The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “George.”

  “Yes, Harry?”

  He had the air of a child who has received an embarrassingly good Christmas gift. “Kate has accepted me.”

  It was gorgeous, the pomposity of the statement. I had a great urge to laugh. He sounded as though he had been practicing it for years—“Kate and I are getting married,”

  “Kate said yes”—before settling on something he read in a book somewhere.

  “That’s wonderful!” I heard myself saying, and adding, irrelevantly, for we had none, “We—we ought to break open champagne!” I managed to stutter out a handful of inadequate congratulations and then asked, “When did all of this happen? I haven’t spoken—”

  “Last night,” he interrupted, searching my eyes again, looking from one pupil to the other, yet oddly silent for a man who appeared to have the world to say.

  “Last night? And where is Kate now? I want to call her.”

  “Oh, no,” he said reprovingly. “Kate’s gone up to Maine. She’ll be asleep by now. Oh, yes”—he glanced at his watch—“definitely by now.”

  “Gone up to Maine? This weekend?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t ask her to miss it.”

  “I know. I just meant—”

  “She had it all planned, George.”

  “I see.”

  “I coulda gone!” Harry insisted. “It’s not like I couldna gone!”

  “Well, yes, of course, you could have gone. Next week, then. We’ll have to have dinner together …” I groped on in a surreal fashion. “I had a feeling this might—”

  Harry gripped my arm. “You did? This had occurred to you before, then?”

  “You told me the other night.”

  “No, but before that,” he pressed me. “Before I said anything?”

  “When you started dating, of course I wondered, or expected—”

  “Are you telling the truth?” he demanded.

  I was spared from telling the whole truth when Harry’s face cracked and every pretense of taking the fact in stride fell away. With a convulsive sob he sank down into Toff’s reclining chair. I wished very much he had sat on the couch. It was hard to watch a man bawling on a La-Z-Boy.

  “Look,” I began, with no idea of how to continue. I myself hardly felt the effect of the news at all. It was like watching a play so thinly plotted that when the dramatic twist arrives, one only wishes it to pass as quickly as possible, to save the audience the embarrassment. But the actors go on saying their lines, because they have to. “What’s wrong, Harry?” I asked. “You should be happy.”

  Harry raised his face. “It’s not true, is it George?” he murmured. “I knew it was half a joke—I asked her on a lark! I got my stake out of China, spent fifty on the ring. One, two, three, sapphire, diamond, sapphire, little blue Tiffany box. I asked her on a lark, she must have said yes on a lark. She’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be off, won’t it?”

  He called seven years’ labor a lark. And yet that was precisely it: she had said yes on a lark. And yet again, that did not mean it would be called off, that did not mean that the lark could not continue indefinitely. With Kate, that did not really mean anything. I think that was the first moment the news took on an element of reality for me.

  “It’s just new, that’s all. And it’s what you said: you’re the first.”

  Harry’s hands curled into fists and drummed the arms of the recliner. “We are the first. We are the first, dammit! There’s that. She’s beating all her friends.” He began to tick off the names of Kate’s girlfriends—Annie Roth, Jess Brindle, Vanessa Prince. It was curious to hear him recite the names of those girls, whom, except for Annie, I knew only enough to say hello to. It made him seem more entrenched.

  I seemed to have hit the right note, however. He stood up abruptly and marched off to the bathroom. The tap ran for several minutes and then he returned, snorting loudly and swallowing. But when he spoke, his voice was hollow in his throat. “George, she doesn’t want me.”

  “Stop it right now,” I ordered, with, I thought, foresight of what was to come: a tiresome, sleepless night of consolation in which I would fail to convince Harry that he was good enough for Kate. “Don’t go undermining yourself. It’s boring.”

  “No,” Harry said. I felt his eyes on me then, assessing me. His voice had turned cold, clinical almost. “I don’t mean like that. I mean she doesn’t … desire me.”

