29

Today,” said Professor Eglantine darkly as she stood before the chalkboard, feet splayed like a ballerina, and twisted her bony, bracelet-freighted arms into a series of pretzeled contortions while she stared at the tape player provided by the A/V Department, “in lieu of our usual business, I hope you’ll be so indulgent as to listen with me to a recording of the dear dead anti-Semite Thomas Stearns Eliot, reading aloud his longish poemlike creation The Waste Land, and meanwhile to meditate on the ways in which Modernism rejects, retains, or possibly even transforms the traditional elements of orality we’ve been discussing throughout the semester.”

Henry never entirely understood Professor Eglantine, but he took this to mean there wouldn’t be much discussion. He slumped in his chair, relieved. He was perched in the top row of the tiny amphitheater between Rick and Starblind, the three of them tucked into too-small desks with piano-shaped tops and presiding in their game-day shirts and ties over the smaller, less athletic members of the class. Rick’s kelly-green bow tie drooped like mistletoe above a huge expanse of rumpled white oxford, armpit stains visible as he yawned and stretched. Starblind looked ready for Wall Street or maybe Hollywood, in a glossy gold tie and a shirt the shimmering vermilion of leaves in late October. Henry wore what he always wore: beat-up blue shirt, navy-and-ecru Westish tie. He and Rick wore their Harpooner caps. Starblind, who only covered his gel-slick blond hair while on the diamond, did not. Shirts and ties were a Mike Schwartz dictum of which Coach Cox did not approve. “What’s wrong with a sweatshirt?” he’d grumble as the Harpooners filed into the locker room. “Goddamn college boys.”

Henry took his physics labs during fall semester, so they wouldn’t interfere with baseball season. In the spring he stuck to jock-friendly guts and courses for which Owen or Schwartzy already owned the books. Transforming the Oral Tradition, English 129, cross-listed as Anthropology 141, was the latter. It wasn’t easy enough to qualify as a gut, but Rick and Starblind were both in the class, and Schwartzy had “edited” Henry’s paper on the Iliad to the tune of an A+.

The classroom faced east and was often flooded with light at this hour, but today the lake churned gravely and it looked like rain. Henry felt a thought creep into his mind, the kind of thought he’d never had before or imagined having: I hope we get rained out.

“Marie! Marie!” Eliot squealed, in what seemed like a hopeless bid for Henry’s attention. Starblind scribbled a note on a piece of paper, laid it on Henry’s desk:

!?!

This could mean only one thing, coming from Starblind. Henry scanned the room for the girl in question: a female newcomer seated beside Professor Eglantine. She had kinky, shoulder-length, wine-or bruise-colored hair. She looked older than a student but too young to be a professor. She could have been a grad student, but there weren’t any grad students at Westish. She looked precisely like the kind of girl—or maybe he should call her a woman—the kind of woman Henry knew nothing about. She had a wide and heart-shaped face, and she was chewing one of her sweatshirt’s strings, not out of nervousness, because nervousness was not an emotion likely to be felt by a person who looked like that, but for some other, better reason. Probably she was chewing on the string because she was concentrating hard on this incomprehensible poem and thinking profound thoughts about Modernism of which Professor Eglantine would approve.

Starblind wrote again: I’d transform her orality. Seen her before?

Henry gave a slight shrug to indicate no.

She’s no prefrosh. She’s 25, 26.

Slight nod.

A little worse for wear, but still…

Henry didn’t respond to this one.

Eggy’s girlfriend?

Henry rolled his eyes. Only in Starblind’s sex-crazed imagination did Professor Eglantine have a twentysomething lesbian lover whom she invited to class.

You’re useless. Wake up Rick.

Henry, using an absolute minimum of movement, elbowed Rick. He didn’t like to talk during Professor Eglantine’s class, not because he’d get in any trouble but because Professor Eglantine seemed as sensitive as a skinned knee, she frequently cried during class at the beauty of various poems, and Henry worried about disappointing her.

