The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  “I know. That’s why I’m quitting.”

  Schwartz switched to the other armpit. “That’s interesting,” he said. “I thought it was because you nailed my girlfriend.”

  “I nail all your girlfriends!” Henry yelled. It made no sense, but he yelled it anyway, fists balled, feeling like he might fall on Schwartz and start swinging. “Who the fuck cares?!”

  Schwartz, with infinite slowness, pulled a Westish Baseball T-shirt from his locker, poked his head through the hole, and unfurled it over his massive torso. “Maybe nobody,” he said, his eyes still fixed on his locker’s innards. “Rick, you care if Skrimshander nails my girlfriend?”

  Rick, whose locker was adjacent to Schwartz’s, looked up cautiously, his pink face grim. “I guess not,” he said.

  “Starblind, how about you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Izzy?”

  Silence.

  “Izzy?”

  “No, Abuelo.”

  Schwartz went around the room, name by name. Each guy murmured in turn that no, he didn’t care if Henry nailed Schwartz’s girlfriend. At least Owen wasn’t there. Henry didn’t know who to feel worst for, but he knew who to blame—himself.

  “Well, that’s fine,” Schwartz said. “Let’s go practice.” He removed the Ziploc bags from his knees, dumped the ice onto the circular grated drain between the benches, and, as guys pressed against their lockers to avoid his bulk, rumbled creakily, bowleggedly, out of the locker room.

  “This is great,” Coach Cox said, his voice growing from a mutter to a drill-sergeant shout. “This is goddamned outstanding. Everybody to the football stadium now! You’re all gonna run till you puke!” He looked at Henry. “You coming?”

  “No,” Henry said.

  “You really want to do this, Skrim? You really want to goddamn do this?”

  Henry nodded. “I do.”

  59

  Affenlight sat in the Audi, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette, looking out across quiet Main Street at the Bremens’ place, its expansive porch, its uneven cupolas, its manicured lawn sliding from green to gray in the thickening twilight. After Pella left he’d remembered that Professor Bremen was retiring from the Physics Department this spring; was moving to New Mexico to play golf, walk around in the desert with his wife, teach for kicks at an online university. Bremen was a few years younger than Affenlight, but he’d made a killing.

  Sure enough, there it was on the lawn, a FOR SALE sign.

  Pella had found a room for the remainder of the semester, with some Westish girls off campus. She’d left Affenlight a message to this effect, on the apartment’s voice mail when she knew he’d be in his office. There was a landline there, but she hoped he wouldn’t call it soon. She wanted some time alone.

  Affenlight stubbed out his cigarette in the Audi’s ashtray, stared at the Bremens’ facade. It was a big white whale of a house, fit for a president, but there was something appealingly quirky about it as well, a kind of ad hoc austerity. Even when it seemed a foregone conclusion that he’d stay at Harvard forever, he’d never come anywhere near buying a place. Rented halves of Cambridge houses had always seemed permanence enough.

  He’d intended only to drive by, to see whether there would indeed be a sign on the lawn, but now he found himself strolling up the front walk to the porch steps. The silhouette of Sandy Bremen, Tom’s wife, appeared behind the front door before he could ring the bell.

  “Why, Guert,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.” A large dog shot out of the small gap she’d made by beginning to open the door, reared up to paw at Affenlight’s chest. “I was just about to take Contango for a walk.” She grabbed the dog by the collar and yanked him backward. “Sorry. He’s awfully rambunctious today.”

  “Quite all right.” Affenlight offered the dog his hand to sniff. He was a beautiful animal, old and noble, a sugar-furred husky with one blue eye.

  “Tom’s out for a run,” Sandy said. “Is it something urgent?”

  “No, no. Not urgent at all. You see, actually… I stopped by because I was curious about the house.”

  “Ah-ha.” Sandy smiled in the slightly flirty but mostly proprietary way that the faculty wives, at least the more secure ones, liked to smile at Affenlight. She was a seal-sleek woman in a monochrome tracksuit and fresh white sneakers. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to spend a few decades with a woman like that—a woman who turned family life into a smooth-running corporate entity, whose genius was to take a sizable income and make it seem infinite, who knew how to convert money into pleasure and pleasantry. “You’re finally thinking of taking the plunge?”

