The second pitch came in just as fast but more toward the center of the plate. Owen, after waiting what seemed to be far too long, dropped his hands and swung. It was a baseball commonplace, dimly remembered from Affenlight’s childhood days as a halfhearted Braves fan, that left-handed batters had more graceful swings than righties, long effortless swings that swooped down through the strike zone and greeted shoe-top pitches sweetly. Affenlight didn’t see why this should be so, unless the right and left sides of the bodies possessed inherently different properties, something to do with the halves of the brain, but Owen’s languid, elliptical swing did nothing to deflate the hypothesis.
The ball looped over the third baseman’s head and landed squarely on the left-field line, kicking up a puff of chalk. Fair ball. The home crowd let out an anguished sigh that seemed all out of keeping with an empty-bases hit in a three-run game. As Owen loped safely into second base, they rose, almost in unison, and began to clap. Affenlight thought them very magnanimous to cheer so heartily for an opponent; somehow Owen inspired that kind of behavior in people.
Affenlight stood to clap as well, but it was the pitcher who, as the noise continued to mount, sheepishly tipped his cap. Affenlight, flummoxed, asked the woman beside him, who was wearing a gold-and-navy CHUTE YOUR ENEMIES sweatshirt, what happened. “That lucky twit,” she said, indicating Owen, “just broke up Trevor’s no-hitter.”
Out on the electronic scoreboard in center field, the 0 in the Westish hit column had changed to a 1. Affenlight reproached himself; a real fan would have noticed that immediately. He reproached himself again; he’d gotten a dab of mustard on his Harpooner tie. Not that he didn’t have three dozen more at home. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it a rather skillful play.”
The woman chuckled. “I’m pretty sure his eyes were closed.”
The next batter, Adam Starblind, drew a walk. “Your pitcher seems a bit rattled,” Affenlight noted.
“Trevor? Please. These rich preppy kids couldn’t hit him with a ten-foot pole.”
Affenlight wanted to point out that several of the Harpooners came from extremely modest or even straitened circumstances, and that the team didn’t have a baseball facility anywhere near this luxurious—how on earth did a public school afford it?—but it would be hard to make the case while wearing his best Italian suit, and anyway the game had reached a critical moment, two runners on, the tying run at the plate. The batter was the Harpooners’ replacement for Henry Skrimshander at shortstop—Affenlight prided himself on knowing the students’ names, but the freshpersons often eluded him. The Latino non-Henry, whatever his name, performed several rapid signs of the cross as he stepped into the batter’s box. He took one strike, then another. He gamely fouled off two tough pitches, then slapped a ground ball that glanced off the fingertips of the second baseman’s glove. Bases loaded.
“Almost!” cheered Affenlight, with what amounted to a kind of sneering glee. Remorse quickly followed. What if that second baseman was this woman’s child? In any event, he was somebody’s child.
“Do you have a son on the team?” he asked, trying to atone, but the woman simply shushed him and pointed to the field. Mike Schwartz, his daughter’s cuckolded lover, was walking toward home plate.
The catcher called time and jogged out to calm Trevor, who was storming around behind the pitcher’s mound, talking to himself. Affenlight focused his attention on the lovely Owen, who, while standing with both feet on the tiny island of third base, reached into his uniform’s back pocket and produced a roll of mints. He offered one to Coach Cox, who declined with folded arms, and then to the third baseman, who shrugged and held out his palm.
Mike Schwartz, by comparison to Owen—or, really, to anyone—had a snarling, hyperactive mien in the batter’s box, like a barely restrained bull. His back foot gouged at the dirt until it found a purchase it liked; his hips twisted, screwing his knock-kneed stance more tightly into the ground; his shoulders bobbed while his fists made curt, jerky motions that slashed the bat head through the air. He crowded close to home plate, smothering it with his bulk, daring the pitcher to find a place to throw the ball. Affenlight couldn’t tell whether all this kinetic menace came naturally to Schwartz or was a performance designed to intimidate; probably any such distinction would be false. Only in the instant of the pitch’s release did he quiet himself, and then the swing became compact and dangerous, and the pitch—a high fastball, probably in excess of ninety miles per hour—shot off the bat with a pure loud ping of aluminum. Affenlight leaped to his feet, thrust a fist in the air. The ball landed in the tall firs beyond the left-field wall, and all four Harpooners—Owen, Starblind, not-Henry, and Schwartz—stomped joyously on home plate in turn. Four to three, Harpooners.