Rick’s chin jerked up. He wiped a glistening wisp of drool from the corner of his mouth. “Wuh?” he asked. Henry pointed to the top item on the piece of paper: !?! Rick furrowed the big pale brow beneath his sandstone hair-shelf, looked around the room. Unfurrowed, furrowed, looked around some more. “Holy criminy,” he whispered, picking up Henry’s pencil. Eliot droned on. Professor Eglantine lifted her eyes ceilingward as she flicked her paper-thin fingers in rapt arcs like a conductor. The mysterious girl/woman chewed her sweatshirt string and speed-kicked the toe of one running-shoed foot with the heel of the other, in a way that would have looked nervous if she wasn’t who she was. Whoever that was. Rick crossed out 25, 26 and wrote 22, tapped the pencil against his chin, crossed out 22 and wrote 23. Starblind pointed to Seen her before?

Almost didn’t recognize. Tellman Rose. 1 yr ahead of me. Pella Affenlight.

Affenlight, Affenlight?

Rick confirmed this relation with a nod. WILD, he wrote. Also crazy.

Meaning what? Been there?

Not me.

Shocking, Starblind wrote.

Rick ignored the insult. Ran off with dude who came to lecture on Greek architecture. He went back and inserted old bearded before dude.

Heard she had a bunch of kids.

Starblind glanced across the room, nodded thoughtfully. Could explain the tits.

Henry was mostly ignoring this exchange, which had spilled over its original scrap of paper to cover a full page of his five-subject notebook. Mostly he was looking out the window, wondering whether it would rain. He could feel some part of himself willing it to rain. He’d never quite discarded the childhood belief that he could alter the course of distant or natural events with his mind. Westish Field was already early-April soggy; fifteen minutes of steady rain would probably suffice to postpone the game. The sky was growing darker by the second. A grainy electric grayness accumulated in the room, matching in tone the scratch and crackle of the old cassette player. When T. S. Eliot began to read the part about what the thunder said, Henry, who’d skimmed his homework and knew the thunder was coming, nonetheless assumed it to be a sign of his own unconscious influence. Da da da shantih shantih shantih and soon the sky would crack open and rain would whip the field and he wouldn’t have to go out there and try to throw the ball today. But instead the room’s light brightened half a shade as Eliot’s voice crackled into quietness, and Professor Eglantine dismissed the class. He and Rick and Starblind shouldered their backpacks and headed for the exit.

“Henry?” said a female voice—quiet, cautious, inquisitive, but no less startling for that. Henry froze in the doorway. Doomful scenarios skipped through his brain. It was Professor Eglantine, addressing him directly for the first time all semester: he should at least have read his Iliad paper after Schwartzy rewrote it. Schwartz had a tendency to show off, to throw in old foreign words with letters Henry couldn’t even find in Microsoft Word. Cheating would get him kicked off the team and maybe out of Westish. It couldn’t prevent him from being drafted, only continuing to play like crap could accomplish that, but teams did take into account what they called “character”—all week he’d been staying late after practice to take weird multiple-choice personality exams administered by scouts from different teams.

If one of your teammates told you he had raped someone, what would you do?

What’s your favorite thing about money?

If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?

It was sheer laziness not to have reread the paper and rephrased the parts that sounded like Schwartzy; he was usually much more careful about that kind of thing.

“Henry?” said the voice again, nearer now, even more tentative, and Henry realized it wasn’t Professor Eglantine at all but rather Pella Affenlight, standing there bookless. “Are you Henry Skrimshander?”

Henry nodded dumbly.

She told him her name. “I figured you had to be Henry. Mike’s told me a lot about you.”

“Oh.” Henry felt a touch disappointed. He’d been ready to believe this exotic stranger just happened to know who he was; he’d been in the local news a lot lately. “You know Mike?”

“Well, yeah…” Now it was Pella who seemed disappointed. “I guess he hasn’t mentioned me.”