  Affenlight shrugged. “I saw the sign,” he said. “It made me a bit curious.”

  “Well, come on in. I’ll give you the grand tour. Contango, buddy, I’m sorry—false alarm on that stroll of ours.” She shooed the dog through the door, planted a hand in the small of Affenlight’s back to do the same to him. “Is beer okay? I can’t join you because I’m halfway through a juice cleanse, faddish girl that I am, but I’m sure Tom will partake when he gets back. He’s been logging a lot of miles these days.”

  Affenlight, clutching the sweaty neck of his Heineken, dutifully trailed Sandy throughout the first floor and then the second as she explicated the virtues of California Closets, natural light, their recently remodeled kitchen. The Bremens’ two children were both graduated from college and gone, their bedrooms converted into spruced-up, stripped-down pieds-à-terre for holiday and summertime visits. “Lucy’s wedding is in October,” Sandy said as they stood on the threshold of the more extravagantly pillowed of the two rooms. “Old time she is a flyin’.” She turned to lead Affenlight back down the stairs. “As you can see, the place is big but not that big. Three bedrooms, Tom’s office, one bath up, one down. It’s really a very functional house, because it’s so old—it’s more on the model of the farmhouse than the mansion. Not outlandish for one person.” She gave Affenlight that sly look again. “You are still living alone, aren’t you, Guert?”

  “More or less.”

  “Ah, the ambiguities! Meaning what?”

  They sat at the kitchen table. Affenlight accepted the second beer Sandy handed him, reached down to ruffle the dog’s belly. Pella had begged for a dog throughout girlhood, but they’d never quite gotten around to it. “My daughter’s considering enrolling at Westish,” he said, knocking a knuckle softly against the wooden table so as not to jinx that prospect. “We wouldn’t necessarily be living together, but…”

  “Ah, but she’d need her own room, certainly. Pella, is it? Such a lovely name. But I thought she was at Yale? Or even finished by now?”

  Affenlight had for years brought a deliberate vagueness regarding Pella’s whereabouts to cocktail parties. It felt like a betrayal now. “Yale didn’t entirely pan out,” he said.

  Sandy nodded sagely. “Few things do,” she said, her beaming, impossibly hale face suggesting just the opposite. “So what else can I tell you?”

  Affenlight gazed through the patio door at the groomed and moonlit backyard, the lake beyond. It was a beautiful house. Big but not outlandish, as Sandy said. But why even consider it? He’d been in the quarters for eight years, had hardly felt cramped or dissatisfied. If the garbage disposal broke or there was a problem with the heat, he just called Infrastructure and they sent someone over. Here there was no Infrastructure. He’d have rooms to paint, a furnace to replace, property taxes to pay. Not to mention the fact that he owned so little furniture, not nearly enough to fill so many rooms. What kind of condition was the roof in? That was the kind of question he needed to ask Sandy, the kind of question that, if he bought a house, he’d be asking himself forever.

  Hadn’t the myth of the glory of home ownership been debunked once and for all? Did he really want to trade his free time—and a formidable chunk of his savings—for a big white symbol of bourgeois propriety? Well, maybe so. And he couldn’t help thinking Pella would love the place. The enti
re upstairs could be hers: one room for sleeping, another for a study, the third small one for a studio, or a walk-in closet, or whatever. He himself would have plenty of space downstairs. She could take a room in the dorms too—a place where he could assume her to be when she wasn’t around, thus saving him plenty of worry and compromised sleep. She was upset with him now, and rightly so, but she’d love this place, he could feel it. Not that this was a plan to win her back.

