Chad Harbach - The Art of Fielding

“And now,” Bruce went on, “suddenly you’re putting all these new initiatives on the table. Low-flow plumbing. A complete carbon inventory. Temperature setbacks. Guert, where is this crap coming from?”

“From the students,” said Affenlight. “I’ve been working closely with several student groups.” Really, he’d been working closely with one student group. Okay, really he’d been working closely with one student — the same student he wanted desperately to get down to the baseball diamond to see. But Gibbs didn’t need to know that. It was true enough that the students wanted to cut carbon.

“The students,” said Gibbs, “don’t quite understand the world. Remember when they made us divest from oil? Oil is money. They complain about tuition increases, and then they complain when the endowment earns money.”

“Cutting emissions will be a PR boon,” Affenlight said. “And it’ll save us tens of thousands on energy. Most of our benchmark schools are already doing it.”

“Listen to yourself. How can it be a PR boon if our benchmarks are already doing it? If we’re not first movers on this, then we’re back in the pack. There’s no PR in the pack. Might as well sit back and learn from their mistakes.”

“Bruce, the pack’s way out ahead of us. Ecological responsibility is basically an industry ante at this point. It’s becoming a top-five decision factor for prospective students. If we don’t recognize that, we’ll get hammered on every admissions tour till the cows come home.”

Gibbs sighed, stood up, and hobbled to the window. Management consulting terms like industry ante and decision factor were the glue of their relationship — Affenlight tried to learn as many of them as possible, and to intuit or invent the ones he hadn’t learned. Gibbs gazed out at the Melville statue that overlooked the lake. “If it’s a decision factor we’ll deal with it,” he said. “But I doubt we can afford it this year.”

“We should get started now,” Affenlight replied. “Global warming waits for no man.”

This was true, of course — he’d read the books, he had rightness on his side — but still he feared that Gibbs, or someone, would detect a deeper reason for his urgency. He wanted to do what was right, wanted to prepare Westish for the century ahead, but he also wanted to prove to O that he could do those things. A year, two years, three — the normal time horizons of the college bureaucracy didn’t square with his objectives. When it came to impressing someone you thought you might love, a year might as well be forever.

Chapter 8

Having taken leave of Gibbs, Affenlight crossed the campus as quickly as his long legs would carry him, nodding and smiling at the students he passed, and settled into the top row of bleachers behind first base to watch the Westish Harpooners play the Milford Moose in early-season, nonconference Division III baseball. Shreds of cloud blew past the setting sun, causing shadows to scurry rodentially over the grass. To his right rose the big stone bowl of the football stadium; to his left stretched Lake Michigan, which this afternoon was colored a deep slate blue that perfectly matched his bathroom floor. It was a cold, uncompromising color — he always put on slippers before his four a.m. piss. The visiting Moose were in the field, and each outfielder stood dumb against an expanse of frozen grass. Affenlight couldn’t tell, from here, what sort of fellows they were: whether they manned their lonely outposts with dejection or relief.

Even the slight elevation of the bleachers afforded a handsome view of the campus, whose situation here on the lakefront had always been one of its selling points. Affenlight exhaled and watched his lungs’ CO 2float whitely away. His elbows rested on his knees, his long knobby fingers interlocked. His forearms, hands, and thighs formed a diamond-shaped pond into which his tie dropped like an ice fisher’s line. The tie, which was silk, sold at the campus bookstore for forty-eight dollars, but he received a free box of six each fall, because the tie depicted the official emblem of Westish College. A diagonally arranged series of tiny ecru men posed against the navy silk, each standing in the prow of a tiny boat. Each held a harpoon cocked beside his head, ready to let fly at a pod of unseen whales. Affenlight also owned the figure-ground-reversal version of the tie, with its navy harpooners bobbing on an ecru sea. These were the Harpooners’ colors: the batter at the plate wore a parchment-colored jersey with pin-width navy stripes.

In Affenlight’s undergraduate days, when they were still called the Sugar Maples, the Westish teams had worn a rather hideous combination of yellow and red, in homage to the autumn colors of the state tree. The change to the Harpooners was unveiled soon after Affenlight’s graduation, and as a direct result of his literary discovery. Near the end of H. Melville’s lecture, while thanking his hosts for their hospitality, he’d uttered the following comment, now long committed to Affen-light’s memory: “Humbled, I am, by the severe beauty of this Westish land, and these Great Lakes, America’s secret sinew of inward-collecting seas.” The schools’ trustees, not wanting to squander such an eloquent endorsement, erected a statue on campus in Melville’s honor in 1972 and had those words inscribed on the base. They also changed the athletic teams’ name to the Harpooners, and their colors to blue and ecru — to represent, Affenlight assumed, the lake Melville admired and the age-faded sheets on which his admiration had been transcribed.

At the time this might have seemed like a stretch, not to say a risible act of desperation — to adopt Melville a thousand miles from where he spent his life, ninety years after a visit that lasted a day. But as rebrandings went it had turned out okay. Certainly the new colors looked more dignified on a seal or brochure, and the athletes enjoyed not having their teams named after a tree. And over the years a thriving cult of Melvilleania had developed at the college, such that you could walk across campus and see girls wearing T-shirts with a whale on the front and lettering on the back that said, WESTISH COLLEGE: OUR DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOURS, or you could enter the bookstore and buy a Melville’s-bust keychain and a framed poster of the full text of “The Lee Shore” to hang in your dorm room. Quotes from Melville’s work were threaded throughout the brochure, the application materials, and the website. A seminar called Melville and His Times was one of the few permanent features of the English Department rotation — Affenlight hoped someday to make time to teach it—and the library had acquired a small but significant collection of Melville’s papers and letters. Affenlight tended to be heartened by his hero’s academic legacy at Westish and to despair over the ways he’d been turned into commercial kitsch, but he wasn’t so naive as to think you could necessarily have the former without the latter. The bookstore did a brisk business in that kitsch; they shipped it all over the world.

The aged scoreboard in left-center field read WESTISH 6 VI ITOR 2. The wind flared off the lake in petulant gusts. The few dozen fans on the home side, most of them parents and girlfriends of the players, huddled under afghans and sipped from Styrofoam cups of decaf that had long ago ceased to steam. A few fathers — the ones too tough for decaf, the ones who shot deer — stood in a row along the chain-link fence that abutted the dugout, feet spread wide. Hands thrust deep in their jacket pockets, they rocked from heel to toe, muttering to one another from the corners of their mouths as they cataloged their sons’ mental errors. With only a topcoat over his wool suit and no hat or gloves, Affenlight felt underdressed. That lone scotch he’d had with Gibbs was still generating a hint of inner warmth. The Westish batter — Ajay Guladni, whose father taught in the Economics Department — stroked a single up the middle. Mittens muffled the sparse clapping of the fans.