The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “Yes?”

  “George will have a vodka and lemonade.”

  “Sorry?”

  “A Popov and lemonade,” Kate went on, making her voice silly and dreamy. “Dining hall lemonade. Dining hall lemonade mixed in an athletic department water bottle.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said warmly, catching on. She was referring to a habit of ten years earlier. Kate and I had gone to boarding school together; I had met Chat in college based on our mutual acquaintance. Or to put it more precisely, our friendship there had been predicated on my knowing her.

  “Will you have one, too?” I asked quickly, flattered by her turning this into a landmark, and in front of Chat.

  “Of course.” She laughed.

  “One quart, you mean,” I supplied.

  “Yes! And if I drink too much—!”

  “If we should get sick, you mean—”

  “Why, we’ll go and vomit our guts out behind the science building!”

  “I don’t want to hear about you and George behind the science building!” Chat bawled. “Wouldn’t surprise me if you did want vodka and lemonade!

  “I’m telling you, George,” he went on, petulant, gesturing with his empty glass, “I don’t know what anyone drinks anymore. In China, it’s one thing, get a little tropicallee, but I swear, the next corporate tool I hear ordering a Kamikaze, I’ll—”

  “I want a Sex on the Beach!” cried Kate. “I want an Orgasm!”

  “Don’t say that word, Katie. I hate that word. You know I hate that word.”

  “Get me an Orgasm!”

  “They should never have let women into the Town Club,” said Chat gloomily.

  “Oh, have they?” I said. I meant this to be ironic somehow—as if I would know the inner workings of the admissions policy—but the irony was lost on Kate.

  “Well, not really,” she said seriously. “Only till we’re thirty.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we have to marry in or we’re out.”

  “Put out or shut out,” they both said, and they both gave half a laugh.

  Chat took himself off to the bar.

  Alone with Kate, I was self-conscious, suddenly, as if I had forgotten my lines. Their particular brand of droll urbanity was not entirely new to me, but it was the first time I’d seen them in situ, as it were, and their casual indifference to the setting made me feel like a very young boy, with shiny shoes and his hair slicked down, who has been allowed to make an appearance at the grown-ups’ party before bed.

  I thought that Kate and I might now talk for real, but she said, rather annoyed, “Did you hear Jess Brindle was engaged, George?”

  “No, I hadn’t,” I said.

  “Yes, but she broke it off.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, glad of this, for some reason, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever met the girl.

  “Yes, bit of a … random choice …”

  Kate proceeded to give several more names I had never heard and to account for their whereabouts. Marnie Pall was in town, and her cousin Dick had married Loribelle Betz up in Maine, and Granny had gotten drunk at the wedding—which was a rather elaborate affair—and Granny had said, “That girl is climbing as fast as she can, isn’t she?” and it was very embarrassing …

  I heard it said once, by whom I can’t recall, that true beauty always has one flaw. As Kate went on, blithely chattering, I fell into the habit I had of looking for that flaw—the thin lip or feature out of place—which might have meant her entry into that elite society. And yet those frank good looks of hers had always seemed to suggest that there was something distasteful about beauty, something a little tacky about a quality that by its very nature draws attention to itself, like coming overdressed to a party, or throwing a black-tie wedding in the country. But Kate—Kate was what you wanted, somehow, in this infinitely ironic age. She was the kind of girl about whom other girls used to say, “All right, so she’s thin but,” trying vainly to suss out the appeal. And even now, when her name comes up, and with it the sulky protest it invariably evokes—“She’s not that great”—I do not feel compelled to argue in her defense. That was the whole point: she didn’t have to be.

  “You’re not still with that one girl, are you?” she wanted to know.

  “Hmm. What else do you want to know?”

  Kate thought, frowning. “What you ate for breakfast.”

  “Poached eggs on toast,” I lied, finally getting up to speed.

  She liked it. “Where did you eat a poached egg? Where did you get a poached egg?”

  “In my kitchen.”

  “You poached the egg yourself, George? How did you learn to poach eggs?”

