The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [111]
“Junior.”
“Junior year. My goodness. You must have had the whole campus in a kind of choreographed group swoon. Boys and girls alike.”
“Not really,” Affenlight said. “I was awkward, behind the times. A bit of a loner.” It sounded like false modesty, considering the stately swagger of the kid in the photo, but it was true.
“Sure you were.” Owen flipped to the back, failed to find an index. “Are there any more like this?”
“I don’t think so.”
Owen, hungry for more, paged through the entire register. Then he pulled down the registers from Affenlight’s other three years and piled them in his lap. He smiled at Affenlight’s football pictures, his crew cut and shoulder pads and tight pants; chuckled at the Whitmanesque beard he began to cultivate senior year; couldn’t resist returning, in the end, to the photo with the bicycle. On most occasions Affenlight sensed a hint of irony in Owen’s attentions; now he seemed thoroughly absorbed. Affenlight sipped his cooling coffee and shifted in his spindle-backed chair. Why was Owen using a different mug? Why was he staring at pictures, when the real-life Affenlight was right there? Maybe he should have been flattered by Owen’s oohing and ahhing, but instead he felt cut out of whatever emotional transaction was passing between Owen and the young man on the page. “I wish I’d known you then,” Owen said wistfully.
“Then instead of now?”
Owen, eyes still on the page, reached out to give Affenlight’s socked ankle a squeeze. “Then and now,” he said. “Always.”
“I was different then. You might not have liked me.”
“I’m sure I would have liked you plenty. What’s not to like?”
“I was different,” Affenlight repeated. For some reason he felt keen to get this point across. The kid in the photograph wasn’t simply his current self with better forearms and flowing hair. Hell, he could grow that hair now, and it’d look all the more striking for being flecked with silver. But the hair was not the point. “Back then,” he said, “I wasn’t me. Not like this. I… I could never have fallen in love.”
“Well, sure.” Owen, still looking at the photo, continued absently to caress Affenlight’s ankle. “Look at you. Why would someone like that bother to fall in love?”
Why indeed. Owen asked if he could borrow that junior-year register, said he’d like to try making a copy of the photograph, and Affenlight had little choice but to say sure, why not, go right ahead. And they smooched awhile and read aloud a bit from Lear, and Owen left. And that was yesterday. And now today the chapel bells were tolling five, with no Owen. Affenlight stared again at the bold type on the baseball schedule, hoping in vain that another home game would materialize. He pushed back his heavy chair and went to the window, looked up toward Phumber 405. It had begun to rain in fierce sheets, a potent spring storm. Affenlight saw no movement behind the herbs and twisting miniature cacti that lined the sills of Owen’s room. He pulled open his office door—he would make the coffee himself, Owen be damned. Standing there in the hall, sopping wet, fist poised to knock, was a bearded man Affenlight had never met before but recognized instantly, from the photograph on his firm’s website.
39
Affenlight didn’t hate David, not anymore. Not that he had much regard for the man, but he’d spent more time thinking about David in recent years than about anyone in the world besides Pella and Owen, and that kind of constant mindfulness, over time, could mellow into sympathy. He would never forgive David, but David had become a part of life, and Affenlight had achieved a grudging acknowledgment of the fact that David would continue to live and breathe whether he wanted him to or not. He used to think of him as a selfish lothario and borderline pedophile; now he thought of him more as a man with whom he had a quarrel. Almost—perish the thought—as a son-in-law, albeit an unpalatable one.
Even Affenlight’s moral indignation had cooled recently, for obvious reasons. He himself had always observed a strict rule against liaisons