The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “What’s the idea?”

  “The idea? Awright, awright.” Harry cleared his throat, contemplated me for a moment with some consternation, and then gave a barely perceptible nod, as if he had answered some internal question for himself. “Okay, okay, George—I’m going to lay it on you. You know how up at Dartmouth all the computers were, like, connected? Yeah? You with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “You’re with me?”

  “Yes.” It has crossed my mind more than once to wonder what another man would have given that year to have heard a speech like the one that followed.

  “Okay, okay. So there’s all this information, right, flowing between the computers. You see what I’m saying?” I nodded. “Great, great. So now forget about school, because I’m not talking about school. I’m talking about networks everywhere, George. Picture this: there are all these different networks, and they’re connected up, too. This information is everywhere and anyone can access it through their own computer—George, you with me? Now this is a great thing, right? I mean, this is what it’s all about: access to information.” Harry’s tongue lingered lovingly on the words. “Access,” he breathed. “To information. You have that, you have—I mean, damn it, you have everything! And technologically, it’s all there. All I have to do, with your support, a’course …” He glanced at Kate. “But you know—why don’t we, uh, talk about it later,” he muttered, clearing his throat again. “You and me.”

  As I have said, Kate had expected me to be a good sport about this brunch. I very nearly let her down. I nearly let her down, but I have always been susceptible to the oddest, most sudden sympathies. And the joy with which Harry made this last suggestion, with which he reined himself in at last, to assign men’s affairs to the realm of men and spare the little woman the boredom, aroused a wild charity in me. I turned shyly away and ordered another round. Harry insisted on going with the waitress to show the bartender how to make the Bloody Marys. After he got up Kate and I sat in silence, looking out into the afternoon. You could see people through the glass door, scowling on their ways, made angry by the heat. But inside it was cool.…

  “Think I straightened this guy out!”

  “Oh, good!” we both cried.

  Later on, I became the topic of conversation. They were going to find a great girl for me. That is the other thing a newly minted couple is compelled do for their only mutual friend: set him up. “I know a girl for you, George,” Kate said. “She’s a great girl. Virginia Prince, Hotchkiss, Trinity. We’ll all go out next week.”

  “What about Delia?” Harry said. He wiped his mouth and threw the napkin down on the table. “What’s wrong with her? If you’da given her another try, I’da bet—”

  “Delia? Who’s Delia?” interrupted Kate.

  “Girl from the party.”

  “What party?”

  “George’s party.”

  It was my cue to tell them I had called Delia Ferrier after the party and that I was taking her out on Sunday. We had a dinner date, just as Harry had recommended. But I didn’t mention Delia; somehow I felt it would be rude—rude to Kate—to bring her up. I sat there and let them discuss me.

  “Oh. Oh, you mean—yes. The girl from the party. She seemed fine. But I don’t know, I think George wants someone really … fun, don’t you, George?”

  “You come out to the Hamptons, you’ll find the funnest girls around,” Harry asserted.

  “That’s an idea …” said Kate.

  “You mean you’ll go?”

  “Go? Well, we haven’t been invited—”

  “Invited! Kate, you know—I’ve asked you ten times. I mean, if you’d go … Jesus!”

  Turning to me: “I got a house out there,” Harry said apologetically.

  It spoke to my particular capacity for mythologizing that I believed Harry meant he had bought a house. I didn’t find out till the weekend was over that he was renting, just like everyone else. After the introduction of the possibility, Harry was bent on going that very afternoon.

  “Why shouldn’t we? Gimme one good reason why we shouldn’t go!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Kate said carelessly.

  “What do you usually do on the weekends?” I inquired.

  I didn’t mean to imply anything with the question, but Kate said, a touch indignantly, “I’ve been busy, George. I’ve had sailing. I’ve gone out on Uncle Goodie’s boat almost every weekend.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t realized until then that she was interested in stooping quite that low—in having a boyfriend she didn’t go out with in public—and it made me feel a little sick.

