The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  Schwartz remained at the threshold while Owen stepped into the room. “Hi, guys,” Pella said, glancing up from her book—The Art of Fielding—with an actress’s aplomb.

  “Hi,” Schwartz said.

  “Good day?”

  “Not bad.”

  Emboldened by the banality of this exchange, Henry did something he regretted instantly. He spoke: “How’d we do?”

  Schwartz glanced at him, then at Pella, then back at Henry. “Buddha,” he said.

  “Yes, Michael.”

  “Forget to make your bed this morning?”

  Owen scrutinized the bed, his lips pressed tightly together, his eyebrows contracted into an expression of total concentration. “It’s possible,” he said after a long moment, nodding gently. “It’s very possible.”

  “Mm-hm.” Schwartz pointed toward the nook between Owen’s bed and the mantel. “And is that yours too?”

  There in the nook’s convergent shadows lay a rumpled piece of silk or rayon or some other satiny fabric, icy blue in color. Owen gazed at it for a long time, as if willing it to disappear, or at least to become a more ambiguous version of what it so unambiguously happened to be. “No,” he said finally, his voice soft and thoughtful, after it became clear that Schwartz intended to wait for a response. “I suppose not.”

  Pella started to speak, but Schwartz waved her off. “I’m not mad,” he said, his voice loud and cracking. “I think you’re a goddamn saint. Coming in here and laying on hands. Laying on mouth. Laying on whatever. I should have sent you sooner.”

  “You could have sent somebody else,” Pella said. “Christ, you could have done it yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means. I don’t have to be the middleman. Mike, Henry. Henry, Mike.”

  Owen stepped into the center of the room, held up a hand. “Okay,” he said in his best, most caramelly mediator’s tone. Why don’t we jus—”

  “Not you.” Pella glared at Owen. “I know about you.”

  Owen looked at her. A flicker of understanding, of consternation, crossed his face, and he subsided to the corner of the room. Henry just stood there, feeling invisible. Maybe that should have been a relief, in the wake of what he’d done, but instead it was making him angry, the way Schwartz and Pella were squared off as if he weren’t even there.

  “I’m sorry,” Pella said, her voice changed and soft.

  “For what? For fixing everything?” Schwartz shook his head. “No.” His amber eyes were unfocused, vacant, as if he’d gone blind. He turned and walked down the stairs.

  57

  Mrs. McCallister stood at the beautiful old washbasin in the hallway, the one whose coiled brass tubes, like those of a sackbut or trombone, she kept buffed to a pristine shine. Her thick gray hair was just long enough to be put up in a pencil-spit bun. She poured a capful of white vinegar into the glass coffeepot and swirled it with an elbowy motion as Pella approached. “Ah, bella Pella,” she sang, “wherefore art thou? Where art thy fella?”

  Pella had her wicker bag slung over one shoulder and her Westish-insignia backpack slung over the other. Together they contained everything she owned. “You’re in an awfully good mood,” she said. “Is my dad around?”

  Mrs. McCallister rolled her eyes toward Affenlight’s office door. “For once,” she said. “My dear, you do have an effect on him. Ever since you arrived he’s been as hyper as my nine-year-old grandson. Can’t focus on anything. I told him I’m going to start putting Ritalin in his applesauce, the way they do for Luke.”

  “I’m sure he’ll calm down eventually,” Pella said.

  “Of course. And of course it’s wonderful that you’re here. There’s nothing like family.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  Mrs. McCallister laughed merrily. “You two are lucky to have each other.”

  Her dad’s heavy wooden door was shut tight. Pella knocked once. Her dad cracked the door open and peered out, his cell phone tucked between shoulder and chin. Maybe he was talking to Owen—maybe Owen was telling him, in benignly neutral Owen-words, that his daughter was a whore.

  “Pella.” He clapped the phone shut. “There you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  It was Monday; they hadn’t spoken since Friday, here in this office, with David sitting between them. She’d spent last night on Mike’s broken porch swing, waiting for him to come home, but he never did. She knew he was at the VAC—he was always at the VAC—but there was no way to penetrate that fortress after hours. He hadn’t returned her calls, not that anyone could blame him; it was possible he’d never speak to her again.

  “I’m so sorry about dinner,” Affenlight said. “I got hung up in my meeting with Bruce Gibbs and…”

  “So you said.”

  “Well, I meant it. And I’m sorry. I wanted to be there to support you.”

  These lies made Pella feel more guilty than angry—here she was, arms folded, foot tapping, paying out rope for her dad to wrap around his neck.

  “And then all weekend when you didn’t come home I was so worried. We need to get you a new cell phone. I thought something terrible had happened.”

  “Like I went back to San Francisco.”

  “Well, yes. That was one scenario. Though I thought up more frightening ones, as I lay awake.” He did look haggard—his shoulders slumped, the lines around his eyes pronounced. “I know you’re not obliged to apprise me of your whereabouts. But when I didn’t see or hear from you for so long, my mind began to—”

  “I saw you,” Pella interrupted. “On Saturday.”

  He looked surprised. “Where?”

  “At the baseball game. You were talking to Owen.”

