The Art of Fielding
One day during that eighth-grade spring, Pella mentioned that she was thinking about getting a tattoo.
“Of what?” Mistake: it didn’t matter.
“The Chinese character for nothingness. Right here.” She pointed to one of her coltish hip bones.
“No tattoos until you’re eighteen.”
“You have one.”
“I’ve been eighteen for a while,” Affenlight countered. “Besides, tattoo parlors are illegal in Massachusetts.” This wasn’t a great argument, depending as it did on a geographical contingency — what if they’d lived someplace else? — but at least it posed a logistical difficulty.
Two weeks later, he walked into the kitchen and found Pella standing before the sink, rather pointedly wearing a tank top in chilly March weather. “Hi,” she said.
On her left arm was a black-ink tattoo of a sperm whale rising from the water. Its long square head twisted back toward its tail, as if it were in the process of thrashing some helpless whaling boat. The surrounding skin was pink and splotchy. “Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Providence.”
“How did you get to Providence?” Affenlight was shocked. Not by the fact that she’d defied him — as soon as she’d said the word tattoo he’d known she would defy him — but by the tattoo itself. It was a perfect mirror image of his own. Even the dimensions were identical, uncannily so. They could have stood side by side, pressed their upper arms together, and the ink would have lined up perfectly.
Even now it was hard to parse what Pella had done. His tattoo, then thirty years old, now close to forty, had always been a secret, sacred, sentimental part of him. Was Pella defying him on the surface while allying herself with him more deeply, more permanently, underneath? She had always loved The Book, as they called it, and she probably loved her father too, somewhere in there. This was a bond the two of them now shared. Their hair, their eyes, their complexions, were nothing alike — Pella looked unreasonably like her mother — but this was proof, proof of something, a kinship even deeper than blood . . .
Unless she was, for lack of a better phrase, fucking with him. She might have been fucking with him, playing around with things that were terribly, even preposterously, important to him. Pointing out the very preposterousness of his feelings for her, for The Book, for everything. Everything you’ve ever done is nothing, old man. Anyone could have done it, every bit. I’ve already done it, and I’m fourteen.
Affenlight had never been so angry. When she was young he’d never dreamed of using corporal punishment, but now he wanted to shake her, to shake every bit of insolence and cruelty, if that’s what it was — of course, it might have been something very different — out of her body and onto the floor.
Instead he walked into his study and softly closed the door.
In a sense, that was the end of their relationship. Affenlight went off to Westish, Pella to Tellman Rose. She canceled half of her scheduled visits, claiming school or swimming commitments. Her grades were good, but every few weeks the phone would ring, and it would be an administrator, wanting to discuss some “incident.”
And now here she was, asking to take classes at Westish, to be readmitted to his fatherly care. Affenlight opened his top desk drawer, pulled out his daybook. “What kind of classes did you have in mind?”
“History.” Pella straightened in her chair. She wanted to prove she was serious. “Psychology. Math.”
Affenlight’s eyebrows lifted. “No painting?”
“Dad, please. I gave that up forever ago.”
“No lit classes?”
Pella yawned and fidgeted with her zipper. She looked exhausted — purple circles beneath her eyes, a small tic pulsing at the corner of her mouth. “Maybe one.”
Affenlight made a few notations, clapped the book closed. Pella yawned again. “You should hit the sack,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter 11
Henry flipped the light switch, dropped his equipment on the rug, sank down on the edge of his unmade bed. He kicked off his shoes and almost instantly fell asleep. But the phone was ringing. He had to answer the phone. It might be about Owen.
“Skrimmer.”
“Schwartzy.” They’d last seen each other ten minutes ago, when Schwartz dropped him off by the loading dock of the dining hall.
“Have you eaten?”
“No. Not since lunch.”
Schwartz gave a paternal sigh of reproof. “Gotta eat, Skrimmer.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Doesn’t matter. Have a shake. What time are you running stadiums?”
“Six thirty.” Henry lay on his back, eyes shut. “Hey. I forgot to ask. Any news from schools?” Schwartz was applying to law schools, top-notch places like Harvard and Stanford and Yale. Tucked into Henry’s bag was a bottle of Ugly Duckling, the big guy’s favorite bourbon, to give him when the good news came. Henry hoped it would be soon — the bottle wasn’t all that heavy, but he’d been lugging it around for weeks.