Adam Starblind, who had been playing center field, came in to pitch the last two innings. The Titans stranded a runner on third in the eighth, and in the ninth not-Henry and Professor Guladni’s son Ajay turned a handsome double play to end the game. Affenlight wended his way through the stands toward Duane Jenkins, the Westish athletic director, who was standing behind the Harpooner dugout, filming the celebration with his cell phone.
“Nationals,” Duane said, beaming. “South Carolina. Can you believe it?”
“I can now.” Affenlight held out his hand. “Congratulations, Duane. A lot of hard work went into this.”
“I’d like to take the credit. But we all know who to thank.” Duane jerked his head toward the field, where Mike Schwartz had somehow obtained a folding chair and was sitting quietly apart, undoing the buckles of his shin guards while his teammates jitterbugged around Adam Starblind, who thrust the big faux-gold trophy aloft.
Affenlight wrapped an arm around Duane’s schlumpy shoulders. “That’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about.”
66
Alcohol was banned from the locker room by NCAA decree, but Schwartz had bought three cases of champagne with the last of Coach Cox’s money—he’d also paid his May rent and his Visa bill—and, with Meat’s help, smuggled them into an empty locker at Chute Stadium and covered them with bags of ice. When the Harpooners returned to the locker room after accepting their trophy and hugging their families and posing for pictures and plenty of jumping around, the ice had melted and seeped out the locker’s cracks, forming a giant puddle on the fancy slate navy-and-gold checkerboard floor. Meat undid the lock, and a few moments later they were having the victory celebration they’d seen on TV so many times, dancing shirtless in their sliding shorts to the Spanish hip-hop that blared from the boombox Izzy brought on road trips. Only the cameras were missing.
Schwartz took a long slug from his personal bottle of champagne, which he wasn’t going to waste by spraying around, and sought out Owen, who was shimmying on top of the locker-room bench, his Harpooner cap twisted and cocked like he was from the hood. He paused in his gyrations to give Schwartz a high five. “I’m wearing my cap askew,” he said.
“Looks good.” Schwartz leaned in to be heard above the music without shouting. “Listen, Buddha. After your surgery—they gave you something?”
Owen nodded. “Percocet.”
Schwartz belted back some more bubbly. “Huh.”
Owen reached into the locker, unzipped his bag, and produced a translucent orange cylinder. “This is what’s left.” He slipped the bottle into Schwartz’s palm and closed Schwartz’s fingers around it, like a grandparent distributing dollar bills or illicit stores of candy.
Schwartz, not wanting to seem eager, didn’t shake the cylinder, but he gauged its near weightlessness with dismay. “Thanks, Buddha.”
“Aye aye, my captain.”
Schwartz retreated to a bathroom stall, just to be by himself for a minute, and popped two of the remaining three capsules, hoping to keep one in reserve for later, but it seemed silly to let that lonely little thing jitter around in there like that, like some kind of keepsake, so he swallowed it too. Three Percs weren’t going to do shit anyway.
Even i
n the best circumstances his enjoyment of moments like this was bound to be partial, muted, hedged; he was already thinking about the next game and how not to lose it. It was a coach’s mentality, a field general’s mentality, and it was his mentality too. Permanent vigilance, because disaster always lurked. The best he could hope for was an instant of peace before the planning began again, a moment when his muscles unclenched and he thought, Okay, fine, we did it.
