The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [101]
“Thanks,” said Schwartz again. Meat’s door clicked shut, and the bedsprings wailed mightily through the wall.
The house was abandoned again. Schwartz felt his way past the beer-pong table en route to the kitchen. What you missed about these bitches / Is they all can feel my fame. / My sick hits make ’em ticklish / Till they screamin’ out my name. God, the stuff you filled your head with, no matter how hard you tried. It wasn’t exactly Milton; it wasn’t even Chuck D. Really, he should make them switch the jukebox at Bartleby’s from hip-hop to poetry. Then you could drop in your dollar, punch up 10-08, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” and soak up some Keats while you drank your beer.
The kitchen, compared to the rest of the house, was eerily immaculate, the sink shining beneath its sink light and almost restored to its original lima-bean color. Pella had gotten in the habit of scrubbing it every time she came over, and so Schwartz had taken to scrubbing it so she wouldn’t have to, and lately it seemed that even Meat had gotten into the act by scraping stains off the linoleum—old chewed gum from previous tenants, more recently spat tobacco—and rinsing out the garbage can. Schwartz microwaved the cookies for thirty seconds, popped one in his mouth, poured a quart of milk into a souvenir Chicago Bears glass, drank it down, and polished off the remaining cookies by the light of the open fridge. Arsch, that mensch, had bought a twelve-pack of Schlitz; Schwartz grabbed two and walked into the musty living room and sat down on the couch in the dark. It was a stupid idea, jukebox poetry, but he liked it anyway. He wished he could tell it to Pella, if only so that she could laugh at him and call him a Chicago conservative.
They’d never fought before; she was good at it, if the point of a fight was to injure the other person. Beneath his anger he could sense a faint counterweight of satisfaction at the knowledge that this kind of pain could happen, that a girl, a woman, could mean enough to him to hurt him, and this raised the possibility that Pella was right, that he preferred to suffer and was happiest while suffering. But that could only be true if you added “for a reason.” He liked to suffer for a reason. Who didn’t? But all his reasons were falling apart. He ticked them off in his mind: law school, thesis, Henry, Pella.
He wasn’t a kid from the projects anymore. If he drank himself to death like so many Schwartzes before him, or otherwise managed to screw everything up, he’d have no one to blame but himself. He didn’t have excuses. What he had were options, Yale Law notwithstanding. He didn’t get into law school only because he hadn’t applied to any of the hundreds of schools that would have him. He had all these tools, rhetorical and analytic and critical tools, tools for self-reflection, rich friends, references, respectability. Hell, he even had a thousand bucks in his jacket pocket. He went back to the kitchen for two more beers.
Pella could cruise through James or Austen or Pynchon at seventy pages an hour and remember everything, like she’d been born to the task. He loved to watch her do it, reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, her thoughts independent of him.
She misunderstood his life. It wasn’t that he wanted everything to be difficult but that everything was difficult. Forget money. He wasn’t smart the way she was. The only thing he knew how to do was motivate other people. Which amounted to nothing, in the end. Manipulation, playing with dolls. What wouldn’t he give to have talent of his own, talent like Henry’s? Nothing. He’d give it all. Those who cannot do, coach.
A car drove slowly down Grant Street, pumping through its subwoofer