The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

  Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry’s superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can’t be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.

  At the far left of the shelf of DVDs was a single unlabeled videocassette. Schwartz slid it out with a finger and popped it into the ancient VCR.

  “What’s this?” Henry asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Schwartz watched this tape alone sometimes, late at night, the way he reread certain passages of Aurelius. It restored some nameless element of his personality that threatened to slip away if he didn’t stay vigilant.

  The camera, that day, had been positioned on a tripod behind home plate. A thin stripe of chain-link backstop cut at an angle across the frame. The sun glared white against the lens, bleaching out one side, so that when Henry ranged to the camera’s right his white undershirt and finally his entire scrawny body dissolved in a ghostly burst of light.

  Henry watched himself field a few grounders and whip them to first. “Is this from Peoria?”

  Schwartz nodded.

  “Weird. Where’d you get it?”

  “My Legion team. We taped all our games.” After Henry finished fielding on that scorching afternoon, Schwartz had checked the camera and found its red light still lit. He wanted a record of what he’d seen—proof to other people, and especially to himself, that he hadn’t exaggerated Henry’s talent or hallucinated him altogether. So he commandeered the tape, watched it several times, mailed a copy to Coach Cox. It had served, more or less, as Henry’s Westish application.

  Henry didn’t know the tape existed. Schwartz couldn’t quite say why he’d kept it to himself for the past three years—as if there were a part of Henry that belonged more to him than it did to Henry. That he didn’t want to share, not even with Henry.

  “Weird,” Henry said again. “Look how skinny I was. Somebody give that kid some SuperBoost.”

  “Just watch.”

  Henry tossed a baseball from hand to hand, gazed at the screen. “What am I watching for?”

  “Just watch, Skrim.”

  “I thought maybe you’d noticed something.”

  “Maybe you’ll notice something,” Schwartz snapped. “If you shut up and watch.”

  Henry looked hurt. He stopped tossing the baseball, stared at the screen.

  “Sorry,” Schwartz muttered. He was doing so unforgivably little to help his friend. Hitting extra grounders, repeating stupid bromides like relax and let it fly—it amounted to moral support, nothing more. Once Henry stepped out on the field, he was totally alone.

  There was that aloneness on the screen: that implacable, solitary blankness on Henry’s sweat-streaked face as he backhanded a ball and fired it into the glove of his pudgy first baseman. Not that Henry withdrew from his teammates; in fact, he was more animated on the diamond than anywhere else. But no matter how much he chattered or cheered or bounced around, there was always something frighteningly aloof in his eyes, like a soloist so at one with the music he can’t be reached. You can’t follow me here, those mild blue eyes seemed to say. You’ll never know what this is like.

  These days, when Henry walked onto the diamond, those eyes were saying the same thing, but with a rising undercurrent of terror. You’ll never know what this is like. Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse—these were melee sports. You could make yourself useful by hustling and scrapping more than the other guy. You could redeem yourself through sheer desire.

  But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric—not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn’t storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

  It took ten minutes to watch the tape straight through. Schwartz rewound it to the beginning, and they watched it in slow motion. Then regular speed again. Then slo-mo one more time. Sudden spring rain drummed against the flat metal roof of the VAC. The kid on the screen fielded ball after ball, intent and tireless, engulfed in his half-bored rapture.

  “Can we go now?” Henry’s foot tapped nervously on the carpet. “I’m hungry.” He wasn’t, really; he had very little appetite these days, but he wanted to get out of there. It was weird, even creepy, how intensely Schwartz was focused on the video—as if he wanted to will that skinny, thoughtless kid back into being. As if Henry were dead instead of sitting right there. I’m right here, he thought.

  “One more time,” Schwartz said. “Just once more.” They watched it again, and still Schwartz’s finger hovered over the rewind button. To Schwartz the kid on the screen seemed like a cipher, a sphinx, a silent courier from another time. You’ll never know what this is like. But Schwartz had been trying for years, and he kept trying now. If he could crawl inside that empty head, crack open the oracle of the kid’s blank face—expressionless, expresses God—maybe then he’d know what he should do.

  Henry headed to lunch, Schwartz to Glendinning Hall with his anticlimactic stack of binders. When he got home he went through three razors shaving off his thesis beard.

  37

  Here,” Hero had said during the breakfast shift, “I fix.”

  Pella waved him off. “Forget it. It’s fine.” Really her finger didn’t feel too bad; it was stiff and purplish but not overly painful from moment to moment. Every once in a while she’d jam it on a pot or plate or the beveled lip of the sink, and a yelp of pain would escape her. Chef Spirodocus had told her she could go home, but she didn’t want to go home—she wanted to sort silverware into bins, blast bacon fat from shallow pans. After breakfast ended she wanted to restock the so-called salad bar with ketchup and syrup and blueberry yogurt, skim the yellow crust off the mayonnaise, replenish the ice that underlay the stainless-steel tins. Today was Friday, her double-shift day. She wanted to work. She didn’t want to think about last night with Mike or tonight with David. She wanted to be here among the rolling Portuguese and the tinny salsa that wailed from somebody’s radio, the mingling roars of the trash compactor and the power washer, water everywhere, the added roar of Chef Spirodocus when he got upset. She wanted to keep moving, to stay right here in the heart of the noise. She had built up a tiny bit of momentum in her life, going to lectures and swimming and working, checking out books from the library, falling asleep when her head hit the pillow. She’d caught herself thinking that spending four years at Westish might not be the worst thing in the world. But she could also sense how tenuous this progress was, how easy it would be to slow down and shut down and wind up back where she started, in bed all day but unable to sleep, terrified by the day and doubly terrified by the night, never picking up the phone, comforted only by th
e thought of never needing comfort again.

  “Here.” Hero beckoned her impatiently. With a cleaver he lopped off a length of white woven first-aid tape, wound it around her injured and ring fingers so the two were bound firmly together. “No jams.”

  “Hmph,” said Pella, impressed. She looked tough, like a football player. After a few hours of steam and soapy hot water the tape’s glue dissolved and Hero cut another length. She made it through both of her shifts without jamming her finger again. Then, the lunch dishes done, her uniform covered in food slop and dishwasher scum, her skin by a sheen of sticky gold grease, she sank down at a round faux-wood table in the empty dining hall with a fresh bag of ice for her finger. The afternoon light through the tall mullioned windows was itself deepening to a greasy gold. David would be arriving soon.

  Between shifts Chef Spirodocus had thrust a stiff envelope into her hand. Now she pulled it from her pocket, feeling oddly nervous as she folded and tore the perforated edges. And there it was—an honest-to-God paycheck, made out to Pella Therese Affenlight. The government had taken out taxes: Social Security, Medicare, state, federal. They added up to $49.83. Her first direct contribution to trash collection and public schooling, the maintenance of highways and libraries, the killing of people in war.

  She kept looking at the check, though there wasn’t much to see. She and David used to spend more on dinner. But it wasn’t nothing, especially here in the middle of nowhere, especially when your meals and rent were free. And it was hers. She wouldn’t have to ask her father for money anymore. She could buy some underwear to replace what she’d left at Mike’s.

  She needed to shower and change, David showed up early for everything, but instead she poured herself a Sprite from the drink dispenser and sat back down to admire the check some more. She still planned to sell her ring, but this was something better. Like Ishmael said: Being paid—what will compare with it! It was embarrassing, how proud of herself she felt. The check proved that she’d been alive these weeks, that she’d accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.

  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.”

  38

  Owen 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.