The Art of Fielding
He returned to Chicago, got a job tending bar, resumed his reading. With each new writer he began at the beginning and proceeded to the end, just as he’d done with Melville. When he’d exhausted the American nineteenth century, he expanded his reach. By absorbing so many books he was trying to purge his own failure as a writer. It wasn’t working, but he feared what would happen if he stopped.
On his thirtieth birthday he borrowed a car and drove up to Westish. Professor Oxtin, thank God, was still alive and compos mentis. Affenlight, with a calm determination that stemmed from desperation, reminded the old man of the capstone that the Melville lecture had placed on his career, and of Oxtin’s failure to credit him in the Atlantic article. The old man smiled blandly, not quite willing to admit or refute the charge, and asked what Affenlight wanted.
Affenlight told him. The old professor lifted an eyebrow and walked him down to the campus watering hole. There, over beers, he administered an impromptu oral examination that ranged from Chaucer through Nabokov but dealt mainly with Melville and his contemporaries. Satisfied, perhaps even impressed, the old man placed the call.
That September Affenlight trimmed his beard, bought a suit, and began Harvard’s doctoral program in the History of American Civilization. There he became for the first time — excepting a few lucky moments on the football field — a star. Most of his fellow students were younger, and none had achieved so desperate a grasp on the literature of his chosen period. Affenlight could drink more coffee, not to mention whiskey, than the rest of them put together. Monomaniacal, they called him, an Ahab joke; and when he spoke in seminar — which he did incessantly, having suddenly much to say — they nodded their heads in agreement. Thirty-page papers rolled out of his typewriter in the time it had taken to write a single paragraph of his not-quite-forgotten novel.
At first, Affenlight felt uneasy about his newfound sense of ease. He considered himself a failed writer, nothing more, and there didn’t seem to be much honor or grandeur in having read some books. But soon he decided — whether because it was true or because he needed it to be true — that academia was a world worth conquering. There were fellowships to win, journals to publish in, famous professors to impress. Whatever he applied for, he got; whatever he hinted he might apply for, his classmates shied away from. His successes were social as well. He’d always been tall, square-shouldered, and striking; now he had a purpose, an aura, a name that preceded him. The Cambridge ladies come and go / from Guert’s flat at 50 Bow. That was another joke of his classmates, and it was true.
He wrote his dissertation in the kind of white heat in which he’d always imagined writing a novel — the kind of white heat in which his hero Melville, over six torrid months in a barn in Western Massachusetts, had written the greatest novel the world had ever seen. The dissertation, a study of the homosocial and the homoerotic in nineteenth-century American letters, turned into a book, The Sperm-Squeezers (1987), and the book turned into a sensation: academically influential, widely translated, and reviewed in the Times and Time (“witty and readable,” “augurs a new era of criticism,” “contains signs of genius”). It wasn’t Moby-Dick, but it sold more copies in its first year than The Book had, and it became a touchstone in the culture wars. At thirty Affenlight had been nobody; at thirty-seven he was debating Allan Bloom on CNN.
Just as abruptly, he’d become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he’d been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up — Sarah initiated the split — she called to say that she was pregnant. “It’s mine?” asked Affenlight. “He or she,” replied Sarah, “is mostly mine.”
They named the child Pella — that was Affenlight’s idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella’s Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there’d been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn’t keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his own townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing.
Soon after Pella turned three, Sarah received a grant to go to Uganda, and Pella came to stay with Affenlight for the summer. In August came the news: Sarah’s jeep had rolled off an embankment, and she was dead. Pella was half an orphan, and he was a full-time father.
After a perfunctory stint as an assistant professor, during which a series of winks and perks from the administration kept Stanford and Yale at bay, Affenlight was awarded tenure. He never mustered another major project like The Sperm-Squeezers, but his lectures were the department’s most popular, and the grad students vied fiercely for his favor. He reviewed histories for The New Yorker, stockpiled teaching awards, and kept up with his reading. He became the head of the English Department and a fixture on the Boston magazine Most Eligible Bachelor list. Meanwhile he raised Pella, or at least stood by while Harvard raised her; the entire school seemed to consider her their charge. He sculled on the Charles to stay in shape. He took the Cambridge ladies to the opera. He thought he would do such things forever.