  Affenlight froze. “Owen…,” he said as if trying to place the name. When he began to speak he spoke fast, as if to induce Pella to forget what she’d said. “Yes, Owen’s doing much better. Wish I could say the same for Henry Skrimshander, the poor fellow. You know, I wrote a few pieces for The New Yorker when you were quite young, after my book came out. They had a fellow on staff everyone called the Gray Ghost. He’d written some wonderful pieces in the sixties—one about veterans of Korea I remember in particular—and ever since, he’d been showing up at the office every damned day, Monday to Friday, summertimes too, without ever turning in a single draft of a single article. You could hear his typewriter going great guns behind his door, and of course there were rumors about what he was working on, the opus to end all opera, but nobody ever saw a word of it. I’d come in to be put through the fact-checking wringer and he’d be wandering the hallways with this blank, stricken look on his face. He was done for and he knew it. That’s what Henry’s face reminded me of, when he walked off that field. The Gray Ghost.” There were two kinds of incompetent con men. Those who talked too much and those who didn’t talk enough. Affenlight, who was clearly of the former school, paused and shook his head. “Poor kid. I wish there was something that could be done—”

  “Already taken care of,” Pella said acridly. “Look, Dad, we need to talk. I can’t live here anymore. I’m moving out.”

  “What?” Affenlight looked baffled. “Now? Is this about David?”

  “No.” The straps of her bags were cutting into her shoulders. She moved into the room and let them slide down onto the love seat, a temporary defeat. “I just need to get out of that apartment. It’s not big enough for both of us. It’s not even big enough for you. Books piled everywhere, closets stuffed full of junk. You’re sixty years old. Do you really want to live in a dorm for the rest of your life?”

  Affenlight looked dumbly up at the ceiling, above which his apartment lay. “I like it here.”

  Pella tapped a flip-flop on the floorboards, annoyed at herself for the obliqueness of her approach. When she complained about her dad’s living arrangement, what she meant was that he should live in a way that was quote-unquote “normal” for a man his age—id est, without Owen. Still, she kept at it, unable to bring he
rself to be more direct. “Why not buy a house?”

  Affenlight smiled ruefully. “Where were you eight years ago? The school wanted to sell us the outgoing president’s place for pennies on the dollar. But I figured I’d get too lonely, rattling around in a big old house all by myself. Instead it went on the market, got snapped up by some physics professor who made a killing on tech stocks in the nineties. Like I should have done.”

  “You’ve done all right.”

  “I’ve done all right,” Affenlight agreed.

  “Anyway,” Pella said. “I’m not a kid anymore and we’re not a married couple. I think things will go more smoothly if we each have our own place. Okay?”

  Affenlight nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  “Don’t look so glum,” she said. “Now you can have guests stay over.”

  Affenlight chuckled, or tried to. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like whom?”

  It was the classic criminal error, that like whom—the longing to get caught, to take credit for the crime. Pella steeled herself. “Like Owen.”

  A profound, interstellar kind of silence filled the office. Eventually Affenlight said, “I was planning to tell you.”

  “When, on your deathbed?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or a little after that.”

  Pella felt a return of that same urge she’d felt at the baseball diamond—the urge to protect her father from onrushing harm. He was so naive, so boyish. She remembered how he looked while talking to Owen by the fence: Like the thousand other people in the park didn’t exist. Like if they existed, they couldn’t see how he felt about Owen. Like if they could see how he felt about Owen, they’d condone or forgive him. But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right—that was the last thing they forgave you for.

  “How long has this been going on?” she asked.

  “Not long.”

  “Not long with Owen, or”—she didn’t know how to put it—“in general?”

  Affenlight lifted his eyes from the floor. “There is no in general,” he said. “Just Owen.”

  He wasn’t old but he looked it now, his arms limp at his sides, deep lines of worry scored into his forehead beneath his mussed gray-silver hair, his expression sad and beseeching. Why was the younger person always the prize, the older person always the striver? Ever since adolescence Pella had been gathering experience in the role of the younger person, the clung-to one, the beloved. That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn’t happened yet. But the old kept trying.

  By the old she meant everyone who loved something younger—her dad but also David, and even the twentysomething guys she’d hooked up with in high school. Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes. You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo. “He’s a kid,” she said. “He’s younger than I am.”

  Affenlight nodded. “I know.”

  “What if somebody finds out? Then what happens to us?” The us was a touch melodramatic.

  “I don’t know,” said Affenlight.

  “But you’re in love with him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, great,” Pella said. “Amor vincit omnia.” What she was thinking was even crueler: He’s going to break your heart.

  She hoisted her bags and moved toward her dad. For the happiest and splittest of seconds Affenlight thought she planned to embrace him, but her hands were wrapped tightly around the straps of her bags, and in fact he was simply blocking her way. He shifted aside, leaving several inches of troubled air between them as his daughter ducked her beautiful port-colored head and slid past him and down the hallway and out of sight.

