The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  But he wouldn’t be budged. “I got a cold, Kate! Summer cold! You don’t wanna mess with temperatures when you got a cold!” And a little later, as I worked myself back into my clothes, he confided, “In the past I would have gone in. But now I don’t have to.” And then he continued in what I thought was a curious vein. “She doesn’t know it, but Kate doesn’t really want me to go in. See those guys out there?” We looked to where Dick and Chat and the undergraduate were continuing to romp semi-naked. “She doesn’t want to marry a guy like that.” He offered no apology for the comment. After a moment I found I agreed.

  We watched the group of them leap out of the pool and seize their clothing. Chat picked Kate up, piggyback. She put her hands over his eyes and screamed when he tried to buck her off. “This is great, guys—this’ll go down in history!” Dick Scarum yelled, standing up mid-pool in his boxer shorts. “This is like the time at Chatham my brother brought the cow into the chapel! That was before your time, guys, but you remember it, don’t you?”

  Dick was the last one out. He didn’t want to get out. Loribelle had to plead with him to get dressed. Then she wanted to take him home, immediately, and give him hell. Before he left Kate’s cousin put up a hand all around. As he waved good-bye, he seemed to me like a man defeated, vanquished by nostalgia.

  “It’s funny,” I confessed to Harry. “I ought to get going, too. I don’t know why I stay. I don’t know what it is that keeps me—”

  “They’re that word you can’t use anymore,” Harry interrupted.

  It took me a moment but I got it. They weren’t exactly happy—that was too profound. “You’re right,” I said. “They’re gay.”

  They were gay. If you went out with the crowd two or three times, you might notice a brittleness to the gaiety. You would not notice it the first time or the tenth time, but you would see it in new people who came out, the second or third time they came out, and you could see it in newcomers like Dick Scarum’s wife. You would notice the brittleness hitting them and weighing them down in moments of repose, when they thought no one was looking at them.

  The brittleness arose because theirs—ours—was a quoted gaiety. We were the last generation of the century to come of age, and the first one that wanted to be as much like our parents’ as possible. We ought to have started a revolution; instead we bought cocktail shakers. Chat wanted to start a revolution: to bring back the old telephone nomenclature, PLaza 5 and MUrray Hill 4.

  The fashions the girls wore, too, were in a fervent cycle of regeneration. Take Dick’s wife, Loribelle, for instance. One night she was dressed in a forties-style outfit, and the next night the seventies, and then one disconcerting night the eighties. She wasn’t the brightest girl, and Chat used to tease her, asking her once, “What if there was an early nineties revival?” Without missing a beat, she said, “You mean like mini-backpacks? That kind of thing?”

  But somehow we must have sensed our failing, that we weren’t making it new. None of us was. And that was where the brittleness came from. There was only one new thing and it didn’t have a name yet. Harry Lombardi knew what it was. The way he was planning on making his money: that was new.

  Bits of the idea had trickled down to me, until I had a vague grasp that the company was to help Luddites like me—“Just like you, George, I’m not kidding. People with no skills at all, even!”—access the coming network of information. One word that always came up when Harry discussed the infrastructure that would facilitate his plan was “protocol,” and I found its recurrence somewhat comical. I remember a conversation we had that same night, when the group had adjourned, clammy and obnoxiously dripping, to the bar at the Racquet Club. Harry had a go at speaking what he assumed was my language. “Let’s say you belonged to a country club when you were little, George.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Really? Gosh.” Harry frowned; banished the frown. “Well, let’s just say you did.”

  “Okay.”

  “And maybe there was a certain way to act or dress at your country club that wouldn’t have been the way to act or dress at the country club in the next town over. But let’s say the two country clubs wanted to have a party together—you know, for, uh, the Fourth of July, with maybe, say, swimming and tennis. Well, then they’d have to get together and decide what the protocol would be.”

  “What if there was a dance afterward?” I said.

