The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “The unbelievable thing was, he pulls it off. He’s just one of those kids who … pull it off.”

  For a moment the obvious pleasure Chat took in the narrative seemed to desert him. In the fading daylight his long white face registered the utter inequity of adolescence: that after five years, nothing intervening—not even the visit we had just paid Deb—had changed the fact that Nick Beale had been born cool, while Chat and the rest of us could only hope to achieve it.

  “In about three weeks Nick’s the big hero. By Christmas it’s the thing to wear the green blazer. Guys fight over it. Everybody walks around barefoot the way Nick does until it gets too cold and they wimp out. In the spring Nick’s the hot little skipper on the sailing team. They went undefeated and beat us in team racing for the high school championship. And of course it doesn’t hurt that he and Kate are friends from Maine.

  “She was the perfect little girl first year away. Sailed J.V.; remedial math; French Three; string bracelet; Jerry-bears on her notebooks drawn by Charlie Pall … headbands. They started going out around March break. Holding hands, smooching after the dance. No one can decide who’s luckier, him or her, her or him. He makes her a tape, and every single girl who’s even halfway friends with Kate gets a copy made, and most of those girls still have that tape today, ‘Groovy Toons for Kate from Nick.’ Later there was a ‘More Groovy Toons.’ ‘Magic Carpet Ride,’ ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ … saw her at a lacrosse game in the spring.

  “They were king and queen all summer, too; the rest of us were going to tennis camp, summer school—I guess we made some effort at being productive. Kate and Nick were sailing instructors. They just sailed their 420 and hung out on the porch of the yacht club. Kate was such a baby. She still couldn’t party with us. She and Vivi had to be home at eight. Artie Goodenow didn’t even know they were going out, she and Nick. They used to sneak out to the big boat and fool around. A couple times in the summer Goodenow had a talk with Nick about getting his grades up, but everybody’d figured it would take him a while to get up to speed, and they all commented on his appearance—‘vastly improved.’

  “I only went up a few times that summer. I asked Nick how he liked Chatham, and he said, ‘It’s all right. The sailing’s decent and Kate’s there.’ He didn’t know he was supposed to have”—Chat smirked—“great expectations.

  “And now Sex—heh, heh—rears its ugly head.” Chat cracked open a can of beer from Deb’s six-pack and took a long, thirsty swallow. “Nick was ‘experienced.’ The rumor was that he had lost it when he was twelve with one of Deb’s friends—as a joke at some party. There was a girl in Wamatuck he was supposed to sleep with on vacations, and I guess at some point Kate figured it out. Nick said he didn’t understand what it had to do with her, he said it was two separate things—he told everyone who would listen, and I honestly believe he meant it, but that only made it worse, and anyway Kate had convinced herself that she was going to have to sleep with him to stay going out with him. And by now she wanted to keep him more than ever. Nick was—crazy. I heard he used to whip up frozen drinks in the kitchenette blender, and if a teacher came by, he’d offer them a glass.

  “So she had it all planned out in her girly way. She wanted them to go down to New York some weekend her parents were away and sleep in her bedroom at home. But Nick didn’t know that part of the plan. So one Saturday night he took her out behind the science building and had sex with her.”

  There was a long pause. I thought of a girl called Hallie Dryer.

  “Kate was very … thin,” Chat said finally. “Very thin. And she got thinner.” With his free hand he picked absently at a blemish on his chin.

  For the wrap-up Chat had adopted a soothingly businesslike tone, like the one Mr. Goodenow must have used to explain to his constituents that the experiment had failed.

  “What can I say—you know the rest. Nick didn’t get asked back after their junior year. The rest of us were gunning for the Ivies; Nick didn’t care. Nobody had told him what came next. The money was mostly gone, and with Nick slacking his way through Chatham, nobody felt like putting up more. Mr. Goodenow told my dad he’d figured the kid would work hard, maybe get a scholarship somewhere decent. Nobody counted on his not caring at all, or his not ever caring.”

  After a moment, I said: “They let him finish out the year.”

  My interruption seemed to annoy Chat. He sped up, then cursed the car in front of him. It must have disconcerted him to be reminded that I had been there for this part of the story, that I could bear witness. He seemed to take no notice of the fact: somehow if I had been there, his story couldn’t have been true. And yet it was. I knew, because I had been there.

  “Memorial Day weekend they had the team-racing championships in Newport, and on Saturday night Nicko went down to Ida Lewis and stole a boat. He stole a boat right off the pier. He tried to get Kate to come along. He was going to take her down to the Caribbean. Can you imagine? The kid had a vision!”

  “But she said no.”

  “She said no, so he sailed home.”

  “He had nowhere else to go.”

  “He came honking into Cold Harbor, ’chute up, soloing, ragging the main, cutting Little Otter closer than anyone ever cut it. And nobody has ever understood how he got through the Narrows at low tide.”

  “It was a Bermuda Forty,” I remembered. I had memorized that. It had seemed important to me at the time.

  “He had good taste in boats.”

  “He just had good taste.”

