The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [90]
“Steve Sax? Chuck Knoblauch? Mark Wohlers? Rick Ankiel?”
If Sarah X. Pessel hadn’t been a girl, Henry might have socked her in the face. Her middle name probably didn’t even start with X; she probably just liked the way it looked in her byline. “None of those guys were shortstops,” he said.
“Don’t get mad at me, Henry. I’m just doing my job.”
“You’re in college, Sarah. You work for the Bugler. You don’t get paid for this.”
Sarah looked pointedly out at the field, back at Henry. “Neither do you.”
30
Like many Midwesterners, Mrs. McCallister started the workday early. By four fifteen she’d put in an hour of overtime and headed home to her half-acre garden and a multicourse dinner cooked by Mr. McCallister, whose fall from a tree stand three deer seasons ago had smashed his left hip and forced him to retire. Now he grew vegetables in the McCallisters’ garden, cooked them into sauce for his homemade pasta. Often Mrs. McCallister would slide a plate onto Affenlight’s desk at noontime; even reheated in the office microwave, it always tasted exquisite.
It became Owen’s habit to drop by Affenlight’s office around four thirty, post–Mrs. McCallister, on days when the Harpooners didn’t have a home game; because of his injuries he wasn’t yet traveling or practicing with the team. Owen would enter without a word, shut the door behind him, and slide out from under his messenger bag, the strap of which held a rainbow pin, a pink-triangle pin, a black-and-white taijitu pin, and pins that read CARBON NEUTRALITY NOW, PAY A LIVING WAGE, and WESTISH BASEBALL. Then he lay down on the love seat, which wasn’t quite long enough to lie down on and too stiff to be comfortable anyway, but Owen didn’t seem to mind. He slipped off his shoes, crossed his slender ankles on the love seat’s far arm, and closed his eyes, fingers interlaced atop the soft swell of his childlike belly. The only sign of wakefulness would be the slow, thoughtful tap of his thumb pads against each other. He wanted Affenlight to read to him.
This was what Affenlight wanted too. The original pretense for these sessions was that the aftereffects of Owen’s concussion made it hard for him to focus. Now, two weeks removed from Owen’s injury, Affenlight wasn’t sure whether this was still the case—often Owen would turn his head and follow along on the page anyway—but he didn’t want to break the spell by asking. He rose from his desk chair, which was too antique and massive to move around, and shifted to one of the spindle-backed Westish-insignia visitors’ chairs, which he drew up close to the love seat. Owen extracted his homework from his bag and handed it to Affenlight—on this particular day, the last two acts of The Cherry Orchard and a turgid dramaturgical essay from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Affenlight began to read.
“Don’t you think this is strange?” Owen murmured sometime later, as Affenlight turned a page.
“What?”
Owen rubbed his belly, eyes still serenely closed. “You know. The way we do this every afternoon. I lie here, and you read to me, and we talk.”
“I’m sure it’s very unusual,” Affenlight agreed. “I’ve certainly never done anything like it.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Owen swung up to a sitting position, opened his eyes, and fixed them on Affenlight. “What I mean is… it’s almost as if you didn’t like me.”
“I do.” Affenlight reached out and brushed his fingertips against the little knob of bone at the base of Owen’s skull, but the gesture seemed insufficient, if not utterly false. He felt schoolboyish, intimidated. Since that first tentative moment on the moonlit linoleum, they had not touched.
“I don’t know if you know what you’re doing.”
Part of Affenlight felt peeved at Owen for interrupting or dismissing his bliss. Because it was bliss, he felt, to be here with Owen and to read to him, even when he was reading dry-as-dust sentences from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Of all the activities two people