  “Yeah, exactly!” Harry exclaimed. “That’s what I mean—that’s even better, George! You’re really getting this. Well, the individual computer networks are like country clubs, and they’ve all figured out how to throw their big party. That’s all been done! But not everyone knows how to find it, or how to get in. Let’s say that you want to join. You want to go to this big party—you, George.”

  “I’m not sure I’d get in.”

  “Oh; you’ll get in—with my help.”

  “It does sound fun,” I agreed.

  “I’m tellin’ you, you’re not gonna believe how fun it’ll be.”

  At that point Kate had come tripping over to see what we were up to. “So serious over here in the corner. That can’t be good!”

  “Harry’s going to show me how to get me into a country club,” I couldn’t resist saying.

  “George!”

  When Kate had taken him away to talk to Mr. Vincent about investing, I sipped another Gin Wethers and thought about the theory I had begun to form on my date with Delia—one that Delia herself would have taken issue with. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I was missing something insidious because through association I happened to be on the receiving end of Harry’s aspirations. But it didn’t make sense to me—his personality simply didn’t add up. By all rights he should have been worried about protecting the ground he had gained with Kate, in Kate’s world; instead he had invited Chat out for dinner to discuss investing. And even the company he was starting was too ironic: it was catholic in nature. It was all about letting people in.

  CHAPTER 16

  I later heard that a friend of the Wetherses had been passing by in a cab and had recognized Chat and Kate bathing in their underwear on Park Avenue. Eventually my name was also connected with the incident and Daniels looked at me with a new kind of respect. But that consolation, and laughable legitimization, came several weeks afterward; it always did.

  For waking up after a night like that, one would feel like a banished soul. It was no use calling anyone. There were dictates on how much fun one was allowed to have, and one of them said that after having a great deal of it—like that, all at once—there would be no more fun for some time. One simply had to wait, alone and sweating, for the whirl to come around again. It was taking your medicine and everyone understood this and no one was so foolish as to call.

  Labor Day rolled around and I skipped a train to Southampton, then two more trains, and finally went home and turned down a perfectly good offer to go out drinking with Toff and some friends of his. The friends came over, they went out, and I was left alone. I knew I ought to have rallied and gone downtown with them, but I just couldn’t face the idea of trying to make something of the night.

  When it got dark, I skulked out to the deli to get a Coke. There was some initial comfort in the horror of it—alone in the city on the last Friday night of the summer—and I was beginning to feel rather defiant about it when, in the deli line, I recognized a girl from college. She was two ahead of me. Her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail and the ponytail was stuck through the back of her Dartmouth baseball cap. She was wearing big Dartmouth sweatpants and buying a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and a quart of ice cream and a bag of potato chips. “I don’t need a bag,” she mumbled, and looking guilty, she stuffed everything into the plastic bag she was already carrying, which bore the logo of a national video store chain. After she left I noticed that the guy behind her was wearing a cap as well, from his university, and had a bag from the same video store and was buy
ing ice cream and beer. I was behind him wearing a Dartmouth T-shirt and buying Cokes. It struck me that all over the city the useless college graduates of American universities were skulking out of their apartments in sweatpants and falsely jaunty caps and returning with unsavory little plastic bags of junk food to stuff into their mouths while they watched their rented movies. And somehow I did not think that the same thing was happening all over Paris, but perhaps I was wrong. I had never spent a night there hoarding a little plastic bag of food watching a rented movie, but perhaps I had only been trying to live up to the context, while the native Parisian twenty-to-thirty-year-olds spent their evenings in just this way. Then I decided I would rent a movie, too.

  There was nothing I wanted to see, however. Mostly I just rent the same two movies—one is about a hockey team and one is about a rock band—and both were gone. After sitting at the kitchen table and staring blankly at the salt and pepper for half an hour I came to the conclusion that something had to happen. It was a miserable thought, for whenever one thinks it, nothing ever does, and one spends an evening staring one’s appalling obscurity in the face, and answers the telephone too brightly. Except for that evening, when the buzzer rang. “They’ve gone,” I said into the intercom, but the ringing persisted. “Yes?”

