The Fundamentals of Play Page 12

  “Christ!” Kate hissed. “My neck is in pain!”

  “Do you want out?”

  “Of course not! Do you want to ruin it?”

  It was the Kate I had met ten years before—the old wicked Kate, skipping chapel in the boys’ dorm. And just like then, my heart was pounding with the fear of being caught and the joy of the secret.

  We gave up after half an hour, when we heard Harry dialing the Southampton police. I had never seen Kate so disdainful.

  “But how was I supposed to know you were hiding down there? I mean, why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” Kate said coldly.

  The ocean air drove the humidity away. Upstairs, Kate turned on the shower. I meant to get that swim and changed into my trunks but dithered instead, eyeing the blue water, circling the pool. I gave up, finally, and took up chaise-longue position and a beer. It was touching to see how solicitous Harry was of a guest’s comfort. He toiled between the kitchen and pool, panting a little, getting out the grill, setting it up, lugging a bucket of ice poolside, poking beers into it. On the last trip he produced an opener and a pair of cushions. “Sit up a minute. There you go. Isn’t that better? Huh? Isn’t that way better? Make yourself at home, George—really, I mean it. Comfort is everything. You want another beer? I got lotsa beer in the fridge after this, and if we run out there’s another fridge downstairs.”

  “Why don’t you have one with me?” I suggested.

  He passed a hand over his head distractedly. “Oh—yeah. Yeah, I’m going to. Thanks.” I opened a bottle and passed it to him. He took a long drink, and the Lombardi grin flashed on as he surveyed his surroundings. “This is it, isn’t it, George? I mean, this is really it: barbecue by the pool, beers in the great outdoors. It doesn’t get much better than this, does it?”

  “I can’t imagine it does,” I said.

  “I come out here, I think to myself, Christ—this is really it!” And yet almost before he had gotten the words out, the grin had ebbed from his face. He took a cigarette out of his breast pocket and smoked it miserably.

  The shirt, a muted mauve, was cut Hawaiian-style, with a long open collar, and went halfway down his shorts. Like many men who had learned to dress at the firm, he hadn’t quite mastered the leisurewear. The old trader’s habits were catching up with him, and he had put on another five or ten pounds.

  “You comfortable, George? You need anything?”

  Embarrassed, as if he could read my thoughts, I took a swig of beer. There were details about his life that I had always wanted to know. I found myself asking him, point-blank, to fill me in.

  “You serious?” I kept prodding him when he would have changed the subject, and so that evening, on the lawn of Harry’s rental, I finally got the full story of his astronomical rise in finance. Harry didn’t brag, but the false modesty was gone, perhaps because he was moving on now and could think of the Wall Street chapter as closed. He was the kind of person who is forever passing the present into the past at a desperate, sweaty-palmed rate, like nothing so much as a kid playing hot potato; nothing was real to him unless it was over, lost, cast in color-by-number sunset yellow and orange, and he was as comfortable in the nostalgia of the past as he was ill at ease in the present.

  “Gonna tell it to you straight, George, ’cause I know you won’t do anything with it. I know you just wanna know.”

  “Go,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  I had been right about systems.

  After quitting Dartmouth, he’d gone home to Long Island, lied about his age, and talked himself into a summer job at Broder. “Don’t ask me how I did it, ’cause I’m not sure myself. I kept my head down, that’s for sure—did my work, made sure I didn’t make enemies. So after a couple of months I kinda got a reputation, you know? I was, like, the psycho computer guy. Everybody on the floor knew you went to Lombardi when things fucked up. Lombardi would deliver. Lombardi would put in the extra time.”

