17

Affenlight climbed the stairs of Phumber Hall, nervously fingered the key in his jacket pocket. His quarters were next door in Scull Hall, an almost identical building in many respects, same warping stairs and latticed windows on the landings, same hard-to-describe odor of lake water soaked into hundred-year-old stone, but he felt a world from home. Loud music played behind several of the doors. Presumably the students were at dinner, but they let the music play anyway. The proctors needed to emphasize conservation—talk to Dean Melkin about that. Dirty dishes sat on the windowsills. White dry-erase boards hung on the doors, black markers attached by corkscrewing cords. The boards were filled with scrawled phone numbers, quotes, directions. On one, a stick-figure man faced a stick-figure woman. An arrow pointed to his shoulder-high tumescence—THESIS, it read. Another pointed to the blacked-in hair between her legs—ANTITHESIS. Well, thought Affenlight, that about covers it.

Most of Phumber’s residents were freshpersons, still frantic with their recently acquired freedoms. The top floor felt more sedate. No noise, no dishes, no vulgar cartoons. Only two doors, one to either side of the narrow landing. Affenlight faced the leftward one and knocked. He wanted Henry Skrimshander not to be home, so that he could be alone among Owen’s things—not to snoop, mind you, but just to be—and so was glad when he got no answer. Voices rose up through the stairwell. He stuck the key in the lock and ducked into the room.

Soothly it belonged to Owen: orderly and full of books, with a memory of marijuana in the air. In many ways it was better appointed than Affenlight’s: there were thriving plants, paintings on the walls, slim silver electronics. Messiness was confined to one unmade bed.

No lingering, he thought. No paging through books. Get what you came for and go. He scanned the room’s surfaces for a pair of eyeglasses. It was clear which desk was Owen’s—the tidier of the two. As Affenlight leaned across it his wrist brushed against the mouse that was tethered to Owen’s computer. With a whir the screen came to life. He couldn’t help but look. Open in the internet browser was a picture of a man, a muscled, bronzed, hairless, oiled twentysomething man, sprawled in a wooden chair with one hand cupped over the tip of his erect and outsize penis like it was the gearshift of Affenlight’s Audi. Affenlight clapped the laptop closed, tried to name the potted herbs that were growing along the windowsill. Mint. Basil. And was that thyme? Yes, thyme.

The first definable feeling that worked its way up to his brain was disappointment. Owen would never want me, he thought. If this is what Owen wants, then Owen would never want me. Maybe he’d been thinking of Owen as a creature of the mind, a pure spirit to be mixed with his own, but that wasn’t quite right, was it? Because Owen had a body too, and a need for bodies—and when it came to that, how did Affenlight feel about Owen’s body? Did he want Owen in a sexual way? Because that website, that photograph—that was sexual. That was what he was getting himself into, or trying to get himself into. Not that Owen wanted him. But if Owen did want him—if Owen wanted his aging, pasty, great-for-sixty, okay-for-forty, unthinkable-for-twenty body, which was seeming more unlikely by the second—then would he want Owen’s body in return? He thought he did, had fantasized about it, sort of, but compared to the sharp lines of that photograph his fantasies were all caresses and quiet confidences, sweetness and abstraction.

Two sets of questions swirled through Affenlight’s mind—one set to do with Owen’s erotic desires, the other with his own. He’d never thought of either of them in connection with hard-core pornography. And yet there was the website, right there. A part of Owen’s life, in whatever small way; and now, because he’d broken his no-snooping dictum, a part of his. He lifted the lid of the laptop, prepared himself to look and to gauge his reaction. There were footsteps on the stairs again—but this time they passed the third-floor landing.

BY THE TIME HENRY MADE it to the dining hall, the salad bar had been cleared, the stainless-steel bins in the entrée line pulled from their stainless-steel frames and dumped. He found a campus phone, called Rick O’Shea to see if he wanted to go to Carapelli’s.

