79

Schwartz’s new job would start in mid-August, when football season began and the new school year’s budget kicked in. Till then he’d been working at Bartleby’s, picking up as many shifts as he could, but there wasn’t much need for bouncers during the slow summer months, and even when he filled in behind the bar, like tonight, he walked home half drunk with no more than forty dollars in his pocket.

When he got back to the quarters, Pella was curled in a leather armchair in what had been her father’s study, asleep. Schwartz scooped her up in his arms—she was several pounds lighter than she’d been in April, a change of which he did not approve. She murmured and squirmed, wrapped her arms around his neck, but didn’t awake. He supported her bottom with one hand; with the other he plucked her book from a crevice of the chair.

She groaned and rolled onto her stomach when he laid her down on the bed they shared. He tugged up the hem of her tank top and unhooked her bra, rubbed very lightly the twin pink indents where the clasp had pressed into her skin. Things were not so bad. Lately she seemed to be emerging from the deepest part of her grief, that summerlong coma during which she’d napped and read, read and napped, eyes Xanaxed and dry. A few nights ago they’d made love again, for what felt like the first time.

The night was warm, too warm to bother with blankets. Schwartz found an extra sheet in the hall closet and spread its seashell pattern over Pella’s sleeping form. Now they had no parents between them.

He went to the kitchen and boiled water for instant coffee. He made it strong, the way he liked it, and added a finger’s worth of scotch from President Affenlight’s liquor cabinet. He’d been working through the scotch slowly, systematically, starting with the least expensive. Only in the last week had Pella asked him to pour her a little glass too; this was another good sign, the stepwise return of one appetite at a time.

It was after one. He descended the narrow staircase to President Affenlight’s office, where he’d been spending his nights, his dawns, and many of his days. Contango trailed him down the stairs and curled up in his usual spot on the rug. The financial documents had been carted away by accountants and attorneys, but Affenlight’s books and papers, a lifetime’s worth of learning, were still here. They needed to be dealt with, or at least packed up, before late August, when the newly hired president arrived, but Pella had so far refused to come into this room, the room where her father died. So it fell to Schwartz to comb through the typewritten lecture notes and yellowed journals; the coffee-stained drafts of essays and wrinkled carbons of decades-old correspondence; the grocery lists and scribbles; the copiously annotated copies of antebellum prayerbooks and poetry primers, to decide what should be kept and what thrown away. Everything was paper, paper, paper—he’d brought twenty more boxes of paper from the study upstairs, and these were stacked in the corners of the room. Affenlight had kept a computer on his desk, but it seemed to have been mostly for show.

One box of 4×6 cards was marked, simply, SPEAKING. Some of the cards contained jokes or anecdotes, along with the dates and occasions of their use. Schwartz remembered many of the more recent occasions, and the jokes. Other cards offered aphoristic rules in Affenlight’s precise hand: With a small group, assonate, as in writing; with a large group, alliterate.

Often Owen dropped by as late as three or four, mug of tea in hand. Schwartz would share his recent discoveries; Owen, as he listened, would purse his lips into something like a smile. They would seal their evening by smoking a wordless joint on the front steps of Scull Hall. Tonight, though, Owen didn’t come, and Schwartz, feeling rather literary, took down Affenlight’s Riverside Shakespeare and settled in behind the desk to page through it. He scanned the marginalia, paused to read some familiar passages. He somehow felt deeply at home here, in Affenlight’s office, among Affenlight’s thoughts, near Affenlight’s death. Deeply at home but also tenuously so; he considered it a privilege to serve as the de facto custodian of Affenlight’s papers, and he felt a constant worry that someone closer to Affenlight, or at least better versed in American literature, would show up to kick him out. But it hadn’t happened yet, and as the summer crept by it seemed less and less likely to happen. Which saddened Schwartz, in a way: what a smart and thoughtful man Affenlight had been, and how little he’d be remembered.

The Sperm-Squeezers was a beautiful book, the early exemplar of a critical genre; perhaps grad students would read it for another decade, and intellectual historians mention it for a decade after that. And perhaps Schwartz, as he readied all this paper for the college’s library, could pull together a second, posthumous book, a collection of essays and speeches that a university press would publish. But a Guert Affenlight wasn’t a Herman Melville; wouldn’t burst back into prominence after death and fifty years’ obscurity. His portrait would hang in the dining hall, alongside those of the other former presidents; four years from now, only the kitchen staff would recognize his face. No doubt some conference room or floor of the library would be renamed in his honor—or, Schwartz thought now, what about the baseball diamond? The current name, Westish Field, was strictly by default. Affenlight Field had a nice ring to it. Was that alliteration or assonance? The crowds there usually constituted a small group, though that might change now that they were national champs.

The office door creaked open, waking Schwartz, who’d been dozing at Affenlight’s desk. Morning light leaked through the blinds. Schwartz jumped up, not wanting to get caught by Mrs. McCallister, who preferred both him and the dog to sleep upstairs. But it was Pella, freshly showered and dressed for work. She hadn’t so much as poked her head in here all summer. “Hi,” she said, and plunked down on the love seat, and told him what she wanted to do.

Schwartz said nothing for a while; just leaned back in the president’s chair. She’s been reading too much, he thought—had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do. “I think we should think about this,” he finally said.

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

Maybe it was the morning light, or the heat of the shower still flushing her cheeks, but she looked sharpened and repaired. “We have to,” she said. “We have to.”

“You can’t just dig up a body.”

“Why not? It’s my dad. It’s my plot. It’s my coffin.” She swept a hand over the room. “You’ve been through all this stuff. So show me where it says, ‘Put me in a box. With fake gold trim. And then stick it in the ground.’ Show me where it says that.”

Schwartz went to the love seat and sat down beside her. He zipped her hoodie up to her chin and gently knotted the strings. This gesture used to bug her—it bugged her right now—but at least she’d figured out what he meant by it: you are mine.

“It just makes sense,” she said. “My dad loved this lake. He spent three years on a ship. He spent half my childhood rowing on the Charles. It’s what he would have wanted.”

Schwartz, having passed the summer among all this Affenlight-annotated Melvilleania, the memoirs of whaling ships, merchant ships, naval ships, couldn’t disagree. “I understand why you want to do it this way—”

“We should have done it this way to begin with. If I’d had time to think it through, we would have. If I hadn’t been so upset.”

“I see what you’re saying. But it’s just not possible. It’s a felony, for one thing”—Schwartz was bluffing, but he figured it could easily be a felony—“and you’ve got to remember how deep that hole is. And how much that box weighs. It would take forever. One person walks by and we’re sitting in jail.”

“Fine by me.” Pella smiled, and Schwartz knew that he had lost the argument, had lost it before it began. He ran his hand over his deepening widow’s peak, scratched his softening belly. He hadn’t worked out once since May.

He half hoped that Owen would veto the scheme, but Owen just nodded and said, “Call Henry.”