The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [170]
He kept scrubbing the clean pot, pretending not to be able to hear footsteps in the living room over the running water, pretending not to feel the heat of the eyes of the person who stood in the doorway.
“Henry.”
He could plausibly ignore a soft voice like that.
“Henry.”
He could not-so-plausibly ignore a not-so-soft voice like that.
“HENRY.”
He left the water on, turned around, his hands covered with suds. Pella’s hair was pulled back and her ears were flushed pink. She sighed and let her wicker bag full of soup and swim gear bang down on the linoleum.
“We need to talk.”
Maybe he’d left a pee-filled Gatorade bottle next to the bed. He’d tried to be careful about that, tried to remember to dump the bottles in the toilet and rinse them every day, but part of him, the truest Henry-part, didn’t want to remember, wanted to keep the pee forever, and maybe he’d let that part get the best of him. It was the one real freedom he had, waking at noon with his bladder full of water and coffee and pissing a long clear stream into the bottle in the bedroom without having to go down the hall and worry that someone would be in the bathroom, or would knock on the bathroom door while he was peeing and be annoyed with him because it wasn’t his bathroom at all.
It was a three-year-old’s freedom, yes, he recognized that. Like peeing in the lake on those August evenings after Schwartz had worked him like a dog and he’d swum way out and turned back to look at the few lights winking on the Westish shore. He didn’t want to rinse out the Gatorade bottle, okay? He wanted a permanent collection of all his pee and shit, not that he ever shat anymore, now that he’d stopped eating.
“Sure,” he said. Bubbles scudded down the backs of his hands. “Let’s talk.”
“Good.” She gestured toward the Formica table with its three matching chairs. “Sit down.”
Henry sat down. Pella took a mug from the cupboard and poured herself coffee. She sat down at the table, cupped her mug with two hands. Her face looked leaner than when Henry first met her, leaner but also healthier. He thought of asking her to marry him. The thought came idly, in a what-if way, the way that sometimes when his face came close to Owen’s he wondered what would happen if they kissed.
“Henry, what are you doing here? And don’t say the dishes.”
He looked at the sink, the sponge, the still-dripping faucet. “I like it here.”
“No, you don’t,” Pella said. “But that’s not the point. We talked about this, remember? We agreed that you can’t hang out here all day. You’re going to get us kicked out. And then where’ll we be?”
Henry nodded.
“Why are you nodding?” Pella said, her voice rising. “It wasn’t a yes-or-no question.”
He stopped nodding. Pella looked down at her coffee. “Sorry,” she said. “What I meant to say was, I talked to Chef Spirodocus today, and he said it would be great if you wanted to come back to work. You know how much he likes you. And you know how everybody quits this time of year. Nice weather. Finals.”
Henry looked at her.
“It wasn’t even my idea. Chef Spirodocus brought it up.”
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“I know you don’t want to bump into anyone. But you wouldn’t have to. We’d be on shift together. I’d take care of the salad bar and the juice machines and all the other dining room stuff. You could just stay in the back and do dishes. Get a little exercise. Make a little money.”
“I can’t,” Henry said. “Not yet.”
“Okay,” Pella said. “Okay. Then I have one other suggestion. Hear me out, okay?” She reached into her sweatshirt pocket and pulled out her little vial of sky-blue pills, removed the cap, and tapped one into her hand.
Henry shook his head.
“They work,” Pella said. “I should know.”
“I don’t want them to work.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It doesn’t, like, change your personality or anything. You’re still