  “My mother taught me.”

  “She did? I wish my mother—”

  “Come over sometime; I’ll make you one.”

  “Breakfast date?” she said curiously. “Do you think Chat would approve? You know he and I are supposed to be engaged,” she added, as if it was an afterthought, and she grinned.

  “I lied,” I admitted suddenly. “I didn’t eat breakfast.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No, I just had coffee. That’s all I ever have.”

  “That truly disappoints me.”

  “I meant to say—best wishes.”

  “Oh, it’s not … official,” she said. For some reason this made both of us laugh. There was no promise in Kate’s laughter; in fact it was just the opposite note that seemed to resound, an expression of utmost faith in today, of total absorption in the moment as it passed. “You know, George, the main thing is to have fun,” she asserted.

  “I don’t know,” I said after a moment. I put my hands in my pockets and took them out again. “It’s just New York, I guess. I’m still getting used to it.”

  “I understand completely,” Kate said. “Isn’t it dirty and awful?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But it’s fun,” Kate continued. There was something in her voice that made platitudes like that sound fresh. “It’s so, so, so, so fun. You just go out and everyone’s around and—and you don’t have any homework. It’s so nice not having any homework.”

  “Oh, Kate.”

  “And you know, George, what else would we be doing? We have nothing better to do, do we? Or …? I should speak for myself, shouldn’t I? I have nothing better to do.” She said this cheerfully. “Do you?”

  “Well, sometimes I work about a hundred hours a week,” I said.

  “Right,” Kate replied. “Work—play—that’s what I mean.”

  Presently Chat returned with the drinks.

  “Cheers, then,” I said, making an effort to rally. This was cardinal with Kate; one always rallied. I think she had invented the word, at least in this context. She and Chat lived by certain imperatives, such as “You have to rally,” and “You never bail out on a scene,” and the principle, when throwing parties, of never running out of tonic.

  “To what?” said Chat, drinking off the top of his glass.

  “Well—to our generation,” I said. “Because we have nothing better to do.”

  Chat, good sport—best sport—laughed a little too hard.

  We stayed for two more. Waiting at the coat check, I cursed the middle of the week. There were not five minutes to turn into an hour to turn into a night out. “Get used to it, buddy,” Chat advised. “I’m telling you. I did. All anybody did in China was drink and work.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Guys getting plastered—American guys—same goddamn two bars every night. Pure liver torture.” He eyed me then, seemingly on the brink of a confidence. Perhaps these many months apart were what made him hesitate, or the fact that our friendship in college had been born not of late-night intimations, but of certain fundamental agreements about how things ought to be done. We had never seen the need to bog each other down with exposing the more sordid corners of our souls. “Tell you, Lenhart, it’s different over there,” Chat said finally.

  “What’s different
?”

  “The drinking.”

  “Really.”

  “Same thing as here, same as school, but it’s different.”

  “Come on,” I said, “a hangover’s a hangover.”

  But he replied coldly, “No—I’m not talking about that.”

  “What, then?” I really couldn’t guess what he was getting at.

  “It’s like—it’s—well, you work so hard, you know, and you’re all alone over there.” Chat took off his glasses and rubbed them absently on his shirtfront. “You end up hanging around with people you wouldn’t hang around with here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Kind of … random sometimes.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll tell you who I ran into.”

  “Over there? Who?”

  He hooked his glasses back on and ran a hand through the colorless strands of his hair. I remembered his saying in college, “See, some men thin and some men recede, but my dad did both and so will I—I’m doubly fucked,” and laughing then, too, because of his many vanities, physical beauty was not one, or if it was, he saw it as so far beneath himself he would no sooner indulge it than sleep off a hangover.

  “Hell with it, I didn’t just run into him,” Chat said, looking me in the eye as if making a decision to come clean about a crime. “I’m not going to lie, why should I? Truth is, I spent time with him. I drank with him nearly every night.” There was another fraction of a pause before he pronounced the name, a fraction of a pause during which Chat and I were alone in the foyer, waiting for Kate in a kind of disgruntled sympathy that was the usual state of things between us. Then he said: “Lombardi.”

