The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  Henry nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Been a rough week. But you can’t get down.”

  “I know.”

  “Just relax out there. Scouts or no scouts. Let ’em sit there, type on their fancy laptops, talk on their fancy phones. Relax and play your game.”

  “Right,” Henry said. “I will.”

  “I know you will.” Coach Cox gave him an awkward pat on the back. “We’re with you, Skrim.”

  By the time Henry returned to the locker room, banter had given way to preparatory solemnity. Each Harpooner sat half or mostly uniformed in front of his locker, nodding along with his iPod’s pregame playlist. Schwartz used an ancient cassette-tape Walkman; only Henry didn’t listen to music at all. Izzy twisted his wristbands so the Nike insignia were aligned just so. Sooty Kim buttoned the bottom two buttons of his jersey, unbuttoned one, buttoned two more, unbuttoned one. Detmold Jensen worked at his glove’s leather with tiny pinking shears, snipping off a superfluous centimeter of lacing. Henry went to the bathroom, which was still thick with the ordurous odor of Rick O’Shea, and urinated a long clear stream. He soaped his arms and hands with industrial candy-pink liquid soap, rinsed clean.

  His stomach was rumbling queerly. It always clamped down before a game, not from nervousness exactly—it was more like self-containment, a narrowness of purpose that made the idea of putting anything into his body seem bizarre. Today, though, something was amiss. He could taste bile in the back of his throat. He went into a stall, locked the door, knelt down with his face to the bowl. He’d heard of major leaguers who threw up because of nerves. It wasn’t necessarily a sign of weakness or any kind of big deal. Still, he hoped no one could hear him. He hiccuped once, twice, dryly. He wasn’t sure how to hasten the process along. He stuck his index finger into his mouth and rooted around with it, rubbed his tongue, prodded the place where his tongue met his palate. His finger tasted like the pink soap, whose color suggested sweetness but which was warm and horrid. The taste made his stomach churn worse. Finally his finger found the right spot. His gut lurched, he gagged, and his lunch cascaded into the bowl in one long spilling fall. Slumped there on the floor, he felt better, almost sleepy. A happy surge of chemicals hit his brain.

  He headed back to the locker room. He was behind schedule now, but he took care not to rush his own ritual preparations, the double-and triple-checking of jockstrap, cup, sliding shorts, pants, Cards T-shirt, jersey, sanitary socks, stirrups, belt, batting gloves, glove, and cap. He tested each part of his body for looseness: wrists, fingers, toes, all the anonymous muscles that surrounded his chest cavity and made up his neck and face. He untied his laces and retied them to the ideal tightness, so that the tops of his feet were pressured but not pinched. He followed his teammates outside.

  “They’re baaaa-aaack,” Izzy said, meaning the scouts. Supereconomy rental cars stood in a row in the parking lot, their bright paint jobs dulled by the closet-gray day. Mixed in among them were a few bald-tired sedans, their foot wells littered with fast-food bags and Styrofoam cups. These were the two kinds of scouts: scouts who rented, and scouts who owned.

  During warm-ups Henry’s arm felt light and pliant, lively as a bird—but it didn’t matter how you felt during warm-ups. You had to perform when the pressure was on. He hit a double in the first and a long, long home run in the third. But when an easy grounder came his way he hesitated, threw low and wide of first so that Rick had to scoop it out of the dirt. Three innings later, he did it again, only this time Rick couldn’t make the scoop. Another error, his fifth in a week; they were piling up like bodies in a horror movie.

  After the game, the sports editor of the Westish Bugler, Sarah X. Pessel, approached him with her tape recorder. “Hey Henry,” she said. “Tough game.”

  “We won.”

  “Right, but personally.”

  “I had four hits.”

  “Right, but defensively. It seems like you’ve been struggling. Couple more shaky throws today.”

  “We’re fifteen and two,” Henry said. “That’s the best start in school history. We just have to keep improving.”

  “So you’re not worried about the way you’ve been throwing the ball?”

  “Fifteen and two,” he repeated. “That’s what counts.”

  “What about your personal future? Doesn’t that count too? With the draft just eight weeks away?”