  I drew back, surprised into asking, “Don’t you sleep together?” as Kate’s rose and white bedroom floated up in my mind.

  “Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,” he said, in the manner that he had said, “Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time,” and began to talk very quickly, pacing about the small room. I noticed how difficult it was for a short man to pace convincingly; there was something emasculating about it. He was better standing still. “I’m over there all the time. I practically live over there, George. You ever been there? Yeah, well, you know. You should see us in the mornings. It’s so goddammed civilized! I read the Journal and the Post and she orders in coffee and—and it’s like we’re already married, you know? Like you know how when you’re married, you read the paper together? We read the paper together. I read the sports pages and the financial section.” He paused expectantly.

  “And what—what section does Kate read?” I said inanely.

  “Well, she doesn’t really read the paper,” he said, sounding annoyed.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “We’re going to work it all out when she comes back from Maine. We’re going to go up to Maine together at the end of the month and see where we want to have the tent. We’re going to have a long engagement—Kate likes that. She likes the fuss, you know?” The entire speech sounded like “gunna, gunna, gunna, gunna, gunna.”

  “Kate could get married in New York if she wanted to, but we’re going to get married in Maine. We both like it better in Maine. We’re going to spend every summer up there. And our kids—our kids”—it took him three tries to get his head around the idea—“our kids are going to spend every summer there. They’re going to grow up there.”

  He went on for another moment or two, building summer cottages in the sky, until he stopped quite dead. “And we’re gunna—” But he couldn’t think of another thing they were going to do. He looked across at me with the mute expectancy I’d been dreading. It was very awkward. He had chosen a confessor and evidently wanted this sin of omission coaxed from him.

  “We have everything, George,” he murmured. “Everything.”

  “But you don’t …” I started reluctantly. There was only one way to put it: “have sex?”

  For a moment Harry looked through me to a point on the wall, seeming to see the series of scenes that had led to this moment. He said hoarsely: “I try to … I don’t know. Sometimes we …”

  “Harry, don’t tell me anything you—”

  “It’s so strange,” he went on in an eerily calm tone, as if talking to himself. “We’ll be out somewhere, and I can tell, you know, that she—I mean, if it were any other girl, I’d know that the minute we got home—!” He looked wistful as he said this, as if in memory of simpler times, with simpler girls. The look faded; he seemed to take himself in hand mentally. “But then once we’re home …”

  “You have trouble going—?”

  “George,” Harry broke in abruptly, “is there such a thing as a girl being …” He ran a hand through his thick, receding hair several times. “As a girl being frigid?”

  I laughed, an unconvincing, foolish laugh. “It’s such a fifties word,” I said. “I don’t know what it means, really.”

  “I mean a girl who doesn’t like sex,” Harry said clearly. “Who gets no enjoyment out of the act. The actual act.”

  “With the wrong person …”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean degrees. I mean is there a scientific diagnosis for—oh, God!”

  He buried his face in his hands, I got up to make us another round, and tha
t was how Cara found him when she let herself in with Toff’s key.

  CHAPTER 17

  The door closed too loudly, as if she’d been going to slam it and had then thought better of it. Coming out of the bathroom once, I had caught her and asked her not to slam it again; our relations had been rather cooler since.

  Cara’s high heels clicked on the parquet floor and then she made her entrance: the righteously offended woman. It was lovely to see her modify this in a flash of opportunism when she spotted Harry weeping.

  “Hello, Cara,” I said.

  “George, hi”—cozy, the good sport, finding nothing curious in the situation—“how’s it going?”

  Harry gave another great snuffle and arranged his features into a dull placidity. “Cara.” He cleared his throat with determination. “Cara, how are you?”

  “Fine, fine—just fine—great. Didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “Yeah.” Harry gave a forced laugh. “Keeping George out of trouble.”

  “We all do that! Georgie keeps us busy with that, don’t ya, George!” Her lips turned up to indicate gaiety, but her eyes were working a million miles an hour, drawing conclusions—leveraging, as they said in the office, her assets. She pranced farther into the room. “Hope I’m not interrupting!”

