The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [74]
She could hear her dad on the phone in the hall, bantering. Ten to one when this Genevieve showed up she’d be a lot hotter than your average mom of a twenty-one-year-old. Pella wasn’t sure why she had to be dragged along on what seemed like a double date, but she wanted to indulge her dad, to prove that they could be friends again. Plus, of course, he’d bought her this dress.
Affenlight, looking more agitated than ever, poked his silver-gray head around the jamb of Pella’s door. “Change of plans!” he said. “Make drinks!” The head vanished.
The head reappeared. “Drinks!” it added.
Pella smoothed her dress, allowed herself one last approving glance in the mirror, and went to the study to pour two scotches, one with ice and one without. She delivered the former to the kitchen, where her father was dicing chives with manic staccato knife strokes. “What’s going on?” she asked. “When did you change your tie?”
Affenlight looked down at his baby-blue tie. “You don’t like it?” he said with childlike disappointment.
“I like it,” Pella said. “But I think you’re very strange.”
Affenlight nodded distractedly and resumed hacking at the chives with one hand. Meanwhile he grabbed his scotch with the other and belted back two-thirds of what had been a very full tumbler. A bright matrix of pinpricked sweat stood out against his flushed mahogany forehead. “What’s going on?” Pella asked.
“Owen’s won the Trowell.”
“The what?”
“The Trowell. It’s a fellowship. He’ll be studying in Tokyo next year.”
“Well, that sounds good. Right?”
“Fantastic.” Affenlight grabbed a tomato from the wooden bowl beside the sink and halved it with a powerful thwack. “Many of our students have applied,” he said as he speedily minced the tomato to a pulp, “but none have won. It’s a very prestigious fellowship. Imagine—Owen gone to Tokyo!”
“What are you making, there?” Pella gestured toward the red puree blooming across the cutting board.
“Hors d’oeuvres.”
“I thought we were going out to dinner.”
“Owen’s not up to it. Poor fellow, he’s been through a lot these past few days. Genevieve thought a restaurant might be too hectic for him. She suggested she and I have dinner, just the two of us, but I thought that wouldn’t be fitting, seeing as how we have Owen’s news to celebrate. So I invited them here.”
“For hors d’oeuvres.”
“Right.” Affenlight drained his drink and sank down on one of the stools that flanked the little kitchen’s butcher-block island. He gazed around the room with plangent, uncomprehending eyes. He looked, for a moment, wildly old—a decade older than his literal age, two decades older than his usual self. “Tokyo,” he murmured. Pella took the knife from his hand and laid it on the counter. She peeked into the refrigerator: limes, butter, and pert white bags of coffee beans. “I’ll walk over to the dining hall,” she said. “Maybe they can whip us up something.”
25
A Saturday evening gloom hung in the air of the dining hall, and it seemed that the revelry happening elsewhere on campus had left a sad vacuum here. Dinner was no longer being served, and the vomit-green chairs contained only a few lonesome stragglers, gazing down at textbooks as they slowly forked their food. A gigantic clock glowered down from the far wall, its latticed iron hands lurching noisily to mark each passing minute. Go somewhere else, the noise seemed to say, anywhere but here.
Pella passed through the open doorway to the kitchen. A small but substantial man, built low to the ground like an Indian burial mound, was scraping mashed potatoes into a giant baggie. He had wide fleshy features, flared nostrils, and acne scars under his eyes. He wore a flopped-over, caved-in chef’s hat. “Closed,” he said forlornly, without glancing up, before Pella could open her mouth. “Closed.”
“I know. I’m sorry to bother you. I was hoping that maybe—”
“Closed.” He pronounced it softly, as a sad but ineluctable truth, and clanged his mashed-potato scooper against the rim of the pan.
“I know, it’s just…”
He didn’t even say the word