The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [167]
“I think it’s a great idea,” Owen said.
“You do?”
“Certainly. This apartment is, as my mother has noted, a bit dismal. I think you’d benefit from having some more space to roam around in. Space that’s brighter, and really yours. And Pella would like it too. Especially if you let her decorate.”
“What about us?” said Affenlight, stressing us.
“What about us?” replied Owen, stressing about.
“I mean… you’re going away.”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy a house. Unless you’d like me to talk you out of it? Is that what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“Yes please.” Affenlight lay on his side, one hip rolled over on top of Owen’s thigh, one cheek on Owen’s shoulder. It was a quintessentially feminine posture, or had been throughout his forty years of sharing beds—the man on his back with hands behind his head, the woman nestled against him—and yet he slipped into it naturally now. With his free hand he caressed Owen’s belly, which itself felt almost feminine, not muscled but soft with the strong, invulnerable softness of youth. His senses remained on high alert, but for the moment the quad had slipped into silence. It was too late for the students to go out to the bars, too early for them to come home.
Owen assumed his lecturer’s tone. “That’s easy, Guert. What you so blithely call a house would better be termed an ecological disaster. How many barrels of oil does it take to heat a big old place like that through a bad winter, not that we have bad winters anymore? Just to keep a couple of bodies warm?”
Affenlight couldn’t help wondering which couple of bodies he meant. Two Affenlights? An Affenlight and a Dunne? “ ‘I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls,’ ” he said, quoting Emerson’s The Conduct of Life.
“I’d hardly describe you as a stiff person.” Owen slid a hand down between Affenlight’s legs, toyed with him gently. “At least not right now.”
“We just finished,” Affenlight protested, not wanting to be mentioned even jokingly in the same breath as that particular ailment of age, but in fact he was already thickening under Owen’s touch.
“Thoreau’s journals,” Owen said. “ ‘When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside.’ He doesn’t buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter. And to cool in the summer—let’s not even talk about air-conditioning. Why not just buy a McMansion out by the freeway, install a helicopter pad in back? Do you think you get a free pass because the house is old and lovely? It doesn’t work that way, Guert. Waste is waste, sprawl is sprawl. Your good taste doesn’t count. If there’s any kind of exclusionary, private-club-style afterlife, St. Peter won’t be asking questions at the gate. You’ll just be lugging all the coal and oil you’ve burnt in your life, that’s been burnt on your behalf, and if it fits through the gate you’re in. And the gate’s not big. It’s like eye-of-a-needle-sized. That’s what constitutes ethics these days—not who screwed or got screwed by whom.
“Perhaps you’re better off here, Guert. This place suits your spartan tendencies, which I much admire. You’re an especially unencumbered type of soul.”
“Jeez, O,” said Affenlight glumly. “You didn’t have to do quite such a good job.”
“Sorry.” Owen released Affenlight’s half-hard penis, kissed him on the forehead. “I get worked up.”
Sometimes Affenlight worried that Owen dallied with him solely so that he could whisper in Affenlight’s ear about campus-wide environmental initiatives. But that was probably reductive, if not downright paranoid, and anyway such things were worth being whispered to about. The schools Affenlight had been affiliated with—Westish in the late sixties