“Mail only comes once a day, Skrimmer. I’ll keep you posted.”
“I heard Emily Neutzel got into Georgetown,” Henry offered. “So maybe soon.”
“I’ll keep you posted,” Schwartz repeated. “Have a shake. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
Henry got up—last time, this — and pulled a pitcher of pilfered dining-hall milk out of the fridge, added two scoops of SuperBoost. Ever since he’d arrived at Westish he’d been trying, trying, trying to gain weight. He’d grown an inch and put on thirty pounds; he could do forty pull-ups and bench-press alongside the football players. But still the knock against him was his size. Teams wanted monsters in their middle infields, guys who could blast home runs; the days when you could thrive as a pure defensive genius, an Omar Vizquel or Aparicio Rodriguez, were over. He had to be a genius and a monster. He had to eat, and eat, and eat. He lifted weights so he could chug his SuperBoost, so he could lift more weights, so he could chug more SuperBoost, lift, chug, lift, chug, trying to gather as many molecules as possible under the name Henry Skrimshander. An economy like that wasn’t very efficient—it produced, to be honest, an awful lot of foul-smelling waste, which caused Owen to light matches and shake his head in dismay. But it was what he had to do.
Hours after the game, he was still wearing his jockstrap and cup — not a pleasant feeling. He pried them away from his crotch, stripped naked, climbed into bed. His legs and feet, gritty from sliding and diving on the infield, chafed against the sheets.
The phone again. He needed to answer the phone: it would be news about Owen, or someone looking for news about Owen.
“Henry Skrimshander?”
“This is Henry.” Not a teammate — a woman’s voice. Probably the doctor.
“Henry, this is Miranda Szabo of SzaboSport Incorporated. I hear congratulations are in order.”
“What for?”
“What for? How about for putting yourself on par with the great Aparicio Rodriguez? Today was the day, right?”
“Oh. Well, I mean, it’s . . . yes, today.” When a game ended midinning, which happened most often because of rain, the official statistics reverted to the last finished inning. Officially, then, the Harpooners had beaten Milford 8—3 in eight innings. Officially, the top of the ninth inning had never happened. Officially, he’d never made an error.
“Splendid,” said Miranda Szabo. “Listen, I’m sorry to call so late, during your private time, but I’m out in L.A., closing a deal for Kelvin Massey.”
“Kelvin Massey? The Rockies’ third baseman?”
Miranda Szabo paused for a perfect, haughty half beat. “Kelvin Massey, the Dodgers’ third baseman. But don’t tell Peter Gammons, that snoop.”
“I won’t,” Henry promised.
“Good. The press can’t know till tomorrow. We’re still putting the finishing touches on this little objet d’art. Fifty-six million over four years.”
“Wow.”
“How’s that for a recession special? Sometimes I impress myself,” Miranda Szabo admitted. “But let’s stay focused. Henry, I keep my ear to the ground, and lately your name is all I hear. Skrimshander, Skrimshander, Skrimshander. Like a tongue twister, only better. More mellifluous.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“Everybody’s asking, Where’d this kid come from? And nobody knows.”
“I’m from Lankton, South Dakota.”
“Exactly my point. Nobody knows where you’re from, but everybody knows where you’re going. Straight to the top of the draft charts. I’m hearing third round, I’m hearing higher.”
“Higher?”
“Higher’s what I’m hearing. Third, second, who knows? Now Henry.”
“Yes?”
“Listen to me closely. You’re a busy person trying to balance baseball and academics at a reputable institution. We may not know each other well, but I know enough about you to know that much. And I also know that you’re about to get a whole lot busier. Do you know what the average signing bonus was for a third-round pick last year?”
“Uh, no.” Until very recently, Henry’s thoughts had been focused on next year’s draft, not this year’s — both juniors and seniors were eligible — and his goal for next year’s draft was to get himself picked in the fiftieth round, or maybe the forty-ninth if he was lucky. He’d barely even bothered to daydream about a signing bonus. He had no idea what the five-star guys, the high school hotshots and the sluggers from Stanford and Miami, got paid.
