The Fundamentals of Play Read online

“His wife,” I said.

  “It’s not the same Nick.”

  There was a creak down the line of boats as they adjusted themselves, unhurriedly, to a three- or four-degree shift in the wind.

  “Stacy! She’s an Aussie. I met her in a bar last Race Week. She got bumped off her charter, so I was gonna get her a job on Fixation—she’s a cook. Blond hair. Dyed blond hair.” The boy appealed to me: “I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right!”

  “When did they get married?” I asked.

  “Last winter,” he answered triumphantly. “She didn’t take me up on Fixation, ’cause they’d just gotten married.”

  “Where did they meet?” I said.

  “Same as everyone—in a bar down there, right? And wait, I know.” The kid finished coiling the line and looped the end that was in his hand through the coil. Then he slung the coil over his shoulder and patted it against his side, companionably, to neaten it out. “This Nick’s from Maine,” the kid said.

  Across the Sound a new race was starting. The mass of white quivered together, fluttering along the line in an agony of anticipation for the gun. Then they were off. It was a clean start. We heard the echo of the shot.

  “Where are you from?” I inquired.

  “Marion,” the kid said proudly. “Massachusetts. It blows all summer.”

  “A nice southwesterly.”

  He met my eyes quickly. I think he was surprised I knew anything. “You got it. I mean, out here it’s cool—you can see they’re getting races off—”

  “Not like Sippican Harbor, though.”

  This got a laugh, again, of surprised recognition. “We used to sail on Buzzards Bay,” I volunteered.

  “Whereabouts?”

  I told him. “We went to Chatham.”

  “Yeah? You still sail dinghies?”

  “No,” I said. “Not anymore. We live in Manhattan.”

  “So? You could still get out on weekends.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? Come on, man, frostbite or something. At least keep your hand in.”

  I shrugged.

  “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way,” the kid told me, “but that’s pretty lame of you.”

  He had opened a hatch to lay the line inside and when he came up he seemed to really notice Kate, finally, and she smiled at him across the cockpit in an anguished sort of way. “Hey, you!” the kid said. He went and sat down beside her and put his arm around her and squeezed her tight. “Hey, you!” he said again.

  Harry came trundling up the companionway and announced: “I’d like to get a boat like this. How much did you say it would cost?”

  No one said anything.

  “Well, whatever it costs, if my company makes it, and it will, I’ll buy a boat like this,” declared Harry. “You guys should see it down there! It’s got real bedrooms! And a fucking art collection! On a boat! The bathroom’s made of marble! What do you say to that, Kate? Would you want me to buy a boat like this?”

  Kate stared at him as if he were the most extraordinary person on earth.

  “What kind of a company are you starting?” asked the kid, jumping up again. He remained in constant, deliberate motion. He didn’t stand, he balanced; he didn’t sit, he perched. They were all light on their feet, boys like Nick, from hopping around the bow in thirty knots of breeze.

  “It’s a software company. Has to do with navigation, actually.”

  “What do you mean?” said the kid. “Satellite navigation?”

  “Naw, I’m talking about navigating computer networks.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It could still be cool,” the kid assured him. “You looking for investors?”

  “Oh, yeah. Say, maybe this dentist of yours …” Harry began speculatively.

  “I can do better than that!” asserted the kid. He reached around into his back pocket and drew out a hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Harry. “Just got paid. Here—take it.” The boy glanced at Kate; her big spender, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  Harry studied the bill for a moment. “Oh, no, you see …” he started to say. But then an embarrassed look crossed his face and he stopped himself. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.”

  “You gotta get in touch with me if we make it big, okay?”

  “Sure thing,” said Harry. He tucked the bill carefully into his wallet. “Sure thing … care of Oral Fixation, right? Or maybe I oughta get your parents’ address, case you—move on.”

  The kid wrote it out for him. “Now don’t lose that, okay? And if you do buy a boat, and you, like, need someone to sail it for you—”

  “I’ll remember,” said Harry, and, with a glance at the slip of paper, he added, “Jason.”