  From the couch Harry made a slow, indifferent assessment. “You look good,” he offered.

  “Aw, Henry—”

  But he was right. The summer was the right time for a body like hers, and she was tanned to within an inch of her life. Everything else was frosted, her hair, her nails—I thought suddenly of the big boat in Sag Harbor: it wasn’t my kind of thing, her look, but you had to give it credit.

  “No, I mean it. How you been?”

  “Good! I been good! Real good.”

  I was all set to ask her to leave, to save Harry more embarrassment. But as I got up to fix the drinks, it dawned on me that Cara was just the thing you needed at a time like this; she was just what the doctor ordered. I looked over at Harry, and he was kind of grunting and laughing at the things she said.

  I found a stray beer for Cara and made two more feeble vodka tonics for Harry and me.

  “That all you got, huh?” she said. “Too bad we weren’t at my place. I’ve got my collection. I collect all kinds of alcohol, so no matter what somebody wants, they can always have it.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Harry.

  He dragged the recliner over and we all sat down and smoked a cigarette. It was static in the room, and yet comfortable somehow. “Hey,” said Harry, “why don’t blondes like vibrators?” He paused a beat. “Too hard on the teeth.”

  “My virgin ears!” Cara objected. “Please!”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” said Harry. “You used to tell—”

  “Shut up!” she cut him off. Then she snickered and said, “All right, listen up. What do a tornado and a redneck divorce have in common?”

  “You’re bad, Cara, you know that.”

  “Somebody’s gonna lose a trailer!”

  “God, even George liked that one,” remarked Harry.

  They went on like that—blondes, feminists, rednecks. Then Harry wanted to do a card trick, so I found the cards. Then Cara tried to do one but it didn’t come out right. “That’s not your card?”

  “It’s not my card,” I said.

  “Are you sure it’s not your card? It’s gotta be your card!”

  “It’s not my card.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think I know what card I picked.”

  “Don’t laugh, it’s not funny!”

  “It is funny,” said Harry. “It’s fucking hysterical!”

  “George, tell him not to laugh at me! I’m gonna kill you if you laugh one more time!” Cara stood up and play-punched him.

  Her body had been stair-mastered and sculpted and treadmilled into its lean, taut, menacing form, and the very presence of it was like a compliment, and Harry was man enough to take the compliment. As for me, I liked her more that night than ever before. Cara could sense my indulgence and she began to tease me and tap my arm to emphasize a point, and then she and Harry put their heads together because they were going to set me up, they were going to find a girl for me, a really great girl.

  “I got tons of friends for you, Georgie! If you’d only ever asked. If you woulda said something, I coulda had you introduced to all my girlfriends by now!”

  “George wouldn’t like your friends,” Harry said.

  “That’s an obnoxious thing to say!”

  “He wouldn’t,” Harry said, taking a last drag of his cigarette.

  Some time later we had run out of card tricks and jokes and Harry had taken off his jacket and his tie and he was still hot.

  “Whatta you have the A.C. on?” Cara asked me.

  “I don’t know—it’s Toff’s.”

  “And so you’re not allowed to touch it? Please!” She rose and clicked into Toff’s bedroom. “I cranked it way up,” she said when she came back. “Way up.”

  “Thank God for that!” Harry said.

  “C’mere.” Cara scooted to the corner of the couch so she could lay a hand on his forehead. “Jeez, you’re hot. You sure you’re not sick or anything?”

  “Naw. I’m not sick. I’m just hot.”

  There was a silence then, of a kind that I hadn’t heard since college but that anyone who has ever had a roommate could not fail to understand. And as always with this kind of silence, I wondered how I had failed to hear it earlier, and I had the same sensation I had always had, though it lasted only a second or two. It was like being slapped in the face. I mumbled something about having to be up early and stood up to excuse myself, taking my glass with me.