“Guess,” urged Miranda Szabo.
“Um. Eighty thousand?” It felt embarrassing, greedy, to name such a big number, even in indirect connection to himself.
“Close. You forgot the three. Three hundred eighty thousand.”
“Holy shit.” How long did it take his dad to earn that much? Six years? Seven? “Oops. Sorry. I didn’t mean to swear.”
“Swear away, sailor. Now, that doesn’t exactly put you in Kelvin Massey territory, but it’s a reasonable sum of money, and I think it’s the least you can reasonably expect, come June. And that means people are going to want a piece of you. It’s a crossroads, a complex time. You’re going to need someone working for your best interests. You’re going to need representation.”
“An agent?”
“Exactly right. You’re going to need an agent. Someone to help you navigate this crossroads, personally and fiscally. Selecting representation is a big decision, Henry, and not one to be taken lightly. Your agent has to be an extension of yourself. Just like your glove, when you’re out there in the field. Do you trust your glove, Henry?”
“Sure.”
“Well, you have to trust your agent just as much. Your agent, if your agent’s a good agent, doesn’t just draw up terms and disappear. Your agent becomes the fiscally minded, detail-cognizant you. So that you — the Henry-you, not the Miranda-you — can focus on baseball. And academics. Do you follow me, Henry?”
“I think so.”
“Have you been contacted by other parties interested in providing representation?”
“Um, no.”
“You will. Believe me. The mere fact that you’re on the phone with Miranda Szabo means that everybody and their mother will be calling to offer representation. Happens every time.”
“How will they know you called me?”
“They just will,” Miranda Szabo said, and sighed at the predictability of it all. “These people are animals.”
Henry’s thoughts swung in odd orbits over the next few hours, as he lay in bed listening to the groan of Phumber’s ancient heat vents. It was strange not to be able to hear Owen’s breathing. Midnight came, and one o’clock and two, and though he wasn’t quite awake he remained aware of the passage of time, the quarterly toll of the chapel bells. Unlike most of his classmates, who pulled all-nighters and slept through their early classes, he hardly ever saw or heard this time of night. He trained too hard and awoke too early, and it was a rare weekend kegger that found him leaned against a wall, politely holding a cup of beer that would be poured into the bushes on his walk home. The windows were cracked open, because it was always warm in their garret room. An occasional glitter of voices rose up from the quad below, an occasional gust of wind shuddered the panes. The latter drifted into Henry’s head and became the gust that helped to blow his throw off course. He wished he could have seen Owen tonight. Just for a moment, just a peek of Owen asleep in his room in the ICU. Then he’d know that Owen was okay. It was one thing to be told by the doctor, another to see it for yourself. In Henry’s half dreams Owen stared out at him, in the frozen instant before he slumped to the dugout floor, his popped-wide eyes asking, Why?
Why, in Henry’s experience, was a question an athlete shouldn’t ask. Why had he made such a terrible throw, so bad that Rick couldn’t even get a glove on it? Was it because of the scouts? He’d tensed up because of the scouts? No, that made no sense. For one thing, the scouts weren’t even there, they’d left after the eighth, and he’d seen them go. And anyway he had no fear of scouts in his heart, at least not that he could detect. Was it because he didn’t want to break Aparicio’s record, be the one to wipe his name from the record book, because Aparicio was Aparicio but he was just Henry? Maybe. But he could at least have tied the record before he messed up; then their names would be side by side. Then again he had tied the record; the error hadn’t counted. He’d have a chance to break it next game. If he didn’t want to break it, he’d have to mess up again. Maybe he’d mess up again. This was why you didn’t ask why. Why could only mess you up. But he’d be fine in the morning, as long as Owen was okay.
Schwartz would be glad about Miranda Szabo. Thrilled. Ecstatic. Henry had been worried about what would happen next year, after Schwartz graduated and went off to law school on the East Coast or the West. But maybe he’d be gone too, off to the minor leagues a year ahead of schedule, with money in his pocket. It was bittersweet to think about leaving, he loved it here, but baseball was baseball, and it was fitting that he and Schwartz might leave together. Without Schwartz there was no Westish College. Without Schwartz, come to think of it, there was hardly even any Henry Skrimshander.