  When he fixed a systemwide bug that had stumped his bosses, he caught the eye of one of the partners, Donald McCance, and McCance took him under his wing. He was trading by Christmas. He hadn’t exactly lied about college, just fudged the details—he certainly didn’t look too young to have graduated—and by the time the truth about his degree surfaced, first in murmurs around the trading floor, then in self-congratulatory tones upstairs, he had already made the firm so much money that his lack of a college education became the stuff of insider legend. McCance had known from the beginning; he had guessed the truth and called Harry on it, and with a trader’s instinct for a position he should get out of, Harry had been straight with the guy. Most of the old guys took it as a good joke, but it just about floored the Ivy Leaguers. Lombardi had done it the old-school way, back office to front, no B.A. That took balls.

  As for the new company, I still couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had always been a bit of a technophobe, and proud of it. At least I made the most of that attitude, for it was the last year one could wholly get away with it.

  “You don’t hafta understand it, but understand this: it’s gonna be huge.”

  “What is?”

  “The computer network—the interconnected networks. The ‘World Wide Web.’ And I’m going to be providing a, a, like an entrance to it. Or like, like a navigation tool. A, ah, whatchama call it—on a boat. You know.… A six ton—”

  “You mean a sextant?”

  “Yeah! Just like that, right? You’ll use it to get around. Navigate your way through choppy seas to a new world.” He took a swig of beer. “I got guys throwing money at me. ’Nother frienda mine came in for fifty yesterday.”

  “Is that the minimum?” I inquired.

  “Naw, I’d take half that, a quarter that. Hell, I’d take anything from you, George. You wanna give me ten, twenty thousand, I’ll put it in water and grow it like a Chia Pet.”

  “By when?”

  “Mmm … better be by Christmas. You know,” he added, juggling the barbecue fork, the cigarette, and the beer, and still managing to get his hand to his mouth to bite off a hangnail, “I’m pretty sure Chat Wethers is going to come in for fifty thousand.”

  “You spoke to Chat?” I said, surprised. “Recently?”

  “Yeah, we took Chat out to dinner the other week. He’s a great guy, that Chat—a real original.”

  “So the three of you …? Wasn’t it—a bit—”

  “Naw,” Harry said casually. “Chat’s not gonna get upset over some girl.”

  “Some—girl?” I repeated blankly.

  “Yeah, you know”—he flashed a guilty grin—“pals before gals.”

  Even the expression was Chat’s. Harry eyed me over the top of his beer. “I helped him outta something once, you know.”

  “You,” I said, trying to get it straight. “Helped Chat.” I seemed to be out of my league. I couldn’t seem to keep up.

  “Yeah … in China.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s a funny guy, that Chat. He just about attacks this girl—”

  “What? You mean a Chinese girl?” I said.

  “Naw, it was nothing like that. She was like us, over there with the firm. You know, I take it back. What do I know, right?” He snapped the grin on; it had never looked more grotesque. “It was just, this girl … she was so, so, so drunk. You ever have that, George, when they’re just so drunk it’d be, it’d be … well, you just can’t figure out how it would be … enjoyable?”

  He looked so guilty by this point I could barely look him in the eye. But with Harry you never knew what that look meant. Some men achieve guilt; many more have it thrust upon them by their fathers. But Harry had been born guilty.

  “How exactly,” I asked with distaste, “did you ‘help him out’?”

  “Aw, it was no big deal. I just took the girl out to dinner and cooled her off a little …” He left a rather pointed ellipsis. “It was a really nice dinner, I’m telling you. I musta spe
nt three hundred bucks, with the wine.”

  “Did you.”

  “Oh, yeah.… Shit, what’m’I’unna do! This thing finally gets going and Kate’s still upstairs!”

  “Why don’t you drink another beer.”

  Harry contemplated this. “Okay. Okay, good idea. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll drink a beer.”

  We were on our third or fourth when the screen door banged and Kate flip-flopped out into the evening, combing her wet hair into straight lines. She was wearing a man’s shirt, a long white oxford shirt, and she had her bathing suit on underneath.

  Despite the setting, I got to my feet. “Will you go swimming with me?”

  “No,” Kate said. “I just took a shower.” Harry glanced furtively at her and away, as if she were someone else’s girlfriend.

  “You can take another one.”

