The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [50]
Pella shuffled across the parking lot with her head down, trying to keep the wind-angled snow out of her eyes. As she climbed the steps of the VAC, she stumbled over what turned out to be a leg—the bare hairy leg of an enormous, almost naked person. Sleep deprivation, apparently, had caused her to hallucinate a naked lumberjack. The lumberjack was sitting on the steps in a snow-white towel, staring sadly ahead as wet snow gathered in his hair, his beard, his chest hair. Even when Pella tripped over his leg and had to plant her hands on the concrete to keep from planting her face, he didn’t acknowledge her presence. She rolled over onto her butt, wound up sitting beside him on the steps.
“Nice towel.”
No response.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
The massive shoulders shrugged up and down. Pella had never seen, nor hallucinated, so much flesh at such close range.
“Are you locked out?” she said. “Because I think they’re supposed to open at six. It must be just about—”
“Door’s open.” The lumberjack heaved a heavy sigh. “You don’t look familiar,” he said wearily, still staring straight ahead. “Are you a freshperson?”
“No. Although I guess, in a way, you could kind of say—I’m just visiting,” Pella concluded. “What about you?”
“Mike Schwartz.” His right hand reached across his body for her to shake, though his head stayed turned toward the parking lot, the stone bowl of the football stadium, the darkness of the lake beyond.
“Pella,” she said, leaving off her surname. She felt a pleasant anonymity, born of the swirling snow and Mike Schwartz’s apparent indifference to her presence, which she was afraid her father’s name might dispel.
“Like the city,” he said.
“Yep.”
“Sacked by the Romans in 168 BC.”
“Somebody’s been doing his homework.”
Like an apparition—everything looked like an apparition in this weather, in this hoary predawn light—an elderly man rode up on a bicycle, dismounted niftily, and docked the bike in a skeletal rack at the foot of the stairs. His wispy hair was dusted with snow. He unhooked a small canvas duffel from his handlebars and trotted up the VAC stairs, nodding as he passed. To judge by the old man’s affably neutral expression, you’d think Mike Schwartz sat on these steps in a towel every morning, greeting industrious gym-goers. Which was true, for all Pella knew. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked.
“Cold is a state of mind.”
“Well, my state of mind is freezing.” Pella stood and brushed the snow from her thighs. “It was nice to meet you, Mike.”
That was when he finally turned his head and looked at her for the first time. Pella saw that his eyes were a lovely, light-bearing color, like the lucid amber in which prehistoric insects were preserved. They contained a look of injured confusion, as if she had promised to sit there all day and was suddenly reneging on the deal. She felt, for a moment, as if her soul were being evaluated in some unusually profound way. Then he glanced down at her breasts. Pella crossed her arms. She felt annoyed that he’d looked, ruining the moment; doubly annoyed that she was wearing her unflattering flattening suit beneath her hoodie.
“I didn’t get in,” he said heavily.
“Get in what?”
He pointed between his shower-thonged feet, where an envelope was being buried by the snow. “Law school.”
“That’s why you’re sitting here in a blizzard? Because you got rejected from law school?”
“Yes.”