  “George, you’d be up for it, wouldn’t you?” Harry demanded. “Why not, right? What else are we gonna do?”

  “What else …”

  “Come on!” he urged. “Say you’ll go—we leave now—what is it—three-thirty? Four? We can have swordfish on the grill at eight. Seven, the way I drive! Come on, whaddaya say? Let’s do it! We’ll have swordfish, tomatoes, corn on the cob—corn on the cob, you guys! George, come on, you talk her into it.”

  “I think we ought to go,” I said. I didn’t even bother trying to plead third-wheel; they never would have gone without me.

  “See? George is up for it! You gotta be up for it! I mean, wait’ll you see it! I got everything! I got a grill in the backyard, a hot tub!”

  “Oh,” Kate murmured, elbowing me under the table, “you didn’t tell me you had a hot tub.”

  “No, but—I’m serious!”

  O love affair that cannot wait a week but must go forward now. To show—this I did, all of it, for you! Harry, the newly minted lover, must have felt that there was no time for them, that there would never be enough time—in spite of the information he had acquired, in spite of the access he had gained—and even taking into consideration the way he drove.

  The restaurant was nearly empty by then, except for a disheveled couple with two whining children and an Hispanic busboy who, having given up on getting us to leave, had begun to mop the floor. He was younger than we were, though it was hard to tell by how much. Over the course of the meal Harry had developed a rapport with him, or believed that he had. Harry was the type of person who considers a meal a failure unless he relates successfully to the wait staff.

  “Yo, Carlos!”

  “You need something, sir? More coffee? I get the waitress.”

  “Naw”—he batted the suggestion away—“I had enough caffeine; drank like five cups. Listen: I wanna ask your opinion. You know the Hamptons?” His voice rose a little to help the foreigner understand. “Like Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton?”

  The boy nodded, smiling faintly. “Yes, sir. Long Island, sir.”

  “Okay. Now if you got a chance to go out to a house in the Hamptons, you know, go out to a really nice house with a big pool—huge pool—and a hot tub and everything, would you go?”

  The young man grinned. He had a quick, knowing smile, insolent and deprecating at the same time. “Oh yes, sir.”

  “That’s what I’m tryin’-a convince these two, and it’s like pulling teeth!”

  The young man looked from Kate to me, nodding as if he understood a joke. “More coffee?”

  “Oh, no—no, thank you. But thank you.”

  “You want something else, sir?”

  “Naw, thanks—you been great. Now, guys …”

  Harry drummed his index fingers on the table as if waiting for inspiration. Kate and I began a silly conversation about nothing at all, teasing him, which Harry half listened to until, in a perturbed fit of energy, he burst from the booth, threw a handful of bills on the table, and announced we were leaving. “We gotta go now if we’re gonna go!” he said miserably.

  “All right, Harry,” said Kate with the greatest indifference. “So we’ll go now.” She stood up and walked out.

  In his rush to follow her, Harry tripped over the busboy’s mop bucket and sent the dirty water spilling across the floor. “Jesus Christ!”
He took several thudding steps to regain his balance, cursed again, brushed off his pant leg, and hurried toward the door.

  I counted the money on the table. The tip was a little shy, especially with the spill, so I took a five out of my wallet and added it to the pile. When I stood up I realized I was drunk. On the way out, I apologized and shook the busboy’s hand. It seemed wrong not to, seeing as how for that day, anyway, he and I were in the same line of work.

  I am no teetotaler—that fault, at least, Mr. Goodenow couldn’t pin on me—but I can count on two hands the number of times I have been drunk in daylight. It is the guiltiest feeling in the whole world. The sky that day might have cloaked the knowledge with a considerate meteorological opacity, but the ceiling had lifted while we ate, and by the time we stumbled out of the diner, the sun had come out to vilify the lot of us—except that Kate had barely touched her drink. When I got back to the apartment, I wanted to crawl into bed, stand them up, and call it a day. But I knew how I’d feel later if I passed out now, so I threw a few things into a duffel and met them at the garage where Harry kept his car.

