The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [119]
“I was amazed by you, Bella. By your brilliance. It was one of the chief reasons I fell in love with you.”
“We were living together before you ever saw one of my paintings. We were living together before I found out you were married. I still don’t know how you pulled that off.”
“I didn’t keep my marriage from you any more than you kept your painting from me. We were discovering each other. We were young and in love.”
“I was young,” Pella said.
“And I was in love. Anyway, Bella, my point is this: If you want to become a chef, I support you fully. But I think you should go about it in the proper way. And I’m not sure that living with your father and scrubbing pots for ten dollars an hour—”
“Seven fifty.”
“My God. Really? Seven fifty, then. Is even remotely the way to blossom as a chef. Art, academia, cuisine—whatever you choose, the only way to become the best is to immerse yourself with the best.” David, as he said this, speared a forkful of gray, weary escargot and wagged it as evidence. “I don’t have to tell you that the Bay Area has some of the best and most adventurous chefs in the world. The Asian and the European; seafood, which I know to be a particular favorite of yours; not to mention a fair amount of actual thoughtfulness about matters of sustainability and ecologi—”
“So I should come home. Why not just come out and say it?”
“I don’t think I was being terribly circumspect. You’re living amongst children, Bella. What are you going to do, wash their dishes until you’re thirty? While this country has problems you could be helping to solve.”
Pella had fallen in love with David’s rectitude, and she still found it hard to disregard. She wanted to be a good person, and that meant she should do something good with her life. Yes, from a certain vantage the Westish dining hall was a wasteland, a supporter of slaughterhouses, an exploiter of immigrant labor, a treadmill of routine and repetition and industrial foods delivered over long distances to be prepared and consumed hastily with great amounts of waste. But she felt comfortable there. Wasn’t that a prerequisite, a place to start? How could you learn anything, accomplish anything, build any kind of momentum toward becoming a good person, unless you felt at least a little bit comfortable first?
Professor Eglantine signed her check and wrapped her lime-green boa around the collar of her black jacket like a scarf. She picked up her large hardcover book, tiptoed toward the door on her five-inch heels, somehow seeming both exquisitely composed and as if the book’s torturous weight might pitch her over and pin her to the floor. Pella sent a pleading look in her direction, hoping against hope that she would tiptoe over to engage them in charming, heartfelt conversation that would demonstrate once and for all that Westish was a place where an elegant, useful life could be led, but it didn’t happen, and Professor Eglantine was gone. So much for romance, Pella thought, so much for a new mother-in-law. Where the heck was her father?
“Don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I like doing dishes.”
David ruffled his tightly trimmed beard with his fingertips, sighed an ennui-riddled sigh meant to indicate that he didn’t much care what Pella did but wished she wouldn’t be so exasperating. “You know, if you wanted to leave, Bella, you could have done so in a slightly more civil fashion.”
“I thought it was fairly civil,” Pella said. “No flashing blades. No bloodshed.”
“Maybe mature is the word I’m looking for, then. You’re not a teenager anymore, Bella. You can’t keep running away from home every time you feel frightened about the future. Whatever the trouble, I wish you had talked to me about it. I’m sure we could have worked it out like adults. I’m sure we still could.”
Pella slugged back the rest of her wine. She was shifting into the blame-David phase of the evening. “Right,” she said. “I can imagine how that conversation would have gone. ‘Uh, David, I’m leaving you because you’re controlling and unreasonable