The Fundamentals of Play

  Acclaim for Caitlin Macy’s

  THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLAY

  “Well-written and thoroughly conceived.… Macy has crafted a well-honed story that builds with tension and surprise. It’s a promising beginning.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A noteworthy debut.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Reading Caitlin Macy’s fine first novel, The Fundamentals of Play, is a bit like being invited, unawares, to the party.… Macy’s portrait of prematurely conservative rich kids … is richly evocative. Her narrative swings gracefully from present to past and back, slowly revealing the secrets in the shadows.”

  —Salon

  “An insightful first novel.… What resonates is the style and sharp eye for detail.… Macy finds the poetry of regret without stumbling into sentimentality.”

  —People

  “A slick drug-free Less than Zero for the relatively buttoned down ’90s set.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The Fundamentals of Play is a graceful, poignant tale of thwarted love.… The book works because of an all-too-rare quality in first novels—its grace.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  Caitlin Macy

  THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLAY

  Caitlin Macy graduated from Yale and received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia. She has been published in The New York Times Magazine and Slate. She lives in New York City.

  First Anchor Books Edition, July 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Caitlin Macy

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it are inventions of the author and do not depict any real persons or events.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Macy, Caitlin.

  The fundamentals of play : a novel / Caitlin Macy

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82900-9

  1. Young adults—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A3387 F86 2000

  813′.54—dc21

  99-086625

  Author photograph © Sara Barrett

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  For my father,

  Peter Tarr Macy,

  and my mother,

  Claire Canapary Macy

  I would like to thank the George Gorham family; the Carballals—for letting me keep my hand in; Tim Scott, Ron Irwin, Jenny Offill, Jeremy Barnum, and my sister, Jem.

  I would also like to thank Daniel Menaker, whose editorial presence had a wonderfully steadying effect; and Dan Mandel, this book’s first friend.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!”

  —Great Expectations

  I went to Paris after graduation but it was too late to do me any good. Under the stipulations of the fellowship, I was to stay for a year; I barely lasted the winter. I cited, in my letter to the committee, the weakness of the dollar, which had eaten up the stipend. Touching down in New York in gray, frigid March, I had a great sense of relief. The truth was I couldn’t wait to put on a coat and tie and go to work and have the next ten years go by. It was only later that I associated the feeling with the realization that Kate was right. She had always maintained that she and I shared this quality—call it a fundamental conservatism, associate it with whatever you like: the Latin motto of your youth; Budweiser in cans; the moral imperative of fresh air. Or as Kate would have put it, I am one of those Americans who would rather go to Connecticut than France.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was the year they changed the name on the building that ruins the view down Park Avenue. My firm was midtown—Fordyce, Farley—and I was that lowest form of post-undergraduate life: the first-year analyst. We worked hundred-hour weeks in fabric-upholstered cubicles of four feet by six. The guy in the one next to mine didn’t so much as acknowledge me till one morning when he came in late and was compelled to share the latest outrage. “They changed the name!” I was indignantly informed. “They went and changed the name!”

  I remember I told Robbins not to worry, that everyone would go on calling it the Pan Am Building. I was wrong. Everyone started calling it the MetLife Building. This isn’t really important—I certainly never heard anyone try to make a metaphor of it (the change in the city’s most visible corporation from airplanes to insurance)—but it stuck in my mind, and it is from that point that I always date my arrival in the city.

  I was like any other foolishly young face in pinstripes. I lived on the barren top of the Upper East Side in one of those high-rise dormitories called the Something Arms. My roommate was Geoff Toff—Will Toff’s brother, whom I’d known at Dartmouth. Geoff was paralegaling as a means of getting into law school. We didn’t live together so much as run into each other in the apartment every couple of weeks. When we did, Geoff was amiable, aggressively amiable, agreeing with my opinions before I had fully uttered them.

  “I really think this whole mess about the Long Island—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know—me, too.”

  The television was Toff’s. So was the sofa bed, and a large fake-leather reclining chair from which he affected an ironic distance that I didn’t quite believe. I had the stereo and a glass coffee table and hung three prints of the Seine on the wall.

  In my bedroom (the smaller of the two; I lost the coin toss), as in the living room, the floor was carpeted blue. I slept on a mattress on the floor which I planned to upgrade to a bed. The night I moved in we made spaghetti and jar sauce, and that was the last time either of us opened a kitchen cabinet.