  “Harry Lombardi? My God.”

  It was the last person on earth I would have expected Chat to name, and I didn’t know quite how to react. But Chat seemed to take my remark for general derision, and he gave a harsh, approving laugh. “He surfaced, George! Reinvented himself as a go-getter, a fucking entrepreneur! High-tech venture capital: who would have thought? Ambitious, evidently.”

  “But—of course,” I said. “We always knew that.”

  “We did? I didn’t. I had no idea.”

  I had to think he was joking, but the long blank face was void of humor. The unbelievable, and sometimes delightful, thing about Chat’s myopia was how astoundingly vast it was in scope. Rumors of Lombardi’s success had reached me even in Paris.

  “Guy had quit his job—was knocking around China for kicks, Lenhart—finds this electronics factory … takes it over. By the time Broder sends me over he was king of the goddamn hill! All these factory manager guys were like, No, Mis’ Lombardi, Yes, Mis’ Lombardi—”

  “You mean you worked together?”

  Chat nodded. “You know he’d been at Broder, too?”

  “God,” I said, trying to get my head around it, “that’s some crazy coincidence.” I was only voicing the obvious, and yet this element of the encounter hardly seemed to have occurred to Chat.

  “You think?” he said with a shrug. Then, seized by a fit of impatience, he drummed the coat check on the counter. “Gilberto! You dozing in there? We need our jackettos, guy!”

  We shrugged into our overcoats. I’m sure I would have grilled him about Lombardi right then if there hadn’t been another, much more pressing question I wanted answered. “How long have you and Kate been going out?” I asked, as if the answer would shed light on their relationship, as on any old couple’s.

  Chat guffawed. “Three months? Fifteen years? Hell if I know! You think she deserves the ring?”

  I was saved from answering when Kate herself emerged from the ladies’ room, her long blond bob curving to her shoulders. Chat got her into her camel’s hair with a neat toss and watched her button it up. The expression on his face—it wasn’t affection, it wasn’t remotely affection. It was the way I’d seen him, a thousand times, look at himself in the mirror after shaving—with approval for a job done, if not perfectly, then well enough. He approved of her, that was all.

  I followed them through the revolving door. I felt as if my thoughts were spinning, too, trying to catch up with the evening’s revelations. Lombardi … and Kate and Chat … I wasn’t so much crushed by Kate’s announcement as I was conscious, again, of my own backwardness. Until then I hadn’t been aware that people could—well, bore themselves into marriage engagements, was the way it struck me. Why now? When she had known Chat her whole life?

  Outside it occurred to me that I had not asked Kate what she was doing.

  She pretended to be offended. “I work, George.”

  “Oh, right—you and Meems and Annie Roth,” Chat interrupted, chuckling, with a wink in my direction. “They’re in the art business, George. They’re all—”

  “You’re extremely funny tonight, Chat—”

  “—objets d’art.”

  “I’m in American paintings, George, at Sotheby’s.”

  “You work, Kate Goodenow,” Chatland Wethers sententiously pronounced, “because you live in an age when it is considered appropriate for rich American girls to work.”

  He would get drunk and come out with things like that. But somehow I felt that this made sense of the whole evening, much more so than their putative engagement.

  We walked to the corner, and Chat hailed a cab going uptown. Most men would hold a taxi door for a girl, but Chat knew better: he did the slide himself.

  “We’ll drop you off, George,” offered Kate. “Chat? We’ll drop George off.”

  “Sure, hop in.”

  “Oh, no,” I said quickly, “I want to. Walk.”

  “Shoot yourself, Lenhart.”

