The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [109]
“Thank you.”
He waved his fingers again, as if to brush away the casualness of her response. “Listen to me. You care about the kitchen. You dry the spots from the glasses. You think nobody notices”—he tapped himself on the temple, near the eye—“but I notice. A fine employee.”
Pella felt her own eyes getting moist. Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought, or maybe it’s just me: a purportedly intelligent person, purportedly aware of the ways in which women and wage laborers have been oppressed for millennia—and I get choked up because somebody tells me I’m good at washing dishes. “Thank you,” she said again, this time with earnest emotion that easily matched Chef Spirodocus’s own.
He dropped an elbow onto the table, squished his supple chin against his stubby-fingered hand, eyed her with a melancholy squint. “The god is in the detail, as they say. You understand this. I think you would make a good chef.”
“Really?”
Chef Spirodocus shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “If it was what you wanted.”
“Huh.” Pella imagined in a flash the restaurant she would own: small and white, all painted white but warmly so. And every so often she would take a white chair or a white table and paint it according to her mood, paint a door frame or a section of filigreed molding, hang a canvas on the white wall, so that bit by bit the whiteness of the restaurant would emerge into color. So as customers sat there over the course of weeks and months and years the place would slowly bloom and change before their eyes, sliding from whiteness into something ingeniously raucous, a riot of green and mango and orange. And then when the job was finished she’d obliterate what she’d done with a blizzard of white paint and start again. That was the kind of restaurant she’d like to own. The food being served was fuzzier in her mind: she saw the white plates move and clatter but couldn’t tell what was on them. She could see the clean sharp arrangements on the plates, the contrasts of color and texture, but not the foods themselves. She’d have to learn a lot about food. And really when the restaurant actually opened she’d be so busy cooking, running the kitchen, that she wouldn’t have time to paint. So really she’d have to develop a whole new idea of restaurants and how they worked, not an interior decorator’s idea but a chef’s idea, and this was an idea she didn’t yet have, but would maybe someday like to have. Or maybe she didn’t want to be a chef at all, but the possibility of doing something, pursuing something, seemed, for the first time in a long time, not only appealing but real.
“Now go home,” ordered Chef Spirodocus. He pushed back his chair and resumed glaring at his clipboard. “And if you don’t quit after a month, the way all these children quit, maybe I can teach you something about food. I’m not some hack, after all.”
38
Owen hadn’t come. Had not yet come. Had not yet executed his light backhanded tap tap tap against the presidentially heavy walnut of Affenlight’s door, slipped into the room and locked the door behind him, slid out from under his messenger bag and clasped Affenlight’s hands and planted an ironically chaste peck on his lips.
It was 4:44 according to Affenlight’s watch, 4:42 by the clock on the wall. Had Owen ever come this late before? Affenlight didn’t think so. He yanked open the central drawer of his desk. The drawer’s wheels jerked and screeched on their ill-fitting tracks. He rummaged through a scatter of pens and staples, cigarette boxes, neglected silver sheets of Lipitor and Toprol, and pulled out a wallet-size trifold Westish Baseball schedule with a picture of Henry on the front.
Affenlight had the schedule nearly memorized; had become the Harpooners’ most ardent fan after a lifetime of benevolent indifference to the game. He went to watch Owen, of course, but the team as a whole, led by the dogged Mike Schwartz, had an aura of competence that might have been unknown in the history of Westish sports. And what