The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [94]
After a few minutes Affenlight’s stomachache passed. He went to the window. Dusk was falling. A soft spring rain was filling the flower beds, a soft wind trembling the new-leafed trees. No lights came on in Phumber 405. Where had Owen gone if not to his room? To dinner, perhaps. Or the library. Or the arms of another, better, more appropriate lover. Affenlight missed him already. Why couldn’t he have acted more normal, hid his confusion until it passed? Why couldn’t he have explained himself to Owen? Didn’t love sometimes have to explain itself?
Affenlight resolved, there at the window in his darkening office, to take himself out of the running for Owen’s affections. Not that he was in the running, after today. Owen wouldn’t be back, and that was for the best. Owen would be happier with someone his own age, someone better at being gay. Affenlight would call Pella, take her to Maison Robert for dinner—that was the sort of thing he should be doing anyway. The two of them had spent so little time together. His stomachache had been a sign.
He went to his desk, dialed the phone upstairs to see if Pella was there, listened to the first two rings. The office door reopened. There stood Owen, his damaged face bathed in lamplight, his soft, one-sided smile more saintly than anything an old master ever did. Affenlight placed the phone back on the hook just as Pella said hello. “I thought you’d gone,” he said.
“Gone? Without my shoes?” Owen nodded toward his saddlebacks, which were right there beside the love seat, heels aligned. Stupid, foolish Affenlight! “I went to make some coffee.” He handed Affenlight a steaming mug. IF MOMMA AIN’T HAPPY, AIN’T NO ONE HAPPY, read its weathered pink lettering. “Should we have a cigarette?”
Affenlight smiled. This was the thought that had been eluding him, the little switch deep in his head that needed to be flipped to restore him from his vague fears to his actual physical life: after sex, after oral sex, with your saintly lover, your saintly twenty-one-year-old lover, your saintly twenty-one-year-old male lover, you should get to smoke a cigarette. Of course! Things were simpler than they seemed. Repeat it like a mantra, Guert: Things are simpler than they seem.
“Smoking in the parlor,” he said, nodding up at the hand-painted sign as he slapped his overcoat pockets for his cigarettes, “is expressly prohibited.”
The routine became entrenched: After they did whatever they did that day, Owen would go out into the hallway and return eight minutes later, always bearing the same two steaming mugs from the particleboard shelf above the coffeemaker: KISS ME, I’M IRISH for himself, IF MOMMA AIN’T HAPPY for Affenlight. They sipped their coffee and smoked a cigarette, chatted, read Chekhov together, passing the book back and forth once Owen’s headaches subsided. The kitschy mugs had been culled, over the years, from Mrs. McCallister’s home kitchen cupboards. It might have sounded silly, but Affenlight loved the way Owen always picked these same two mugs and even, presumably, went so far as to rinse them in the sink when they were dirty. Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.
Affenlight told Mrs. McCallister that he’d resumed a daily exercise regimen and so needed to keep the late-afternoon hours clear of appointments. He laid awake nights thinking of Owen, half listening for Pella to come home from Mike Schwartz’s house, always relieved when he heard