The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [121]
Something buzzed. David pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket, glanced at the screen. “It’s your father,” he said.
“So don’t ans—,” she said, but David already had. He handed her the phone.
“Pella. I’m so sorry. I can be there in fiftee—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said chipperly. “I think you were right not to come. David and I needed to hash some things out by ourselves.”
“Really?” said her dad, not believing her.
“Really.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“Next question!” Chipper but honest. Chipper, honest, and drunk.
“Okay… it’s not going too well, I hope?”
“That’s proprietary.” Pella could hear noise in the background—voices, a kind of clinking, faint music. “Are you in a restaurant?”
“Me?… No, no, of course not. I got waylaid by Bruce Gibbs… A president’s work and so on… Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Pella said.
It could barely have been nine thirty, but around the room checks were being paid, jackets donned. Midwestern living: the ten o’clock news and up at dawn. Pella grabbed the neck of the wine bottle, no longer willing to wait for the waiter’s invisible hand. She looked at David. “I’m sleeping with someone.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She knew he meant it: he didn’t believe her. “It’s true.”
“I don’t believe you,” he repeated. “I don’t even know why you’d say that. What about us?”
“What about us? It’s not like we’re sleeping together. We haven’t had sex in a year.”
He glared at her. “That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true,” Pella said. “A year at least.”
“Bella. You don’t remember the last time we made love?”
Pella tried to remember. But why should she remember? They’d made love less frequently, and then they’d stopped. It wasn’t like there’d been some kind of ceremony, or even a conscious decision.
“It was Christmas Day,” David said. “The day I gave you these.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny manila envelope. He undid the flap and shook out onto the tablecloth two gorgeous teardrop earrings, sapphire and platinum. Pella had never seen them before. Or had she?
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“I thought you might want to keep them. I don’t have much use for them myself.”
Pella resisted the urge to pick one up. “We did not have sex on Christmas,” she said.
David fixed her with a calm, pitying expression, the kind that usually preceded some calmly phrased suggestion—that she should calm down, or drink some water, or consider seeing someone. “Bella,” he said reprovingly. “You know I hate it when you do this.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend that you don’t remember things. As if memories were just a matter of convenience, and you could throw them away if you didn’t want them. Although why you wouldn’t want such pleasant memories is beyond me. We woke up. It was sunny. I cooked breakfast. We listened to Krebenspell’s Second. We made love. We went to dinner at Trisquette. I gave you these.” His voice was obnoxiously calm. Pella’s need for a sky-blue pill was through the roof, but she wasn’t sure where her purse had gone. She looked for the bottle of wine, but it was gone too, hauled off by the waiter with the hairless hands. She’d probably drunk the whole thing herself. David always stopped at two glasses. She’d have to be crazy not to remember those earrings, and she was clearly not crazy. Opaquely not crazy. Not not not crazy. She vaguely remembered dinner in late December, an awful afternoon walled in by the platinum sun, the bizarre creakings of Deskin Krebenspell, whom David regarded as the quote “only living composer.” No making love—no way. But people believed what they wanted to believe. She’d told David that she was sleeping with Mike, and he refused