The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [59]
Pella looked to Mike. “Should we order wine?”
“Uh… sure.”
“We don’t have to.”
“No, no. A bottle of your finest white.” Mike gave Mrs. Carapelli a reassuring pat on the shoulder as she spun on a sturdy heel and stomped away.
“Mrs. Carapelli doesn’t seem eager to attract new business,” Pella said.
“Don’t take it personally. Henry and I have been coming here every Friday for years.”
“But tonight he had to study?”
Mike planted an elbow on the table, ran a big hand over his widow’s peak. “I’m having a hard time talking to Henry right now.”
“Tell me about it,” Pella said. But as Mike began to speak—haltingly at first—her heart sped up in that familiar, terrible way. At the bar a thirtysomething couple was dandling hands, their legs intertwined beneath their stools. The woman wore a red dress that clashed with the huge, ornately framed oil painting that hung above their heads, on which darker reds and golds were slathered in thick, light-catching layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads of sweat forming along her hairline. Not right now, she thought. Her panic attacks had grown less intense in recent months, and she knew how to withstand them, but this would be a less-than-ideal time. She considered excusing herself to go to the bathroom, but that would have been rude, since Mike was midparagraph and picking up steam, and besides, the bathroom seemed impossibly far away, across the dining room and down a corridor and around a corner and through a door, and it was bound to have some sort of terrible citrusy odor, citrus mixed with shit…
Mike had stopped talking, his head cocked at a concerned angle. “Are you okay?”
Pella nodded, squeezing her hands together under the table.
“Are you sure? You seem a little pale.” He looked at her with those light-bearing eyes, laid his hand on her upper arm, just for a moment. Pella tried to remember whether she’d taken her pills this morning, both the birth-control one and the sky-blue one. But actually she’d stopped taking birth control however many months ago. Get yourself together, girl. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Just keep talking.”
By the time Mike finished his History of Henry, the wine was nearly gone. He looked so upset that it raised Pella’s spirits, as if one corner booth at Carapelli’s could hold only so much distress.
“So,” she said, taking a small square of the extremely large pizza and setting it on her plate. “Let me see if I have this straight. Ever since you met Henry, you’ve been his mentor. Teaching him what to eat, what classes to take, how to hit a speedball, whatever. Henry doesn’t move from point A to point B without thinking, How would Mike want me to do this?”
“We usually call it a fastball.”
“Fastball. And now your work is paying off. You were right about the kid—what you saw in him three years ago, everyone else is seeing now. But it’s not making you happy, the way you thought it would. In fact, you’re starting to resent the ungrateful bastard.”
Mike frowned. “Henry’s grateful.”
“But not grateful enough. Without you he’d be working in a factory right now. And instead he’s about to realize his dream. And make a boatload of money to boot.”
Mike folded his hands beneath his chin. Pella felt relieved to sit across from someone who was willing to act so unreservedly glum in her presence, as if she weren’t there. David never did that—David’s eyes were always right on her, probing, admiring, assessing, enjoying. That was what he called love. “It makes me feel like an asshole,” Mike said.
“What?”
“To not be happy for him.”
“You are happy for him.”
“But to the extent I’m not, it’s irrational. I had a plan for Henry, and it worked. I had a plan for myself, and that one didn’t. I shouldn’t take it out on him.”
“Well, feelings aren’t rational.”
Mike folded two squares of pizza into a kind of sandwich and tossed them in his mouth. His woes didn’t seem to affect his appetite.