  Kate cranked the window down. “Sure we can’t take you somewhere?” she called. They were very polite, the two of them. They were always very polite. When I declined a second time, Kate warned, “You know, you won’t be able to hide your mysterious double life from us forever!” and I forced a laugh, too late to hide the solemnity that had stolen across my face. I remember resolving, as their cab sped off and I started on my solitary way uptown, to do better the next time. With Kate I was forever trying to live up to an ideal, but when you considered what that ideal was, it made no sense at all, my striving: it was an ideal of carelessness.

  The next week at work I reached into my suit pocket and drew out a balled-up cocktail napkin with the Town Club logo crumpled across the front. I tossed it into the wastebasket, only to retrieve it a moment later. I smoothed it out and stuck it in the top drawer of my desk. I think I kept it because it made me think of luck. They were the most conservative people I knew, and yet I had walked home that evening thinking the two of them seemed to represent everything that was worthwhile in the city, everything that was respectable, solid, even hopeful. Their lack of ambition struck me as wonderfully smart against the vulgar striving I witnessed by day. My own ambition for Kate suddenly seemed vulgar as well, like a bold, alcohol-induced comment that one would never make sober. How much better, it seemed, to have her taken, and to get the two of them in one package, so we could all have a lot of fun together. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by fun, but I felt as if I had been running in a boring, drawn-out race called New York until that evening, when my old friends stopped me and pointed out the rest of the fair. And if Chat and Kate said it would be more fun over where they were, then I believed them. They had grown up here, after all, whereas I had just arrived.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was hard, with a roommate like Toff, to confront him about anything. The fear was that he would agree about his failings but do nothing; that further confrontation would mean a scene; that a scene would make his wiring go berserk. But after I had to wait for the shower several days running, I made up my mind to say something about coordinating our schedules, and one morning I waited outside the bathroom door. When the water stopped, however, a girl came out in a towel.

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I said. I went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  The girl�
�s name was Cara. I used to see her late at night from time to time, because she liked to come over and watch television and get away from her roommates. If it was I and not Toff who found her there on the couch, she would apologize and make herself smaller on her cushion, curling in around her frozen yogurt; I got the feeling Toff had told her she should. Some nights the two of them slept together, and other nights Toff wouldn’t come home at all and she would crash on the couch, though his bed stood empty and unmade. She was tall but fighting slim with the haircut of the moment—a layered helmet—highlighted blond. I gathered she hoped to marry Toff.

  You know how it is when you learn a new word and then all at once everyone seems to be using it. That spring it happened not with a word but with a man: Harry Lombardi. A week or so after my reunion with Chat and Kate, when Lombardi’s name had so improbably come up, I was riding up in the morning elevator; it stopped on four, the trading floor. Two men shouldered out and one of them distinctly said, “You’d have to go to Harry Lombardi for that now.” It gave me an odd feeling all day, that name—part curiosity, part dread—though I hadn’t laid eyes on the guy in four years. Nor, I hasten to add, in the months that I had known him, had Lombardi been either close friend or enemy. I ought to have forgotten him entirely, the way Chat had, until the two of them ended up whiling away the Pacific nights together, ten thousand miles from home.

  And while there was some justification for my curiosity—Lombardi’s wild success on Wall Street as tracked by the Dartmouth grapevine—there was less for my dread. The only way I can think to put it is that he got to me, Lombardi did; he always had. He was one of those people who, even in absence, take on an annoying, insistent presence in one’s mind, like the bang of a shutter or the whine of an airplane ruining a summer’s day. And though Chat’s introduction of the name had seemed the one discordant note in an evening with old friends, it only made sense that with Chat and Kate, I would get Lombardi as well. For if they were the evening’s unexpected pleasure, Lombardi was the unavoidable reckoning of the morning after. And get him I did.

  That same week I was pushing through a subway turnstile at Grand Central when my eyes happened to meet those of someone pushing through the opposite way. I couldn’t place the face, though it stared up hard for an instant at my own, with blue, bloodshot eyes. With a jolt it came to me, sitting at my desk that afternoon: it was Lombardi I’d seen. He was losing his hair, that was all. Later that day I was tracing the name on a piece of paper when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and—by this point I was rather expecting the call—it was Harry Lombardi.