“Sorry, Skrimmage,” Rick said. “Starblind and I ate a while ago. Where’s the big guy?”

“Working on his thesis.”

“Figures. Listen, I’ve got Grandma O’Shea on the other line. She’s telling me why Clinton was almost a better president than Jack Kennedy. See you bright and early, okay?”

Henry walked back into the dining hall, where he poured himself two glasses of skim milk. He’d have to double up on SuperBoost and be satisfied with that.

Chef Spirodocus came clip-clopping out of the kitchen on his wooden clogs, staring down at his clipboard. “Hey, Chef Spirodocus,” Henry said.

Chef Spirodocus looked up from his clipboard reluctantly, his fat-pinched eyes slow to focus. In general he didn’t like to talk to students. But when he saw it was Henry, he nodded. “Young man. When are you coming back to work?”

“Soon.” Henry mostly enjoyed working in the dining hall. Chef Spirodocus drove a lot of work-study kids to quit with his speeches and tirades about how food was art, the kitchen a studio, the dish a canvas, and could you make art on a messy canvas?—but for Henry that kind of discipline fit right into his routine. And yet. If he got drafted, if he got paid to play baseball, he wouldn’t have to do it anymore. “I think.”

A mistiness entered Chef Spirodocus’s small black eyes. “I could use you.” He lifted an awkward hand to pat Henry’s shoulder. “Your fellow students are idiots.”

Back in Phumber Hall, Henry set his glasses of milk on the floor of the stairwell and rooted in his bag for his keys. He found them, then realized the door wasn’t locked—odd, since Owen was at the hospital. He pushed the door with his hip and picked up the milk. As he turned into the room, he caught movement from the corner of his eye. Startled, he dropped one of the glasses. It landed where Owen’s Tibetan rug met the floorboards, exploded into glinting shrapnel. Milk splattered his sweatpants and desk chair and half the rug.

“Henry.” President Affenlight took two quick strides into the center of the room. “My goodness. I’m sorry.”

“President Affenlight. Hey. Sorry. You surprised me.”

“And rightly so.” President Affenlight began gathering up shards and dropping them into the wastebasket. “What a boneheaded move on my part.”

“No use crying over it, right?” Henry slung his bag on the bed and grabbed a towel from the hamper. “Here, let me do that.” It was weird to find the president in his room, but it was weirder to watch him crawl around on his hands and knees, scanning the rug for invisible slivers.

“I’m very sorry,” President Affenlight said. “I was just, well, you see, the hospital called my office this afternoon. Apparently they listed me as Owen’s contact person, since I arrived at the hospital first. They needed someone to bring over his glasses.”

“His glasses? That’s weird. I dropped them off before practice.”

“Ah. Well, that would explain my difficulties finding them.”

“I left them next to the bed. At least I think I did. I hope they didn’t fall out of the bag.”

“I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding,” President Affenlight said quickly. They knelt on either side of the sopping towel, separating pieces of glass from fibers of rug. Henry tried to think of something to say. President Affenlight seemed sad, or lonely, or something, though maybe it was just the context, the two of them hunched here on the floor. “Your tie,” Henry said as the silk point of the president’s tie dipped down into a milk puddle.

“Hm? Ah. Thanks.”

When they stopped finding slivers, President Affenlight stood and buttoned his coat. “Sorry again to bother you, Henry. I owe you a glass of milk sometime.”

Henry couldn’t think of anything to say to President Affenlight, but he also sort of didn’t want him to leave. Maybe it wasn’t the president who was lonely—maybe it was him. “What do you call it,” he asked, “when you assume somebody else has the same problems as you?”

“Projection,” Affenlight said.

“Right. Projection. Do you ever have that problem?”

“You mean, do I ever project my problems onto other people?”

“Yeah.”

Affenlight smiled. “Why, do you?”

“I asked you first.”

“Sure,” said Affenlight. “Doesn’t everybody?” As Affenlight departed, the door swung shut behind him, and his expensive shoes made bright noises on the stairs.