“Of course he’s mentioned you,” Henry said vaguely, though Schwartz hadn’t. “I just… I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“So I hear.”

Rick and Starblind were watching this exchange without, thankfully, being able to hear it. Henry shot them a stern, desperate, get-out-of-here look over Pella’s shoulder. Starblind licked his index finger lasciviously and made a little tally mark in the air. Finally they wandered off toward the north doors. Henry headed the other way. Pella Affenlight matched his steps, all the way through the dining-hall line and back outside, where they settled with their trays near the Melville statue. On sunny days this was a popular spot, because you could look out at the water without leaving the quad, but today the sky was a low gray dome, and they had Melville to themselves. Henry sipped a glass of skim milk, which the outdoor light made feebly blue, and waited for Pella to speak.

“It must be nice,” she said, “to be so good at something.”

Thunder shuddered somewhere to the northeast. “Um,” Henry said, embarrassed.

“Am I embarrassing you? I don’t mean to.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m just wondering what it’s like, to be so good at something and know it. For a while in high school I thought I wanted to be an artist, but I gave it up, because I could never convince myself that I was good enough.”

Henry, not sure what to say, made an interested noise meant to encourage her to continue.

“I mean, I made some okay paintings, but nothing I made had any life to it. You know? Finally I just said fuck it. I decided I didn’t like painting so much as I liked covering myself in paint and drinking a lot of coffee. So now I just do that once in a while.” She jabbed her fork at her dish of chickpeas and ducked her head and laughed. If you could have said with any certainty that someone like Pella Affenlight was capable of nervousness, you might have called it a nervous laugh. She looked up at Henry. “So?”

“So what?”

“So what’s it like to be the best?”

Henry shrugged. “There’s always somebody better.”

“That’s not what Mike says. He says you’re the top—what is it, shortstop?—in the entire country.”

Henry thought about it for a moment. “It doesn’t feel like much,” he said. “You really only notice when you screw up.”

Pella nodded, finished chewing. “I know what you mean.”

Out over the lake, the clouds were pulling apart into pale-gray gauze, blueness shining through from behind. The sky was lightening lumen by lumen. On how many rainy game days had Henry stared out a classroom or bus window, wishing for exactly this kind of reprieve? But now his stomach churned at the thought of having to play.

When he arrived in the locker room, Schwartzy and Owen were discussing the Middle East. Henry was late; the discussion had already entered its terminal stage.

“Israel.”

“Palestine.”

“Israel.”

“Palestine.”

“Israel!” Schwartz roared. He slammed the heel of his hand into the steel of his locker.

Owen shook his head and whispered, with no less conviction, “Palestine.”

It was Owen’s first appearance in the locker room since his injury. “Owen,” Henry said. “How’s your face?” It was funny how glad he could feel to see his roommate, even though they were roommates and saw each other all the time. And yet over the winter holidays or during the summer, when Owen went to Egypt, as he’d done last summer, or home to California, as he’d done the summer before, Henry didn’t miss him much at all. The more he saw him, the more he missed not seeing him.

“Getting better,” Owen said. “I’m still having some trouble with my studies, though. The words swim around.”

“Are you going to play today?”

“No, no. I’m out until these bones heal. A month, they say. I came to support my comrades.”

“Buddha!” cheered Rick O’Shea as he ambled out of the bathroom with his belt undone. “What’s the matter? You missed seeing me naked?”

“I’m not into fat guys,” Owen said.

“Fat? That’s not fat. Just a little moss on the ol’ rock.” Rick hoisted his T-shirt and slapped his doughy midsection. “Here, feel.”

“Ugh. Get away from me.”

“Suit yourself.” Rick tugged his shirt down, clapped Henry on the back. “Hey Skrim. How’d it go with Pella Affenlight? Looked like she was really feeling your fabric.”

Henry glanced around, worried that Schwartzy would hear and get the wrong idea, but Schwartz had already dragged his banged-up body down to the trainer’s room to get taped and wrapped. Izzy’s impish face appeared around a row of lockers. He tilted his head to one side as he unpinned a gleaming diamond stud from his ear: no jewelry allowed during games. “Feeling his fabric?” he said. “What kind of phrase is that?”

