The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [114]
40
David went to the hotel, Pella upstairs to change. Affenlight dialed the five digits of an intracampus call. It rang once, twice, three times. Owen might have been in the shower—but, no, there went his shadow past the lamp.
Four rings. Five. The machine picked up.
Maybe he’d been a terrible lover. He’d been told he was a good lover, or, by his British lovers, of whom there had been a few—women were always trafficking back and forth between the Cambridges—a brilliant one. Back in the day, British women were always rolling apart from him and sighing: Brilliant! But he was older now. And those women, whether British or American or whatever else, were all women. It wasn’t a given that the skills would translate. A good friend didn’t necessarily make a good father, a good professor didn’t necessarily make a good college president, and a good performer of oral sex on women couldn’t necessarily turn around and start giving blow jobs without submitting to the logic of learning curves.
Oh boy.
Affenlight listened to the answering machine’s message all the way through, just to hear the wry mellow tones of Owen’s recorded voice, but he couldn’t leave a message. It would seem pathetic, for one thing, to chase after Owen after a single day’s absence—and what if Owen declined to listen, and Henry heard it instead? Why, why, didn’t he know Owen’s cell phone number? The fact that they didn’t communicate by cell phone, didn’t chat or text, could reasonably be chalked up to the fact that they didn’t need to, they lived fifty yards apart and saw each other five days a week, but then again the students did little but chat and text, text messages were their surest form of intimacy, and to never have texted or been texted by Owen, not to know Owen’s number even for emergency purposes, not that this was an emergency, seemed suddenly to expose a great gulf between them. Affenlight set the receiver down in defeat. The shadow went past the lamp again.
He walked out of his office and into the quad. Half-lost in anxious thought, hardly aware of what he was doing, he found himself entering Phumber Hall and climbing the stairs, precisely at the dinner hour when traffic in and out of the dorms was at its peak. He encountered no one on the staircase, thank goodness, passed no doors propped open in neighborly cheer, though anyone at all could have seen him crossing the quad and ducking inside.
“Guert,” Owen said when he opened the door. His eyes were glassy from marijuana, but he also seemed startled or surprised. Affenlight realized it was a reckless thing to do, coming here, and not just because he might get caught. At least in his office he maintained some semblance or illusion of control over the situation. Not here. Here he was bound to seem absurd. He couldn’t bear to wonder how old, how unfit he looked in this harsh undergraduate hallway light. “Hi,” he said.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.” A door swung open and closed on the floor below. Feminine shoes swift-clicked down the stairs. “Do you mind if I come in?” Affenlight asked. “It’d be a little awkward if anyone…”
“Of course.” Owen closed the door behind him, gestured to the rose-upholstered easy chair that straddled the room’s imaginary center line, the one unique, neutral piece of furniture nestled among the mirror-image school-issue desks, beds, dressers, bookshelves, and closets. Affenlight remained standing, admired the paintings on the walls, the climbing tendrils of the hook-hung plants, the collection of wines and scotches on the mantel. He could smell the way Owen’s life and habits—weed and gingery cleaners; bookbinding glue; stiff white soap and the garlicky tang of his skin; hardly a trace of Henry except for a faint bouquet of ribbed gray sock—had ingrained themselves deep in the walls and floorboards of the place. He’d made the place home. By comparison Affenlight’s own quarters, which he’d lived in three times as long, reeked of bachelor transience. His whole life had been bachelor transience, rootlessness,