  “Jason?” Kate repeated, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “ ’At’s right!” the kid said. “That’s my name! So, who wants breakfast? How about you?” He addressed Kate. “You look like you could use something to eat.”

  “Oh, no,” Kate said faintly. “I don’t think I could eat breakfast right now.”

  “We’ve had breakfast,” I said.

  “Yeah? What about lunch? What time is it? I’m all messed up, ’cause of this delivery.”

  “We’d better get going,” I said.

  “Really?” said Harry. “But we were just—”

  “It’s time to leave,” I interrupted.

  The kid followed us back to town. I remember he took another hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and held it in his hand and carried it that way, as if he were about to lay it down on odds or evens.

  “Summer to summer, huh?” said Harry, revving up the car, his eyes following the lank silhouette up the road. “Must be a nice life.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Screwing around on boats. Probably dropped out of school. Those guys have it made.”

  “Excuse me,” said Kate. “But you’re not allowed to talk.”

  “What the hell?”

  “No, please,” Kate said mildly. “I mean it. Please don’t talk. Only George is allowed to talk.”

  “What in goddamn hell do you mean?” Harry threw the car into a violent reverse. He stared at her, waiting for an answer, his hand on the gear shift.

  Kate flipped her sunglasses down and stared ahead, motionless.

  “Why am I not allowed to talk?”

  “Because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, please don’t say anything else.”

  “Are you all right, Kate.”

  “All right?” Harry bellowed. “Why wouldn’t she be all right? What the hell’s going on?”

  “Shh … don’t bother me. I’m sleeping.” And she curled her slender arms around my neck and pretended to go to sleep.

  Somewhere along the way Harry had lost his sunglasses. Eyes naked, he drove into the sun.

  His mind must have been working, beating out a connection: he had never seen her this way. He didn’t know enough to take that alone as some small measure of reassurance and leave it be.

  “What about this Nick?” he asked. Groping, blind, he had hit on it. “This Nick that always gets mentioned. Did you know him, George?”

  I nodded, acutely aware of Kate, pretend-asleep in my arms. I could feel her breath, the impression of her nose and mouth, at the base of my neck—could feel, with every minute shift I made, a corresponding shift down her body.

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  “Well, they grew up together,” I said slowly. It seemed to me I was speaking to her as much as to him. “Kate’s grandmother has a house in Maine. In Cold Harbor.”

  “Where Chat goes—I know,” Harry said impatiently.

  “Right. And Nicko lived across the bay—the town’s called Wamatuck.”

  Harry frowned, trying to understand how this fit in. I ought to have told him the endeavor was impossible. Or I ought to have told him a story—the same story Chat had told me to pass the time on a road trip to
the city three years before. If the circumstances had been different, perhaps I would have—perhaps I would have given him the whole thing, all the information he could have possibly wanted, and then some. I might have added anecdotes here and there, that would have come to mean something to him. There was the time Nick taught me how to use a sextant, for instance, one dark winter afternoon when we were fooling around out at the Chatham boat-house. It’s a simple thing, really. If it’s night you get a moon sight or a couple of star sights and with those and the horizon you can pinpoint your boat on earth. Of course, you have to know what hemisphere you’re in. What hemisphere, he said—as an afterthought, something that he might have left out, or that I might have failed to hear. I might never have had to learn that coming to the end of one half of the world in a boat, for him, simply meant crossing over to the other. The finite urgency of school, of youth, that I counted on didn’t exist for him.

  But Kate was wonderfully fair on my lap—

  “And?” Harry demanded.

  “That’s just it,” I said. “They grew up together.” And I let the rest of it go.

  CHAPTER 12

  There were two stories, actually—two stories Harry never heard. One of them was a story Chat told me on our drive down to New York, the summer after sophomore year. But the first was the story of the drive itself; we didn’t go directly but stopped for a visit near New Haven. It wasn’t till months later that the possibility occurred to me that Chat had undertaken the visit not by chance, as it seemed that day, but for the express purpose of making his subsequent narrative resonate. It’s not something I have asked him about, however. It wouldn’t have done any good then, nor would it now. I can’t unlearn what I learned that day. Part of me thinks it’s better, anyway, for a person like me to have his eyes opened periodically.

