The Fundamentals of Play Page 18

It was one of those strangely agreeable dates. The whole evening I kept expecting Delia to say no. I figured she would decline a cocktail and say, “No, I’ll just have the wine.” I thought she would refuse dessert and drink an espresso with me. I even expected her to argue about the check, in a perfunctory way, after which I would insist. But I didn’t have to insist. When the check came, she was good and drunk and hardly seemed to notice it. Nor did I have to insist on walking her home. She seemed grateful to take my arm and leaned on it comfortably as we walked the five blocks to her studio.

  “Eh, voilà—the piano nobile,” she announced, ushering me up a short flight of stairs.

  She unlocked the door and I followed her into a rectangular room with a Murphy kitchen on one end. It was not a large room; a brown velvet couch and a pine-frame futon, facing off from opposite sides, occupied most of it, with a low table in between. The table was littered with magazines and coffee cups, and the rest of the room was crammed with a hodgepodge of collectibles: a shelf of cocktail shakers, a shelf of blue glass, a set of Dickens, a child’s globe that glowed in the dark. There was a poster of Edith Piaf curling from the wall opposite the kitchen. It struck me as a friendly room, with character, but something about it alarmed me. It wasn’t like my room, set up with no commitment at all, and it wasn’t like Kate’s apartment, which could have endured forever. There was some kind of truth in Delia Ferrier’s apartment, some kind of reality I wasn’t ready to reckon with. Delia herself was rummaging through the fridge. “I think I have some wine somewhere.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her not to bother—I had to go. “Oh, good,” I said. “Do you mind if I stay for a minute?”

  “I invited you in, didn’t I?”

  And when she joined me with two glasses, she had a look of wry expectancy as to how the evening was to continue. I hadn’t expected that, either. Somehow I’d thought this young woman would be difficult—that she would put me in my place—and I had rather looked forward to being summarily turned down.

  “Should I put some music on?”

  “That would be nice.”

  And while there was a part of me that met each assent with a marveling at my luck, there was another part of me that dreaded the answer to why it didn’t feel the same. The whole evening I’d had the idea that I would get through the date, push through it, the best I could, but then the strategy had proven unnecessary: she was good company, not taxing; she was better-looking than I remembered, not worse; she was happy to get drunk, not disapproving. And yet I couldn’t seem to relinquish the mindset.

  She had a giving body, Delia, when we embraced—it seemed almost thankful.

  “Curves have gone out of fashion, I’m afraid,” she said.

  “My God—they shouldn’t have,” I said. I meant it, too. A whole world of possibilities presented itself to me when she took her shirt off. And once my hands found her breasts, I knew I was going to make it happen if I could.

  “Really?” I inquired, sometime later. In the studio there had not, of course, been the sobering move from the living room to the bedroom.

  “Well, we’re not going to have ersatz sex all night, are we? I’m not fond of that.”

  “It does seem sort of pointless,” I agreed.

  Unfortunately, I’m sure the real thing proved just as irrelevant for Delia. Her face had been so animated all evening, but at the moment when I would have most liked specific reassurance, it went as neutral and pleasant as a mannequin’s. I seemed to be alone in my sweaty, fleshy urgency, doing something I thought I’d forsworn once in adolescence, and once more since I came to New York—trying too hard: I couldn’t seem to stop trying too hard.

  Afterward, when I was lying on my back staring up at the ceiling, she said, “Don’t stand on ceremony!” overly brightly, and added, “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”

  “Yes. But—I’d like to stay,” I got out miserably.

  “Oh, no, please. Don’t be silly. I really think it’s time you got home.”

  She sounded like Mary Poppins, sending me briskly to bed, as she sat up and groped for her underwear. It was dusty in the room, and on top of the dust I could smell the kitchen spice rack a few feet away.

  “Is my bra under there?”

  I felt around for it. My father, I remembered, bizarrely, had always said “brassiere” on the rare occasions the word had come up, so now when people said “bra,” to me it sounded like kids who called their mother “Ma.”