  “Wouldn’t you know it turned out the boat he stole belonged to Kate’s uncle. Goodenow patched it up with him, washed his hands of Nick. I think by then he’d finally figured out about Kate and Nick, and he didn’t like it one bit. Goodenow’s always been … different about Kate—he’s more protective of her than he is of Vivi or CeeCee. Doesn’t really make sense since she’s the oldest, but everyone sees it and everyone agrees. Now this is funny: Nick made friends with Uncle Goodie, and he used to work for him, taking that boat from the warm places to the cold and back. The guy’s pretty funny, actually. He said if Nicko could bring her home single-handed all that way and keep her out of trouble, then he sure as hell could do it again with crew.”

  “We lost the regatta,” I said, “and drove back to Chatham without him.” The whole school had gone into mourning over Nick. There was a strike to get him asked back; nobody went to class for a week—well, that part was fitting. In the fall it was the same thing. Everybody wanted to tell Nick stories. Kate had to hear them until she was ready to scream. They expected her to be the authority on the Nick Beale apocrypha when all she was trying to do was get her mind off him and get through. She applied early to college and she got in.

  “Kate and I talked over Christmas break,” Chat went on. “I called her up to congratulate her when I heard about Yale. She said Nick was talking about coming down to New Haven to be near her. Maybe at school in the dead of winter with him sneaking back on campus to take her out drinking, it seemed like a good enough plan. And when it clicked, in spring, that maybe the idea wasn’t so hot, what was she supposed to say? I think at that point she still thought she owed him something.

  “Kate didn’t come up at all the summer before college. She got a job in New York—internship at a chick magazine, lived out in Greenwich at Uncle Goodie’s. Maybe she made it up one weekend—I guess I did see her over the Fourth. She told me Nick was going to come hang out in New Haven for a while, maybe get a job working on boats. I asked her if she thought that would be a drag, since he wouldn’t be going to school. She said she didn’t know—she thought he would be fun to have around.”

  No doubt in the first year or two, he had been the ace up her sleeve. She wouldn’t have had to bother with the orientations, the friendly overtures to her roommates—and Kate liked very much not having to bother. She would have had her own insulation in Nick. For him, nothing had changed. He had Kate, and New Haven was on the water. But in spite of the face she put on things
, it must have been harder and harder to believe they would be together someday. Perhaps he had embarrassed her at a party, or perhaps it was simply the inconvenience, after a while, of having him show up in her real life at all. So she had gone on with her life—college, and college boyfriends—but she had created a space for him in which she believed she could always find him. She would see him from time to time in that space, which had nothing to do with her real life, and it would always be the way it had been when they were fifteen. Nothing would have to change.

  CHAPTER 14

  When Kate and Harry and I got back to the city, it was late afternoon and people were coming back from their weekends and running out again as fast as they could to fill up the cafés and murder the day and make it to Monday.

  Through no effort of my own, I had made it back in time for my date with Delia Ferrier. I was glad to have somewhere to go, but I couldn’t psych up for it, for the whole interesting, positive interaction between Mature Persons Numbers One and Two. I felt more like watching static on TV or going home and not talking to Toff. Everyone must feel like that once in a while, it’s like getting take-out for dinner or putting a song on repeat—it’s self-indulgent in exactly the same way. You just want to hoard your past in the luxury of your own room, to replay the stories over and over in darkness and not be bothered.

  “Just leave me on the corner,” I said.

  “No, no, we’ll drop you off. No trouble, George.”

  At my building Kate gave a good imitation of someone rousing herself sleepily. I deposited her on the seat and got out. “Oh, George. You’re going, then. It was so good you could come along.” Her smile seemed to come from far away, the way one smiles over a memory that is pleasant and will always be pleasant but is no longer compelling.

  I took a dollar out of my pocket and gave it to her. “You won,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said in a sleepy, vague, but happy voice. “That kid … was just a kid with a great job, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ll get myself something with this,” she said, straightening up in her seat. “I’ll get myself—well, what can somebody buy for a dollar?”

  “Plenty of things!” Harry asserted, warming to the challenge. “A Coke or a candy bar—”

  “He thinks of food,” Kate remarked.

  “But it’s been hours since breakfast!” Harry said indignantly. “And we didn’t even eat lunch!”

  “You could buy a newspaper with a dollar,” I suggested, leaning on the side of the convertible.

  “Not today,” Kate reminded me. “It’s Sunday. And anyway, I hate that big, dirty thing.”

  “I hate it, too,” I admitted. “I just about dread it.”

  “Oh, George!” she said helplessly, and the two of us started to laugh. Somehow Harry thought he was being made fun of, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  I kissed her good-bye, then went around behind the car to shake hands. But I wasn’t quick enough. Harry gunned the car into first and flashed his palm at me as he pulled away. I watched the car speed to the stoplight at the end of the block. I felt as if we had been going to run a race, a dumb little race between two boys in their own backyard, and that Harry had cheated in the stupidest way, by making a false start. I had suffered this very injustice from a fellow fac-brat at the Rectory, a neighbor of mine, when I was seven or eight, and even then I had been embarrassed for the kid, for thinking it meant anything if he won by cheating, and more than that, for being so stupid and obvious about it. Then as now, the lack of originality was depressing.