  58

  If you pretended not to know Coach Cox and you walked into his empty office, sat in the only visitor’s chair, and glanced around apprehensively, you’d never guess that he’d been coaching Westish Baseball for thirteen years. He might as well have moved in yesterday. The door was never locked. The walls were a plain industrial white, the metal schoolteacher’s desk a lackluster military green. The main signs of life were a taped-up baseball schedule and a wastebasket overflowing with pinched Diet Coke cans. A half-sized fridge, its top littered with fast-food napkins and mustard packets, completed the furniture. The narrow window didn’t overlook the lake.

  The desk’s glass-topped surface held only a phone and a small framed photograph of Coach Cox’s two children. They were sitting in a kiddie pool full of raked-up leaves, the girl with her arm around the boy in that protective way of older siblings, mugging for the camera. Henry picked it up for a closer look. Both kids wore earth-toned autumn jackets and had messy midlength hair. The boy looked about four and the girl seven, but the picture had been there as long as Henry could remember, its inks had faded, and they were no doubt much older now—maybe older than he was. Strange how little Coach Cox talked about his family; strange how little you wound up knowing about the people around you. Henry thought maybe the daughter’s name was Kelly, but maybe her face just reminded him of some Kelly he’d gone to school with. Kelly and Peter, he thought aimlessly, replacing the photo on the desk in its original position, so that it faced Coach Cox’s chair and not his own. Peter and Kelly.

  Coach Cox came into the room, took a Diet Coke from the fridge, and plunked down in his pleather desk chair. The hinges screeched; they were so loose his whole body tipped back like he was about to get some dentistry done.

  “Coach Cox,” Henry said, “before you say anything, I want to apologize for what I did yesterday. I abandoned the team. It was a terrible thing to do. I’m really sorry.”

  The Harpooners had won both of Sunday’s games against Coshwale, the first by the score of 2 to 1, the second, 15 to 0. The second game was halted after four innings in accordance with the UMSCAC’s mercy rule, which was how Owen and Schwartz made it back to campus so early. The Harpooners were conference champs for the first time in their 104-year history of playing baseball. The regional tournament was days away.

  Coach Cox leaned back in his chair even more, so that he was almost lying down, and stroked his mustache. “You realize I’m going to have to suspend you, Skrim. I don’t especially want to, but there’s no way around it. Team rules. You missed two games, so two more should be a reasonable punishment. With luck we’ll win one of them. Consider it a chance to get your bearings.”

  “Actually,” Henry said, “I was planning on something longer.”

  Coach Cox frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean… I’d like to resign from the team.”

  Coach Cox’s frown deepened into something else. He rocked forward to a seated position, planted his feet on the ground, glared into Henry’s eyes. “I’d like to be twenty years old and have your kind of talent,” he said. “But we can’t always get what we want. Permission denied.”

  “But Coach, you don’t understand. I’m quitting the team.”

  “You’re not quitting anything. In fact, you’re unsuspended, effective immediately. Practice starts in fifteen minutes. Go get dressed.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Bullshit you can’t. And wear old clothes. I don’t care how fit you are. I’m going to run you until you puke.”

  “Coach,” Henry said quietly, “I’m through.”

  Something in his voice convinced Coach Cox he was serious. The older man resumed stroking his mustache and eventually said:

  “Have you talked to Mike about this?”

  For a split second Henry thought that Coach Cox had heard what had happened with Pella. His throat seized tight, even as he realized the question meant something else. What Coach Cox was driving at was that Schwartzy would n
ever let him quit. “No,” he admitted. “I haven’t.”

  “Well, let’s get his input on this.” Coach Cox tipped his head back and drained his Diet Coke decisively. “Come on.”

  They walked out to the elevator together. Henry could have refused to go down to the locker room—could have pressed the first-floor button and walked through the VAC’s front doors and never come back. But something wouldn’t let him. Maybe he was too used to obeying Coach Cox’s commands, or maybe there was a part of him that wanted to go down there. Last night, Mike had just turned his back and walked down the stairs.

  “Schwartzy,” barked Coach Cox. “Can we see you for a minute?”

  Schwartz, who was sitting in front of his locker with a bag of ice on either thigh, glanced up somberly at the word we, took one earphone out of his ear. “What is it?”

  The other Harpooners in the vicinity—Rick, Starblind, Boddington, Izzy, Phlox—stared into their own empty lockers, pretending they hadn’t noticed Henry come in. And they don’t know the half of it, Henry thought.

  “Out in the hallway.” Coach Cox jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m icing,” Schwartz said. “What is it?”

  You could tell by his quick snort of breath that Coach Cox was about to start yelling, something he rarely did. Henry cut him off. “Here’s fine.” He steeled himself and took a step toward Schwartz. “I’m sorry about what happened, Mike. I let you down, I let everybody down. I made a mistake and I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry…” Technically he was apologizing for ditching the team yesterday, which was its own unpardonable sin, but of course it didn’t feel like that. “Coach Cox wanted me to let you know that I’ve decided to quit the team.”

  Schwartz was staring dead into his locker, his hairy shoulders slumped, those huge bags of ice on his knees. He reached inside for a stick of deodorant, pulled off the cap with a suctioning pop, and lifted one arm above his head. “Izzy’s our shortstop,” he said. “You can’t even throw.”