  “As long as the team’s winning, I’m happy.” Whenever Henry set some kind of record, or was named somebody’s Player of the Week or Month, Sarah would ask him for a comment, and he would tell her, with the practiced blandness of an all-star, that he’d gladly forgo the plaques and stats and trophies, would even be happy to ride the bench, if it meant that the Harpooners, after more than a hundred years of trying, would finally win a conference title. Until today, he’d always been certain he meant it.

  “Do you know who Steve Blass is?” Sarah asked.

  “Never heard of him,” Henry lied. Steve Blass was an all-star pitcher for the Pirates in the early ’70s. In the spring of 1973 he suddenly, inexplicably, became unable to throw the ball over the plate. He struggled for two years to regain his control and then, defeated, retired.

  “What about Mackey Sasser?”

  “Never heard of him.” Sasser was a catcher for the Mets who’d developed a paralyzing fear of tossing the ball back to the pitcher. He would double-, triple-, quadruple-, quintuple-pump, unable to believe it was okay to let go. Opposing fans would loudly, gleefully count the number of pumps. Opposing players would run around the bases. Total humiliation. When it happened to Sasser, they said he had Steve Blass Disease.

  “Steve Sax? Chuck Knoblauch? Mark Wohlers? Rick Ankiel?”

  If Sarah X. Pessel hadn’t been a girl, Henry might have socked her in the face. Her middle name probably didn’t even start with X; she probably just liked the way it looked in her byline. “None of those guys were shortstops,” he said.

  “Don’t get mad at me, Henry. I’m just doing my job.”

  “You’re in college, Sarah. You work for the Bugler. You don’t get paid for this.”

  Sarah looked pointedly out at the field, back at Henry. “Neither do you.”

  30

  Like many Midwesterners, Mrs. McCallister started the workday early. By four fifteen she’d put in an hour of overtime and headed home to her half-acre garden and a multicourse dinner cooked by Mr. McCallister, whose fall from a tree stand three deer seasons ago had smashed his left hip and forced him to retire. Now he grew vegetables in the McCallisters’ garden, cooked them into sauce for his homemade pasta. Often Mrs. McCallister would slide a plate onto Affenlight’s desk at noontime; even reheated in the office microwave, it always tasted exquisite.

  It became Owen’s habit to drop by Affenlight’s office around four thirty, post–Mrs. McCallister, on days when the Harpooners didn’t have a home game; because of his injuries he wasn’t yet traveling or practicing with the team. Owen would enter without a word, shut the door behind him, and slide out from under his messenger bag, the strap of which held a rainbow pin, a pink-triangle pin, a black-and-white taijitu pin, and pins that read CARBON NEUTRALITY NOW, PAY A LIVING WAGE, and WESTISH BASEBALL. Then he lay down on the love seat, which wasn’t quite long enough to lie down on and too stiff to be comfortable anyway, but Owen didn’t seem to mind. He slipped off his shoes, crossed his slender ankles on the love seat’s far arm, and closed his eyes, fingers interlaced atop the soft swell of his childlike belly. The only sign of wakefulness would be the slow, thoughtful tap of his thumb pads against each other. He wanted Affenlight to read to him.

  This was what Affenlight wanted too. The original pretense for these sessions was that the aftereffects of Owen’s concussion made it hard for him to focus. Now, two weeks removed from Owen’s injury, Affenlight wasn’t sure whether this was still the case—often Owen would turn his head and follow along on the page anyway—but he didn’t want to break the spell by asking. He rose from his desk chair, which
was too antique and massive to move around, and shifted to one of the spindle-backed Westish-insignia visitors’ chairs, which he drew up close to the love seat. Owen extracted his homework from his bag and handed it to Affenlight—on this particular day, the last two acts of The Cherry Orchard and a turgid dramaturgical essay from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Affenlight began to read.

  “Don’t you think this is strange?” Owen murmured sometime later, as Affenlight turned a page.

  “What?”

  Owen rubbed his belly, eyes still serenely closed. “You know. The way we do this every afternoon. I lie here, and you read to me, and we talk.”

  “I’m sure it’s very unusual,” Affenlight agreed. “I’ve certainly never done anything like it.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Owen swung up to a sitting position, opened his eyes, and fixed them on Affenlight. “What I mean is… it’s almost as if you didn’t like me.”