  “No, I don’t think I’ll swim at all this weekend. I’ll tell you what I’d like to do—I’d like to go get in the hot tub.”

  Harry beamed. “You mean it? Great! Lemme go down and get it all going and everything and you guys can come down.”

  “What about the grill?”

  “Aw, hell, it doesn’t matter, George. We can eat anytime. Anytime we want. We got no hurry, do we? We got all night! There’s no need to rush things, is there?” But he himself was in a rush and panted off to the screen door.

  I retook my chair feebly. I felt the old sense of vertigo returning. I couldn’t get my head around any of it: Harry’s having come to Chat’s rescue, Chat and Harry and Kate’s having had a pleasant outing together in New York. It was as if the world had suddenly turned professional, and all engagements were to be of a business nature, and those who struggled along as I did, with a remedial—or perhaps a romantic—conceptualization of how things worked, would soon be obsolete.

  Kate sat down at the foot of my chair facing the pool and dangled her feet in the water. I kept focused on her hair. It reassured me, somehow, that the top of her head was ash-blond to the scalp.

  “Sip of your beer?”

  I passed it over her head. Kate took a sip and held it up, and we shared the rest of it as the last of the sun set through Harry’s hedge. You could smell the next-door neighbors’ barbecue through the hedge, and hear them jumping in and out of their pool and crying out. A child screamed, “Cannonball!” and there was an emphatic splash.

  “Did you have a pool growing up, George?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No? I thought—in the country—you might have had a pool.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

  “We lived at the school,” I reminded her.

  “You lived—”

  “At the Rectory.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Kate said. But her boredom with the subject made it seem as if she hadn’t heard.

  She set her legs on the surface of the water and let them break the surface and float down to the side of the pool.

  “Don’t you want to go in?” I said.

  “No. Not this weekend.”

  The way the ground floor was laid out, you could sit in the hot tub and watch television on the big-screen TV at the same time. We made a cozy après-ski party—in the middle of June. Kate seemed to have become a cold-blooded animal that turns the temperature of the environment. “Aren’t you hot?” I asked, perching on the side for one of my breaks.

  “No, I could sit here all night.” Her face wasn’t flushed, but her eyes were so bright I worried she would faint.

  Like me, Harry could stay in only so long. He trundled up and down the stairs, working the blender and bringing down daiquiris and plates of food from the grill which nobody ate. Every time he came down, he made a big deal of settling in, only to jump up five seconds later with something he had to “take care of.” The room began to smell of barbecued meat. After a few of Harry’s trips the tile floor was covered in water and used towels, and here and there were pink splotches of spilled daiquiri.

  When Harry came down a final time, I announced I was going to bed.

  “Oh, do you have to get up early for chapel?” Kate inquired. I had risen from the tub to dry off.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Acolyte duty tomorrow.”

  “Torch or cross?”

  “Torch.”

  “Harry is a Catholic,” Kate remarked. “Did you know that, George?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Our host took a breath and slid his head down the edge of the tub till it was fully submerged. He came up, loudly, for air. “Yup,” Harry said for me.

  “I’ll bet you’re a very poor Catholic,” Kate teased him. “Can you say a Hail Mary?”

  “Hail Mary, full of Grace,” he recited. “The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women—”

  “All right, all right.” Kate thought for a minute. “Can you do the seven deadly sins?”

  “Pride, envy, anger, lust, avarice, gluttony, and sloth.”

  “Say them again!”

  Halfway through the list, Kate began to laugh, a rather derisive laugh. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!” she cried. “The seven deadly sins in a hot tub!”

  I’m not quite sure how he did it, but Harry managed to clamp a hand over her mouth and pick her up and get the two of them out of the tub. “Past your bedtime, too,” he grunted.

  “No!” Kate protested, and wrenched his hand away. “I don’t want to go to bed! Don’t make me!”

  “Come on, Kate—don’t you wanna go to bed?”

  “No!”

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “No!”

  “Well, whadda you wanna do?”