Henry mixed his remaining milk with three scoops of SuperBoost, whipped it into a thick sludge, and ate it with a spoon. Not much of a dinner, but what could you do? He’d been up since before dawn, and he didn’t have the energy to leave the room again. He opened his physics book and tried to study, but what he saw was the path of that ball, from his fingertips to Owen’s face, over and over. The phone rang.

“Henry.”

“Owen! How are you?”

“Much better, thanks.”

Henry knew Owen would say precisely this, regardless of how he felt, but it was good to hear it anyway. As they chatted he could tell Owen wasn’t quite himself—his words came slowly, and at moments he forgot where a sentence was headed. The one time he became animated was when Henry told him about his conversation with Miranda Szabo. “Three hundred eighty thousand dollars?” Owen said. “My God. That’s ridiculous. But tremendous. It’s ridiculously tremendous.”

“That’s the average,” Henry said. “But high school guys usually get more than college guys. Maybe I’d get two-fifty.”

“A premium for a lack of education? That’s the most ridiculous news yet.” Owen was getting worked up; it made him enunciate better.

“The high school guys have more leverage,” Henry explained. “They can refuse to sign and go to college instead.”

“Bah! Two can play that game. We’ll sign you up for the GRE, threaten to send you to grad school. They’ll crack. Oh, they’ll crack so fast…”

“Hang on a sec?” Henry said. “We’ve got another call.” He clicked over.

“Henry? This is Dwight Rogner. I’m an area scout with the St. Louis Cardinals. Great game yesterday. I was freezing my butt off, so I cut out a little early. But I heard you tied Aparicio’s record. Congratulations.”

“Um… thanks.”

“I’ll level with you, Henry. I saw you play last year, and I was impressed, but I figured you were a couple years away. Another of our guys saw you over the summer, and he said the same. Our attitude was, wait and see.”

“Right,” Henry said. “Wait and see.”

“Then last week I started hearing it from our scout in Florida. ‘Dwight, where you been hiding this Skrimshander kid? He’s better than Vance White.’ ” Vance White, Henry knew, was the University of Miami’s all-American shortstop. “You’ve made huge strides since last season, Henry. Huge. You just turned twenty, right?”

“In December.”

“Heck, you’re a baby. A lot of guys straight out of high school are nineteen. That’s great. It gives you time to develop. Now mind you, it’s still early, and a lot could happen before the draft. But you’re shooting up our board. We’d love to see you in a St. Louis uniform. Too bad we’ve already retired your number.”

“I know.” And Dwight knew that he knew. That was why he wore number 3—because Aparicio had worn it for the Cards for eighteen seasons.

“Have you signed with an agent?” Dwight asked.

“No.”

“Well, I’m technically not allowed to talk about stuff like this. But you should know, just between us, that our front office likes you a lot, and we’re looking for signable players in the early rounds—guys who aren’t looking to break the bank. So you should keep that in mind when choosing an agent. A hyperaggressive agent—your Scott Borases, your Miranda Szabos—can really hurt your draftability. If you know what I’m saying.”

“Sure.”

“It’s not uncommon,” Dwight went on, “for a team and a player to come to an informal agreement before the draft. For instance, we might come to you and say, Henry, we’ll agree to take you in the first round, with our number twenty-six pick, if you’ll agree to sign for reasonable money. Say, six hundred thousand or whatever.”

The call-waiting was beeping again, Owen calling back, but Henry wasn’t going anywhere. “First round?” he said softly.

“That’s just between you and me,” said Dwight. “But yes. First round.”

“Wow.”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Dwight said. “And it’s a bit premature. Lots of time till the draft, lots of things could happen. But our GM wanted me to open up a dialogue.

“This is the perfect place for you, Henry. With the right support you could become the next Aparicio. Personally, I think everyone involved—you, me, the front office—should do everything possible to make sure you wind up wearing a St. Louis Cardinals cap.”

Henry reached up and touched his brim. “I’m wearing one right now.”