40

David went to the hotel, Pella upstairs to change. Affenlight dialed the five digits of an intracampus call. It rang once, twice, three times. Owen might have been in the shower—but, no, there went his shadow past the lamp.

Four rings. Five. The machine picked up.

Maybe he’d been a terrible lover. He’d been told he was a good lover, or, by his British lovers, of whom there had been a few—women were always trafficking back and forth between the Cambridges—a brilliant one. Back in the day, British women were always rolling apart from him and sighing: Brilliant! But he was older now. And those women, whether British or American or whatever else, were all women. It wasn’t a given that the skills would translate. A good friend didn’t necessarily make a good father, a good professor didn’t necessarily make a good college president, and a good performer of oral sex on women couldn’t necessarily turn around and start giving blow jobs without submitting to the logic of learning curves.

Oh boy.

Affenlight listened to the answering machine’s message all the way through, just to hear the wry mellow tones of Owen’s recorded voice, but he couldn’t leave a message. It would seem pathetic, for one thing, to chase after Owen after a single day’s absence—and what if Owen declined to listen, and Henry heard it instead? Why, why, didn’t he know Owen’s cell phone number? The fact that they didn’t communicate by cell phone, didn’t chat or text, could reasonably be chalked up to the fact that they didn’t need to, they lived fifty yards apart and saw each other five days a week, but then again the students did little but chat and text, text messages were their surest form of intimacy, and to never have texted or been texted by Owen, not to know Owen’s number even for emergency purposes, not that this was an emergency, seemed suddenly to expose a great gulf between them. Affenlight set the receiver down in defeat. The shadow went past the lamp again.

He walked out of his office and into the quad. Half-lost in anxious thought, hardly aware of what he was doing, he found himself entering Phumber Hall and climbing the stairs, precisely at the dinner hour when traffic in and out of the dorms was at its peak. He encountered no one on the staircase, thank goodness, passed no doors propped open in neighborly cheer, though anyone at all could have seen him crossing the quad and ducking inside.

“Guert,” Owen said when he opened the door. His eyes were glassy from marijuana, but he also seemed startled or surprised. Affenlight realized it was a reckless thing to do, coming here, and not just because he might get caught. At least in his office he maintained some semblance or illusion of control over the situation. Not here. Here he was bound to seem absurd. He couldn’t bear to wonder how old, how unfit he looked in this harsh undergraduate hallway light. “Hi,” he said.

“How are you?”

“I’m okay.” A door swung open and closed on the floor below. Feminine shoes swift-clicked down the stairs. “Do you mind if I come in?” Affenlight asked. “It’d be a little awkward if anyone…”

“Of course.” Owen closed the door behind him, gestured to the rose-upholstered easy chair that straddled the room’s imaginary center line, the one unique, neutral piece of furniture nestled among the mirror-image school-issue desks, beds, dressers, bookshelves, and closets. Affenlight remained standing, admired the paintings on the walls, the climbing tendrils of the hook-hung plants, the collection of wines and scotches on the mantel. He could smell the way Owen’s life and habits—weed and gingery cleaners; bookbinding glue; stiff white soap and the garlicky tang of his skin; hardly a trace of Henry except for a faint bouquet of ribbed gray sock—had ingrained themselves deep in the walls and floorboards of the place. He’d made the place home. By comparison Affenlight’s own quarters, which he’d lived in three times as long, reeked of bachelor transience. His whole life had been bachelor transience, rootlessness, one noncommittal night after another in the cosmic boardinghouse. Life was temporary, after all. But to live with Owen, to let Owen make his home their home—that would really be the thing.

Owen plugged in the electric teapot that sat above the squat refrigerator, set about making tea.

“I tried to call,” Affenlight said. This was somewhere between an accusation and an apology for showing up unannounced. “You didn’t pick up.”

“I just got home a few minutes ago.”

“I saw you in the window while I was dialing.”

Owen’s eyebrows lifted in what Affenlight hoped was genuine puzzlement. “You did?”

“Yes.”

Owen snapped his fingers. “Henry.” He walked over to the phone, inspected the console, flipped a switch. “He’s been turning off the ringer. He comes home and doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Not the scouts, not his parents, not even Mike. It’s worrisome.”

“Mm.” Affenlight didn’t want to talk about Henry, not right now.

“I went to practice today,” Owen said.

“You did?”

“I’m going to play tomorrow against Coshwale. Or rather, it’s unlikely I’ll play, because I’ve missed so much time, but I’ll wear my pinstripes and warm the bench. Dr. Collins cleared me this afternoon.”

“You went to St. Anne’s?” Affenlight said. “I would have driven you.”

“That’s why I didn’t ask. I take up enough of your time. You have a college to run.”

“Bah.” Affenlight’s knees wobbled, and he sank into the plushy rose chair. “This place runs itself.” It was dawning on him that they’d reached the end of something, something that began when that errant baseball hit Owen in the face, and would end now that he’d rejoined the team. They’d had their time together, the time of Owen’s convalescence, his holiday from baseball. Their time out of time. And now that time was over. And he had stupidly turned up here to speed things along. “That’s great news,” he said. “About being cleared to play.”

Owen smiled gently. “Then why do you look so glum?”

“No reason. I just missed you today.”

“I missed you too.”

Owen handed Affenlight a cup of tea, tousled his hair, leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. Affenlight couldn’t help feeling consoled, like a child whose goldfish has died. “I wish you had told me,” he said.