But today he couldn’t even have that. All he could have today was a sickly champagne-and-Percocet high, and the knowledge that there’d be at least two more games—because nationals were double elimination—before he had to face his fucked-up life. If Henry were here, Henry’s joy would be total, his holy-fool dancing would put the Buddha’s to shame, but Henry wasn’t here. He hadn’t pushed through that one last barrier, his fear of succeeding, beyond which the world lay totally open to him. Schwartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He’d never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he’d never be as good as he wanted to be. He’d never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn’t double-edged, that couldn’t just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing, and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around; this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you’ve barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier’s soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.
Working with Henry was the closest he’d ever come, because Henry knew only one thing, wanted only one thing, and his single-mindedness made him—made both of them—pure. But Henry had tried to beat himself, had inserted himself into the equation, had started to worry about being perfect instead of simply becoming the best goddamn shortstop ever, and now he was no better than Schwartz. He was just like Schwartz, a fucked-up guy with a fucked-up life.
“Schwartzy!” yelled Rick. “Get the bleepity bleep out here!”
Henry, Schwartz thought, hauling himself up from the sink over which he’d been hunched, staring at his sunken but shaven face through a mess of dried toothpaste and spit flecks. Henry’s here. He headed back into the locker room, still throttling his empty champagne bottle. The Harpooners had gathered in a huddle in the center of the room, undressed and dripping champagne, arms draped around one another’s shoulders. Rick and Owen stepped apart to open a spot for Schwartz, and the circle expanded to accommodate his girth. Henry wasn’t there. The rest of them pressed their temples together and swayed back and forth like junior high school kids at their last-ever junior high school dance, singing the school shanty at the top of their lungs.
67
Late that night, after the team returned from Chute, Owen came. And as they made love, and afterward, as they lay together in the dark, Affenlight kept one ear open, listening for Pella. It was unlikely she’d show up unannounced, after so emphatically declaring she wanted a few weeks to herself, and now past midnight it grew less likely with each passing moment. Even if she did come she wouldn’t barge into his darkened bedroom. And yet. Every voice that floated up from the Small Quad seized his senses. Every standard nighttime sound produced by the apartment—the crack of frost in the back of the fridge, the chiropractic groans of walls and floors, the scratch of the mouse Affenlight had never seen but knew existed—caused his breath to catch, just for a second. His breath caught a lot; there were lots of sounds.
“Are you all right?” Owen asked. “You seem tense.”
“I’m okay.” He felt guilty more than anything. Guilty to Pella for having Owen here; guilty to Owen for the way he himself was absent, his attention scattered like pollen over the quad.
“Tell me about the house.”
Now that he was no longer in the house, knee-deep in the Bremens’ belongings, distracted by Sandy’s superior saleswomanship, surrounded and perplexed by their superfluously detailed lives, the place had begun to take shape in Affenlight’s mind. He began to talk about it to Owen, haltingly at first, but as he got rolling he started to remember and describe the shapes of rooms, the size of windows, the shaved-wood smell of the kitchen’s ancient buckling cedar floor. Soon he was verbally ripping up carpets, repainting rooms, converting the Bremens’ den into a proper library with custom bookshelves. The backyard was even expansive enough that you could build a little writer’s shed there at the back edge of the property, overlooking the lake; perhaps that would be profligate, given how big the house was already, but it might also be fun, and clarifying to the mind, to have a spartan outpost back there, a spot without comforts or distractions, in which to sit and write. Perhaps—he couldn’t believe he was saying this aloud—he would even be moved to revive the novel he’d begun so long ago, Night of the Large Few Stars, the 153 pages of which were still sitting in a drawer somewhere. Or, better yet, to begin something new—no use chasing the dreams of so long ago. But to have the shed, to bundle up and stoke a tiny stove and look out at the lake and write, would be good. And if visitors with writing projects to pursue—here he glanced at Owen—would make use of it too, well, all the more reason.
“Sounds like you want to buy it.”
