70

Affenlight, as he sat at his desk, slid one socked foot from its burgundy loafer and rubbed his instep, which itched, on the rigid heel of the shoe. Competing versions of the coming year’s budget were spread out before him, along with the official proposals of Students for a Responsible Westish and transcripts of discussions Affenlight had had with environmental consultants and activists and architects, the people who’d undertaken these sorts of transformations at wealthier, more on-the-ball-type schools. He’d been toiling hard enough lately that Mrs. McCallister had resumed greeting him in song.

Beside him on the rug, not toiling at all, lay Contango, his regal head at rest on his white paws. This was a trial run, while Sandy Bremen was in Taos decorating their new place.

Affenlight felt bleary; the numbers blurred and shifted before his eyes. A cup of coffee would perk him up, but it was already 4:37, 5:37 in South Carolina, where Owen was, and Mrs. McCallister would have dumped the day’s sludge before she left. He would need to make a whole fresh pot. Perhaps he should take the dog for a walk instead, refresh himself that way.

He extracted something small and dry from the corner of a nostril and flicked it toward the wastebasket. Then he lifted his hindquarters, grasped the arms of his antique leather chair, and shuffled ninety degrees left to face the window. The chair was sturdy and comfortable, suitably presidential—it had supported the buttocks of every Westish president since Arthur Hart Birk himself—but sometimes Affenlight pined for a sleek modern one, with casters and a medial axis on which you could spin. Having shuffled the big chair to the window, he leaned his forehead against the glass, which felt cold despite the sunlight, and dragged his neatly trimmed nails across the exposed portion of the screen, producing a scratchy metallic sound. The word for what a chair should do had been escaping him: swivel. Melville had once called America a seat of snivelization; what Affenlight wanted was a seat of swivelization.

Outside the window, a dining-hall worker in a navy smock and cap hurried out for a smoke. A girl in navy shorts with Greek letters across the butt tossed a pink Frisbee, bending it expertly between the trees. A skein of geese passed overhead. Scaffolding had been appended to the side of Louvin Hall, which had a leaky roof. Yellow rope strung between white stakes protected a newly sodded corner; Infrastructure loved to try to make the place seem idyllic for commencement, sometimes going so far as to spray-paint dead patches of grass bright green. Piano notes wafted like smoke, mixed with bland chirpy birdsong. A pizza deliveryman emerged from Louvin, rezipped his red insulated hamper.

Affenlight felt expansive, as if he’d had one scotch and was angling for a second. Pella didn’t know about the house yet—he didn’t want to unveil the surprise over e-mail, which was the only way they’d been communicating—but negotiations were proceeding apace with the Bremens. And, happily, Pella had decided to become a full-time student for the fall semester. He missed her, more so when she was a mile away than a thousand, but he sensed that they’d made a renewed commitment to each other, he by buying the house, she by enrolling at Westish. His future as a father seemed more secure than it had in a decade. Things were moving ahead. Mike Schwartz hadn’t accepted Jenkins’s offer, but that was his prerogative. And in any case, it wasn’t for Pella’s sake that Affenlight had fought hard to apportion the money for a job for Schwartz. It wasn’t even because Schwartz would repay his salary twenty times over, in the funds he’d raise directly and in the improved PR that athletic success would bring, though that was indubitably true.

It was because Affenlight could tell that Schwartz felt the same way about Westish College that he did. If Affenlight were to list the things he loved, he wouldn’t include Westish—that would seem silly, like saying you loved yourself. He spent half his time frustrated with, ambivalent about, annoyed at the place. But anything that happened to alter the fortunes of Westish College, however small; anything that was done to or even said about Westish College, Affenlight took more seriously than if it were happening to himself. He would protect Westish from any danger. That attitude was taxing—it kept you ever vigilant—but it was invigorating as well. It served to expand the self far beyond its usual confines. And Mike Schwartz felt like that about Westish too. Schwartz might not realize it yet—hell, it had taken Affenlight thirty years to figure it out—but he felt like that too.

Contango had fallen fast asleep: so much for their constitutional. Affenlight went to the hall and brewed a pot of coffee. As he sipped a steaming mugful—MAMA AIN’T HAPPY—he decided to reward himself for a week well spent by setting aside the budget and working on his commencement remarks. The end of the academic year, after all, was fast upon them. He shuffled his chair to a neutral position—desk on one hand, window on the other—and opened a fresh legal pad. “We can make liquor to sweeten our lips,” he mumbled. “Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut tree chips.”

Commencement tended to be a wicked bit of fun for Affenlight. The hired keynote speaker—usually some middling politician or author or corporate head; they never pulled a big name—pontificated, told laborious stories, and displayed strange notions about the fears and desires of the newly minted graduates. By comparison—not that it was a competition—Affenlight always came out ahead. He kept his remarks brief and stuffed them with dubious Westish in-jokes and puns, to which the students, having been subjected to such groaners from their convocation onward, now responded with raucous laughter. These were their puns, this was their college, their president, and no one else could understand. Affenlight lifted a somber hand, pretending to admonish them for their laughter, and this made them laugh all the harder.