  “Gentleman here would like to come up.”

  “Who is it, please?”

  After a moment the doorman gave the name, and I went to unlock the bolt. It was the second time that summer Harry had provided me with some distraction, and as always I knew I would disapprove of most of what he had to say and of whatever premise had brought him here. But I understood, too, how easily held my position was, and how false. I had always understood this, but it did not stop me from disapproving of him.

  He was as haggard as I had ever seen him. The circles under his eyes were so dark they looked etched onto his face. He was wearing one of his custom suits, and it looked as if it had been slept in not just last night, as they often did, but all the past week.

  He stood there poker-faced when I opened the door, the blue eyes the only living things in his face. “Is anyone else here?” he whispered, leaning forward a notch to peer into the apartment.

  I assured him that I was alone.

  Even in his strung out condition the fact made Harry wince. “Well, that’s okay,” he said after a moment. “It’s actually you I came to see.” He entered the apartment cautiously, as one enters the room of a patient when one is not quite sure how sick the patient is. I could see he was drunk, but not sloppily.

  I showed him in and fixed him what we had—cheap vodka on freezer-burned ice; even the tonic was flat. To my surprise this produced no comment. He took the glass without a word, drained it, and walked unseeingly to the living room window. For several minutes he stood there motionless, as if trying to stare down the lights on Roosevelt Island. “George: sit down,” he said, when he finally turned into the room.

  I did so, on an arm of the couch, feeling that the order was given for effect, and more than a little repulsed by the theatricality of it. With difficulty I met his eyes.

  “George, if I were to tell you something—I mean, not one particular thing …

  “George, what I came here to say …”

  After another false start or two, he found a way in. “George, do you know what my father does for a living?”

  I didn’t know the word for Mr. Lombardi’s profession. “He’s … an architect, isn’t he?” I said.

  “No,” Harry said. “He’s not an architect. He’s a builder.”

  “Oh.”

  “He builds six-, seven-, eight-bedroom houses in Glen Cove, Locust Valley.… If one doesn’t sell, we sell our house and move into it.”

  I nodded, uncertain as to the correct response.

  “He started out working construction, and he moved up. Hit the market dead-on. It’s all in the timing; you have that, you have it all. Timing’s off, you got nothing. Now I’m going to tell you something, George, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  “All right.”

  Harry’s eye contact was relentless, searching my eyes for a latent bias. “My father never went to college,” he said. “I’m one of those kids who got into Dartmouth based on intelligence alone.”

  It was highly comic, the way he phrased it, and pathetic, too—not the information but his conviction that it was news.

  “Didn’t want Harvard. Didn’t want Yale. I wanted the Big Green all the way.”

  “So you got what you wanted,” I suggested, but he had warmed to his confessional. I could feel a headache starting behind my eyes, and I had to force myself not to look at my watch.

  “You know, I used to tell people I was from Glen Cove. But I never lived there more than six months. We never lived in any of those houses long enough to set them up. And two guys—you don’t really need much furniture, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

  Evidently my empathy was not convincing, however, for Harry added hurriedly, “It’s not that we didn’t have a good time, don’t get me wrong. Hell, we had a great time on our own. We threw some sick parties, let me tell you. My dad used to party right along with us. You know, it was a rite of passage at the high school to shotgun a beer with Daddy-o. I kid you not, George, I kid you not.”

  He paused as if to consider the implications of the fact, and there he was: trapped like everyone between self-pity and the brag. His mom had split for Florida when he was twelve, with the two younger brothers, but he had stayed on Long Island with Daddy-o. “I couldn’t just leave the guy!”

