The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [102]
35
Pella wanted to go to Bartleby’s and scotch herself into a stupor, but she found herself in the middle of Grant Street with nothing between the soles of her feet and the pebbly pavement, exactly the kind of too-emphatic gesture for which she’d always been famous, at least in her own mind, and so there was nothing to do but head back to Scull Hall. The football-player bouncers would have let her in without shoes, because she was a girl, and not just any girl but Mike Schwartz’s girlfriend—ha-ha—but it would have been disgusting to walk around barefoot on those floors, slick with beer and the memory of mopped-up vomit, and it would leave her feeling worse than she already felt.
Damn that Mike Schwartz! How many nights in the past few weeks had he agreed to meet her somewhere, only to phone at the last second and say, Sorry sweetheart, honeypie, darling, noodlepuss, kiddo, dear—sorry, but Henry and I are at the gym, Henry and I are at the diamond, Henry’s feeling down, Henry and I are watching video, Henry and I are chatting, saying it just like that, saccharine and matter-of-fact and with just a smidgen of condescension, as if she were almost capable of understanding the overwhelming importance of every last scrap of Henry’s moods and needs.
And had Pella said boo about any of it? Never. Had not said, for instance, that Henry was an adult or nearly adult person who could fend for himself; nor had she said that being occasionally unable to throw a baseball from one place to another with perfect accuracy didn’t exactly qualify as tragic; nor had she said—for instance—that Henry would start throwing the ball better when he felt like throwing the ball better, and maybe everybody should just leave him alone for a while and let whatever was going to happen happen. It was amazing the way people hemmed each other in, forced each other to act in such narrowly determined ways, as if the world would end if Henry didn’t straighten himself out right now, as if a little struggle with self-doubt might not make him a better person in the long run, as if there were any reason why he shouldn’t take a break from baseball and teach himself to knit, to play the cello, to speak Gaelic—but no, God no, he had to work hard and stay focused and grind it out and keep his chin up and relax and think positive and keep plugging away, subscribe to every stupid cliché Mike or anyone else could throw at him, working and worrying until he started having panic attacks, for Christ’s sake, which wasn’t tragic either but was far from a promising sign.
Poor Henry. As if anybody cared what happened to him, a silly kid with a silly problem. Everyone’s problems were silly in the long run, silly when compared with global warming, despeciation, some birdborne or waterborne disease that was lying in wait to flatten us all, silly when compared to the brute fact of death, but Henry’s problem was just plain silly. And yet she’d wasted plenty of hours on Henry’s problem, turning it in her mind, hoping like hell it would go away, so that Mike could spend less time thinking about Henry and more time thinking about her. Because she liked him.
Or did like him, she thought as she stamped her way across the dark damp grass toward the wide mirrored windows of the library—liked him, past tense. Because why should she like him? A month since they’d met, and he still hadn’t trimmed that stupid beard. She hated beards. “I hate beards,” she spat aloud, and cuffed the skinny knotted trunk of a staked campus sapling with an open-handed slap. “Hate hate hate.” The fact that she’d run away