  “What is it with people?” I said weakly, as one is too apt to say, handing over the garment.

  “People?” she repeated.

  “Everyone’s gotten so goddamn professional all of a sudden.”

  “Mmm … much easier that way.”

  We laughed a little, a little desperately. I hated to go, because then no matter what I did or said, that time with her would be over, and I would have to start a new time, and all I could hear in my head was doubt, at the highest decibel.

  “Look, I hate to say this—”

  “Why? What do you hate to say?”

  “No, it’s not bad, it’s just, it sounds wrong.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Well, exactly.” I tried to think of a way out of the cliché, but there was no other way to leave. “I’ll call you,” I said finally.

  She watched me get dressed by the light the street cast into the room. It was so bright it was almost like daylight. I pointed this out to Delia.

  “Yes,” she said. “It makes less of a difference when you sleep all day.”

  When I was ready to go, I thought I saw her expression change and admit some doubt, as well, but only for a moment.

  “Listen, is it—?”

  “No,” said Delia, shaking her head as if dismissing a weakness of her own. “Nothing at all. I was just thinking—well, when I moved here.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  She smiled wanly up at me. “It’s just I had this idea that New York was going to be mostly cocktail parties where you would, you know, have the opportunity to recite ‘Whan that Aprille.’ ”

  I walked up the street toward the subway trying to do it so as not to think about anything else, but I got hung up where I always did—between “corages” and “Pilgrimages.”

  In our apartment I ran into Cara coming out of the bathroom, wearing one of Toff’s T-shirts. “You’re home late,” she murmured sleepily, squinting without her contacts in.

  “Yeah, you know.”

  “Get a little action, Georgie?”

  “Cara, you’ve really got to stop—” But I couldn’t hide the grin that crept, completely unexpectedly, across my face.

  “Oh, my God!” Cara’s hand went to her mouth. “Georgie got laid.”

  “Cara!”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? Georgie—Georgie—Georgie got la-aid,” she chanted.

  I goosed her under the arms.

  “Georgie! Owwwww!”

  I wanted to thank her, really, or give her a kiss, for pointing out the possibility that it was that simple.

  CHAPTER 15

  Summer itself wore on like a doomed affair. One got through the days and emerged in darkness with the notion of doing something reckless, but it was hard to think of just what. It is hard to be reckless and still have one’s shirts starched. That was how people our age wanted to play it: “wild” but safe. It seemed to me that Kate, at least, was giving it a good stab—I mean when she took up with Harry—until I realized that she was incapable of reckless behavior. It is next to impossible to be reckless with that kind of money as a buffer. Or perhaps it came down not to money but to one’s personality. On the other side of recklessness lies remorse and after that regret, and regret wouldn’t have occurred to her, really.

  In the first week of the August heat wave, Robbins started sleeping with the only single woman in our Fordyce class because he said it was too hot to leave the office for courtship—well, he didn’t say “courtship.” Chat’s air-conditioning broke—or rather Pam Allen’s di
d, he was still camping out on her couch—so he checked himself into a midtown hotel, and when he called me he had been living there for two weeks. “It’s great, George. You ought to check in yourself. I mean, I can get my pants pressed every night!” There was something about talking to him and knowing he would organize a crowd and we would go out soon that made me impervious to the oppression of work and of the heat. I found myself playing mind games with Daniels, being weirdly cheerful at home—complimenting Cara just for the hell of it—and eventually I asked myself why.

  Of the fifteen or so young men and women Chat and Kate called their friends in New York, more than a few knew either Kate from Chatham or Chat from college (among other connections, and of course there was a great deal of overlap); in other words, I had gone to school with them, too—Billy P., Dick Scarum, Gretchen Willie—but I wouldn’t have sought them out in New York. And had I known the others—the Cold Harbor kids, the Manhattan grade school friends—I think the same would have held true. In fact I had a hard time justifying to myself, though not admitting, their appeal. They were all attractive, certainly, and they all had good manners. And perhaps I am confessing my fatal flaw when I say that for long, long stretches of my life, this has often been answer enough. They weren’t scintillating conversationalists; they weren’t particularly talented. They certainly weren’t hip. They did not have glamorous jobs. They weren’t even rich-rich—not as rich goes in New York. What affectations they did assume were so obvious as to be canceled out. But there was something about them. One night Harry told me what.