“Told you what?”

“That you were going to practice. You must have known ahead of time.”

“I didn’t know the doctor would clear me. And then Mike and I went straight to practice.”

“Mike took you to the hospital.”

“Yes.”

There was nothing especially interesting about that bit of information, but every syllable Owen spoke felt portentous. “You come every day,” Affenlight said. “It makes me expect you’ll keep coming.”

“It’s just one day.”

“Well, carpe diem, as they say. A day is a day. There are only so many of them.”

“Guert, don’t get upset. I mean, why be upset? Because there was one afternoon when my schedule didn’t conform to yours? You’ve never visited me, you know. This is the first time you’ve even called, and you only called to chastise me.”

“I’m not chastising you. That’s not—”

“Are you under the impression that this is really what I want? Covert oral sex in an office, like some scene from a seedy movie?”

Affenlight was baffled. “I hardly think it’s like that.”

“What do you think it’s like?” Owen was standing in front of his desk, his tailbone and the heels of his hands resting against its wooden edge, his long legs crossed at the ankles. Affenlight recognized the posture: that of the lecturer in command. Which made Affenlight, fidgety and underprepared in his borrowed chair, the student. “I show up, we read and make small talk, we suck each other off, we smoke a cigarette, I leave. You wash the couch with Windex and we do it again. It’s like a gay-porn Groundhog Day.”

“We… I don’t wash the couch,” protested Affenlight. “I… we drink coffee.” He sounded pleading and inane, trying to imbue these three simple words, this one banal act, with all the import and sentiment it held for him.

“Everybody drinks coffee,” Owen said.

Affenlight, as he glanced longingly toward the bottle of scotch on the mantel of the deactivated fireplace, noticed a familiar navy volume propped beside it. That damned register, he thought. That damned twenty-year-old me. He imagined his junior-year self strolling the crosshatched walkways with Owen’s fingers entwined in his, the two of them sharing a joint on the library steps, pouring out cuplets of tea for each other at Café Oo, basking in the cinematic light of their campus celebrity. It was hard to imagine, but painfully easy to imagine Owen imagining it.

“Guert? Are you hearing anything I’m saying?”

“Yes,” said Affenlight gloomily.

“And?”

“And I’m sixty years old. I’ll be sixty-one next week.”

“That’s true,” said Owen. “But I’m not sure how it relates to what we’re talking about.”

“Which is?”

“Which is the fact that we have nothing resembling a normal relationship. We’ve never been to dinner. We’ve never been to a movie. We’ve never even rented a movie.”

“I don’t like movies.”

Owen smiled. “That’s because you’re an Americanist and a philistine. But I feel like a prostitute, showing up at your office every afternoon. A poorly paid one, to boot.”

“It’s not like I don’t want those things,” said Affenlight. “I do.”

“But?”

“But… it’s delicate.”

“I know it’s delicate. I know we can’t just walk around holding hands. There are restrictions. My worry is that you find these restrictions convenient. Or even necessary. What if we were in New York, or San Francisco, or even down the road in Door County? What if you came to Tokyo with me? Would you walk down the street with me then? Could you look in a store window and see us holding hands? Or would that be too gay for you? Better to stay right here, in the heart of the problem, where your restrictions will protect you.”

“You’ve been reading too much Foucault,” Affenlight said.

“That’s impossible. And anyway don’t be glib.”

The mention of Tokyo, those words in that order—What if you came with me?—scrambled Affenlight’s thoughts. It was possible, really it was. He could take a year’s sabbatical, pretend to be writing a book, wander around Japan with Owen as his fearless guide, Buddhist temples, neon kittens, tea, Mt. Fuji, the tiny island where two of his uncles died. Bill Murray in that movie he’d never seen, just like he’d never seen Groundhog Day, the one with the curvy blonde and the hotel bar, May–December in a far-off land.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Owen added. “I’m not trying to stake some ominous claim. I’m not even saying I like you. But why would I want to be with someone, for whatever length of time, with whom I can’t go anywhere? I want to live, Guert. I don’t want to hide in your office. It was fun the first week.”

He folded his slender arms, to indicate that he had finished steering the discussion and was willing to wait for Affenlight’s response. He would make a first-rate pedagogue if he chose that route; then again he would make a first-rate anything. All that remained of his injury was a makeup-like swipe of steel blue that traced the outer and under curve of his eye socket. Affenlight shifted in the rose-colored chair. He knew that this was his exam, he was supposed to be answering questions and not asking them, but he felt exhausted, buried in his chair, and he couldn’t help it. “What should I do?”

Owen uncrossed his arms, unfurled himself from his lecturer’s perch. His eyes flashed darkly. “If I were you I’d ask me out to dinner. I’d put on a nice shirt that matched my eyes and I’d pick me up in my silver Audi and teach me about opera while I drove me out through the dark countryside to some Friday-night fish fry in some little town in the middle of nowhere.”

“You don’t eat fish,” Affenlight said.

“I know. But I’d be so smitten by the invitation that I wouldn’t care. And then I’d take me to a motel and turn off the heat and crawl into bed with me and watch cable television into the wee hours, the way that consenting adults are sometimes end to do, even if they normally detest television. And I’d hold me all night and kiss me on the ear and recite whatever poems I knew by heart and feed me awful processed snacks from the vending machine, since I wouldn’t have touched the fish. And then in the morning I’d have me back nice and early, so I could make team breakfast before the game.”