  And though it had been decades, he himself was no slouch mechanically—he’d grown up on a farm, spent years on board a ship. He wasn’t some kid who’d been raised by the internet. He could take care of a house. The Bremens maintained their yard in the familiar American style, a lush immaculate carpet, but that didn’t mean he’d have to do the same—he could dig up all that lushness and plant tomatoes, rhubarb, beans. Garlic in the fall. Hell, pumpkins. He could plant pumpkins, his favorite boyhood crop, crazy as that seemed. Who could stop him? Was there some rule that said a lawn had to be a lawn, with a prim staked garden tucked in the corner? Yes, most likely—the town of Westish probably had no lack of pointless regulations and nitpicky neighbors to enforce them. But those people would be confronted, stared down, chased off, by the grumpy Thoreauvian president with the pumpkins and the beans…

  His phone trilled in his pocket. Maybe it was Pella, maybe he could convince her to come over now and look around. He smiled apologetically at Sandy, slid it out to peek at the caller ID: Owen.

  “Don’t mind me,” Sandy said. “I know how in demand you are.”

  But Affenlight let his voice mail absorb O’s melted-butterscotch voice. If this extempore scheme appealed to him partly as a declaration to his daughter—I’m here, I’m reliable, rely on me, I love you—it could only mean something entirely different with regard to Owen, something Affenlight wasn’t ready to formulate. Owen would be going to Japan in September, would come back to Westish for his commencement ceremony and little else. There was nothing for him in this part of the country, nothing at all. Whereas Affenlight had a college and a daughter, at least for the next four years, and then he’d be sixty-five. To buy a house would be a declaration that he could conceive of living without Owen—or at least that he was resigned to try.

  Contango settled down on the pale kitchen floor inches from Affenlight’s chair, noble head on noble paws. The two of them watched as Sandy washed and peeled carrots and oranges and prepared to feed them into a juicer. “Looks like somebody’s made a friend,” she said. “Now, not to be crass, but should we talk about money?”

  “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

  She told him the list price. He whistled. “I thought the housing market collapsed.”

  Sandy laughed. “You get what you pay for.”

  Except when buying suits and scotch, Affenlight habitually thought and acted as if he were poor; this was one consequence of his upbringing he’d never quite kicked. But in truth he had plenty of money; his expenses were nil and his salary went straight in the bank. The Audi, his last extravagance, was six years old. The lake, through the patio door, felt near enough to touch.

  “We can make this work!” shouted Sandy over the hum of the juicer. “If we move fast we can pull it from the realtor—the sign just went up this morning—and do it ourselves, chop off six percent that way. Lord knows Kitty Wexnerd doesn’t need the money. And all the red tape we can just leave in ribbons on the floor. I would so love to have you and Pella fall in love with this place. It pains me to leave it.”

  The front door banged open and in came Tom Bremen, fit and bald and drenched in sweat. “Herr Doktor Presidente,” he said. “Let me wash my hand before I shake yours.”

  “Guert stopped by to talk about the house.”

  “Really?” Tom kissed his wife, took two beers from the fridge, set one down in front of Affenlight. “Did you gild the turd and gloss over all the flaws in this dump?”

  “I certainly did not. Because there aren’t any.”

  “I knew I could count on you. Like a sexy Ricky Roma. ABC, baby. Dump needs a new roof, though.”

  Sandy rolled her eyes. “We put on a brand-new roof last summer,” she explained. “Tom and Kevin did it themselves.”

  “Five weeks of fourteen-hour days. Almost cost me my life. And my relationship with my son.” He sat down at the table, clinked his Heineken against Affenlight’s. “Good to see you,” he said, plucking his sweat-wicking shirt away from his chest. “Did Sandy tell you the unburdened beast comes standard?”

  Affenlight looked at Contango, who looked back. Maybe it was the third beer that made the latter’s expression seem so companionably wise. “Really?”

  “How about I translate?” Sandy said, joining them with her juice. “Contango is Kevin’s dog. And Kevin’s going to be in Stockholm for a length of time he refers to as ‘indefinite to permanent.’ ”

  “To what end?” Affenlight asked politely, reaching down to pat the dog again.

  Tom, catching Affenlight’s eye, mimed a plenteous Swedish bosom.

  “Thomas, please. And I’m actually terribly allergic to pets of all kinds, though I’ve been keeping a stiff upper lip about it. And Contango has grown very comfortable here in the past few months. So if the buyer of the house, whoever that may turn out to be, were really and truly interested in such an arrangement…”

  “We’d throw in a year’s supply of Purina and flea shots,” Tom concluded. “How’s that for sweetening the pot?”