  “Don’t go to bed now, George!” cried Cara predictably.

  “Yeah, George,” Harry breathed, “you should stay up with us.”

  With my back to them I raised my glass to demur and to say good night. I didn’t want to turn around and see the guilty gladness on their faces.

  In the early hours of the morning I woke to hear them moving on the couch. They were talking still, murmuring to each other in low voices. I heard Harry say, “You are truly heaven-sent.” It seemed to me the one compliment that could make Cara blush.

  But the night was not quite over. Coming out of my bedroom at six or seven, I met Harry sneaking through the living room.

  “Jesus! I thought you were the goddamn boyfriend!”

  “Toff’s home?” I said.

  “He’s in bed with her! I’ve been hiding in the fucking closet for an hour!”

  “So get the hell out of here,” I hissed.

  “I can’t—I can’t find my shoes!”

  “Borrow a pair of mine,” I said grimly.

  “I can’t! I can’t! No offense, George, but these are four-hundred-dollar loafers from Italy that you can only buy …”

  At the door he stuffed his tie into his pocket, licked his hand, and plastered his hair down against his skull. “How do I look?”

  “Frightening.” I meant to be funny, but I was sorry the minute I said it. He was crestfallen. You couldn’t talk that way with Harry.

  Wearily, I made the gesture of following him out to the elevator. “Listen, George,” he began nervously. I knew what was coming, and in order to prevent him from saying it, I fixed him with as black a look as I could muster. But the bastard couldn’t help himself. “Listen, George,” he said again, passing his tongue over his lips, “don’t tell Kate, okay? I mean, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell Kate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t trust you …”

  I think it was their lack of a sense of humor that tried my patience, more than the general sordidness of the evening. I had the sneaking suspicion both Harry and Cara saw this, their second and (one presumed) final episode together as the third act in a little tragedy about star-crossed lovers. Each of them had a dangerously melodramatic narrative bent, which the other’s presence must have reinforced.


  In light of what happened later, however, I have had to revise my opinion slightly. Cara’s performance that evening was much, much better than either Harry or I observed. Even her body had underlined it, as if, like a Method actor, she had gotten into the right shape for the part. We had presented her with so many opportunities to give herself away and yet she had the wit to wait. I wish I could say to her now, Well played, Cara, well played.

  CHAPTER 18

  After Kate and Harry got engaged, Kate’s crowd splintered for a little while. I didn’t hear much from either of them, nor from Chat, but I had not expected to. I knew Chat wouldn’t like to call me out of the fear that I would try to sympathize with him, which would have been intolerable to him, and I didn’t like to call him for the same reason, lest he think I was checking up on him, to make sure he was all right. As for Kate, I gathered she was going around with her girlfriends most of the time; Annie Roth used to call me and keep me informed.

  She was much too polite to say a word about Harry. “We’re thrilled for Kate, we all are. It’s just what she wanted. We couldn’t be happier.” And yet there was the slightest note of jealousy in her voice, which indicated Harry had been right: it did mean something to them that Kate was going to be first.

  “And who are you saving yourself for, George?” she wanted to know. “We ought to get you out with us one night.”

  “Nothing would make me happier.” She was great fun, Annie was. She was one of those chubby, tartan-wearing lacrosse girls—the daughter, perhaps, of a man who had wanted sons. She was good-natured to the core, and could hold her liquor, too.

  When I got off the phone I sat at my desk brooding. Kate was engaged. It was time I dated someone—Annie or the elusive Jess Brindle, if she would have me, or even one of Robbins’s devotees. I guess it was just bad timing that that was the week Delia Ferrier got around to returning my call.

  I had left the message weeks before, in an amnesiac moment, when the tone of our date escaped me. The words never matter, in books or on dates; it is the tone I’ve learned that survives. On the night we went out again, it came back to me with chilling clarity: ambivalence had been my attitude, covered up in desperation.