The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [144]
“Your dad went to school here?”
“Class of seventy-one. So be cheery, my lads and all that jazz.”
Henry thought of the time he’d come upstairs carrying two glasses of milk, and President Affenlight was in their room.
“What’s that look?” Pella said. “You knew about this?”
“No… no.”
“But.”
“But… your dad’s been at a lot of our games this year.”
Pella nodded. “I told myself it was all in my head. But here’s this yearbook, right on cue. And look at you—you’re not even surprised. How much proof do I need?”
She took the register from Henry’s hands and flopped down on the bed, her head on Owen’s pillow. She looked at the photograph for a long time, saying nothing. Beneath the window the quad lay in the soundless trough of a late Sunday morning. No birds, no crickets, no rustle of breeze in the mitt-sized leaves of the maples. When Henry’s throw hit Owen in the face, his teammates, the fans, the umps, even the Milford players, fell totally silent, as if their silence might help Owen or undo his injuries. And then again yesterday, when he handed Starblind the ball and walked back to the dugout, there wasn’t a sound in the park, not even a You suck, Henry! from the Coshwale fans. His teammates couldn’t even look at him, pretended to be engrossed in the smashed paper cups and sunflower-seed shells on the dugout floor. Why not say something, something rude or obtuse or irrelevant? If the silence was for his benefit, it wasn’t helping. He wanted to scream and wail his way through these false silences, wanted to put an end to them forever. Yet here he was, trapped in another such silence, a tiny two-person silence, and he couldn’t even put an end to that.
One stray strand of Pella’s wine-colored hair stretched out across the pale-green pillow, like a flattened sine curve or a trail that ants might follow. He reached out and touched it with his fingers, a weird thing to do.
Pella’s whole body tensed, then relaxed.
“It’s a great photograph,” she said. “I’d like a copy for myself.”
Henry could see, beneath the loose waist of her jeans, a thin shiny sliver of snow-blue fabric. His fingers wavered a little as they left her hair and traced the soft line of her cheek. She tilted back her chin to see him from the tops of her eyes. “Nervous?”
“No.”
“Don’t be.” She grasped his wrist and guided his hand down the front of her body, toward the icy blue. “Tell me what it felt like, when you were walking off the field.”
56
A trace of afternoon light still hung in the sky when Henry awoke. Cold air flooded the room from the wide-open window. His penis hurt, up near the root. He reached down under the blankets and found the lip of a condom digging into his skin. The rolling coastline of Pella’s leg and hip lay alongside his own, radiating warmth. He tried to unroll the condom—it had been in his desk drawer for a year, two years, more—but it stuck to him like a Band-Aid. Finally he shut his eyes and ripped it free.
Pella, he realized as he opened his eyes and flicked the spent condom down between his legs, was awake and watching him. And now she probably thought he was playing with himself. He met her eyes, and she smiled a rueful knowing fraction of a smile.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… now what happens?”
“Nothing happens. I go home. You stay here. Maybe you’ll do your roommate a favor and change his sheets.”
“Oh.”
“Were you expecting something else?” she said. “Some kind of sex-induced apocalypse?”
“No.” Henry thought about how far he’d gone out into the lake in his flak jacket, how long he’d stayed there, treading water with thirty pounds of lead and nylon strapped to his