The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [151]
He’d intended only to drive by, to see whether there would indeed be a sign on the lawn, but now he found himself strolling up the front walk to the porch steps. The silhouette of Sandy Bremen, Tom’s wife, appeared behind the front door before he could ring the bell.
“Why, Guert,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.” A large dog shot out of the small gap she’d made by beginning to open the door, reared up to paw at Affenlight’s chest. “I was just about to take Contango for a walk.” She grabbed the dog by the collar and yanked him backward. “Sorry. He’s awfully rambunctious today.”
“Quite all right.” Affenlight offered the dog his hand to sniff. He was a beautiful animal, old and noble, a sugar-furred husky with one blue eye.
“Tom’s out for a run,” Sandy said. “Is it something urgent?”
“No, no. Not urgent at all. You see, actually… I stopped by because I was curious about the house.”
“Ah-ha.” Sandy smiled in the slightly flirty but mostly proprietary way that the faculty wives, at least the more secure ones, liked to smile at Affenlight. She was a seal-sleek woman in a monochrome tracksuit and fresh white sneakers. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to spend a few decades with a woman like that—a woman who turned family life into a smooth-running corporate entity, whose genius was to take a sizable income and make it seem infinite, who knew how to convert money into pleasure and pleasantry. “You’re finally thinking of taking the plunge?”
Affenlight shrugged. “I saw the sign,” he said. “It made me a bit curious.”
“Well, come on in. I’ll give you the grand tour. Contango, buddy, I’m sorry—false alarm on that stroll of ours.” She shooed the dog through the door, planted a hand in the small of Affenlight’s back to do the same to him. “Is beer okay? I can’t join you because I’m halfway through a juice cleanse, faddish girl that I am, but I’m sure Tom will partake when he gets back. He’s been logging a lot of miles these days.”
Affenlight, clutching the sweaty neck of his Heineken, dutifully trailed Sandy throughout the first floor and then the second as she explicated the virtues of California Closets, natural light, their recently remodeled kitchen. The Bremens’ two children were both graduated from college and gone, their bedrooms converted into spruced-up, stripped-down pieds-à-terre for holiday and summertime visits. “Lucy’s wedding is in October,” Sandy said as they stood on the threshold of the more extravagantly pillowed of the two rooms. “Old time she is a flyin’.” She turned to lead Affenlight back down the stairs. “As you can see, the place is big but not that big. Three bedrooms, Tom’s office, one bath up, one down. It’s really a very functional house, because it’s so old—it’s more on the model of the farmhouse than the mansion. Not outlandish for one person.” She gave Affenlight that sly look again. “You are still living alone, aren’t you, Guert?”
“More or less.”
“Ah, the ambiguities! Meaning what?”
They sat at the kitchen table. Affenlight accepted the second beer Sandy handed him, reached down to ruffle the dog’s belly. Pella had begged for a dog throughout girlhood, but they’d never quite gotten around to it. “My daughter’s considering enrolling at Westish,” he said, knocking a knuckle softly against the wooden table so as not to jinx that prospect. “We wouldn’t necessarily be living together, but…”
“Ah, but she’d need her own room, certainly. Pella, is it? Such a lovely name. But I thought she was at Yale? Or even finished by now?”
Affenlight had for years brought a deliberate vagueness regarding Pella’s whereabouts to cocktail parties. It felt like a betrayal now. “Yale didn’t entirely