  I was to meet Delia in a little French place downtown that Robbins had recommended. “I’m three for three with first dates there, Lenhart. You can’t miss.” I guess it was an oversight on my part that I didn’t ask him why he was always going on first dates. There was a moment on the subway when I fantasized about telling her the whole story about Kate and Nick, just to have someone to tell—just for the satisfaction of telling it in its entirety. I managed to curb myself, but I am practically incapable of snapping out of a mood, and I’m afraid my preoccupation showed.

  She was on time, which I appreciated but wasn’t quite prepared for, and when we had squeezed ourselves into a corner table, the wine couldn’t come fast enough. When it did, I ordered a gin and tonic as well. “You have to, you know, give it time to breathe,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Would you like something?”

  “I’ll have the same.”

  We gulped them down and I remember I started off a bit wildly, by trying to convince her of my theory of Summer Displacement.

  “Really,” Delia said, when I had finished. “My friends and I never go anywhere. We stay in the city on weekends.”

  “Oh, right. Well, that’s—different.”

  Then I rather rudely inquired, “So, does Harry take you out a lot?” For some reason I had the idea that Delia might have been his confidante.

  But she said succinctly, “Not anymore.”

  The atmosphere was hopeless—hopelessly untenable. I could see the evening degenerating into one of Robbins’s dates, during which he liked to “tell ’em the difference between a stock and a bond.”

  Then Delia said quietly, with the slightest jesting expression in her eyes: “He always used to say, ‘Get whatever you want.’ ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Harry—he used to tell me, ‘Get whatever you want.’ ”

  I gestured to the menu. “Get whatever you want,” I said. “Anything. The steak—the surf and turf—”

  “You shouldn’t imitate him.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re too good at it.”

  “Have you been out to his place in Southampton?”

  “No.”

  And then all at once it was a relief, rather, to sit across the table from her after the long overnight of chaperoning. It was like moving to a new period in the Met. The palate was different, as Delia didn’t tan. Her long brown hair hung heavily down around her pale, expressive face. And the tortoiseshell glasses were fascinating; I had an itch to reach out and remove them.

  “I suppose you’re opposed to the Hamptons in principle,” I guessed, when our salads arrived.

  “Oh no, not in principle,” she replied. “You won’t get me there. But I don’t have any friends who go except Harry. And he’s not likely to invite me.”

  “I would think he’d be begging you to come,” I said.

  “But he knows I won’t sleep with him,” Delia explained, “and he knows I would very much like to be invited.”

  We had finished our cocktails and started on the wine. I was glad to see she was drinking as fast as I was, so I wouldn’t have to worry and pace myself.

  “And because he knows I won’t sleep with him but would very much like to be invited, he won’t invite me. You see, he feels he’d be jeopardizing his position if he were to extend that kind of an invitation: he wouldn’t get anything out of it.”

  “He’d be making a bad trade,” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “It’s funny, that’s not the Harry I know,” I said.

  “Well, have you ever wanted anything from him?” she asked.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “You see, if he did have me out, he’d have to assume I was only using him for his waterfront property.”

  “Well, would you be?” I inquired.

  “No,” she replied after a moment. “I like Harry. I mean, he’s horrible, of course—in that way—”

  “What way do you mean?” I said happily. “His manners?”

  “Oh, no,” Delia replied. “I don’t mind if people are rude, really.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, I’ll trade manners for interesting. And I’ve dealt with much, much worse. No …” She looked up. “It’s his new thing—he’s become socially ‘aware,’ I guess you would say.”

  “You mean he’s a social climber?” I said, b
ecause I thought she was being arch.

  But Delia shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t mean that. Not exactly. Because that makes it sound as if it’s calculated, and with Harry, I don’t think it is. I think it’s instinctive with him—he’s always sniffing out the scent. But it’s still embarrassing to be around. Like your Kate Goodenow,” she said in a carefully neutral voice. “He’s told me half a dozen times that she’s got a house in Maine and a house in Newport and an uncle with a boat. Well, you know what I mean.”

  “Ye-es,” I said slowly, “but I really don’t believe it’s the Maine ticket he’s after.” And I found I had spoken truthfully, whether or not Harry had realized it yet himself.

  “I think I know what you mean,” Delia said, but I could see she doubted me, or rather my motivation for making the statement.

  I was hardly going to get into another discussion about Kate with her; anyway, I’m not sure I could have articulated it then. But that evening a theory began to form in my head about Harry’s ambitions. It wasn’t the obvious thing: it wasn’t Maine or social access he was after, but something else about her, something utterly personal, that at the time I believed had nothing to do with money—it was Kate’s complacency Harry coveted. And maybe he knew about the house in Newport and the house in Maine and Uncle Goodie’s boat, but the need for information would not stop there—not if he had tried to look into Kate’s eyes, as I had, and had instead confronted their opacity.

  “But he is interesting,” Delia was saying. “He’s the most interesting person I know. And nobody’s interesting anymore.”

  “Should we order another bottle?” I said hurriedly.

  “Why not?”