I’m making progress.
“Is that true?” his dad said now. “You’ve got this guy buying you clothes?”
“Um . . .” Henry tried to think of a not-untrue response. “We went to the mall.”
“Why is he buying you clothes?” His mom’s voice rose again.
“I doubt if he buys Mike Schwartz clothes,” Henry’s dad said. “I doubt that very much.”
“I think he wants me to fit in.”
“Fit in to what? is maybe a question worth asking. Honey, just because people have more money than you doesn’t mean you have to conform to their ideas about fitting in. You have to be your own person. Are we understood?”
“I guess so.”
“Good. I want you to tell Owen thank you very much, but you cannot under any circumstances accept his gifts. You’re not poor, and you don’t have to accept charity from strangers.”
“He’s not a stranger. And I already wore them. He can’t take them back.”
“Then he can wear them himself.”
“He’s taller than me.”
“Then he can donate them to someone in need. I don’t want to discuss this anymore, Henry. Are we understood?”
He didn’t want to discuss it anymore either. It dawned on him — as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow — that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.
It was nearly midnight. Henry pressed his ear to the door. The noises that came from within were sweaty and breathy, loud enough to be heard above the pulse of the music. He knew what was happening in there, however vaguely. It sounded painful, at least for one of the parties involved.
“Uhh. Uhh. Uhhh.”
“Come on, baby. Come on —”
“Ooohhh —”
“That’s it, baby. All night long.”
“— uuhnghrrrrnnrh —”
“Slow down, now. Slow, slow, slow. Yeah, baby. Just like that.”
“— ooohhhrrrrgghhh —”
“You’re big! You’re fucking huge!”
“— rrrrooaarhrraaaah —”
“Give it to me! Come on! Finish it!”
“— rhaa. . . rhaa. . . ARH —”
“Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes!”
“— RRHNAAAAAAAAAGHGHHHH!”
The door swung open from within. Henry, who’d been leaning against it, staggered into the room and smacked against the sweat-drenched chest of Mike Schwartz.
“Skrimmer, you’re late.” Schwartz wrenched Henry’s red Cardinals cap around so the brim faced backward. “Welcome to the weight room.”
After hanging up with his parents, Henry had put on his coat and wandered out into the dark of the campus. Everything was impossibly quiet. He sat at the base of the Melville statue and looked out at the water. When he got home the answering machine was blinking. His parents, probably — they’d thought it over and decided it was time for him to come home.
Skrimmer! Football is over. Baseball starts now. Meet us at the VAC in half an hour. The side door by the dumpster will be open. Don’t be late.
Henry put on shorts, grabbed Zero from the closet shelf, and ran through the mild night toward the VAC. He’d been waiting three months for Schwartz to call. Halfway there, already winded, he slowed to a walk. In those three months he’d done nothing more strenuous than washing dishes in the dining hall. He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember more often that life was lived in four dimensions. Maybe they could teach you to build your own dorm furniture or grow your own food. Instead everyone kept talking about the life of the mind — a concept, like many he had recently encountered, that seemed both appealing and beyond his grasp.
“Skrimmer, this is Adam Starblind,” Schwartz said now. “Starblind, Skrimmer.”
“So you’re the guy Schwartz keeps talking about.” Starblind wiped his palm on his shorts so they could shake. “The baseball messiah.” He was much smaller than Schwartz but much larger than Henry, as became apparent when he peeled off his shimmery silver warm-up jacket. Two Asian pictographs adorned his right deltoid. Henry, who didn’t have deltoids, glanced nervously around the room. Ominous machines crouched in the half-dark. Bringing Zero had been a grave mistake. He tried to hide it behind his back.
Starblind tossed his jacket aside. “Adam,” Schwartz remarked, “you have the smoothest back of any man I’ve ever met.”
“I should,” Starblind said. “I just had it done.”
“Done?”
“You know. Waxed.”
“You’re shitting me.” Starblind shrugged.
Schwartz turned to Henry. “Can you believe this, Skrimmer?” He rubbed his tightly shorn scalp, which was already receding to a widow’s peak, with a huge hand. “Here I am battling to keep my hair, and Starblind here is dipping into the trust fund to have it removed.”
Starblind, scoffing, addressed Henry too. “Keep his hair, he says. This is the hairiest man I know. Schwartzy, Madison would take one look at that back of yours and close up shop.”
“Your back waxer’s name is Madison?”
“He does good work.”
“I don’t know, Skrim.” Schwartz shook his big head sadly. “Remember when it was easy to be a man? Now we’re all supposed to look like Captain Abercrombie here. Six-pack abs, three percent body fat. All that crap. Me, I hearken back to a simpler time.” Schwartz patted his thick, sturdy midriff. “A time when a hairy back meant something.”
“Profound loneliness?” Starblind offered.
“Warmth. Survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children would burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nymphs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now all that’s forgotten. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the next ice age comes, the Schwartzes will be sitting pretty. Real pretty.”
“That’s Schwartzy.” Starblind yawned, inspected his left biceps’ lateral vein in one of the room’s many mirrors. “Just living from ice age to ice age.”
Schwartz held out a big hand. Henry realized
