The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  “Now that I think about it,” Owen said, “this whole building’s on one thermostat, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So every night and all weekend, when there’s nobody downstairs, the whole building gets heated just for you. And for me, sometimes. Which must be terrifically wasteful, given how drafty this place is and how old the furnace must be. You’d be better off with the house.”

  “Yeah,” said Affenlight, “but they’d probably leave the heat on all the time anyway.”

  “Who’s they? It’s your college.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple, but Affenlight couldn’t disagree with the principle. Owen began enthusiastically concocting plots for the further greening of Westish, and for the installation of solar panels on Affenlight’s new house. Affenlight loved it when Owen grew enthusiastic, he even loved the plots, but his mind kept drifting away, away, away. Away to Pella. He was buying the house for her, in hopes that she would stay with him for four years. Or three—she might want to graduate in three. And then she could move on to grad school at Harvard or Yale, or even Stanford if she wished. Affenlight disliked the thought of sending her back to California, against which he harbored a grudge even though it was the source of Owen, because California had already once swallowed up Pella and kept her for four long years.

  Not that grad school was the only respectable path in life; perhaps Pella would devise other plans. Affenlight, for his part, planned only to not be overbearing. She could visit the house whenever she liked—could come over for dinner, for pumpkin soup. Her rooms upstairs, should she choose to use them; his rooms down. Owen was right, it was a lot of space for two people, one of whom didn’t even live there, but the solar panels! He would install the solar panels, cost be damned, even if the cost-benefit analysis declared that they wouldn’t pay off until long after his projected life span had expired. He would outlive the actuaries’ projections, would leave the actuaries dejected and abashed at their own uselessness, would remain on this marvelous earth until his ingenious, responsible, not-quite-prohibitively-expensive solar panels had done the work of a thousand, of ten thousand, barrels of criminal oil. And by that time Owen and Pella would be nearing middle age themselves, and global warming—as Owen was now saying, though Affenlight was no longer more than half listening—would have accelerated its decimation of the world’s poor equatorial regions, and the true geopolitical shitstorm—as Owen was now saying, and Affenlight’s ears perked up because Owen rarely cursed—would be under way. Even as sleep closed in on Affenlight and expanded the realm of what was possible to include the stuff of dreams, there was no real way to incorporate Owen’s words into a rosy picture of what the world would be like after he, Affenlight, was gone, a world in which Pella and Owen, and any children Pella might someday have, would have to live, but at least he could bequeath to her (and maybe to them both, to share in some way, because who knew but that they’d eventually become close friends) a pretty white solar-paneled house near the lake in northeastern Wisconsin, and as the summers spoiled and the coasts flooded and the monocrops failed and the powers that be squabbled and panicked, as Owen was now describing in fearsome detail in his sonorous butterscotch voice, northeastern Wisconsin would probably not be the worst place to be.

  68

  Henry was standing in Pella and Noelle and Courtney’s kitchen, washing the dishes, drinking the first cup from a pot of coffee he’d made. He’d started drinking coffee since he’d been here. It was something to do. When he’d finished the dishes—there were just a few glasses and mugs; Pella ate at work, and Noelle and Courtney subsisted on red wine and Red Bull—he sprayed down the sink with a bleachy cleanser and wiped it with a sponge. Through the window the late-afternoon light was dimming steadily but still more gold than tea colored. This was the fragile hour of the day when he felt okay. The hour when he got out of bed and, if he sensed that Noelle and Courtney weren’t home, out of Pella’s room entirely.

  He wrung out the sponge, propped it on the sink’s back. Only a few minutes left before the light would fade. If he’d begun his day earlier—at eight, say, or even ten or noon—he might have felt all right today. It would be smart to get up early tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll get up early, he thought, and then smiled to himself, because the coffee was making him feel okay, and because he’d promised himself the same thing yesterday and the day before and the day before that, so that it had become a private running joke.

  He cleaned the coagulated orange soap out of the little crown top of the dish-soap bottle. When Noelle and Courtney were home, or when he sensed they might be home, he stayed in Pella’s room, lying low, peeing in a Gatorade bottle. Pella didn’t seem to mind. Not about the pee—she didn’t know about that—but about his presence in general. She seemed okay with it. He thought of the Odyssey, which he’d half read in Professor Eglantine’s class—Ulysses trapped on Calypso’s island, wasting time, but he was no Ulysses, had no Ithaca to get home to, even though his beard had come in darker and fuller than he’d expected, a harsh brown beard that after a month or two would be the sort you might see on a statue of Ulysses, or that you did see on the statue of Melville that stood in the corner of the Small Quad, peering out to sea.

  He opened the pantry out of boredom. There wasn’t much there. Olive oil, salt and pepper, girlie protein bars in pastel foil. Protein-enhanced whole-wheat vermicelli. Four-packs of sugar-free Red Bull. A can of black beans. There used to be two cans of black beans: in his first days here, when he was still adapting to his lack of appetite, he’d eaten the other can. He’d also eaten a girlie protein bar. Once he’d even tried to cook vermicelli on the stove. He’d never cooked pasta before, and the job was made more difficult by the fact that he had to keep running to the living room window to make sure that Courtney and Noelle weren’t about to come in and catch him stealing their food. He didn’t boil enough water; then he put in way too much vermicelli; then he cooked it way too long. The water evaporated from the pot, and the pasta sat there in a dull lump like an animal’s brain. Now he preferred not eating. Not because not eating meant not stealing, not because not eating meant not cooking, but just because.