“Whaddya mean, what kind?” Rick said. “It’s just a phrase. It means she’s into him. She’s down. She’s feeling his fabric.”

Izzy shook his head. “That’s not a real phrase.”

“Sure it is. It’s a phrase in the culture.”

“Estúpido.” Izzy tossed the earring from one hand to the other, spat into one of the grated floor drains. “You made it up, man. Admit it.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Not.”

“Too.”

“So what if I did?” Rick’s face was bright pink with exasperation. “How do phrases get started anyway? You think they’re all written down in a book somewhere? Somebody has to make them up!”

“Somebody,” said Izzy. “Not you.”

“Why, because I’m not black? What’s so great about black people anyway?”

“We’re more authentic,” Owen said.

“Irish people are authentic. Look at this chin. You think this chin’s not authentic?”

“It’s a pretty good phrase,” Henry said. “I might use it sometime.”

Rick smiled, grateful for the kind of pleasant intervention Henry could always be counted on to provide. “Thanks, Skrim.”

Izzy spat again. “Estúpido.”

Coach Cox poked his head into the room. “Dunne! How the goddamn hell are you?”

“Much improved, Coach Cox.”

“Well, you look like hell. Skrimmer sure did a number on that cheek. Skrim, you got a minute?”

“Sure, Coach.”

They left the locker room and wandered the corridors of the VAC. The medieval fencing club was scrimmaging in one of the all-purpose rooms, off hands tucked behind their backs as they danced along lines of masking tape. They wore chain-mail vests and what looked to Henry like pirate hats. The lights were off in the other AP room. A winsome music of chimes and woodwinds issued from the room’s speakers as the students sat cross-legged on the floor. “If you feel the need to pass gas,” said the instructor cheerily, “it’s important that you do so.”

A lopsided leather medicine ball lay in the hallway. Coach Cox gave it a dull kick as they passed. He wasn’t much for heart-to-hearts. “So,” he said.

Henry nodded. “Yeah.”

“Been a rough week. But you can’t get down.”

“I know.”

“Just relax out there. Scouts or no scouts. Let ’em sit there, type on their fancy laptops, talk on their fancy phones. Relax and play your game.”

“Right,” Henry said. “I will.”

“I know you will.” Coach Cox gave him an awkward pat on the back. “We’re with you, Skrim.”

By the time Henry returned to the locker room, banter had given way to preparatory solemnity. Each Harpooner sat half or mostly uniformed in front of his locker, nodding along with his iPod’s pregame playlist. Schwartz used an ancient cassette-tape Walkman; only Henry didn’t listen to music at all. Izzy twisted his wristbands so the Nike insignia were aligned just so. Sooty Kim buttoned the bottom two buttons of his jersey, unbuttoned one, buttoned two more, unbuttoned one. Detmold Jensen worked at his glove’s leather with tiny pinking shears, snipping off a superfluous centimeter of lacing. Henry went to the bathroom, which was still thick with the ordurous odor of Rick O’Shea, and urinated a long clear stream. He soaped his arms and hands with industrial candy-pink liquid soap, rinsed clean.

His stomach was rumbling queerly. It always clamped down before a game, not from nervousness exactly—it was more like self-containment, a narrowness of purpose that made the idea of putting anything into his body seem bizarre. Today, though, something was amiss. He could taste bile in the back of his throat. He went into a stall, locked the door, knelt down with his face to the bowl. He’d heard of major leaguers who threw up because of nerves. It wasn’t necessarily a sign of weakness or any kind of big deal. Still, he hoped no one could hear him. He hiccuped once, twice, dryly. He wasn’t sure how to hasten the process along. He stuck his index finger into his mouth and rooted around with it, rubbed his tongue, prodded the place where his tongue met his palate. His finger tasted like the pink soap, whose color suggested sweetness but which was warm and horrid. The taste made his stomach churn worse. Finally his finger found the right spot. His gut lurched, he gagged, and his lunch cascaded into the bowl in one long spilling fall. Slumped there on the floor, he felt better, almost sleepy. A happy surge of chemicals hit his brain.