  It was the night before the heat broke; I had met Chat after work in his room at the Drake. We played several hands of gin and ordered up room service and drank several glasses of gin, and from there we went to the Town Club. Chat had invented a new drink, which made its public debut that evening. The invention of the new drink called for us to make several phone calls and to rally Kate and Dick Scarum and his wife, Loribelle, and her sister, Amanda. Meanwhile Chat had made some friends: a man named Vincent, whose frequent, fervid appearances at the far right end of the bar belied the assumption that a certain type of character had died off long ago—the “Club man”; a thirty-five-year-old divorcée with a Palm Beach tan whose name I am sorry to say I have forgotten; and the divorcée’s date for the evening, who turned out to be an undergraduate at Columbia. Just about the usual Town Club crowd on an off Wednesday.

  Kate showed up with Harry in tow. Evidently she was taking him around with her now. His presence didn’t seem to make any difference to anyone—perhaps we were all simply too hot. Even in Chat I could discern no real reaction; it was as if nothing had changed. Kate’s friend Annie Roth (with whom, after the crank-calling prank, I had developed a phone camaraderie) had explained her theory to me: “He’s like a coffee table that’s a bit of a mistake, George, but once you get it home, you hardly notice because it holds your magazines so well.”

  “Lombardi, you want a Gin Wethers?” demanded Chat.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Didn’t ask how you were, Lombardi; I asked if you wanted a drink.”

  “Oh—yeah, heh, heh—make mine a Gin Wethers,” Harry said.

  “What’s in these, Chattie?” the divorcée wanted to know. “They’re lethal!”

  “Get you another,” giggled the undergraduate, who for reasons of his own was wearing black-tie.

  After we had our drinks, Harry drew me to the side of the bar for the dreaded confidence. “Jeez, George, I been running around too much.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah—boy, does Kate keep a busy social schedule!” He took a sip of his cocktail through the plastic stirrer.

  It sounded like a line out of a mob movie: “a busy social schedule.” I refused to take my cue.

  Harry went on anyway: “Let’s see, the other Wednesday, I guess it was, we hadda go to Annie’s twenty-fifth uptown at—”

  “La Boîte—I know. I was there after you left.”

  He nevertheless proceeded to account for the evening and for the last fortnight. When he told about a restaurant, he told what he ordered and what Kate had ordered, and whether the meal had been successful, culinarily speaking.

  “So you and Kate are serious, then?” I broke in finally.

  To my surprise he took the question, which I had posed intentionally to rattle him, with equanimity.

  “Serious? Nah. She doesn’t have a serious bone in her body. Or else she’s all serious. I haven’t figured out which. Oh, no. I don’t pretend.… But listen here.” He leaned in tight, as if offering me a tip on a horse: “Maybe if someone sprang it on her while she’s young. She might go for it. Nobody else of her girlfriends has taken the plunge, right? I been noticing, and they’re all on the brink, see …”

  This time around I knew what “it” was. He thought that way; he would have had no interest in simply having an affair with her. He was the most goal-oriented person I had ever known. The present existed solely as a means for the achievement of his later goals. It was why people like Chat didn’t get to him—not really. Strictly speaking, Chat had no effect at all on Harry.

  “A lotta these kids weren’t cool in high school,” he went on, confidentially. “See, I was cool in high school. I had a car, I had a girlfriend—always had a girlfriend. I went to the junior prom when I was a sophomore and I went to the senior prom when I was a junior and when I was a senior, heh, heh, I had my own prom! You know, I lived with my dad after Mom split … this sicko batch pad. You’d wake up, nuke a hot dog, drink a Coke, tee off into Long Island Sound …”

  He ambled back around to the point,—this idea he had—which struck me as strangely accurate: “It would mean something to her to be first,” he said simply. “Uncharted territory. Pioneer spirit. And,” he added obliquely, “we’d have a lot of money.”

