The Fundamentals of Play Page 13

  The car itself seemed to have changed sides: it was no longer a favorite toy but an eyesore of ostentation. It was annoying to have Kate sit on my lap, whether she liked it or not. There is nothing more depressing than having to hold a carefree pose when one is full of cares.

  Breakfast in Sag Harbor cheered us a little, and we might still have gotten away in the hopeful hours before noon except that in dropping us off, Harry had parked in a lot behind the main street, and to get the car we had to walk by the harbor front. The marina was crowded, it being June; the masts stretched on like a forest of emaciated trees.

  “Oh!” cried Kate. “Let’s go and look at the boats!”

  “Sure, sure,” Harry agreed. “Whatever you want, Kate. We got plenty-a time.” But he looked at his watch as if to convince himself of the fact.

  We walked down the pier along the water, stopping here and there to admire the boats. It was a perfect day for looking at boats. The stalled front had passed, there was an eight- or ten-knot breeze out of the southwest, and in Shelter Island Sound a fleet of one-designs were racing; you could see the uniform set of white triangles tacking and dipping in the distance. “There must be a regatta on,” remarked Kate. Her voice had a bright, hard tone, as if it alone could persuade the day to behave itself, as if she were saying, “Now isn’t this pleasant?” the way you speak to a child, to force him into good behavior after a temper tantrum. “What do you think they’re sailing, George?”

  I guessed the name of a racing sloop. “Do they sail them out here?”

  Kate shook her head. “You’re wrong, George,” she said lightly. “It’s a dinghy regatta.”

  “Dinghies?” I protested. “They wouldn’t look that big from here!”

  “Still,” insisted Kate, “I say it’s a dinghy regatta. The hotshot skipper’s a fourteen-year-old from the high school out here.”

  “The hotshot skipper’s a fat old man from Greenwich,” I countered happily.

  We ambled on. We passed a pretty sloop with teak decks and a black mast. A gray-haired group having a picnic on their old wooden yawl raised their glasses to us. “That’ll be us someday,” remarked Kate. A little farther along there was a tender the size of a small house.

  “Talk about big—get aloada that!”

  Harry had been trailing a little ways behind us, and it seemed to startle Kate when he spoke up then. She turned around with a vague look of annoyance, as if she’d been jostled in a crowd.

  He pointed toward an enormous cruising boat—the companion, evidently, which the power yacht tended. I made this assumption when I saw a boy come down from the top deck of the tender and hop across to the other boat. There was no denying the sailboat was huge—120, 130 feet, and fat through the middle like a giant’s bathtub. Her hull was painted bright aqua, in contrast with which a lurid hot pink script proclaimed her name: Oral Fixation. At one time people had named their boats Reliant or Courageous or Intrepid. But nowadays people would name a boat any stupid name. They would name it after a rock band or a bad movie; they would name it after a psychological disorder. People would build ignoble boats and give them stupid names.

  “Whaddaya think?”

  “It’s not my kind of thing,” I said. She was tricked out with every kind of gimmick: Jet Skis, mountain bikes, a sea kayak, a rubber raft.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “It might be fun.”

  I didn’t answer, as she was only enjoying being contradictory.

  “How much you think the owner’s worth?” Harry asked.

  “A hell of a lot,” said Kate. The little tour had improved her spirits immeasurably, and like most people with money, Kate loved to talk about how much money people had.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The boy.”

  “You think he works on the boat?” she said.

  “Works?” I said. “I bet it’s the guy’s son.”

  “I bet you a dollar he works on the boat.”

  “Dollar it is.” We shook hands on the bet.

  “He’s gone below.” Indeed the boy had vanished from view.

  As we waited, I chided Kate for not taking a more democratic view of the world. “But my view is the more democratic,” she protested.

  “You think the boy’s a little lackey,” I said.

  “I think he’s a kid with a great job,” she said. “You always romanticize things, George—unnecessarily.”

  The stereo came on playing Caribbean music, and a few minutes later the boy reappeared through a hatch in front of the mast. He was barefoot now, and began to spray off the top deck.

