The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [82]
“You’re leaving,” he said, meaning not for the evening but for Japan. “Soon.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll miss you.”
Owen smiled. “Who’s we?”
Affenlight didn’t answer. He was a little taller than Owen, but the way they leaned against the counter made their eyes exactly level.
“You might have to endure me awhile longer,” Owen said. “Dr. Sobel asked me to teach playwriting to the summer-school kids.”
Three extra months—it wasn’t the forever Affenlight longed for, but it was something. He nodded, showing part but not all of his relief at this. “Beautiful summers here.”
“So I hear.”
“Fishing. Some very good fishing.”
Owen smiled. “Sounds barbaric.”
“We could go sometime,” Affenlight ventured. “On a Saturday morning.”
Owen smiled again. “As long as we don’t kill any fish.” His socked toes brushed against Affenlight’s cordovan loafer. “Or any worms, of course.”
The moonlight made a little patch on the battered linoleum, which Affenlight had always meant to replace and which now seemed awfully embarrassing. What would happen next? Owen leaned toward him, one eyebrow lifted in an expression of benign irony, his eyes near blind like a prophet’s. Closer and closer still, taking care to avert the sore, swollen side of his face. The moon slipped behind clouds, and the pall over the linoleum became uniform. Affenlight’s heart galloped and seized. The phone in his pocket buzzed again. The kiss landed tenderly, toward the corner of his mouth.
28
Sunday morning, quietest time of the Westish week. The dining hall didn’t serve breakfast. The chapel held no early service. The VAC didn’t open until eleven, the library until noon.
Spring was coming for real, and the chirps of robins and sparrows curled toward the upper reaches of the football stadium. From high above came the nasal honks of gulls. One word kept bobbing to the surface of Henry’s mind. He spat it out on the broad stone steps. It came back again, insidious, bright as a neon sign. Motherfucker. He spat it out and back it came. When he hit the top he knuckle-popped the sign, number 17, dodged along the stone bowl’s rim to the next row of steps, triple-timed it down. The south end goalpost’s paint looked dull and chipped. Goalposts need paint, motherfucker.
He was running as hard as he could, vest cinched tight, sprinting to the top and chop-stepping down, saving nothing. He thought of engines running hot, burning the oil spilled on their blocks. When his vision blurred and sweat stung his eyes, he thought of the salt as wrongness, impurity, error—spill it onto the concrete and watch it evaporate. Offer it up, motherfucker.
He wanted to chase down the holy vacancy that marked his best workouts, to sense his body as a hollow drum. Wanted to let the cool gray-blue of the lake and the green-brown-gray of the campus enter and open his lungs. But he was too agitated, too pissed off. He finished the stadium, his second, and started back the other way. Stair-pounding pain shot up through his anklebones to his shins. He quickened his pace.
He finished his third stadium with a halfhearted war whoop and turned to survey what he’d done. He hadn’t quieted his mind, but at least he’d reduced his legs to quivering, twitching, thoughtless things. The sun lifted high above the lake. A pair of circling birds swooped toward unseen prey and, finding nothing, braked their heels against the water. The dew lay heavy on the football field’s scattered patches of living grass, green welts amid the rutted mud. There against the far goalpost leaned Schwartz, sipping coffee from one of two steaming paper cups he held. He wore WAD sweatpants, shower thongs, a flannel workshirt whose untucked tail flapped in the wind. Henry collected his scattered clothing and hopped the short stone wall that separated the stands from the field.
“You’re crazy, you know that?” Schwartz held out a paper cup. “It’s supposed to be your day off.”
Henry’s