  Recently I was depressed to read in the Times that the idea of catching up on sleep is a myth. Nevertheless, I’m planning my Rip Van Winkle revenge. I took a poll of some friends of mine, and we all agreed the last time we were well rested was in 1982. I remember one particular morning that first spring at Fordyce when I discovered myself lying on a stretch of the blue carpet, the L-shaped inlet which joined my bedroom to the hall. I did not know how long I had been lying there. I believe that I was having a breakdown, from pulling two or three all-nighters in a row, but I don’t know—maybe I was upset about something. Eventually I stood up and went to work. It seemed funny to me, in the cab downtown.

  But then everything seemed funny. The money—or the idea of money, for I had none yet—and the never-ending work weeks gave the year a wired, comic tinge. It was all such a ruse. O
ne pretended to be an adult and did adult-like things: one had the Journal delivered; one had a morning coffee order. The coffee order—order—was everything. If you imposed enough order on your life you would wake up your boss, you would wake up old, the imposition would no longer be necessary because the habits would be fully acquired. And in our generation we wanted to be old. Not all of us, of course, but among those of us who went to Wall Street, it was a prevalent posture. I looked forward to the day when I could creak around in threadbare seersucker and indulge in my baffling idiosyncrasies; when I would be chastised by my wife for sneaking out to the local diner for an old-school, high-cholesterol breakfast. My parents were a little older than most parents with kids my age—closer to World War II than Vietnam—and I and a number of my peers were of the opinion that their generation had gotten it right. And perhaps the habits had stuck all the more in my family because they were all we had been able to hold on to. I hadn’t come to Wall Street for nothing.

  I thought of calling Kate—of course I thought of calling her—but the time was never right. Monday was too early in the week and Wednesday too late. The daytime seemed too casual for the initial call, the evenings much too formal. The weekends were impossible. Chat Wethers would know where to find her, but I didn’t want to go through him. And in the back of my mind, I cherished the idea of running into her. I had envisioned various settings, each triter than the next—crossing Grand Central, hailing a cab up Park on a rainy night. Then one evening she materialized, right where you would expect her to, at the Town Club, on Sixty-second Street.

  The partner in a deal I worked on took us there the night the company went public. It was the partner and I, a director and two associates, shooting endless after-dinner pool in an inner sanctum three or four flights up. My direct boss was the associate Daniels. He was the kind of man who buys the Harvard Business School sweatshirt, the Harvard Business School key chain, and any number of Harvard Business School bumper stickers. He got drunk and said more and more loudly, “You’re having a good time now, eh, Lenhart? First time at the Town Club, eh, Lenhart?” Eventually he picked a fight with me over a shot I didn’t call, and looking for an excuse to escape the scene, I volunteered to put him into a cab.

  I had intended to head home myself, but after hesitating a moment outside, I let myself back into the foyer of the Club. It was well lit; standing just inside the door you could see up a wide marble staircase that rose for several steps, split in two, curved around a gold bust, and rejoined in time to deposit the climber onto a brief mezzanine. Like all stairways, it gave the best view coming down, but the ascending prospect was more enticing because it was in looking up that one anticipated the rewards that lay beyond the mezzanine: ballrooms, there were, and bars.

  Contrary to what Daniels had said, it was not my first time at the club. My grandfather had been a member, and I had childhood memories of drinking Tom Collinses “without the Tom” in the men’s bar upstairs. Looking back, I’m sure I returned to seek some evidence of this—our residual belonging: Grandfather’s name on a roster; a face staring out from the photograph of a men’s dinner half a century ago; or perhaps his old chesterfield hanging still in the coat check, the claim forgotten after a particularly raucous night.

  But of course there was no coat. My mother wore it now. And as I stood there, looking up the stairs toward a muted, urbane din whose source the mezzanine concealed, my disconcerting childhood seemed to creep up and surround me. We didn’t, for instance, own our own house. My father ran a tiny pre-adolescent boarding school in western Massachusetts called the Rectory, for sixth- through eighth-grade boys, of the kind that the last thirty years had nearly wiped out. And so the school provided a house. My grandfather’s apartment had been sold years ago to settle some of his debts. There was more—a whole host of recuperative fantasies which someone like me swears by, growing up: I was going to buy back 1100 Madison …! Buy back Nantucket …! And I suppose the Town Club figured in there somewhere as well. In the meantime the running joke between my sister and me was that we had the only kind of money that was respectable these days—the kind that was all gone.

  I am not sure how long I had lingered there, just inside the door, when somewhere above me I heard a loud party come down from dinner and take over the main bar. Then, over the sound of men’s voices, I heard a girl laugh. “I’ll see if I know anyone,” I decided, and I went for the stairs. At the top I turned to see who was laughing. There were a couple of others passing with me, and they turned, too. It was impossible not to follow that laugh to its source.