  “I do.” Affenlight reached out and brushed his fingertips against the little knob of bone at the base of Owen’s skull, but the gesture seemed insufficient, if not utterly false. He felt schoolboyish, intimidated. Since that first tentative moment on the moonlit linoleum, they had not touched.

  “I don’t know if you know what you’re doing.”

  Part of Affenlight felt peeved at Owen for interrupting or dismissing his bliss. Because it was bliss, he felt, to be here with Owen and to read to him, even when he was reading dry-as-dust sentences from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Of all the activities two people could do together in private, Affenlight had a special fondness for reading aloud. Maybe this was part of his instinct for solitude and self-enclosure; a way to reveal himself while hiding behind someone else’s words. Maybe he should have gone into acting. He’d often thought that Pella would make an excellent actress.

  Owen slid closer to him and leaned toward him and took his face in two hands and kissed him, a proper and unambiguous kiss but also a soft and careful one, as he tilted the damaged part of his face away. Affenlight realized in what was as close to an epiphanic flash as he’d ever dared to come that there were many ways of living that had never been named or tried. The chapel bells tolled a long slow song of six o’clock. His tongue, Owen’s tongue, two tongues. At least he wasn’t quite so old that he didn’t have lips to kiss. He thought of Whitman’s adhesion: the liking of like for like. Although he and Owen were not much alike and in a way kissing Owen was much like kissing a woman, you could close your eyes and find the same softness, same brush of noses, same thick wetness of the inner walls of cheeks. Except with women Affenlight leaned forward, and now he leaned back.

  Owen slipped out of his sweater, which was seafoam green, soft to the touch, with a hole at one elbow. Affenlight traced his fingertips up and down Owen’s bare arm below his T-shirt. The two of them kissed again, kept kissing, and it was, still, surprisingly like what happened between a man and a woman—although, thought Affenlight, perhaps I’m the only person in the world naive enough to be surprised by this—and then Owen cupped one hand over the bulge that had appeared in the inseam of Affenlight’s herringbone slacks. Affenlight flinched. Owen stopped and looked at him. “Are you okay?”

  Was he okay? He was nervous, certainly. Even frightened. If Owen were a girl, Affenlight would have been worried about the politics, the ethics, the power relations of the situation—that was largely why it had never happened with a girl—but here there was too much else to worry about, and it was clear where the power lay: with Owen. Affenlight felt dazed, vertiginous. But he’d come this far, and there seemed no reason to stop right here. He nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Owen undid the slacks’ clasp and unzipped the zipper, dainty silver tooth by dainty silver tooth, with a guileful smile on his face, a very complex smile, mischievous and beatific and maybe a tiny bit malicious, a beautiful smooth-skinned person—did he ever even shave?—who would not necessarily grow old but would certainly someday die. He used his hands to work out the intricacies of slacks and undershorts and brought Affenlight out into the open—Affenlight, strange synecdoche!—and bent and kissed him on the tip of the penis in a womanly way. And kissed for a few more seconds before looking up. “I guess I can’t,” he said, lifting his head, the smile categorizable now, rueful and tender and a little wry. He tapped a finger against his injured jaw. “I can barely open my mouth.”

  “That’s okay.” Affenlight said, and meant it, though his voice sounded strange and hoarse. He picked Owen’s sweater off the couch and began to fold it, matching sleeve to sleeve. He pinched the medial crease and draped the sweater over his forearm, all the while feeling a swell of delight at the fastidiousness of this delay, so different from the frenzied garment-rending of cinematic lovers. He’d long ago learned that he found a twinge of erotic joy in the act of buttoning a girlfriend’s jacket, zipping her sweater to the chin, bundling her up against the northern cold of Westish, New Haven, Cambridge, Westish again. After folding the sweater neatly he placed it on the warped wooden floorboards between Owen’s two-toned shoes, which looked like the saddle shoes of old, and, with the limberness of a man no older than forty, the soundly thrumming heart of seventeen, slid down from his chair and knelt upon it, a hand on each of Owen’s knees. Kneeling, whatever the circumstances, could hardly fail to remind him, however ironically, of childhood bedside prayer, the old Latin Mass—he’d hardly been since Vatican II—and, given the hour, vespers; ad cereum benedicendum, as they used to say.

