The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [117]
41
Pella, having showered and dressed, dried her hair and done her makeup, was pacing the apartment waiting for David to return. Amid the scatter of papers on her dad’s desk in the study lay a half-full pack of Parliaments. He really was smoking again, as she’d suspected; something was up with him. She needed to make him stop, even if that meant calling his doctor and tattling on him; smoking was streng verboten in the Affenlight family.
She’d never smoked much herself, not since junior high anyway, but a cigarette right now would calm her nerves. She tapped one out with her uninjured hand and managed to light it with a match without smearing her still-wet nails. She opened the study window. No sooner had she leaned out to exhale than her father emerged from the front door of the building kitty-corner to Scull Hall. She didn’t have a very good handle on the campus layout—the buildings all looked alike, with their weathered gray stone—but she was pretty sure that one was a dorm, the same dorm Henry pointed to last night when he offered to go get her ice. Her dad looked left, right, left, like a noir character who thought somebody might be tailing him. Then he headed across the quad toward the alley behind the dining hall, where he kept his car.
Three and a half minutes later, as she stubbed out the cigarette on the window frame, Owen Dunne emerged from the same door—which made sense, since Henry and Owen were roommates, though it didn’t explain why her dad had been in there. Maybe it was a mixed-use building; maybe he’d needed that ice machine.
The downstairs buzzer rang; David was here. Cue ominous music. She ran to the bathroom to gargle some mouthwash.
42
They drove in David’s rented hybrid to Maison Robert, the upscale, slightly flagging French place she used to go with her father during her vacations from Tellman Rose. It felt nice to be among adults, even if the adults in question were David and a bunch of past-their-prime-if-they’d-ever-had-a-prime academics bleached white by one too many northern Wisconsin winters. Maison Robert served as a kind of de facto Westish faculty club. Bald pates shone in the yellow-puddled lights, wire-rimmed glasses peered at the immutable black menus, snifters of amber brandy clicked against bulbous goblets of deep red wine. Pella’s oral history professor, the preposterously chic, thoroughly un-Wisconsiny Judy Eglantine, dined alone in one corner, dressed in narrow black, an open book before her. A feathery lime-green boa flopped over the opposite chair in place of a companion. Pella caught her eye and waved shyly as David pulled back her chair with his usual wooden courtesy. Professor Eglantine smiled.
David beckoned the waiter with an impatient gesture and, without having looked at the list, began quizzing him about the wines. The waiter was Pella’s age but had wispy albino-blond hair, as if the winters had aged and bleached him too. He mumbled oaky and spicy a few times. David ordered a red Bordeaux.
“How do you know what I want?” Pella said. “Maybe I’d rather have white.”
“It’s good.” David glanced up at the hurriedly approaching waiter, whom he’d already frightened into submission. “Ah, merci—la dame le goûtera,” he said, though there was little chance the poor guy spoke French.
Pella leaned back so the waiter could pour, let the wine’s oaky spices roll around in her mouth. David knew wine the way he knew architecture and Ancient Greek, the way he knew how to wire a kitchen and choose a mutual fund. She nodded at the waiter. “It’s good,” she said.
“That’s a lovely dress,” David said.
“Thanks.” It was the lilac dress her father had bought her. She had yet to wear it on a date with Mike; she and Mike hadn’t been on a date since that first night at Carapelli’s, unless you counted eating crackers in bed as a date, or watching Mike scarf down dollar pitchers at Bartleby’s.
“The color rather matches your finger,” David