Then, in February of 2002, while Pella was in eighth grade, the phone in his office rang. Affenlight, rattled by what was proposed, dumped his espresso on a stack of senior theses. The interviews and vetting would take months, but that first phone call so unnerved him that he knew it was going to happen. Never again would he stride through the Yard with a graduate student at each elbow, extending the seminar as the sun went down. Never again would he hop the shuttle to LaGuardia just for kicks. Never again would his recent publication record bedevil his sleep. He was headed home.
Chapter 7
Guert Affenlight, sixty years old, president of Westish College, tapped an Italian loafer on the warped maple floorboards of his office on the ground floor of Scull Hall, swirled a last drop of light-shot scotch in his glass. On the love seat sat Bruce Gibbs, the chair of the trustees. It was the last afternoon of March, the eighth year of Affenlight’s tenure.
Besides Affenlight’s desk and the love seat, the room contained two wooden spindle-backed Westish-insignia chairs, two wooden filing cabinets, and a credenza devoted to dark liquor. The built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were filled with leather-bound volumes of and about the American nineteenth century, a drab but lovely sea of browns and olives and faded blacks, alongside neat rows of navy binders and ledgers related to the business of Westish College, and the brushed-steel stereo through whose hidden speakers Affenlight listened to his favorite operas. He kept his more colorful collection of postwar theory and fiction upstairs in his study, along with the handful of truly valuable books he owned — early editions of Walden, A Connecticut Yankee, and a few minor Melville novels, as well as The Book. The room contained so many bookshelves that there was space for only one piece of art, a black-and-white handpainted sign Affenlight had commissioned years ago that constituted one of his prized possessions: NO SUICIDES PERMITTED HERE, it read, AND NO SMOKING IN THE PARLOR.
Gibbs’s walking stick, which he never called a cane, was propped on the love seat’s arm. He sank deeper into the leather, swirled the amber liquid in his tumbler, gazed down at the lone melting cube. “Peaty,” he said. “Nice.”
Affenlight’s scotch was long gone, but to pour another would be to encourage Gibbs to linger. The chill coming off the windowsill at his back reminded him how much he wanted to be out there, at the baseball diamond, before driving down to Milwaukee to pick up Pella from the airport.
Gibbs cleared his throat. “I’m confused, Guert. I thought we’d agreed to postpone new projects until we recapitalized. We got hammered in the markets, we’re hemorrhaging financial aid, and” — he met Affenlight’s eyes steadily — “there’s almost nothing coming in from donors.”
Affenlight understood the admonition. He was the fund-raiser, the face of the school; in his first years on the job he’d mounted the most successful capital campaign in Westish history. But the economy of recent years — the collapse, the crisis, the recession, whatever you called it— had both eroded those gains and frightened donors. His influence among the trustees, once almost boundless, was gently on the wane.
“And now,” Bruce went on, “suddenly you’re putting all these new initiatives on the table. Low-flow plumbing. A complete carbon inventory. Temperature setbacks. Guert, where is this crap coming from?”
“From the students,” said Affenlight. “I’ve been working closely with several student groups.” Really, he’d been working closely with one student group. Okay, really he’d been working closely with one student — the same student he wanted desperately to get down to the baseball diamond to see. But Gibbs didn’t need to know that. It was true enough that the students wanted to cut carbon.
“The students,” said Gibbs, “don’t quite understand the world. Remember when they made us divest from oil? Oil is money. They complain about tuition increases, and then they complain when the endowment earns money.”
“Cutting emissions will be a PR boon,” Affenlight said. “And it’ll save us tens of thousands on energy. Most of our benchmark schools are already doing it.”
“Listen to yourself. How can it be a PR boon if our benchmarks are already doing it? If we’re not first movers on this, then we’re back in the pack. There’s no PR in the pack. Might as well sit back and learn from their mistakes.”
