The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [171]
“It does something.”
It was getting dark in the kitchen. Pella got up, brought over the coffee pot, refilled both their cups, sat back down.
A pill was the opposite of what he wanted. A pill was an answer that somebody else had worked hard to come up with. He didn’t want that. A pill was small and potent. He wanted something huge and empty. He’d decided not to drink coffee anymore and just like that the smell of it wafting up from the mug nauseated him. He covered the mug’s opening with his hand, let the steam condense on his palm.
“Say something.” Pella rested her cheek on her hand, looked at him. “Talk to me.”
He’d never been able to talk to anyone, not really. Words were a problem, the problem. Words were tainted somehow—or no, he was tainted somehow, damaged, incomplete, because he didn’t know how to use words to say anything better than “Hi” or “I’m hungry” or “I’m not.”
Everything that had ever happened was trapped inside him. Every feeling he’d ever felt. Only on the field had he ever been able to express himself. Off the field there was no other way than with words, unless you were some kind of artist or musician or mime. Which he wasn’t. It wasn’t that he wanted to die. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t what not eating was about. It wasn’t about perfection either.
What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words.
Pella was sipping her coffee, watching him, waiting. You couldn’t predict what she’d look like in three or thirteen or thirty-three years. Maybe she’d sprout a third eye, or the strange purply hue of her hair would turn paper white overnight. More likely she would just become more weirdly beautiful with each passing year, though it was impossible, at least for him, to predict what path that beauty would take. Which made her different from all the other girls at Westish, all the other girls he knew. Not that he loved Pella. He didn’t. But he could imagine how someone could love her, and that someone was Schwartzy. They were pretty much perfect for each other. If he, Henry, way back in the days before he arrived on campus, had been able to picture what the women of Westish would look like—twelve hundred girls of the sort Mike Schwartz would date—he would have pictured twelve hundred Pella Affenlights.
But if Pella and Schwartz made a perfect whole, like the yin and yang on Owen’s favorite pajamas, or the two halves of a baseball’s cover, two infinity-shaped pieces of leather stitched together with love’s red thread, then there was no room for Henry. If you were a boy and you loved a girl, you could make plans together. And if you were a boy and you loved a boy—he thought of Owen and Jason Gomes on the steps of Birk Hall, heads bowed together, sharing a joint; he had no comparable image of Owen and President Affenlight to call upon—then you could make plans together too. The world would be against you, would threaten you and call you names, but at least it would understand. It had words for what you were doing. But if you were Henry and you needed Mike you were simply screwed. There were no words for that, no ceremony that would guarantee your future. Every day was just that: a day, a blank, a nothing, in which you had to invent yourself and your friendship from scratch. The weight of everything you’d ever done was nothing. It could all vanish, just like that. Just like this.
“I told myself,” Pella said softly, “that if you wouldn’t come back to work, and you wouldn’t try the pills, and you wouldn