  After several minutes of anticipation in which the humidity pulsated through my brain, they brought the car down.

  I had traveled a bit in Europe, and, as everyone knows, in the global jokeplace the Bavarians are the easiest targets of all; one can make fun of those beer-swilling, wurst-eating, lederhosen-wearing folk for all of the obvious reasons. But one thing the southern Germans are is sincere. You would have to be, to build a car like that. It popped into sight like a blown-up balloon, plump through its curves and glistening faintly like an erotic toy.

  “Blue,” breathed Kate. “My favorite color.”

  And settling into the passenger seat and finding her hipbones with my two hands—she had to sit on my lap, it being a two-seater—I understood that she had every right to be loved in the old, high way of love; that she had every right to be driven out to Southampton in a fifty-thousand-dollar convertible, and that every girl did. It was my problem if I lived life ironically, if indeed it was the only way I knew. It wasn’t as if I even believed in it. I saw how thin it was, I saw the poverty of it—that I couldn’t make love to her because it wasn’t an ironic act.

  CHAPTER 10

  We made the kind of picture you make once or twice in a lifetime. Harry drove a thousand miles an hour and I kept my arms around Kate so she wouldn’t blow away, and the wind we created in that airless day whipped her blue, polka-dot scarf in a crazy, intractable rhythm. Near Millport, Harry shot out onto the shoulder to pass another convertible. It was the same model as Harry’s, but they had left their top up, perhaps to keep the air-conditioning on—more presumably to make our day. Harry double-clutched to get by, the car seemed to gather itself for a split second, and I caught the helpless glance of the other car’s cuckolded driver before we went screaming down the expressway.

  The house was sincerity itself. It was a big, comfy nothing—you couldn’t have even called it a contemporary—overgrown by at least a few bedrooms. We left the car on a gravel half-circle drive, landscaped straight out of the suburbs fifty miles west, and went in through a pair of mini-Doric columns. We could have been anywhere, in that house, anywhere in America. I guess that was the point: to make one feel at home.

  “Look around, make yourselves at home,” Harry advised, and left for the store, refusing help. When he had gone, Kate and I tripped up and down like thieves. I myself felt gloriously far from home. There were six bedrooms upstairs. In the self-consciously superior master bedroom, the bed took up the entire room, and a few hundred geese had been kind enough to make an offering for its pillows. Kate threw herself onto the bed the way you belly flop on a hotel bed.

  “Do you think Harry’ll come around tonight and leave mints on the pillows?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think the service is any good in this place?” I kicked off my loafers and flopped facedown on the bed, too. It was just like being in a hotel, where the one-size-fits-all luxury is such a nice, nice joke. The house had no obligations in it.

  “Get under the covers, dear,” said Kate, “where it’s warm.”

  I did as she said and then we were sitting up in the bed together. “I’m a little worried about Mary, dear,” I said. “Her last report was rather disheartening.”

  “Yes, dear, I’ll speak to her about it. Now, did you take Rex to the vet this afternoon?”

  “Yes, I did. The vet said you mustn’t spoil him the way you do. No more steaks and chops. From here on in, strictly dog chow.”

  “Dog chow? What a bore for poor Rex.”

  “Well, we can still have steaks and chops.”

  “That goes without saying, dear.”

  Kate settled down into the bed and turned over on her side so her back was to me. Her shoulders were wonderfully rigid against the piles of pillows. “Will you get the light, dear?”

  “Yes, dear.” I yawned and scrunched down as well, pushing my legs under the tight, cool sheets. “Now about Mary, dear.”

  She rolled over on her pillows so she was facing me. We were lying about six inches apart.

  “You’re not really worried, are you, darling?” whispered Kate.

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “She’ll reform soon enough, dear.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, yes. We all do eventually.”

  “Well, I hope so. Good night, dear.”