  I should stop drinking coffee too, he thought. He’d almost thought give up coffee, but that was a misleading phrase. There seemed to be meaning in it, meaning that didn’t exist. When you gave something up, who or what did you give it up to? Giving something up implied that your sacrifice made sense, and Henry knew that this was untrue. The days did not accumulate and turn into something better than days, no matter how well you used them. The days could not be used. He did not have a plan. He’d stopped playing baseball and eating beans and now he would stop drinking coffee. That was all.

  The front door opened.

  Henry froze, listened to his heart. He was a rat or a roach in this house—owned the place when he was alone, roamed the rooms like a roach god, and then scurried to safety when one of the humans walked in. Now he was trapped. He grabbed a pot he’d already washed, sudsed the sponge, and began to wash it again. It was too early to be Pella, who was working the dinner shift, and even Pella might be a mixed blessing. She’d urged him to go out more during the daytime, and he’d nodded in agreement. He never knew what to say to her.

  He kept scrubbing the clean pot, pretending not to be able to hear footsteps in the living room over the running water, pretending not to feel the heat of the eyes of the person who stood in the doorway.

  “Henry.”

  He could plausibly ignore a soft voice like that.

  “Henry.”

  He could not-so-plausibly ignore a not-so-soft voice like that.

  “HENRY.”

  He left the water on, turned around, his hands covered with suds. Pella’s hair was pulled back and her ears were flushed pink. She sighed and let her wicker bag full of soup and swim gear bang down on the linoleum.

  “We need to talk.”

  Maybe he’d left a pee-filled Gatorade bottle next to the bed. He’d tried to be careful
about that, tried to remember to dump the bottles in the toilet and rinse them every day, but part of him, the truest Henry-part, didn’t want to remember, wanted to keep the pee forever, and maybe he’d let that part get the best of him. It was the one real freedom he had, waking at noon with his bladder full of water and coffee and pissing a long clear stream into the bottle in the bedroom without having to go down the hall and worry that someone would be in the bathroom, or would knock on the bathroom door while he was peeing and be annoyed with him because it wasn’t his bathroom at all.

  It was a three-year-old’s freedom, yes, he recognized that. Like peeing in the lake on those August evenings after Schwartz had worked him like a dog and he’d swum way out and turned back to look at the few lights winking on the Westish shore. He didn’t want to rinse out the Gatorade bottle, okay? He wanted a permanent collection of all his pee and shit, not that he ever shat anymore, now that he’d stopped eating.

  “Sure,” he said. Bubbles scudded down the backs of his hands. “Let’s talk.”

  “Good.” She gestured toward the Formica table with its three matching chairs. “Sit down.”

  Henry sat down. Pella took a mug from the cupboard and poured herself coffee. She sat down at the table, cupped her mug with two hands. Her face looked leaner than when Henry first met her, leaner but also healthier. He thought of asking her to marry him. The thought came idly, in a what-if way, the way that sometimes when his face came close to Owen’s he wondered what would happen if they kissed.

  “Henry, what are you doing here? And don’t say the dishes.”

  He looked at the sink, the sponge, the still-dripping faucet. “I like it here.”

  “No, you don’t,” Pella said. “But that’s not the point. We talked about this, remember? We agreed that you can’t hang out here all day. You’re going to get us kicked out. And then where’ll we be?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Why are you nodding?” Pella said, her voice rising. “It wasn’t a yes-or-no question.”

  He stopped nodding. Pella looked down at her coffee. “Sorry,” she said. “What I meant to say was, I talked to Chef Spirodocus today, and he said it would be great if you wanted to come back to work. You know how much he likes you. And you know how everybody quits this time of year. Nice weather. Finals.”

  Henry looked at her.

  “It wasn’t even my idea. Chef Spirodocus brought it up.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “I know you don’t want to bump into anyone. But you wouldn’t have to. We’d be on shift together. I’d take care of the salad bar and the juice machines and all the other dining room stuff. You could just stay in the back and do dishes. Get a little exercise. Make a little money.”

  “I can’t,” Henry said. “Not yet.”

  “Okay,” Pella said. “Okay. Then I have one other suggestion. Hear me out, okay?” She reached into her sweatshirt pocket and pulled out her little vial of sky-blue pills, removed the cap, and tapped one into her hand.

  Henry shook his head.

  “They work,” Pella said. “I should know.”

  “I don’t want them to work.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It doesn’t, like, change your personality or anything. You’re still you. You’re more like you.” Christ, Pella thought, I should be in a commercial.

  “It does something.”

  It was getting dark in the kitchen. Pella got up, brought over the coffee pot, refilled both their cups, sat back down.

