The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [98]
Since the first time they’d had sex they’d never not had sex. But tonight it wasn’t happening. He was too tired, too tense, had popped one too many pills on the ferry. It was bound to happen eventually, this slip toward domesticity—was a normal and natural and even potentially comforting development, but Schwartz could tell this wasn’t the night for it. Pella would think they weren’t having sex because he was worried about Henry. That was the last thing he wanted her to think, even if it was true.
She had said it was okay, but here she was, persisting. She slid her fingers inside the flap of his boxers and tickled the crease where his pelvis met his thigh. Schwartz tried to feel it. Missiles, redwoods, the Washington Monument. Come on, he thought, one time.
He had a few stray Viagra in the bottom drawer of his broken-down dresser beneath his jeans. No shame in that, was there? Sometimes—okay, usually—you were drunk when you brought someone home. Sometimes the girl was too klutzy, or too shrill, or just plain not that sexy. Sometimes you needed a little extra. Part of the relief of meeting Pella was the way he responded to her so fully, so fundamentally—he’d forgotten the pills were even there. But he wished he’d taken one tonight.
Pella withdrew her hand to his belly, outside his T-shirt. Schwartz searched her little sigh for evidence of exasperation—he found some, but if you corrected for paranoia it might as easily have been a yawn.
“It’s a block,” she said. “Like writer’s block. Or stage fright.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he should be seeing somebody.”
“He is seeing somebody,” Mike said. “Me.”
“You know what I mean. A professional.”
Schwartz bristled. “Henry wouldn’t go for that.”
“He would if you told him to.”
“It would scare him. He’d think there was something wrong with him.”
“Well, isn’t there?”
“He’ll be fine. He just needs to relax.”
Pella’s fingers brushed his boxers again. “Maybe you should relax a little.”
Schwartz flinched. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s what supposed to mean?”
“About me needing to relax.”
“Nothing. You just seem kind of tense tonight.”
It was the tonight that got Schwartz. He’d been tense all month. Hell, he’d been tense all his life. What was so goddamn remarkable about tonight?
“I’m not tense.”
“Fine,” Pella said. “Whatever.”
The smallness of the bed enforced an awkward closeness. Schwartz was wedged between Pella and the wall. In lieu of a shade, a dirt-gray sheet hung down over the window, barely dimming the lights of the neighbor’s garage.
Since moving out of the dorms he’d only occasionally brought a girl back here—better to go to the girl’s place, with all those pillows and photo albums and unguessable scents, the fresh sheets on the bed and the carefully labeled class binders stacked on the shelf. In the room of a girl at a place like Westish, the presence of family was almost always palpable, not just in the framed photographs but in the careful replication of a childhood room, updated for post-adolescence; the holdover stuffed animals, the condom box or plastic pastel birth-control wheel left in plain view in tribute to the parent who wasn’t there to object. Those absent families soothed Schwartz; for a few hours, he imagined them as his own.
“He should see a psychologist,” Pella said. “A behavioral therapist. Someone who deals with athletes. He wouldn’t have to free-associate about his mother or anything.”
“Maybe that’s what he needs. To free-associate about his mother.”
“I’m being serious,” Pella said.
“So am I,” said Schwartz, but he wasn’t. For some reason Pella’s attempted intervention was really pissing him off. He tried to find a softer, more sincere way of speaking.