  A group of men her father’s age with big old-fashioneds in their hands were standing in a circle around my old friend Kate Goodenow. I remember, in the moment before she saw me, I had a dread Kate wouldn’t recognize me, and it seemed to me her face took an instant too long to change. Then she cried my name.

  “George!”

  Anointed, I stepped forward to embrace her.

  “Why, it’s the most fun possible,” Kate declared.

  With us both there, the men seemed to remember themselves, or their collective age, and rather than be introduced they turned in a single motion toward the bar.

  She was all grown-up in a navy blue suit with a sprout of scarf blossoming from the neck. The cut of her suit was too severe to be becoming, but then Kate had never been stylish, really. Like a lot of thin girls, the clothes tended to wear her.

  “I’ve been looking all over town for you,” I said.

  “And where all over town did you expect to find me?” She was as tranquil as she ever was, and I suppose I had known she would be. That was why it wouldn’t have done any good to seek her out. One wasn’t allowed to want things of Kate. I had meant to “catch up,” for instance, and in a hurry, but against my intent was Kate’s demeanor—denying that there was any catching up to be done.

  “I’ve been in Paris, you know,” I said anyway—to establish myself somehow.

  “Really? I’ve been right here every minute.”

  “Then it suits you to be home,” I said.

  For though Kate was not beautiful, hers was a fresh face, to which you found yourself applying old adjectives—she had been called “game,” for instance. “Attractive” wouldn’t work, either. Attractive tells a slightly different story. The preternaturally pale boy who emerged, presently, from the bar would not have gone around with “attractive” women. In the first place, he wouldn’t have found them attractive. He had to squint at me through his wire-rims—

  “Lenhart! Christ almighty!”

  —and then I was wringing hands with my college roommate Chat Wethers.

  “It’s about time you turned up! I thought we’d lost you to the demimonde. Didn’t I say, Kate, George’ll shack up with some Frenchie, start wearing berets, heh-heh?”

  Chat’s bank had sent him to China for three months, but he seemed more concerned with matters on the home front now that he was back. “Business school applications—they’re hell, George! What am I supposed to write about a major setback I’ve encountered? You tell me. The time the Diesel died on the way to Vermont? But maybe I won’t go next year. I don’t know. See if my recommendations pan out. Otherwise do a third year—”

  “I’ll bet George wouldn’t do a thing like that for a living,” said Kate, who could interrupt a conversation without raising her voice. “Would you, George?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I confessed.

  Chat drained his glass. “They got you, too, Lenhart?”

  I nodded. “Corporate finance. Fordyce, Farley.”

  “What about the expat plan?”

  “I just couldn’t—I don’t know,” I started, struggling toward an articulation I myself had not quite formed.

  But Chat nodded as if he understood. “I know exactly what you mean,” he asserted. “You think Paris was tough.”

  “No, not exactly—”

  “Try China, George—Chow-jang, China. Two Western bars in the whole town.”

  “Yeah?” I
couldn’t picture it till Chat added, “One newsstand.” Then an image came to mind of a tall, oblique scowl on legs trying to get hold of a Journal in a remote Eastern city, then settling grudgingly when by some miracle somebody produced a day-old Trib. He had always been bent on travel, yet travel without any wish for, or—my mistake—pretense of, assimilation. I guess he was the old sort of American abroad.

  I had stories of my own to tell and was about to expand on Paris when Kate announced, looking pleased with herself: “If someone gave me the chance to go anywhere in the world, do you know where I’d choose?”

  “Where?” said Chat and I.

  “I’d choose Maine. I’d choose Cold Harbor, Maine. I’d choose it over France, Italy, Spain—” She ticked continental Europe off on her fingers. “Is that horrible of me? Is that the most horrible thing you’ve ever heard?” Her gray eyes looked happily from one to the other of us for confirmation.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Chat said curtly.

  “You?” Kate said, affecting scorn. “You were hardly up at all last summer. George, he was hardly up at all—do you believe that?”

  “I work, Katie, remember?” Chat said, and gave me a burdened look that seemed to say: “Women!”

  And yet from the inflection he put on the word I got the sense that the job remained a novelty. “Guess what, George?” he’d announced our senior spring, with the air of someone who has done something rather devilishly clever: “I got a … job.”

  “Now who’s having what? George? What are you drinking now, straight absinthe, heh-heh?”

  I hardly needed a drink. Kate’s patriotic provincialism—and Chat’s cinematic picture of Paris, with men in berets sipping liqueurs—went down like a tonic after my sojourn across the pond.

  We had settled on something when Kate got a silly look on her face, like she was going to tell a joke. “No, Chattie,” she said. “I have a better idea.”