  31

  Henry and Starblind stood facing each other, pounding out curls with heavy dumbbells in perfect rhythm, Henry’s right arm moving with Starblind’s left, Starblind’s right with Henry’s left, as if each was gazing into a mirror. Starblind’s eyes flicked down to check out Henry’s blood-gorged biceps as if they were his own; Henry reflexively did the same.

  Little Loondorf groaned and squirmed on the flat bench. Izzy hovered over him, shouting, “Come on, Phil! Take the pain, vendejo. The pain is like gas!”

  “The pain is like a gas,” counseled Schwartz. He supervised from a metal folding chair, a newspaper in his lap and towel-wrapped ice bags on both knees. “It expands to fill up whatever space you give it. So we shouldn’t fear pain. A lot of it doesn’t hurt much more, or take up more psychic space, than a little bit. Viktor Frankl.”

  “Come on, vendejo! The pain is like a gas!”

  Henry and Starblind reached their hundredth curl. The dumbbells dropped from their weakened grasps and bounced off the rubberized floor. “Let’s go down to the track,” Henry said.

  Starblind ran a sweat-slick hand through his hair. “Now? You’re nuts.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Starblind sighed that sigh of his—a long, exasperated, put-upon sigh, as if other humans had been designed especially to annoy him. As if he hadn’t dumped Anna Veeli, second-hottest girl in the school, to go out with the hottest, Cicely Krum. They headed for the door.

  The track was empty. The moon hung early in the violet sky. “Hundreds,” said Henry.

  “How many?”

  “Twenty.”

  “That’s crazy. I’ve got to pitch this weekend.”

  “Fine. Twenty-five.”

  “Whatever’s up your ass,” Starblind said, “leave it there.”

  They took off through the dusk. Starblind won the first one easily. He had sprinter’s speed, an extra gear to kick it into; the track coach was always begging him to show up, untrained, for important meets. They walked to the next set of lines on the track, took off again.

  “Two–zip,” Starblind said.

  Henry nodded. He had never beaten Starblind in any of their many races, whether up the stadium steps or here on the track or side by side on adjacent treadmills in the dead of winter, their sneakers slapping faster and faster against the fraying woven rubber of the treadmill belts as the motors creaked and moaned, their shaky index fingers jabbing the buttons that added tenths of miles per hour, sweat flyi
ng around the room like water off wet dogs.

  Starblind won the next two, each time opening a wide gap in the final fifteen meters. “How do my shoe bottoms look?” he asked. “Clean?”

  Henry grunted. True, he’d never beaten Starblind—but they hadn’t had a full-on race in a long time. He was fitter than he’d ever been. “That’s four,” he said.

  Starblind won the fifth and the sixth and the seventh. Henry hung on his shoulder like a bad angel. As they walked toward the starting line for race number eight, Starblind was gasping for air, his rib cage heaving up and down. Henry kept his inhalations quiet and shallow: hide your weakness, hold your advantage. If he wanted to beat Starblind it wouldn’t be by speed. He would have to break his will.

  He took a lead in the eighth, but Starblind came roaring past. Motherfucker, Henry thought. He wanted to grab Starblind by the collar of his sleek silver shirt and jerk him back, fling him down on the track, stomp on his chest. He had no special reason to be pissed at Starblind, but he wanted to hurt, wanted to hurt somebody, and Starblind was right here, asking for it.

  “How many is that?” Starblind asked, as if he didn’t know.

  “Eight.”

  “Already?”

  They flew side by side down the track, legs flailing like a ragged four-legged beast. “Tie,” Henry said firmly.

  “What? Fine. Tie.” You had to hand it to Starblind—he trained hard, he was in great shape. But now he was leaning forward, hands on knees, gasping for air. Trying to buy a little time before the next sprint. He was dead meat.

  Henry won the next one. And the five after that. His lungs rose high in his throat. His legs shook. They’d never run this many sprints at this pace, especially not midseason. He put his hands on his hips and tipped back his chin. His dizziness made the dusk-dark clouds wheel madly through the sky. Come on, he thought. Hang on.