He headed back to the locker room. He was behind schedule now, but he took care not to rush his own ritual preparations, the double-and triple-checking of jockstrap, cup, sliding shorts, pants, Cards T-shirt, jersey, sanitary socks, stirrups, belt, batting gloves, glove, and cap. He tested each part of his body for looseness: wrists, fingers, toes, all the anonymous muscles that surrounded his chest cavity and made up his neck and face. He untied his laces and retied them to the ideal tightness, so that the tops of his feet were pressured but not pinched. He followed his teammates outside.

“They’re baaaa-aaack,” Izzy said, meaning the scouts. Supereconomy rental cars stood in a row in the parking lot, their bright paint jobs dulled by the closet-gray day. Mixed in among them were a few bald-tired sedans, their foot wells littered with fast-food bags and Styrofoam cups. These were the two kinds of scouts: scouts who rented, and scouts who owned.

During warm-ups Henry’s arm felt light and pliant, lively as a bird—but it didn’t matter how you felt during warm-ups. You had to perform when the pressure was on. He hit a double in the first and a long, long home run in the third. But when an easy grounder came his way he hesitated, threw low and wide of first so that Rick had to scoop it out of the dirt. Three innings later, he did it again, only this time Rick couldn’t make the scoop. Another error, his fifth in a week; they were piling up like bodies in a horror movie.

After the game, the sports editor of the Westish Bugler, Sarah X. Pessel, approached him with her tape recorder. “Hey Henry,” she said. “Tough game.”

“We won.”

“Right, but personally.”

“I had four hits.”

“Right, but defensively. It seems like you’ve been struggling. Couple more shaky throws today.”

“We’re fifteen and two,” Henry said. “That’s the best start in school history. We just have to keep improving.”

“So you’re not worried about the way you’ve been throwing the ball?”

“Fifteen and two,” he repeated. “That’s what counts.”

“What about your personal future? Doesn’t that count too? With the draft just eight weeks away?”

“As long as the team’s winning, I’m happy.” Whenever Henry set some kind of record, or was named somebody’s Player of the Week or Month, Sarah would ask him for a comment, and he would tell her, with the practiced blandness of an all-star, that he’d gladly forgo the plaques and stats and trophies, would even be happy to ride the bench, if it meant that the Harpooners, after more than a hundred years of trying, would finally win a conference . Until today, he’d always been certain he meant it.

“Do you know who Steve Blass is?” Sarah asked.

“Never heard of him,” Henry lied. Steve Blass was an all-star pitcher for the Pirates in the early ’70s. In the spring of 1973 he suddenly, inexplicably, became unable to throw the ball over the plate. He struggled for two years to regain his control and then, defeated, retired.

“What about Mackey Sasser?”

“Never heard of him.” Sasser was a catcher for the Mets who’d developed a paralyzing fear of tossing the ball back to the pitcher. He would double-, triple-, quadruple-, quintuple-pump, unable to believe it was okay to let go. Opposing fans would loudly, gleefully count the number of pumps. Opposing players would run around the bases. Total humiliation. When it happened to Sasser, they said he had Steve Blass Disease.

“Steve Sax? Chuck Knoblauch? Mark Wohlers? Rick Ankiel?”

If Sarah X. Pessel hadn’t been a girl, Henry might have socked her in the face. Her middle name probably didn’t even start with X; she probably just liked the way it looked in her byline. “None of those guys were shortstops,” he said.

“Don’t get mad at me, Henry. I’m just doing my job.”

“You’re in college, Sarah. You work for the Bugler. You don’t get paid for this.”

Sarah looked pointedly out at the field, back at Henry. “Neither do you.”