“Bruce, the pack’s way out ahead of us. Ecological responsibility is basically an industry ante at this point. It’s becoming a top-five decision factor for prospective students. If we don’t recognize that, we’ll get hammered on every admissions tour till the cows come home.”
Gibbs sighed, stood up, and hobbled to the window. Management consulting terms like industry ante and decision factor were the glue of their relationship — Affenlight tried to learn as many of them as possible, and to intuit or invent the ones he hadn’t learned. Gibbs gazed out at the Melville statue that overlooked the lake. “If it’s a decision factor we’ll deal with it,” he said. “But I doubt we can afford it this year.”
“We should get started now,” Affenlight replied. “Global warming waits for no man.”
This was true, of course — he’d read the books, he had rightness on his side — but still he feared that Gibbs, or someone, would detect a deeper reason for his urgency. He wanted to do what was right, wanted to prepare Westish for the century ahead, but he also wanted to prove to O that he could do those things. A year, two years, three — the normal time horizons of the college bureaucracy didn’t square with his objectives. When it came to impressing someone you thought you might love, a year might as well be forever.
Chapter 8
Having taken leave of Gibbs, Affenlight crossed the campus as quickly as his long legs would carry him, nodding and smiling at the students he passed, and settled into the top row of bleachers behind first base to watch the Westish Harpooners play the Milford Moose in early-season, nonconference Division III baseball. Shreds of cloud blew past the setting sun, causing shadows to scurry rodentially over the grass. To his right rose the big stone bowl of the football stadium; to his left stretched Lake Michigan, which this afternoon was colored a deep slate blue that perfectly matched his bathroom floor. It was a cold, uncompromising color — he always put on slippers before his four a.m. piss. The visiting Moose were in the field, and each outfielder stood dumb against an expanse of frozen grass. Affenlight couldn’t tell, from here, what sort of fellows they were: whether they manned their lonely outposts with dejection or relief.
Even the slight elevation of the bleachers afforded a handsome view of the campus, whose situation here on the lakefront had always been one of its selling points. Affenlight exhaled and watched his lungs’ CO2 float whitely away. His elbows rested on his knees, his long knobby fingers interlocked. His forearms, hands, and thighs formed a diamond-shaped pond into which his tie dropped like an ice fisher’s line. The tie, which was silk, sold at the campus bookstore for forty-eight dollars, but he received a free box of six each fall, because the tie depicted the official emblem of Westish College. A diagonally arranged series of tiny ecru men posed against the navy silk, each standing in the prow of a tiny boat. Each held a harpoon cocked beside his head, ready to let fly at a pod of unseen whales. Affenlight also owned the figure-ground-reversal version of the tie, with its navy harpooners bobbing on an ecru sea. These were the Harpooners’ colors: the batter at the plate wore a parchment-colored jersey with pin-width navy stripes.
In Affenlight’s undergraduate days, when they were still called the Sugar Maples, the Westish teams had worn a rather hideous combination of yellow and red, in homage to the autumn colors of the state tree. The change to the Harpooners was unveiled soon after Affenlight’s graduation, and as a direct result of his literary discovery. Near the end of H. Melville’s lecture, while thanking his hosts for their hospitality, he’d uttered the following comment, now long committed to Affen-light’s memory: “Humbled, I am, by the severe beauty of this Westish land, and these Great Lakes, America’s secret sinew of inward-collecting seas.” The schools’ trustees, not wanting to squander such an eloquent endorsement, erected a statue on campus in Melville’s honor in 1972 and had those words inscribed on the base. They also changed the athletic teams’ name to the Harpooners, and their colors to blue and ecru — to represent, Affenlight assumed, the lake Melville admired and the age-faded sheets on which his admiration had been transcribed.