  “Huh,” said Affenlight. “Wow.”

  60

  The Harpooners finished dressing and followed Schwartz outside to run stadiums till they puked. No one made a sound. Izzy lingered until he was the last one there, tugging on his wristbands extra slowly, fiddling with the gold crucifix he wore around his neck. It seemed like he might try to say something, but instead he just dropped his head and left. As he passed into the hall he popped his fist loudly into his glove’s webbing, a one-smack salute to Henry’s career.

  Henry sat down in front of his locker. His outburst at Schwartz had surprised him; what surprised him more was the way his anger wasn’t subsiding. He, not Schwartz, had messed everything up. He, not Schwartz, was to blame. And yet every memory that popped into his head as he sat there in that underground room thick with memories was a memory of Schwartz causing him pain. He was angry at Schwartz. He kind of hated Schwartz. Remember when he arrived at Westish, friendless and adrift, and Schwartz, who’d brought him here, who’d led Henry to expect he would guide him, had left him hanging for twelve long lonely weeks before he’d finally called, and said by way of excuse that he’d been busy with football? Back then Henry had felt too pitifully grateful to mention his distress, but now the pain of those early days broke over him. He pretty much hated Schwartz for that. Hated him too for every weighted stadium he’d made him run, every five a.m. workout, every thousand-pull-up workout, every torturous toss of a medicine ball… it was pain that Henry had craved and demanded, purposeful pain, or so it had seemed, but what broke over him now was all that pain in its purest state, pain that meant nothing, could not be redeemed, because it all led only here, and here was nowhere. God, how he hated Schwartz. Hated him for his attention and hated him for his neglect. Lately, since Pella, it had been neglect again. Without Schwartz pushing him, torturing him, he wouldn’t be here. Schwartz had brought him here and now he was fucked. Before he met Schwartz his dreams were just dreams. Things that would peter out harmlessly over time.

  Time to leave before somebody returned and found him here. He took the fire stairs, slipped out a side door, headed away from the campus toward downtown. The streets looked odd and purposeless as they basked in the afternoon sunlight. He’d never come this way in the daytime except while jogging.

  Next to the Qdoba on the corner of Grant and Valenti stood a bank, recently closed for the day. Henry walked up the drive-through ATM lane, his sneakers slurping through the sticky deposits of oil left by idling cars. He punched in his PIN and withdrew the last eighty dollars
from his account. He pocketed the bills and headed back up Valenti toward Bartleby’s.

  Another place he’d never seen in the daylight. It was empty except for two middle-aged couples gathered around a table littered with half-eaten burgers, half-full beer mugs, broken mozzarella sticks with the cheese stretched out like taffy. The bar was being manned by Jamie Lopez, a football player Henry sort of knew. He leaned over an open textbook, a white bar rag slung around his neck. He was wearing a black Melville T-shirt, the concert-style one with the list of the dates of Melville’s travels on the back. Henry took a stool.

  Lopez raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Hey Skrim.” He marked his place with a swizzle stick. “What are you doing here?”

  Henry shrugged. “Chillin’.”

  Lopez nodded approvingly, frisbeed a cardboard coaster to a spot by Henry’s elbow. “What can I do you for?”

  Henry looked down the long row of taps. He’d drunk enough beer at baseball functions to know how bad it tasted. But everything else tasted worse.

  “Tell you what,” said Lopez. “Let me mix you up something. It’s my first day behind the bar. Got to practice my craft.”

  Henry studied Lopez’s face for a sign that he knew what had happened on Saturday. He found none. And yet Lopez had to know. Everybody knew. Half the school had been there, and the other half would have heard right away. Deep down Henry despised this pleasantry, this Hey Skrim, behind which Lopez was feeling sorry for him, or superior to him, or something. Why didn’t people just say what they were thinking? Then again Henry didn’t want to talk about it either, and Lopez’s acting job, if that’s what it was, could be considered a form of kindness. Or maybe Lopez really didn’t know. A pint glass appeared on the coaster, filled with ice and an inky liquid. Henry sipped at the fat blue straw.