  “Good night.” But she didn’t close her eyes. Laughing, impenetrable, they stared into mine.

  “Truth or dare,” I whispered, when I couldn’t stand the silence.

  “You know what I always choose.”

  “Truth or dare,” I repeated.

  “Dare.”

  “I dare you to take off all your clothes.”

  Without dropping her gaze, Kate’s hands went down to her skirt. There she paused, as if daring me to dare her for real.

  Children came banging out of the house next door. A voice cried, “Mo-om!” My eyes flickered away from Kate’s face.

  “I win,” she mouthed.

  “What is this—”

  “We ought to—”

  “—satin?” I said, pushing back the coverlet.

  “—see the rest.”

  She stood up from the bed and arranged her hair in the mirror above the dresser. I watched her reflection.

  “Kate,” I began, “about the other day—on the street, I mean …” But she stopped me with a look, a stubborn hardening of her eyes that yielded to disappointment. I closed my eyes and turned away from her. It was the disappointment I couldn’t stand.

  The only thing I had that was different from the others was that I knew it was a game—all of it—and I played it with her. It wasn’t a game for Chat or Nick, certainly not for Harry. But I had played it with her from the moment I learned the rules. I wasn’t supposed to forget them now.

  “Come on, then,” I said, “let’s go see the rest.”

  “George?” Kate had moved from the dresser and she wasn’t looking at me, but at the square of the sea visible through the window.

  “Yes?”

  “You know.… You’re a very good sport, you know.”

  I nodded. It was cold comfort, but I preferred my comfort cold. She knew that about me, perhaps better than anyone. In that way, we understood each other.

  “Yes, dear,” I said after a moment. I ran my hands down the coverlet to smooth it out for Harry later.

  Downstairs, traditional living and dining rooms had been abandoned in favor of one vast carpeted space minimally furnished with a long table and chairs at one end and a long, beige, L-shaped sofa “unit” at the other. Along the far outside wall, a pair of floor-length blinds, also in beige, sheathed a length of sliding glass doors. These opened onto the backyard. You could just see the pool, curving like an amoeba, and the tall Southampton hedge that flanked it, the one natural touch, the one touch of authenticity.

  “Oh, my gosh—come, come and look at this!�
�� came Kate’s voice from below me. “I’ve found it!”

  I went through a large, new kitchen, glittering with appliances, and down into a basement room.

  Kate was standing in the middle of the room pointing, with a strange expression on her face. “It” was a large sunken Jacuzzi, landscaped by a mass of green plants and topiaries. “Look—watch.” She flipped a switch on the wall and the overhead light changed from white to bright red. “What do you think it’s for, George?” She flipped it to white again. “Pornography?”

  “No.” I laughed. “It’s to keep warm after you get out.”

  “To keep … warm?” She’d hardly had a sip at brunch, but she was very nearly giddy. I was suddenly giddy too, in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol. She turned on the spigots of the Jacuzzi to show me the overwhelming force of the water pressure. I laughed, nervously, and then she did, and we both stood there giggling. It was as if in that house we had been granted an unexpected reprieve, which we weren’t sure we deserved.

  Upstairs, Harry started to call for us from the driveway.

  “Guys? Guys? Hey, guys?” He sounded like a kid who wants to call off the hide-and-seek game. “Guys? Guys? I got mixers! Kate? George? Gonna make drinks in the blender! Guys?”

  I caught her eye.

  “Be quiet,” she mouthed, pointing toward a closet in the corner of the room. We crept over and I opened the door. It was a linen closet, stuffed with clean towels. Kate snatched them from the shelves two at a time, dumping them behind the Jacuzzi, mashing the top ones down so they wouldn’t show. I gave her a leg up and she wedged herself, doubled over, into the middle shelf. “Ow! Dammit!” She had scraped herself on the way in. I crouched myself down onto the closet floor below her and grabbed the door shut.

  We could hear Harry searching the upstairs with increasing desperation. “Guys? Hey, guys? You out at the pool, guys?”