The Art of Fielding: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

always a tremendous amount of hugging and kissing on the cheek. No one invited Henry to parties or offered to hit him grounders, so he stayed home and played Tetris on Owen’s computer. Everything else in his life seemed beyond his control, but the Tetris blocks snapped together neatly, and his scores continued to rise. He recorded each day’s achievements in his physics notebook. When he closed his eyes at night the sharp-cornered shapes twisted and fell.
    Before he’d arrived, life at Westish had seemed heroic and grand, grave and essential, like Mike Schwartz. It was turning out to be comic and idle, familiar and flawed—more like Henry Skrimshander. During his first days on campus, drifting silently from class to class, he didn’t see Schwartz anywhere. Or, rather, he saw him everywhere. From the corner of his eye he would glimpse a figure that seemed finally, certainly, to be Schwartz. But when he whirled eagerly toward it, it turned out to be some other, insufficiently Schwartz-like person, or a trash can, or nothing at all.
    In the southeast corner of the Small Quad, between Phumber Hall and the president’s office, stood a stone figure on a cubic marble base. Pensive and bushy-bearded, he didn’t face the quad, as might be expected of a statue, but rather gazed out toward the lake. He held a book open in his left hand, and with his right he raised a small spyglass toward his eye, as if he’d just spotted something along the horizon. Because he kept his back to the campus, exposing to passersby the moss-filled crack that ran across his back like a lash mark, he struck Henry from the first as a deeply solitary figure, burdened by his own thoughts. In the loneliness of that September, Henry felt a peculiar kinship toward this Melville fellow, who, like everything else on campus that was human or human-sized, he had mistaken several times for Mike Schwartz.

3

     
    T hat Thanksgiving was Henry’s first holiday away from home. He spent it at the dining hall, working his new job as a dishwasher. Chef Spirodocus, the head of Dining Services, was a tough boss, always marching around inspecting your work, but the job paid more than Henry had ever made at the Piggly Wiggly in Lankton. He worked the lunch and dinner shifts, and afterward Chef Spirodocus gave him a sliced turkey breast to take back to Owen’s minifridge.
    Henry felt a surge of homesick joy when he heard his parents’ voices on the phone that night, his mom in the kitchen, his dad lying on his back in the family room with the TV on mute, ashtray by his side, halfheartedly doing the stretches he was supposed to do for his back. In Henry’s mind he could see his dad rolling his bent knees slowly from side to side. His pants rode up to his shins. His socks were white. Imagining the whiteness of those socks—the terrible clarity with which he could imagine it—brought a tear to Henry’s eye.
    “Henry.” His mother’s voice wasn’t Thanksgiving-cheery, as he’d expected—it was chagrined, ominous, odd. “Your sister told us that Owen…”
    He wiped away the tear. He should have known that Sophie would spill the beans. Sophie always spilled the beans. She was as keen to get a rise out of people, especially their parents, as Henry was to placate them.
    “… is gay. ”
    His mom let the word hang there. His dad sneezed. Henry waited.
    “Your father and I are wondering why you didn’t tell us.”
    “Owen’s a good roommate,” Henry said. “He’s nice.”
    “I’m not saying gay people aren’t nice. I’m saying, is this the best environment for you, honey? I mean, you share a bedroom! You share a bathroom! Doesn’t it make you uncomfortable?”
    “I sure hope so,” said his dad.
    Henry’s heart fell. Would they make him come home? He didn’t want to go home. His total failure so far—to make friends, to get good grades, or even to find Mike Schwartz—made him more loath to go home than if he were having—like everybody around him