The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [148]
“You’ve done all right.”
“I’ve done all right,” Affenlight agreed.
“Anyway,” Pella said. “I’m not a kid anymore and we’re not a married couple. I think things will go more smoothly if we each have our own place. Okay?”
Affenlight nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Don’t look so glum,” she said. “Now you can have guests stay over.”
Affenlight chuckled, or tried to. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like whom?”
It was the classic criminal error, that like whom—the longing to get caught, to take credit for the crime. Pella steeled herself. “Like Owen.”
A profound, interstellar kind of silence filled the office. Eventually Affenlight said, “I was planning to tell you.”
“When, on your deathbed?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or a little after that.”
Pella felt a return of that same urge she’d felt at the baseball diamond—the urge to protect her father from onrushing harm. He was so naive, so boyish. She remembered how he looked while talking to Owen by the fence: Like the thousand other people in the park didn’t exist. Like if they existed, they couldn’t see how he felt about Owen. Like if they could see how he felt about Owen, they’d condone or forgive him. But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right—that was the last thing they forgave you for.
“How long has this been going on?” she asked.
“Not long.”
“Not long with Owen, or”—she didn’t know how to put it—“in general?”
Affenlight lifted his eyes from the floor. “There is no in general,” he said. “Just Owen.”
He wasn’t old but he looked it now, his arms limp at his sides, deep lines of worry scored into his forehead beneath his mussed gray-silver hair, his expression sad and beseeching. Why was the younger person always the prize, the older person always the striver? Ever since adolescence Pella had been gathering experience in the role of the younger person, the clung-to one, the beloved. That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn’t happened yet. But the old kept trying.
By the old she meant everyone who loved something younger—her dad but also David, and even the twentysomething guys she’d hooked up with in high school. Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes. You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo. “He’s a kid,” she said. “He’s younger than I am.”
Affenlight nodded. “I know.”
“What if somebody finds out? Then what happens to us?” The us was a touch melodramatic.
“I don’t know,” said Affenlight.
“But you’re in love with him.”
“Yes.”
“Well, great,” Pella said. “Amor vincit omnia.” What she was thinking was even crueler: He’s going to break your heart.
She hoisted her bags and moved toward her dad. For the happiest and splittest of seconds Affenlight thought she planned to embrace him, but her hands were wrapped tightly around the straps of her bags, and in fact he was simply blocking her way. He shifted aside, leaving several inches of troubled air between them as his daughter ducked her beautiful port-colored head and slid past him and down the hallway and out of sight.
58
If you pretended not to know Coach Cox and you walked into his empty office, sat in the only visitor’s chair, and glanced around apprehensively, you’d never guess that he’d been coaching Westish Baseball for thirteen years. He might as well have moved in yesterday. The door was never locked. The walls were a plain industrial white, the metal schoolteacher’s desk a lackluster military green. The main signs of life were a taped-up baseball schedule and a wastebasket overflowing with pinched