The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [103]
Two boys sat smoking on the library steps, watching in amusement as she gave the tree angry roundhouse slaps with alternate hands. “Me next!” one of them yelled.
“No man, me! I like it rough.”
Pella turned around to flip them off. They grinned and waved. She wound up to give the tree one last cleansing whack, but she swung too hard and, instead of cuffing the trunk with her palm, her middle finger struck the knotty bark awkwardly. As she jammed the finger into her mouth, she screamed something indiscreet that ended in me.
“Yeah baby!”
“Thought you’d never ask!”
The finger was either sprained or broken. She headed toward the two boys, not really seeing them in a swarm of livid red buzzing, one wearing a knit winter cap and the other bareheaded, their backpacks laid beside them on the uppermost step. Because she was a girl they didn’t stand up to fight or to run away but just watched her dumbly, their idiot faces titillated and amazed.
“Hey,” one of them said. “It’s Schwartzy’s girlfriend.”
There was probably no right thing for them to say just then, but that was the wrong thing. She flew up the steps at an angle, spitting curses. The boys snapped up their backpacks and dashed inside the library. They laughed and bumped fists when they saw she wouldn’t follow.
She passed along the long cool concrete side of the library into the Small Quad, which was dark and cozy and void of noise. Her finger felt stiff and inarticulate. It pulsed with blood and pain. The chapel bells tolled four times, and she realized it was the middle of the night. She couldn’t have gone to Bartleby’s even if she’d tried. As she paused there in the dark, she became aware of a figure—mugger? rapist? baboon?—moving up and down in a nearby tree, making heavy-breathing noises.
“Henry? Is that you?”
Henry, startled, dropped from the tree and staggered a step backward. “Hey.”
“What are you doing?”
“Pull-ups.”
“How many can you do?”
He shrugged. “You can always do one more.”
She studied his face for some of the enormous strain Mike claimed he was under, but found none. His breathing returned to normal. He flexed his wrists absently. He had the blank-eyed look of a well-drilled Marine. Pella felt a fleeting sense of fear, as if he might assault her somehow. “Sort of like Zeno’s paradox,” she said. “I mean, with the pull-ups. If you can always do one more, how can you ever stop doing pull-ups?”
Henry shrugged. “You can’t.”
“Right. I guess that’s why you’re out here at four a.m.”
He didn’t answer. She caught herself fiddling with her sweatshirt zipper—a dangerous tic, since she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She zipped it as high as it would go.
“What happened to your finger?” he asked.
“Nothing. I beat up a tree.”
“Do you want some ice? There’s an ice machine in the basement of my dorm.”
“That’s okay. I’ll just get some at my dad’s.”
“Okay.”
A light came on in her father’s apartment. He kept odd hours lately, waking as early as three thirty or four and heading down to his office soon after. Perhaps it was a sign of age, some kind of male menopause. Throughout Pella’s childhood he’d been a tenured professor who clung to grad-student habits, working deep into the night and then rousing himself, bleary-eyed, caffeine-deprived, his rich brown beard uncombed, to see her off to school.
She didn’t feel like getting caught coming home at dawn, disheveled and barefoot and swollen-fingered. Maybe she could sneak in while he was in the shower. “I’ll leave you to your pull-ups,” she said to Henry. “I’ve got a big day ahead of me.”
“Me too,” Henry said. As she unlocked the side entrance to Scull Hall, he jumped up, latched onto a branch, and began another set.
Her dad, already shaved and dressed, was sitting in the kitchen nook, sipping his daybreak espresso. “Pella,” he said as she entered the room, “can I talk to you