  Most people wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, a monologue like the one Harry gave me that night; most people would have started apologizing for talking too much. But perhaps when confession is a part of your religion, it is only natural to want to run through the whole guilty spiel in front of an audience. And at the end, perhaps I would absolve him of being guilty of that happy American sin, of making a hell of a lot more money than he had grown up with—not that his dad had done badly!

  “Not at all, don’t get me wrong, occasionally there was a cash flow problem—”

  And then of the sin that the first sin begot so naturally, of casting a belatedly covetous eye toward a new milieu—of upgrading from a Cara to a Kate. I suspect it says more about me than Harry that this was the absolution I thought he was after.

  He touched in a desultory fashion on the salient points—his belated conversion, for instance, from heavy metal to classic rock—and as he talked I could see the shrunken concert T-shirt, feel the heat rising from the tar of the beach parking lots where he had hung out, trying to get girls like Cara McLean to give him a chance.

  “I got that over with early, George, as it turned out”—the circumlocution was marvelous—“and all through high school I had a pretty good run. Now, I’m not a good-looking guy, I’m not saying that. But I was persistent, George. Persistent as hell. I learned that lesson very, very early.”

  That night I understood more fully the kind of man Harry was. He was the kind of guy whom girls would lie to one another about sleeping with, not simply because they had—anyone could get drunk and have a bad night, after all—but because they had enjoyed it.

  It was a dark, trashed house, the house they went back to, the only one they managed to keep—tiny, with three or four cars in the driveway which together were worth twice the house. “My dad was really into cars, see.”

  Sometimes a girl would take a fancy to Mr. Lombardi. “Oh, no, nothing like that. But you know how sometimes one of these kinda lost girls will have a thing for an older man? The most he ever did was hug ’em a little, and if they really had no place to go, Dad’d let them sleep on the couch.” In the morning the girl might do a little housekeeping to ingratiate herself with the Lombardi men, “or one time a girl made pancakes.” But there were long stretches where it was just beer and microwaved hot dogs, and the families at St. Catherine’s turning aro
und in their pews to stare when the two skulked in ungroomed for a Saturday night Mass.

  The computers he taught himself. It was the only thing he really liked to do, play video games and mess around with programs in the basement. It kept him busy when his dad was out and kept him out of the way when Mr. Lombardi was home with a lady friend. It wasn’t even that he was good at it; he was, but that never occurred to him; it was just something he did.

  “I guess that was lucky,” I offered.

  “Lucky?” Harry said quickly. He scrutinized me from his stance in front of the window. “In what way was it lucky?”

  “Broder,” I said, “of course, and now the company, and you’re only twenty-four.” But reassurance about specific accomplishments wasn’t what he was after; it never had been. He wanted a grand pronouncement. He wanted to know how it would all add up. But only the green screen of his monitor could help him there, and I very much regretted introducing the topic.

  “George,” Harry demanded, “would you say that overall, I mean speaking in a very overall sense, I’m a lucky person?”

  I don’t remember how I got out of that one, but shortly thereafter Harry seemed to be seized by an internal claustrophobia. He loosened his tie in jerks and stuck his neck out through the shirt collar like a swimmer gasping for air. “Jeez, it’s hot! What do you have the A.C. set on?”

  “I don’t know. It’s in Toff’s room.”

  “You mean you only got one? Jeez, George! What are you, some kind of twentieth-century martyr?”

  “Do you want some water?”

  This was dismissed with a shake of his head. He took a deep, shuddering breath, as if to calm himself, and when he did speak again, he clasped his hands pompously behind his back. With the interruption, the story of his childhood had been forgotten, tucked away and written off. Evidently it could hold his attention for only so long before his mind latched onto some new topic and he abandoned the previous one, as he had abandoned Cara McLean on the couch at our party.

  “George—” There was an irritating note of condescension in his voice. He pronounced my name gently, gravely, as if he were afraid of spoiling some notion of mine with the hard facts he was about to present: that he had slept with my girlfriend, perhaps.