  “I don’t know …” Her eyes sought mine.

  “Let’s dance,” I said. “Fox-trot.”

  I took her, dripping, in my arms. She was just the way she had been on my lap in the car—her balance was light but firm—and she let me lead.

  “Slow, quick-quick, slow,” chanted Kate. “Slow, quick-quick, slow—but you’re good! Did I know this about you?”

  “You did, but you forgot,” I said.

  Harry couldn’t stand it and cut in. “Here, let me! I’ll show you some stuff.” He had flipped the stereo on and he began to dance her around clumsily, because he wasn’t tall, and roughly, and to sing the lyrics of a popular song. There was one like him at every high school gym or college party, in every club, on every dance floor: the guy who thinks he can dance. Not that Harry’s rhythm was bad—it was probably better than mine—he just didn’t know any steps. It took him all of two minutes to get Kate doing the Pretzel.

  “Don’t spin me!” cried Kate. “Don’t—you’ll drop me!” Clutching for her as she fell, Harry knocked one of the daiquiri glasses off the side of the tub and it shattered.

  “Oh my God, Kate—I didn’t meana—”

  From the floor Kate began to laugh the high bright laugh again, and when Harry offered her a hand, she tried to yank him down with her.

  “Watcha glass!” Harry yelled, struggling to keep his footing. A line of blood streaked the tile. Kate reached out her hands to him, and he scooped her up in his arms like a bride or a doll.

  “God, you’re something, Kate,” he said huskily.

  In my elevated consciousness I remember I saw her, kicking in Harry’s arms, as the embodiment of some primal girlhood. I tried to imagine the two of them in bed, and my imagination failed me.

  At the door Harry stopped. He stretched his face down to hers. It was too quiet, I thought; I realized he was kissing her. Then Kate spoke up—

  “Now, George! You go to bed, too!”

  —and I was alone in the room.

  In the middle of the night I found myself standing at the deep end of the pool, steeling myself against the cold. I dived in. But the shock never came, and I realized, as I paddled to the shallow end and floated languidly to the top, that the pool was heated, too.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next morning I woke in the
fine, condescending mood that comes of believing one is the first awake in a house. I threw on a shirt and a pair of shorts and stole downstairs, not wanting, in my condescension, to wake anyone. I did a few stretches and was contemplating a grand pancake-making gesture when I heard a car in the driveway—the car, rather—and who should come through the front door but my host, in a rumpled suit and tie, carrying a box of doughnuts, with the newspapers tucked under his arm like mounted guns.

  “You’re up early.”

  “No, you are,” I replied.

  “Hadda go to Mass. Now I’m going back to bed.” Harry surveyed my attire. “What’re you up to?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a plan,” I admitted.

  “Here.” He pressed the keys into my hand. “You wanna drive somewhere, take the car.” He left the Times, tucked the Long Island paper under his arm, and trudged upstairs.

  I went out to the driveway. I’d been itching to get my hands on the wheel. But the more I thought of it, the more the idea was too stupid, driving around in a car like that with no place to go. And the possibility of running into Robbins or someone else I knew was intolerable. It seemed to me there were two kinds of men in the world: men like Harry, who were ridiculous enough to buy a car like that and drive it; and men like me, who would become ridiculous driving it. I went for a run instead—just like that, in my flat old tennis shoes. I was so out of shape I turned back after a quarter of an hour. When I staggered in, Kate was sitting in the passenger seat of the car with the door open and her feet up through the open window.

  “Where’ve you been?” she said crossly. Stretched out like that, her legs looked much longer than they were.

  “Down the road and back. Barely.”

  “I’ve spoken to Harry. We’re going as soon as you’re ready.”

  “Fine,” I said. It was all the same to me whether the weekend had turned on us now or would turn on us later, for it would turn on us. That much I had understood from the outset.

  We packed the car in ominous silence. Harry couldn’t do anything right. He beat on his suitcase with a frenzied determination to make it fit. “It’ll go! It’ll go! It went in before!”