to create classically beautiful buildings that were, you know, green. This wasn’t a man who watched TV, went to the gym, wasted time. He didn’t eat meat and he drank only to show off his knowledge of wine.