The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [162]
She finished her bowl. Then she finished Henry’s. They put the unwashed bowls in the sink and walked to the bedroom. Pella stood on one side of the floor-bound futon and stripped down to her underwear, while Henry did the same on the other side. Her arms were growing less flabby from swimming and scrubbing pots; it made the lines of her tattoo look sharper, better drawn. Someday soon she would make up with her father once and for all. They’d been fighting half her life, and yet the fights always felt like aberrations. No matter how bad things got between them, she could always reach forward through time and grasp the moment, however distant, when they’d be as close as they were when she was six or ten.
She lowered herself to the futon from one side, Henry from the other. They faced each other under the cool dry sheets, their heads on separate pillows. They were the previous tenant’s sheets and pillows, left in the hall closet: Pella had washed them twice instead of buying new ones. Part of the new frugality. She lay on her left side, facing Henry, her body pressing into the mattress with a pleasant weary weight. She knew that his stifled yawns meant something different from hers, were the signs of a caged, stymied energy turned inward and devouring itself, and she felt for him. They were like children or invalids, in bed at seven o’clock. Her hand slid onto his hip. He flinched and then relaxed.
Tonight was different, stranger than the first time, a kind of surrender to the tender meaninglessness of adulthood. She wasn’t going to let him kiss her, with that beard, and he didn’t try. Apart from the beard his body was like a Platonic ideal of a body, a smooth white marble statue, though already a little less muscular than she remembered. Like a statue, he didn’t smell like much of anything. They clung together loosely, eyelids open, watching each other. He came quietly, with just a hint of a whimper. People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Outside a springtime Saturday evening was just beginning—crickets chirped, speakers thumped, frat boys shouted from porch to porch. Pella reached down and felt for her book on the rug. She was reading Proust, something she’d never done before. For years she’d been planning to get her French in shape to read him in the original. But who knew when that would happen.
Henry pulled on his boxers beneath the covers, part of their weird routine of modesty, and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. As sleep closed over her Pella heard water running in the tub. He’d lie there until he heard Noelle or Courtney come in, which, tonight being Saturday, might be in six or seven hours or not at all.
65
Affenlight’s meeting with the trustees ran long, and the drive, even at dangerous speed, took more than two hours, so he didn’t arrive at Grand Chute Stadium until the top of the eighth inning. Beer, no matter how fervently one wished for it, was not being sold at the concession stand. He bought two hot dogs, applied mustard and relish, and found an available seat—not a swatch of corrugated bleacher but an actual flip-down seat—behind home plate. The UW–Chute Titans’ colors were navy and gold, with emphasis on the navy, so that when Affenlight looked straight at the field and squinted, the seas of people filling his peripheral vision could easily be mistaken for Westish fans.
The Harpooners were trailing by the very respectable score of 3 to 0. They had played admirably to reach this, the regional championship game, winning three of their first four games in the double-elimination tournament, far exceeding the expectations of everyone involved, especially their opponents, who’d expected to crush them—and yet, as Owen told Affenlight on the phone this morning,