The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [60]
“How old are you?” Pella asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“Same here. And not only am I not going to law school this fall, I haven’t even graduated high school. I quit when I met David.”
“Love at first sight, huh?”
Pella shrugged. “I thought so then. Now I just think I was intent on doing something big. Something nobody else my age was doing. David came to my prep school to lecture. He wasn’t an academic, but he read Ancient Greek better than my instructor. He also had a wife, but I didn’t know that at the time.” She looked up to see how Mike would react to the revelation of the wife.
Mike’s eyes were wide. “He knew Greek?”
She nodded.
“And you know Greek?”
“Sort of.”
He touched his beard. “Wow.”
“It was senior year,” Pella said. “I’d just been accepted to Yale—my dad taught at Harvard when I was a kid, so I wanted to be just like him while pretending to be the opposite. Beforehand I was worried I wouldn’t get in. But after I did get in, it started to seem so boring, you know? Half my class was going to Yale. But a bad starter marriage—that was at least five years ahead of the curve.”
Was she rambling? She’d talked so little lately that it was hard to tell. “David lived in San Francisco,” she said, skipping ahead a bit. “I flew back with him and we moved into this loft he was renovating. I didn’t find out about the wife for a while—the two of them were separated. By that time I was pretty much committed to staying.”
Mike grunted in an impressed-sounding way. “How’d that go over with the president?”
“About like you’d expect. First he’d call and lecture me, tell me I was ruining my life. Then came the silent treatment, which lasted about a year, although it was hard to tell who was administering it to whom. Since then he sends me a Westish application once a month.”
“And now here you are.”
“And now here I am.” She looked at Mike, who was looking at her. “I might be here for a while.”
“Good,” he said. “For me anyway.”
Pella, embarrassed, pinged her thumbnail against her empty wineglass. She’d had three little squares of pizza at most. It was the biggest pizza she’d ever seen, and even with Mike’s valiant eating they hadn’t finished it. “Is it fun?” she asked shyly.
“Huh?”
“College, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I’m not much for fun.”
Both of the young waitresses looked like Carapelli offspring, dark and voluptuous where their mom was dark and fat. One of them slid the check onto the table as she moved down the row of booths, collecting glass shakers of parmesan cheese and red-pepper flakes. Mike dug in his wallet, pulled out a blue credit card, and laid it on top of the check. Then, after squinting at the blue card quizzically for a while, he pulled out his wallet again and traded it for a gray one.
He smiled bravely, but the gray card didn’t appease him either. As they talked he kept stealing glances at it. “Wait here,” he finally said, sliding out of the booth and scooping up card and check.
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Pella wanted to crawl under the table—here she didn’t have a dime to her name, and she’d thoughtlessly ordered a bottle of wine, and to top it off she’d barely touched the pizza. Talk about independent. She slunk down in her chair, pulled the collar of her polo shirt—purchased, of course, with her father’s Visa card, which was sitting on the dresser in the guest room right now and which she easily could have brought with her—tight around her throat.
“I’ll pay next time,” she said as Mike approached, carrying his jacket and her sweatshirt. “I, um, forgot my wallet.”
Mike smiled. “Don’t be silly. I invited you.”
“Still,” Pella said. Mike wasn’t pink-cheeked, not like the rest of these Westish kids. He seemed simultaneously old and young—sort of like she felt. “This might sound strange,” she said, “but it’s been forever since I hung out with someone my own age.”
“How does it feel?”
“Not bad.” She nodded, slipping her arms into her sweatshirt as Mike held it for