  Before long the evening went the way of all Town Club evenings: desultory conversations in which points were too earnestly made; club soda’d attempts to make it all right. At some point Chat and I had adjourned to the library to have a serious talk.

  “How serious are they?” I asked him.

  “How serious do you think?” he spat out.

  “Not marriage, then?”

  “Are you on drugs, Lenhart?” He looked appalled.

  “It’s just—I heard a rumor.”

  “Oh, that’s just Katie having fun.” But a moment later Chat took a book from a shelf and hurled it violently across the room. It sat there where it landed, spine up, pages splayed, like a woman dropped on the dance floor, obscenely exposing flesh. “Beale, and now this!” Chat cried. “God, will she grow up.”

  “Why would she want to do that?” I said.

  To his credit he saw the humor.

  We went back downstairs to the bar. “Come on, we’re going,” announced Kate. “We’re bored. Mr. Vincent is going to take us to the Racquet Club now. Two cabs—”

  “I don’t like that club,” interrupted Chat.

  “Oh, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll think of something better to do.”

  “What are you? A dark cloud raining on all the fun?”

  “Speaking of the fun, who’s picking this up?” Chat looked imperiously from one to another of us. The undergraduate slurped his Gin Wethers in a hurry. I myself had a sudden, fervent wish to say coolly, “Would ten thousand cover it?” and write out a check. Chat had never made me feel uncomfortable about drinking on his tab, but I wondered uneasily if the two kinds of debt weren’t associated now, in his mind.

  Chat’s eyes rested, presently, on Harry. “Lombardi. Are you a member yet?”

  “No.”

  “For Chrissake! What’s taking you so long?”

  There was an excruciating pause. “I can give you the cash—” Harry began.

  “Forget it, man. Your money’s no good here.” Chat took a final survey and found us wanting. “Sammy! The check, sir!”

  “Thank you, Chat,”
Kate said sweetly.

  “Dammit, Katie! You run up my tab!”

  “Well, what does a Gin Wethers cost, Chattie?”

  “Ask your big brainiac here, why don’t you? He’s probably got ’em calculated in his head.” He turned to Harry. “Do you? Could you tell me what a Gin Wethers costs? Fair market value, of course.”

  “I’d have to know what was in it,” Harry said steadily. “How many kinds of alcohol.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” Chat spouted his affected laugh. “I knew you’d try to get it out of me, and you never will! Nice try, buddy!” With a brutal pen swipe he signed the check.

  “All right, two cabs to the Racquet Club,” said Mr. Vincent, with a diffident air.

  “We could walk,” someone suggested.

  “It’s too hot to walk,” Chat said.

  On Park Avenue between Fifty-second and Fifty-third streets, on the block directly across from the Racquet Club, there are two long wading pools of about twenty feet by forty feet with fountains at the ends. They are not more than two and a half feet deep. A shallow breaststroke hits the bottom; I would recommend a modest dead man’s float instead.

  Chat was the first to take off his clothes. “I said I’d think of something better, and I did!” He stripped down to his boxers and pussyfooted around, testing the waters. When Kate joined him, the drivers got out of their limos to watch and leer, a joyful noise going up at the good story there would be to tell that night. Then the rest of us stripped down to our underwear and went in, all except for Mr. Vincent and Harry. Mr. Vincent stood watching from the corner of the block with a furtive, prurient interest.

  Dick Scarum’s wife had an elaborate hairdo and didn’t want to get her hair wet, so Kate sneaked up behind her and pushed her under. “Oh, God damn you, Kate!” Loribelle came up, sputtering. “Would you look at this, Dick? Dick, look at my hair! I just had it done!”

  “Aw, Lori, now, don’t get mad at Kate.”

  “Don’t get mad? Don’t get mad?”

  Kate had stood up dripping, exulting, in the middle of the pool. She looked around for her next victim and shouted at Harry to come in.