Chapter 12
On Schwartz’s law school applications, as on most posted documents, he listed his home address like this:
MICHAEL P. SCHWARTZ
VARSITY ATHLETIC CENTER
WESTISH COLLEGE
WESTISH, WI 51851
He rented a campus-slum two-bedroom house on Grant Street with Demetrius Arsch, his cocaptain on the football team and backup catcher on the baseball team, but rarely set foot inside it. During the day there were classes and practices to attend, plus Henry’s regimen to oversee, and at night he worked on his thesis — “The Stoics in America” — here on the top floor of the VAC, in a dark-carpeted conference room that he long ago appropriated as his personal office. Schwartz held no official position within the Athletic Department, but he’d donated so much time and effort over the past four years that no one begrudged him his key to the building. Books with brittle, snapped bindings and missing pages, collected via his nationwide ILL dragnet, stood in drunken piles all along the long oval table, surrounded by a sea of color-coded note cards, wire-bound notebooks, and empty coffee mugs that had been converted to spit cups. He’d quit chewing tobacco two years ago, but it aided his concentration so much that, as he entered this final thesis crunch, he’d had to make some exceptions. With a good dip in, plus a couple Sudafed for luck, he could crank out nine or ten pages in a night. He wasn’t into Adderall.
Schwartz cherished these private, diligent hours. All day long, no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he accomplished, a voice in his head berated him for his laziness, his sloth, his inability to concentrate. His concerns were trivial. His knowledge of history was shallow. His Latin sucked, and his Greek was worse. How did he expect to grasp Aurelius and Epictetus, inquired the voice, when he could barely string two Latin words together? Vos es scelestus bardus. Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet. Even the pain in his knees subsided.
Tonight, though, didn’t seem destined to contain much calm. First the Buddha’s injury, and now, as Schwartz stepped out of the VAC elevator and into the corridor lit only by a red EXIT sign at either end, he could see a bulge in the manila envelope he’d affixed to his office door as a makeshift mailbox. He pressed his fingertips to the sandy yellow paper: sure enough, there was something inside, something that—he drew it out, heart thundering—bore the blue insignia of Yale University.
Schwartz prided himself on his honesty. If one of his teammates was dogging it, he busted that teammate’s balls, and if one of his classmates or professors made a comment that seemed specious or incomplete, he said so. Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve. That was the lesson of the Greeks; that was the lesson of Coach Liczic, who’d banged on the Buick’s window.
That happened two years after his mom died of cancer. He was living by himself. He’d never met his dad — his parents had been engaged at one point, but his dad drank and bet on sports and left before Schwartz was born. When the woman from Children and Family Services came by a month after his mom’s funeral, he’d told the woman he was about to turn eighteen. The woman’s paperwork clearly said otherwise, but he was already six feet tall, weighed a hundred eighty pounds, and had little trouble buying cigarettes and sometimes even beer. “Come on,” he’d said as he stood in the apartment doorway, arms folded across his chest, the dog yapping behind him. “Do I look like I’m fourteen?” Baffled, the woman left, and though it wouldn’t have taken much investigation to prove him a liar, she never returned.
His aunt Diane’s family lived nearby, and Schwartz went there often for dinner. In retrospect it seemed strange that Diane let him live alone like that, but then again she and her husband had three little kids and a too-small apartment, and it wasn’t only strangers who equated Schwartz’s size with maturity. His mom had socked away a little money, which paid the rent.
His school — on Chicago’s South Side, near the Carr Heights projects — had metal detectors at every entrance and armed guards in the halls. The rooms had no windows, and the bolted-down desks could barely contain Schwartz’s massive frame. Even though he was white, his teachers eyed him warily; they seemed intent on averting some vague but imminent disaster. AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto — the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults. Schwartz couldn’t stand it, and the bank account was running low. In November of his sophomore year, as soon as football season ended, he stopped going to class. He got a job at a foundry — he was six-two by then, same as now, and people were more likely to ask his bench press than his age. He worked second shift, learned to drive a forklift, lugged tons of alloys from one end of the shop floor to the other. When his probationary period ended he was making $13.50 an hour, plus overtime. Some nights he drank cheap beer or Mickey’s till dawn by himself. Other nights he took girls he’d gone to school with to seafood restaurants that overlooked Lake Michigan. When he woke early enough he went to the library and read the financial news — he thought that once he’d saved a few grand he might switch to third shift and trade stocks online during the day.