  Dead August.

  Chat and I had been at school all summer under the Dartmouth Plan, and would spend what would have been the fall of our junior year away. Chat was going to Mexico to try and pass the language requirement. I was going to New York to work at a bank, Fordyce, Farley, for the experience—or rather the money. But before Chat left, the two of us were going down to the city to set up camp at his parents’—they were still up in Maine—and hell around for a couple of weeks. We were going to see Kate there. She had graduated from Yale in June and was herself coming home from Cold Harbor just this week to pack before leaving for Europe. It was four years since I’d seen her. All the talk of a weekend road trip to New Haven had never amounted to anything. We couldn’t seem to overcome inertia, Chat and I; each of us wanted the other to put his foot down and say, Let’s go this weekend. “Anytime you want, Lenhart—just say the word.” But I wasn’t going to be the one to say it really mattered, and Chat would finally dismiss the idea: “Well, I’ll see her in Maine.” We talked of her less and less and eventually the subject died, like a crush that dithers too long. I had no claim on her attention, and I disliked the idea of a pilgrimage.

  We got the Diesel packed the night before we left and went out till the wee hours with some Holyoke girls who were up in Hanover for the summer. Chat was so hungover in the morning I had to drive. He coughed awake in Hartford; croaked, “This New Haven?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Get off in New Haven. I gotta get something for Kate. Take it down to New York for her.”

  And so I got to see how she’d been living the past couple of years.

  She had an apartment off campus, in the old Taft Hotel—had it still, though she’d been gone three months: she hadn’t had time to come back and move out yet.

  After some discussion we got the key from the doorman and took the elevator up to her studio. Chat got the door to the apartment open with shaking hands. It was dark inside, with the shades pulled, and freezing cold. “What an idiot!” Chat stepped inside, indignant, and felt for a light switch. “She left the goddamn air-conditioning on all summer!”

  The living room was straight out of a catalog. A white couch faced a bureau of laminated white wood. The carpeting was beige, the prints unobtrusive. In the far corner of the room a built-in closet stood in a state of explosion. It looked as if, rather than simply buying things to wear, Kate was collecting clothes for an exhibition. Fifty pairs of shoes jockeyed for position on the floor, a hundred sweaters bulged from the shelf, and in between an infinitude of sleeves begged to be called upon.

  “Goddammit!” Chat began to hunt through the dresses for the one Kate had asked him for, and I wandered over to browse her bookshelves. There was nothing too highbrow, nothing too low—Cold War spy novels, bestseller-list nonfiction. She read the way a boy reads. I sat down on the love seat to wait. The white looked immaculate until you were sitting on it, and then you saw the cigarette burns and the liquor stains of a hundred parties. I thought with some envy of all the fun I must have missed in this apartment. Beside me was a little end table cluttered with photographs. She had all of the obligatory shots: the extended family ski trip on whatever mountain was “in” that year; the three brown-eyed little girls in smocking, Kate the eldest, sticking her chin out; the girl chums in bikinis by the pool, mouths open, chests flat. There was a great one of Nick and her sailing their 420 in a wild expanse of open water. Nick was gazing into the middle distance with his customary look, as if he were going to eat up the sea; Kate was all the way out on the trapeze, looking like she was having the ride of her life. She loved a howling, heavy-air day; she loved to go out and battle the elements and tell war stories afterward. Nick was different. He just sailed, and dealt with the weather as it came up. Even at Chatham he’d been like that: professional. I’d crewed for him once or twice myself, and he never said a thing beyond “Trim jib” and “Ready to tack?” whereas when I steered I would chat my head off to my crew, out of nerves and excitement.