  A pill was the opposite of what he wanted. A pill was an answer that somebody else had worked hard to come up with. He didn’t want that. A pill was small and potent. He wanted something huge and empty. He’d decided not to drink coffee anymore and just like that the smell of it wafting up from the mug nauseated him. He covered the mug’s opening with his hand, let the steam condense on his palm.

  “Say something.” Pella rested her cheek on her hand, looked at him. “Talk to me.”

  He’d never been able to talk to anyone, not really. Words were a problem, the problem. Words were tainted somehow—or no, he was tainted somehow, damaged, incomplete, because he didn’t know how to use words to say anything better than “Hi” or “I’m hungry” or “I’m not.”

  Everything that had ever happened was trapped inside him. Every feeling he’d ever felt. Only on the field had he ever been able to express himself. Off the field there was no other way than with words, unless you were some kind of artist or musician or mime. Which he wasn’t. It wasn’t that he wanted to die. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t what not eating was about. It wasn’t about perfection either.

  What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words.

  Pella was sipping her coffee, watching him, waiting. You couldn’t predict what she’d look like in three or thirteen or thirty-three years. Maybe she’d sprout a third eye, or the strange purply hue of her hair would turn paper white overnight. More likely she would just become more weirdly beautiful with each passing year, though it was impossible, at least for him, to predict what path that beauty would take. Which made her different from all the other girls at Westish, all the other girls he knew. Not that he loved Pella. He didn’t. But he could imagine how someone could love her, and that someone was Schwartzy. They were pretty much perfect for each other. If he, Henry, way back in the days before he arrived on campus, had been able to picture what the women of Westish would look like—twelve hundred girls of the sort Mike Schwartz would date—he would have pictured twelve hundred Pella Affenlights.

  But if Pella and Schwartz made a perfect whole, like the yin and yang on Owen’s favorite pajamas, or the two halves of a baseball’s cover, two infinity-shaped pieces of leather stitched together with love’s red thread, then there was no room for Henry. If you were a boy and you loved a girl, you could make plans together. And if you were a boy and you loved a boy—he thought of Owen and Jason Gomes on the steps of Birk Hall, heads bowed together, sharing a joint; he had no comparable image of Owen and President Affenlight to call upon—then you could make plans together too. The world would be against you, would threaten you and call you names, but at least it would understand. It had words for what you were doing. But if you were Henry and you needed Mike you were simply screwed. There were no words for that, no ceremony that would guarantee your future. Every day was just that: a day, a blank, a nothing, in which you had to invent yourself and your friendship from scratch. The weight of everything you’d ever done was nothing. It could all vanish, just like that. Just like this.

  “I told myself,” Pella said softly, “that if you wouldn’t come back to work, and you wouldn’t try the pills, and you wouldn’t agree to see someone, then I was going to kick you out.”

  Henry nodded, stared at the back of his hand, the hand that was blocking the coffee smell.

  “And you’re not going to do any of those things. Am I right?”

  He moved his hand, looked at the trembling surface of the coffee. He thought, I’m not going to drink coffee anymore. It was too dark, too dirty. Too much like food. The thought of no more coffee and no more food made him momentarily happy. He wanted to follow that happiness where it led—wanted to and would. It was a journey he was embarking on. Had already embarked on: how many days since he’d eaten more than a spoonful of soup? And each day, each hour, each minute furthered the journey. He knew what would happen if he ate: his body would churn up the food, piss it and sweat it and shit it out, stack little segments of protein on his shoulders
till he looked like the guy on the SuperBoost jar. He knew how to participate in that whole cycle. But not-eating was new. It was new and just for him: he couldn’t tell Pella about it. She wouldn’t understand.

  “Am I right?” Pella repeated.

  Henry nodded. “I can’t.”

  “Okay.” He watched her gather her resolve. He felt bad that he was making her do this. “Okay,” she said. “Then I think you should probably go.”

  Henry shoved back his chair and stood. His knees wobbled a little, not in an unpleasant way: he felt loose and light, like a parade balloon. When he got back to the room Owen wasn’t home.

  69

  Practice had ended an hour before, and now it was just the two of them together in the dimness of the third-floor gym, the smaller man crouched in the batting cage, unleashing swing after swing like a repeatable toy, the other standing behind the cage’s netting with his chin declined and his arms crossed over his chest. After a dozen line drives in a row, Izzy fouled one straight back. Schwartz reached out and snared it barehanded, strands of nylon netting between the ball and his hand.

  “Keep your hands up,” he said.

  “Aye aye, Abuelo.”

  Schwartz didn’t mind the nickname, which all the freshpersons had adopted. It referred to his widow’s peak and his creaky knees, his crotchetiness, his penchant for dispensing pearls of wisdom like an old man on a porch, but there was a more interesting meaning in there too. For Izzy and the other young players, Henry was the father figure, the guy who’d harassed and cajoled and counseled them day by day, bucked them up and called them out, made them memorize passages of Aparicio—taught them, in his own imperturbable way, the lessons Schwartz had taught to Henry and Rick and Starblind. Henry was their father and Schwartz was abuelo. But now their father had abandoned them, as fathers often did, and the old man was back in charge.