At the time this might have seemed like a stretch, not to say a risible act of desperation — to adopt Melville a thousand miles from where he spent his life, ninety years after a visit that lasted a day. But as rebrandings went it had turned out okay. Certainly the new colors looked more dignified on a seal or brochure, and the athletes enjoyed not having their teams named after a tree. And over the years a thriving cult of Melvilleania had developed at the college, such that you could walk across campus and see girls wearing T-shirts with a whale on the front and lettering on the back that said, WESTISH COLLEGE: OUR DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOURS, or you could enter the bookstore and buy a Melville’s-bust keychain and a framed poster of the full text of “The Lee Shore” to hang in your dorm room. Quotes from Melville’s work were threaded throughout the brochure, the application materials, and the website. A seminar called Melville and His Times was one of the few permanent features of the English Department rotation — Affenlight hoped someday to make time to teach it—and the library had acquired a small but significant collection of Melville’s papers and letters. Affenlight tended to be heartened by his hero’s academic legacy at Westish and to despair over the ways he’d been turned into commercial kitsch, but he wasn’t so naive as to think you could necessarily have the former without the latter. The bookstore did a brisk business in that kitsch; they shipped it all over the world.
The aged scoreboard in left-center field read WESTISH 6 VI ITOR 2. The wind flared off the lake in petulant gusts. The few dozen fans on the home side, most of them parents and girlfriends of the players, huddled under afghans and sipped from Styrofoam cups of decaf that had long ago ceased to steam. A few fathers — the ones too tough for decaf, the ones who shot deer — stood in a row along the chain-link fence that abutted the dugout, feet spread wide. Hands thrust deep in their jacket pockets, they rocked from heel to toe, muttering to one another from the corners of their mouths as they cataloged their sons’ mental errors. With only a topcoat over his wool suit and no hat or gloves, Affenlight felt underdressed. That lone scotch he’d had with Gibbs was still generating a hint of inner warmth. The Westish batter — Ajay Guladni, whose father taught in the Economics Department — stroked a single up the middle. Mittens muffled the sparse clapping of the fans.
The inning ended, and the Moose trotted off the diamond. Affenlight leaned forward as the Westish players emerged into the frigid daylight to take the field. He took pride in knowing the names of the school’s twenty-four hundred students, and even from a distance the faces of the upperclasspersons were familiar to him: Mike Schwartz, Adam Starblind, Henry Skrimshander. But where was the face he’d come to see?
Perhaps he wasn’t playing today. Affenlight knew he was a member of the baseball team, but whether he was a starter or a benchwarmer or somewhere in between was a question he’d never considered. How stupid to have sat here, behind the home dugout, so that he couldn’t see inside. And yet what else could he do? Move over to the visitors’ bleachers and become a traitorous president? How suspicious would that look? For now he stayed put. He couldn’t see O, but he and O were facing the same way, watching the same white ball zip toward home plate, the same anxious batter swing and miss, and that in itself, that same-way-facing, felt like something.
Whatever happened, he couldn’t be late to pick up Pella. To be late would be a bad start, and things were tricky enough without a bad start. He hadn’t seen her since she’d dropped out of Tellman Rose, midway through her senior year, to elope with David. That was four years ago, an unthinkably long time. If events had unfolded differently, she’d be graduating from college this spring.
Two nights ago she left a message on his office phone — strategically avoiding his cell, which he might have answered — and asked him to buy her a ticket to Westish. “It’s not an emergency,” she said. “But the sooner the better.” Affenlight bought the ticket with an open return. How long she’d stay, whether things were going badly with David, he didn’t know.
Baseball — what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around. Affenlight looked about, bethinking his options. He had less than an hour. What he needed was a reason, an excuse, to circle over to the Milford side and thereby catch a glimpse of the person he was eager to glimpse. He scanned the visitors’ bleachers, and his eyes settled on two large, well-dressed men whose attitudes and accessories marked them as distinct from the other spectators. Affenlight, combining what he saw with what he’d lately heard, guessed that they must be professional scouts, here to see Harpooner shortstop Henry Skrimshander, a junior. Which seemed to afford the perfect excuse: he would pay his guests a cordial visit.
He rose from the bench, pulling his tie out of the pond-shaped space between his knees. As he followed the bleachers around the backstop, the corrugated aluminum resounded beneath his loafers. He shook a pair of powerful right hands — insisting that Dwight and L.P. call him Guert, just Guert—and lowered himself beside them. The new patch of aluminum felt far colder through his slacks than the old one.