  Finally there was the picture I picked up off the table after a happy moment of recognition—I knew it well. It was of a large group of all ages in evening dress, the men in white tie, the women in gowns; they were imitating a chorus line, leaning forward on their right front feet, back feet in the air behind them, hands out with palms up—“Tah-dah!”—and in the middle of the chorus line (between ruddy Dad and stoically enduring Mother) a girl in a long white dress who had raised both of her hands in a kooky shrug as if to say, “Who, me?”

  She had scabs all over her face. “Chicken pox,” Chat had informed me. And with typical magnanimity: “She was the ugliest deb in New York.”

  Chat (second from left) had a copy of the picture on his bureau at school. Or had had it there till Harry stole it. We knew it was Harry because he was obsessed with it. There was no other way of putting it. I would drop by unannounced and find him studying the thing with an expression not of rapture but of fantastically intrigued puzzlement. Once I’d caught him trying it out for size on his own desk.

  “I just don’t get it!” Chat kept saying after it disappeared. “There are plenty of other pictures of Kate—way better pictures. Why in hell would he steal that one?”

  The temper tantrums, the warnings not to scratch, the bedside battery of calamine lotion, vinegar, soap; the desperately whispered consultations between mother and aunt; Daddy’s pep talk.… I set the picture down. Of course that was the picture he took. It is the oddest, the most melancholy form of envy I know: the desire to have had not another family’s joys but its problems.

  He got to keep the picture. The incident was too embarrassing to mention, even for Chat.

  It happened around Christmas, and in January our Henry came back and announced that he wanted us to call him Harry. All his friends at home did, you see, and his father, and everyone, and the more he thought about it, the more he had realized, Hey, if you’re stuck with a nickname, you’re stuck with a nickname. I was almost impressed by it, in spite of myself—by the blatancy of the lie, of the admission that he was after something Henry couldn’t get him. But he was adamant about it, and corrected us every time we said “Henry,” and despite Chat’s initi
al ridicule, it worked so well that I see I have called him Harry the whole time here.

  Chat whittled the dress competition down to three finalists, all of them blue, all of them short; the other adjective we didn’t know, so we killed the A.C. and took the lot. Walking to the car, I wished I had not gone inside; it was foolish of me, I suppose, but I had expected antiques.

  Back in June an arm of Chat’s glasses had broken off—the other arm was bent nearly vertical—and he’d been wearing them like a two-paned monocle all summer long. “Now watch this bit of inspired engineering, Lenhart.” Having reclaimed the driver’s seat, he dug a pair of shitty sunglasses out of the glove compartment, put them on over the eyeglasses, and jury-rigged everything into place with a piece of duct tape. “I’m going to drive like hell,” he announced, revving up the old car. “Unless …” He gave me a speculative look down his nose as far as he could, which wasn’t far, lest the rig fall apart.

  “Unless what? Let’s get out of here,” I said. It gave me the creeps to be in that deserted college town.

  “Well, I just thought you might want to pay a visit to someone.”

  “Who someone?”

  “An old friend someone.”

  I felt a wave of nausea, sitting there in the heat, last night’s drinking hitting me at last.

  “I thought we could go stop by, say hi to Nicko.”

  “Nick’s around? You mean he’s still here?”

  “ ’Course he’s around.”

  “By himself? But Kate—”

  Chat waited for me to finish.

  “I don’t know,” I said, annoyed at being caught off guard. “I thought he’d be with Kate in Maine.”

  “I don’t think so. I think I would have seen him or heard if he’d been up in Maine.”

  “But why wouldn’t he be in Maine?”

  “Search me.”

  I really hadn’t thought about Nick’s whereabouts at all. By that point, Nick was the kind of person who wasn’t anywhere you could say, or from anywhere. He got jobs on boats and would be spotted in Montauk the same weekend somebody swore they saw him in Miami. Nick’s mother lived in Maine, in Wamatuck, year-round, near Cold Harbor—that much I knew. But the fact had never had much resonance for me. He was like one of the big boats you saw in ports close to home, Westport or Rye; Weatherly, their sterns would say, Nantucket, Massachusetts, and in the next slip over you would see Jamais, St. Barthélemy, FWI. The ports of call were touchstones, that was all.