  We stood watching him; it is always pleasant to watch someone take care of a boat.

  When he came around to our side of the bow, the sun was to our right and the boy’s profile was toward us, outlined by a long lock of hair. “So, ask him,” I prodded Kate.

  “Why—”

  “Go on.” She didn’t answer. I was about to call out myself when the spray of water stopped, because the boy had let it stop, and as the last few drops evaporated into the air, Kate clutched my arm and my own heart began to pound wildly. The boy bore a dead-on resemblance to Nick Beale.

  “It’s not him,” Kate murmured faintly, steadying herself on my arm. “My God, I thought it was Nick.”

  It was Nicko ten years earlier. The kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but he had Nick’s brown coloring; he had Nick’s thin, lithe body. He had Nick’s hair in his eyes, and as he looked at us with no more than mild curiosity, he had the same habit: he put his hand under his shirt and absently stroked his stomach, squinting into the sun. It was not only Nick’s gesture but the universal gesture of thin pothead boys with hair in their eyes who worked on boats.

  “Do you work on this boat?” Kate demanded, going up to him.

  The boy looked her over in a squinting manner. “I do, indeed.” You could hear the derision even in the one phrase; you could see he thought we were tourists—non-sailors—going to waste his time with foolish questions.

  “You do? Where’s it out of?” She walked around to the stern, very businesslike. “Says Anguilla. Is that true?”

  The kid shrugged. “Guy’s from L.A.”

  I was watching him to see if he would do something else like Nick. I was sure he would if we waited long enough; I think Kate was half waiting for him to recognize her. When we didn’t go away, the kid turned the hose back on, and when we still didn’t go away, he stopped the water again and said dubiously, “You wanna … check her out or something?”

  “Oh, no,” said Kate. She had an odd, abstracted look in her eyes that was not like Kate at all. “No, no. We just … we stopped because …” She swallowed and tossed off the last remark: “Well, you reminded us of someone we know.”

  “Yeah?” the kid said, bored. “I get that a lot.”

  “No, but you really look like someone we know,” insisted Kate. She held up a hand to block the sun. “In fact you could be him—couldn’t he, George?”

  “Ten years ago,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” Kate objected. “Not that long.”

  “What happened,” the boy asked skeptically, “the guy die or something?”

  Kate gave an artificial laugh, walking down the dock as the kid walked aft on the boat. “Hardly. The guy leads a very nice life not doing much of anything, running around the Caribbean all winter. He doesn’t do much more than sail.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  This drew a long understanding nod. He wasn’t, after all, as good-looking as Nick. The nod made him look dull-witted, whereas Nick had an omniscient expression. “I just came from there,” he volunteered after a moment.

  “From where?”

  “B.V.I.’s. Brought her up from Lauderdale to Hatteras and from Hatteras last week.”

  “You and who else?” Kate said, calling his bluff.

  “Just a couple other guys!” the kid said hotly. He had gone from writing
her off to trying to win favor in about two minutes.

  There was a silence then, not unpleasant, and I thought we would take our leave. Harry had wandered on ahead, as if to assert his independence. But Kate wasn’t quite ready to leave. She coaxed another invitation from the boy—it was easily won—and this time she said, “Yes, I wouldn’t mind having a look, after all.” A certain change in her voice made me wonder what she had in mind.

  The gunwales were quite high, and the boy took Kate under her arms, leaning over the lifelines to hoist her up. It was wonderful to see someone take that liberty with her.

  I went over to the side of the boat and reached up and belatedly shook the kid’s hand. Immediately I felt the pointlessness of the gesture: the boy had a weak, noncommittal handshake, as if he didn’t quite believe in the custom.

  “You coming on, too?”

  “All right.”

  To help me aboard, he gave me his hand for real. He was very strong, despite being so lean and slouchy, stronger than you would have thought. He had no idea what to make of us, that was clear. Kate was looking at him with an almost parental expression, pleased and patient. “Are you here for the regatta?” the kid inquired finally, directing the question to me.