“So gentlemen,” Affenlight said. “What brings you to Westish?”
The one named Dwight gestured toward the shortstop position with his sunglasses, indicating Henry Skrimshander. “That fellow right there, sir.”
L.P. and Dwight, it turned out, were ex—minor leaguers not far removed from their playing days. Smooth-featured and polite, business-casual in dress, with slender laptops in their laps and BlackBerries laid beside them on the bleachers, they looked like oversize consultants or CIA agents playing a very reserved sort of hooky. L.P. had his hands clasped behind his head and his legs stretched before him, covering several rows; he would have dwarfed Affenlight if they both stood. Dwight was blond and pale, more densely built than L.P. but not quite as tall. Dwight did most of the speaking, in the chatty, choppy tones of the Upper Upper Midwest—Affenlight guessed Minnesota, or maybe he was Canadian:
“Henry Skrimshander. I tell you what, Guert. A heck of a shortstop. I first saw him play last summer at this tournament down in, boy, I forget where . . .”
If Affenlight wanted, he could swivel his head to the right, away from the smiling eyes of Dwight, and look down into that distant corner of the Westish dugout and see him.
“. . . and this pitcher I was there to scout, boy, did he turn out to be a dog, but I was too lazy to get up and . . .”
If he wanted? Of course he wanted. It was the wanting, the incredible strength of the wanting, that had prevented him so far. Affenlight felt afraid to look — afraid, perhaps, that looking might commit him irrevocably. But to what? Commit him to what?
Now, finally, as Dwight paused for breath, Affenlight indulged the desire that had been simmering in his mind. He snuck a peek into the Westish dugout. Oh. His features were indiscernible at this distance, lost in the heavy shadows that shrouded that corner of the dugout. A thin stream of light connected his cap to the book in his lap.
“. . . that’s what scouting is,” Dwight was saying, more or less. “Following up on tips and notes, ninety-nine point five percent of which inevitably turn out to be . . .”
Features indiscernible but contours unmistakable: slender-limbed, right knee flipped girlishly over left, torso gently canted in that direction, bundled up against the cold in a hooded Westish sweatshirt with a wind-breaker on top of that. Chin at a downward tilt, studying his book instead of the game. Affenlight felt something young swell up in his chest, a thudding pain interspersed with something sweet, as if he were being dragged by an oxcart through a field of clover. He blinked hard.
Dwight shook his head slowly, as if disbelieving his own memory. “I’ve seen a lot of baseball, Guert. But never have I seen someone like Henry, in terms of sheer — what would you call it, L.P.?”
L.P. reclined with his elbows spread wide on the row behind him, his wraparound shades disguising his eyes. He answered as if from the depths of sleep: “Prescience.”
The maroon-clad batter rifled a one-hopper to short. Henry backhanded it without a flourish and threw him out. The ease and power of the throw startled Affenlight; he himself was several inches taller than Henry and had been no slouch at quarterback, but he’d never thrown a projectile half that hard.
“Henry can flat-out play,” Dwight went on. “The only question mark in some people’s minds is competition. It’s tough to guess a guy’s ceiling when he’s in such a lousy environment for baseball. No offense, Guert.”
“None taken, Dwight.” The next batter popped up, and the Harpooners jogged off the field to soft applause. There couldn’t have been more than thirty people left in the stands.
“I’ll tell you one thing, though. After the way he played in Florida last week, the word is out. That’s how scouting works nowadays — you don’t discover guys so much as you take the master list and rank them. And Henry’s on the master list. The only reason this place isn’t crawling with scouts today is it’s so dang cold and we’re so dang far from a decent airport. But they’ll be here.”
Airport. Pella. Affenlight checked his watch.
“As of yesterday we had him rated the third-best shortstop in the draft, behind Vance White, who was first-team all-American last year, and this high school kid from Texas who scouts call the Terminator, because he looks like he was built in a lab.” Dwight paused. “But after seeing Henry today, I’d have half a mind to take him over both those guys. He’s not big enough to be the best, he’s not fast enough to be the best, he doesn’t have the body or the raw numbers to be the best. He just is.”