No one from the school commented on his absence until the following August, when football season rolled around. A gentle drizzle dampened the pavement as he left work and headed for his car — an expansive, rust-eaten Buick without a rear bumper, which he’d bought with his first few paychecks. Work covered him with sweat and metallic soot. He climbed into the Buick and dug under the seat for a beer. It was Thursday, just shy of the weekend. He pulled out a warm, linty can. As he cracked it, one of the assistant coaches of his high school team rapped on the passenger’s-side window. Schwartz leaned over and unlocked the door. The coach wedged himself into the seat and asked Schwartz what the hell he was doing. Didn’t he think he should quit acting like a goddamn spic and get his ass back in school?
Schwartz was looking at the pouch of the coach’s sweatshirt, which sagged with the sharp weight of what was obviously a gun. He sat up tall behind the steering wheel and eyed the coach steadily. “That place is a prison,” he said.
“And this isn’t?” The coach chuckled and jerked a thumb toward the long low foundry building. He was one of the varsity assistants; Schwartz, who’d captained the JV the year before, couldn’t even remember his name.
“This is just a shithole,” Schwartz said. “Not a prison.”
The coach shrugged. The gun-form rose and fell on his gut. “Have it your way,” he said. “But this shithole doesn’t have a football team.” He climbed out of the car and was gone. Schwartz finished his beer as his crappy wipers slashed through the beading rain.
The next day, he went to school and then to practice. He hadn’t been afraid of the gun. But the gun as a gesture impressed him. It seemed to indicate, if not love, at least the possibility of such a thing. The coach hadn’t left him alone; hadn’t assumed that he knew what he was doing. Instead he bothered to get in Schwartz’s face, to tell him exactly what he thought of him, in the most forceful way he knew how. Nobody else — relatives, teachers, friends — had ever done such a thing for Schwartz, before or since. He’d vowed to do it for other people.
But lately he’d been lying, even to Henry. Especially to Henry, since Henry kept asking. Zipped tightly into the inside pocket of Schwartz’s backpack were five torn envelopes he’d already received from law schools. Each contained a letter that began with a terrible phrase: We regret to inform you. . . We cannot at this time. . . Unfortunately, our applicant pool . . .
Schwartz turned on the hallway light and held up the envelope, but it was made of quality paper, the fibers thickly woven, and he couldn’t see a thing. Maybe a quality envelope meant good news; maybe they sent thin translucent ones to the losers who didn’t get in. He rested it on his palm, gauged its weight, though he’d heard that the thick/thin envelope test was mostly bullshit. He tapped it against his palm to see if he could sense the shifting of a reply postcard — I, Mike Schwartz, humbly accept your kind offer. Impossible to tell.
This envelope contained his final hope. If you wanted to use a trite analogy, he was oh for five, and now, with two down in the ninth, he had one last chance to redeem himself. Yale had the most competitive admissions in the country, but the other schools he’d applied to were nearly as exclusive, and his thesis adviser was an honored alumna. Schwartz, at all other times in his life, did not believe in fate, but maybe fate was on his side. Maybe those five rejections were a ruse to ratchet up the suspense.
At any rate, it was absurd to stand here wondering. The decision had been made weeks ago by a bunch of deans; it could not be changed. Open the envelope, you putz, Schwartz thought. See what’s inside, react, get back to work.
He slid a fingernail under a corner of the glue, but that was as far as he could force himself to go. He sat down against the wall, let the letter fall between his thighs. The cartilage in his knees was torn to shreds, the result of too many hours behind home plate, too many sets of squats with too much weight, the bar bowed over his shoulders like a comma. The muscles in his back clenched and pulsed in painful, unpredictable rhythms. He unclasped his backpack, fished for his bottle of Vicoprofen, tossed three in his mouth. He tried to avoid Vikes while thesis-writing, but tonight was a special occasion. The whirlpool was what he needed; a good soak would soothe him and give him strength. He stepped back onto the elevator and pressed B2, the letter clenched between his teeth.