  “No, no,” Kate explained, “we’re here …” But her voice drifted off absently; she couldn’t seem to remember why we were there.

  “Wow—late night, huh?” said the kid. “I’m all messed up, too, ’cause of the delivery.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Starving, too—it’s Cook’s day off.”

  With a diffident eye on Kate, Harry came shuffling over.

  “Guys?”

  The whole exchange was beginning to feel rather surreal to me: the boy looked so much like Nick, and he was living Nick’s life. And yet it is never as rewarding as it should be, in life, to meet a representative of one of the types you know. You want to sit them down and have them confirm your suspicions—“And don’t you do this? And don’t you do that?”—but unless you are a sleuth in a detective novel with a murder to solve, the implications remain inconclusive. There is nothing at all to be done with the information. All you know is yes, they are just like someone you know.

  From the dock Harry set about coughing and clearing his throat. That way he had around Kate, of hanging back—presuming not even so much as an introduction to a stranger—seemed pathetic to me. I wanted to tell him to speak up for himself for God’s sake—have it out with her.

  “This is a friend of ours,” I said.

  Turning toward the pier, Kate seemed to consider the premise of my statement. “Why, yes,” she corroborated, “he is.”

  There was an awkward moment when Harry boarded and got tripped up on the lifelines and fell to his knees. His eyes watered, as when he’d drunk the Bloody Mary in the diner. “Oh, gee, I’m sorry—” The kid was beside himself, but Harry wouldn’t take the apology. “I’m fine! I’m fine!” He was clearly in pain. The kid suggested a shot of rum and darted below to get the bottle.

  “You know I’m fine,” Harry claimed, limping forward and aft with a proprietary frown, as if to establish himself as a Man Who Knew Boats.

  “Take the shot of rum,” ordered Kate, ever so pleasantly.

  We went and sat in the cockpit and passed the bottle around. “Isn’t this funny?” Kate said. It seemed to please her enormously that we had been able to make inroads with the boy. She was strangely, overly friendly. They began to talk about the delivery, and Kate plied him with questions. Was it cold? Was it lonely on the watches? Did it blow hard? A gale? A real gale? I didn’t like to see her like that. I didn’t like to see any woman with an agenda, but particularly not Kate. I didn’t like to see her stooping to draw a man out.

  The kid’s jaded manner fell away (but we, knowing Nicko, had known that it would) and he carped happily about the owner of the boat, who didn’t know the first thing about sailing. “Not the first thing. We’re taking her out of the harbor for the first time, going out the channel, and he says, ‘What do I do with that red thing?’ and I say, ‘You leave the nun to port,’ and I go below and come up two minutes later and he’s leaving it about two inches to starboard!” Kate gave the pleased, patient smile, but Harry guffawed loudly. Meanwhile his eyes looked up the rails desperately to see—would there be some indication? Did they label port and starboard? Wasn’t port the one, on the cruise that time—or was that starboard? I wanted to reassure him that there would be no test.

  “You see the name?” the boy asked.

  We nodded.

  “You hear about these dentists? These celebrity dentists?”

  “Um—” I said.

  “What did you say—celebrity dentists?” exclaimed Kate. “George, did you hear that?”

  “My gosh,” I said.

  “Must be pretty successful, though,” said Harry, asserting himself into the conversation at last. “I mean a boat like this must cost, well, at least—”

  “Five,” said the kid coldly, picking up immediately, as teenagers do, on whom he could be rude to without repercussion. “Five and six zereos.” He stretched the tail of his T-shirt out to wipe off a winch. “I have to get her in shape, ’cause the kids are coming,” he allowed.

  “You mean the dentist’s kids?” asked Kate.

  “Yup,” he said, “and they don’t even like sailing. They don’t even like sailing! Dentist has to force them to come out at all, and then they just take the Jet Ski out, and go out for dinner.”

  “How do you put up with them?” cried Kate. “It must be awful!”