He knew from his own student days how the most formidable professors always garnered the biggest laughs; the slightest display of levity, however forced, was enough to send spasms of giddy relief through a lecture hall. See, Professor X is human too! Affenlight himself was now, and had been for a couple of decades, the beneficiary of such easy laughs. People vested him with a certain nobility—they saw him, rightly or wrongly, as the finished product of sixty years of devoted study. It wasn’t a bad position to be in—not so much worse, perhaps, than being young.

Then at the end of any address he would shift, just for a moment, into high oratorical mode. Quote a little Latin, thank the professors and parents, invoke the never-ending search for understanding—it was almost too easy to conjure up strong sentiment, but that was because he meant every word. The students would start to cry; so would some of the parents.

The students’ mistakes lay ahead of them, were prospective and therefore glorious. His own lay in the past. They might have been glorious too, his own mistakes—at least, he would not change them for anyone else’s. He regretted only a single loss—those years he’d missed of Pella’s life, and the string of errors that led to a loss like that was so thick and knotted that he’d never found one end of the string, so that he could follow it in and up and around and figure out why. Perhaps he’d been too permissive and tolerant a parent, and thereby forced Pella to grow up too fast. Or perhaps he’d never been tolerant enough to accommodate a girl of Pella’s talents. Or perhaps he’d raised her perfectly, but every other parent in the world had miserably erred, and so Pella, precisely because of her perfect upbringing, had been forced to find her own way.

This last was a joke, and Affenlight smiled. Most likely the string of errors was perfectly looped, without any ends at all. There were no whys in a person’s life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.

He followed these thoughts down his legal pad for a few moments, then set aside his pencil and inspected his fingertips, which had acquired half-moons of pale grime from the window screen. The sentences he’d scribbled down were a bit gloomy, a bit equivocal for commencement, but they could be brushed into shape. The keynote speaker, the middling politician, would give the rah-rah, use-your-many-talents-and-advantages-for-the-benefit-of-all exhortation. Affenlight would stick to humor and resignation.

His cell phone ring-a-ding-dinged. Contango lifted his nose inquisitively. Affenlight waited a few beats before answering, so as not to seem too eager.

“We did it again,” said Owen, over the din of a locker room. “Eight to seven.”

“Hot damn!” Affenlight slapped the twill of his thigh. “Amazing.”

“You don’t know the half of it. You should see the teams we’re playing against. There must be a large allocation for steroids at these schools. And their fans do coordinated dances.”

“And yet the Harpooners keep carrying the day.”

“Well, we carried today. Sal pitched beyond his talents. And Adam and Mike each hit a home run. Those two are playing like men possessed.”

“Amazing,” Affenlight repeated. “And you?”

“I may have contributed a hit or two.”

“Two?”

“Two,” Owen confirmed. “Coach has me batting third.”

“Amazing,” Affenlight said for the third and, he resolved, final time. Sometimes talking to Owen rendered him extremely eloquent; sometimes it reduced him to slack-jawed stupidity.

“So you’ll be here tomorrow?” Owen asked. “For the championship?”

“I booked a flight already. I didn’t want to tell you, in case that constituted some kind of jinx. It leaves at the crack of dawn.”

“Perfect. You know, Guert, I’ve never been nervous before a game before. I’ve never even understood the concept of nervousness before a game. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? You could win, or you could lose. But now I’m thinking about tomorrow, the national championship game, live on ESPN, and it’s like…” He lowered his voice as if making a shameful confession. “I want to win.”

Affenlight smiled. It was a joy to hear Owen, he of the preternatural calm detachment, cop to a strong feeling of any sort.

“Have you checked on Henry?” Owen asked.

“I knocked on the door last night,” Affenlight said. “And again earlier today. He never seems to be home.”

“Oh, he’s home,” Owen said. “He’s just not answering the door. You’ll have to surprise him. Can you get a key from Infrastructure?”

Affenlight reached into his pocket, fingered the key he’d borrowed when Owen was in the hospital. He carried it like a talisman. “I think so.”

“You’re a sweetheart, Guert. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all.”

Affenlight hung up the phone. Beyond the window, the quad had entered that afternoon hiccup between the end of classes and the dinner rush. The sun lay below the tree line, the light cinema soft. No one, as far as Affenlight could discern, ever accomplished anything at this time of day, although many of the students were compulsive accomplishers, and the gymnasium treadmills, if not the library carrels, were probably packed. Mrs. McCallister’s yellow roses were budding, just barely, in the narrow space beside Scull Hall; he pulled out his daybook and made a note to praise their beauty. A knock came at the door.