Affenlight hesitated. “I do.” His eyes flicked anxiously to Owen’s face. He felt like he was suggesting that they break up, though Owen looked supremely unconcerned, and in truth Affenlight knew that he was as capable of breaking up with Owen as he was of sawing off his own leg with his letter opener: he’d do it to save Pella’s life but probably not his own.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Owen said.
“You do?”
“Certainly. This apartment is, as my mother has noted, a bit dismal. I think you’d benefit from having some more space to roam around in. Space that’s brighter, and really yours. And Pella would like it too. Especially if you let her decorate.”
“What about us?” said Affenlight, stressing us.
“What about us?” replied Owen, stressing about.
“I mean… you’re going away.”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy a house. Unless you’d like me to talk you out of it? Is that what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“Yes please.” Affenlight lay on his side, one hip rolled over on top of Owen’s thigh, one cheek on Owen’s shoulder. It was a quintessentially feminine posture, or had been throughout his forty years of sharing beds—the man on his back with hands behind his head, the woman nestled against him—and yet he slipped into it naturally now. With his free hand he caressed Owen’s belly, which itself felt almost feminine, not muscled but soft with the strong, invulnerable softness of youth. His senses remained on high alert, but for the moment the quad had slipped into silence. It was too late for the students to go out to the bars, too early for them to come home.
Owen assumed his lecturer’s tone. “That’s easy, Guert. What you so blithely call a house would better be termed an ecological disaster. How many barrels of oil does it take to heat a big old place like that through a bad winter, not that we have bad winters anymore? Just to keep a couple of bodies warm?”
Affenlight couldn’t help wondering which couple of bodies he meant. Two Affenlights? An Affenlight and a Dunne? “ ‘I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls,’ ” he said, quoting Emerson’s The Conduct of Life.
“I’d hardly describe you as a stiff person.” Owen slid a hand down between Affenlight’s legs, toyed with him gently. “At least not right now.”
“We just finished,” Affenlight protested, not wanting to be mentioned even jokingly in the same breath as that particular ailment of age, but in fact he was alread
y thickening under Owen’s touch.
“Thoreau’s journals,” Owen said. “ ‘When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside.’ He doesn’t buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter. And to cool in the summer—let’s not even talk about air-conditioning. Why not just buy a McMansion out by the freeway, install a helicopter pad in back? Do you think you get a free pass because the house is old and lovely? It doesn’t work that way, Guert. Waste is waste, sprawl is sprawl. Your good taste doesn’t count. If there’s any kind of exclusionary, private-club-style afterlife, St. Peter won’t be asking questions at the gate. You’ll just be lugging all the coal and oil you’ve burnt in your life, that’s been burnt on your behalf, and if it fits through the gate you’re in. And the gate’s not big. It’s like eye-of-a-needle-sized. That’s what constitutes ethics these days—not who screwed or got screwed by whom.
“Perhaps you’re better off here, Guert. This place suits your spartan tendencies, which I much admire. You’re an especially unencumbered type of soul.”
“Jeez, O,” said Affenlight glumly. “You didn’t have to do quite such a good job.”
“Sorry.” Owen released Affenlight’s half-hard penis, kissed him on the forehead. “I get worked up.”
Sometimes Affenlight worried that Owen dallied with him solely so that he could whisper in Affenlight’s ear about campus-wide environmental initiatives. But that was probably reductive, if not downright paranoid, and anyway such things were worth being whispered to about. The schools Affenlight had been affiliated with—Westish in the late sixties and recently; Harvard in the eighties and nineties—were places where environmentalism had a modest presence, academically and publicly, and his work had tended in other directions, toward questions of political and social selfhood, male identity mixed with sex and a smidgen of Marx. But he was a farmer by birth, a biologist by undergraduate degree, a hippie by year of birth, and a diligent student of Emerson and Thoreau, and so Owen’s growing and insistent interest in ecology was easy for him to assimilate. Perhaps he was a trend jumper, in terms of intellectual preoccupations, a humanist back when humanity was popular, now moved on to bigger things, but certain trends were better jumped late than never.