  “Oh … they’re not that bad.” The kid relented, with sudden largesse. “Actually, they’re not really kids. They’re about … our age.”

  “Our age!”

  “Well …”

  “How old do you think we are?” I asked.

  “I duh-know,” said the boy with a scowl.

  “No, how old?” Kate insisted.

  “Maybe twenty,” said the boy, after a long hesitation. He had to keep Kate within his range, or the whole conversation—and the day and his job on the boat and probably his life—were pointless. I understood this need; I had played the same game at Chatham, when she was sixteen and I was fourteen. But Harry cried, “Twenty?” and smacked his thigh. He seemed to be made up of a series of broad theatrical gestures—a thigh-smacking, throat-clearing, fist-clenching player. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  “Not you!” cried the kid, indignant. “You’re older! But you other two?” He turned to Kate on a note of appeal.

  “You’re right!” Kate spoke up in his defense. “We are about twenty. And you’re also right about him.” She pointed at Harry as if he were her wicked stepfather. “He’s older. Much older!”

  Even Harry didn’t know what to say to that, but he seemed determined not to take offense, to prove that anything—anything—was all right by him, that he was just a roll-off-your-shoulders kind of guy. “Say, you got a bathroom on this thing?”

  The kid took him below to the head and returned, coiling a length of line into a long, lazy circle.

  “So who’d I remind you of?”

  “You remind us of a kid who was the best sailor—” Kate began, her voice softening to paint the picture.

  “Yeah?” the kid broke in impertinently. “Was he all-American?”

  “No.”

  “No? Well, then he can’t have been that great,” concluded the kid. “Anybody who’s good in college—”

  “He didn’t go to college.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He took this in. “Why not?”

  “He couldn’t afford it,” I said.

  “Now, George, you know that’s not true. He didn’t apply himself.”

  “I don’t ‘apply’ myself either,” said the kid.

  “I know,” Kate said simply.

  “What’s the guy’s name?”

  “Nick,” she threw out, after a fraction of a pause.

  Then it was funny, because the kid said, nonchalant as hell, “O
h, I know Nick.”

  “Of course you don’t know Nick.” Kate laughed. “You have no idea who I’m talking about.”

  “Still—I know him.”

  “No, you don’t,” Kate said. “That’s stupid.”

  The kid shrugged. “Works on a boat called Troubador. Hangs out down the Caribbean.”

  It was as if he had now called her bluff of flirtation—and was demanding that she reckon with him. Kate turned cozily, patronizingly, to me. “George, wouldn’t it be too funny if—”

  “Look, I know who you’re talking about. Tall kid …”

  “Not that tall!”

  “No, not that tall,” the boy said quickly. “I mean, pretty tall. He’s built … like me. Brown hair.”

  It was impossible to read the emotion on Kate’s face. “I don’t believe you,” she said evenly. “You don’t know Nick.”

  “Yes, I do. I do.”

  “How could you?”

  “I just do!” The kid was utterly frustrated, practically to the point of hysterics. “I’m telling you, I know the guy.”

  “What’s his last name?” Kate inquired.

  An indifferent shrug. “Got me.”

  “Then how do you know him?”

  We waited, acutely tuned to the boy’s answer.

  “Just ’cause … everybody knows Nick,” he said helplessly.

  “That’s a stupid thing to say,” Kate said. And yet oddly enough it was the kind of thing someone would say about Nick, and I know that’s when I, at least, made up my mind that the kid probably did know Nick Beale. His description sounded like Nick, for one thing. For another, every experience seems to prove it: the world isn’t just small, it’s smaller than you would ever think.

  “You haven’t told me one thing to make me believe you’ve ever laid eyes on him,” Kate said.

  She had him stumped for a moment, and he repeated, “Thin guy, really good sailor.… Wait, I know! Ha, ha! I got you!”

  “What?” Kate said carelessly. She had lost interest in the game.

  “I know his wife! Stacy! See, I do know him! I know Nick’s wife!” The kid threw his head back and reveled, laughing, in his victory.