The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [61]
They’d driven to the restaurant, though it was only ten or so blocks from campus—a chivalrous gesture on Mike’s part, to keep her out of the cold, or else he just wanted to show off his beastly boat of a car. On the way back they took a different, longer route along the lakefront, past the lighthouse. Waves crashed on the breakers, sending up curtains of surf. The black of the water, which stretched as far north and south as the eye could see, graded imperceptibly into the black of the starless sky. “I forgot how much it looks like the ocean,” Pella said, cracking open her window to see how it smelled.
“Everything but salt.”
“When we lived in Cambridge, my dad was always driving us down to the ocean. Even in the middle of winter, he’d find some excuse.” A spritz of mist came through the open window, along with an odor of rotting fish.
“I should have warned you,” Mike said. “That window’s impossible to roll up. Here.” He blasted the heat and angled the vents toward Pella. They had already wrapped around the lighthouse and were headed, very slowly, back toward the campus, the lake now on the Mike-ward side of the car. Pella felt that flicker of sad foreclosure she always felt at the end of an outward voyage.
“We have three options,” Mike said. “We can go to Bartleby’s, which is a bar. We can go to my house, which is a mess. Or we can drive around until my car breaks down, which will be soon.”
Would it seem forward, not to say slutty, to go to his house? Pella wasn’t sure what the college dating norms were like these days—whether accepting three squares of pizza and half a bottle of syrupy chardonnay amounted to a sexual bargain. In any case, it seemed like Mike had a set of dating norms all his own. She didn’t want to seem slutty or forward, but, just as on the steps of the VAC this morning, she felt reluctant to leave his company.
“I vote for your house,” she said.
“Consider yourself forewarned.”
The house was appointed in classic collegiate squalor: garbage cans on the porch, busted spindles in the railing. A storm door hanging from a single hinge, a peeling slab of tape on the mailbox lid that read: SCHWARTZ/ARSCH.
“I’d turn on the lights,” he said as he reached back to lead her by hand through the dark living room, “but that would be embarrassing.”
Pella could smell dried beer and another sickly odor, like spoiled milk. The sticky floorboards clung to the soles of her shoes. “How do you ever pick up any girls,” she whispered, “living in a place like this?”
“I don’t.”
She let the lie slide. They passed through a low archway into a second room, perhaps a dining room, though the table beneath the chandelier appeared to be a Ping-Pong table. Even stronger than the smell of beer in here was the burnt dusty odor of a used bookstore’s basement, where paperback copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Rabbit, Run and Leon Uris novels cost a quarter. “Books,” Pella said.
“Too many.”
“What’s that noise?”
“My roommate.”
Pella felt, again, both older and younger than the situation required. She’d skipped this whole era of roommates and beer pong and Salvation Army furniture—it wasn’t necessarily something you wanted to go back to once you’d lived in a clean decorated place of your own. And yet being here, with Mike’s huge hand wrapped around hers, she sensed a certain long-felt pressure lifting from her sternum. She imagined hiding out for a year or two, pacing her way through the brittle paperbacks, and finally emerging, rested and fine. Though someone would have to wash the floors. “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked, meaning the roommate.
“He’s a bit of a snorer. You’ll get used to it.”
“When?”
“A few weeks, at the most. Do you want anything to drink?”
“No.”
Old. Young. Old. Young. They entered a room that was mostly consumed by a low bed, and Mike let go of her hand to shut the door. Pella sat down on the bed’s edge. A fat stack of books slid off the mattress and crashed to the floor. “Sorry,” she whispered.
“Don’t be.”
She took off her shoes, lay down with her head on the pillow, and