The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [202]
She groaned and rolled onto her stomach when he laid her down on the bed they shared. He tugged up the hem of her tank top and unhooked her bra, rubbed very lightly the twin pink indents where the clasp had pressed into her skin. Things were not so bad. Lately she seemed to be emerging from the deepest part of her grief, that summerlong coma during which she’d napped and read, read and napped, eyes Xanaxed and dry. A few nights ago they’d made love again, for what felt like the first time.
The night was warm, too warm to bother with blankets. Schwartz found an extra sheet in the hall closet and spread its seashell pattern over Pella’s sleeping form. Now they had no parents between them.
He went to the kitchen and boiled water for instant coffee. He made it strong, the way he liked it, and added a finger’s worth of scotch from President Affenlight’s liquor cabinet. He’d been working through the scotch slowly, systematically, starting with the least expensive. Only in the last week had Pella asked him to pour her a little glass too; this was another good sign, the stepwise return of one appetite at a time.
It was after one. He descended the narrow staircase to President Affenlight’s office, where he’d been spending his nights, his dawns, and many of his days. Contango trailed him down the stairs and curled up in his usual spot on the rug. The financial documents had been carted away by accountants and attorneys, but Affenlight’s books and papers, a lifetime’s worth of learning, were still here. They needed to be dealt with, or at least packed up, before late August, when the newly hired president arrived, but Pella had so far refused to come into this room, the room where her father died. So it fell to Schwartz to comb through the typewritten lecture notes and yellowed journals; the coffee-stained drafts of essays and wrinkled carbons of decades-old correspondence; the grocery lists and scribbles; the copiously annotated copies of antebellum prayerbooks and poetry primers, to decide what should be kept and what thrown away. Everything was paper, paper, paper—he’d brought twenty more boxes of paper from the study upstairs, and these were stacked in the corners of the room. Affenlight had kept a computer on his desk, but it seemed to have been mostly for show.
One box of 4×6 cards was marked, simply, SPEAKING. Some of the cards contained jokes or anecdotes, along with the dates and occasions of their use. Schwartz remembered many of the more recent occasions, and the jokes. Other cards offered aphoristic rules in Affenlight’s precise hand: With a small group, assonate, as in writing; with a large group, alliterate.
Often Owen dropped by as late as three or four, mug of tea in hand. Schwartz would share his recent discoveries; Owen, as he listened, would purse his lips into something like a smile. They would seal their evening by smoking a wordless joint on the front steps of Scull Hall. Tonight, though, Owen didn’t come, and Schwartz, feeling rather literary, took down Affenlight’s Riverside Shakespeare and settled in behind the desk to page through it. He scanned the marginalia, paused to read some familiar passages. He somehow felt deeply at home here, in Affenlight’s office, among Affenlight’s thoughts, near Affenlight’s death. Deeply at home but also tenuously so; he considered it a privilege to serve as the de facto custodian of Affenlight’s papers, and he felt a constant worry that someone closer to Affenlight, or at least better versed in American literature, would show up to kick him out. But it hadn’t happened yet, and as the summer crept by it seemed less and less likely to happen. Which saddened Schwartz, in a way: what a smart and thoughtful man Affenlight had been, and how little he’d be remembered.
The Sperm-Squeezers was a beautiful book, the early exemplar of a critical genre; perhaps grad students would read it for another decade, and intellectual historians mention it for a decade after that. And perhaps Schwartz, as he readied all this