The Fundamentals of Play Page 25

  “He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Well, you should tell your friend to clean up his act. You know he smokes all day! That’s very bad for me. For … someone like me,” she finished rather meekly, momentarily deserting her indignant stand.

  “Come on, you smoke yourself.”

  “Cigarettes!” shrieked Cara. “And not anymore.”

  When I didn’t reply she positioned herself between me and the television. “Yes?”

  “I quit.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Well, it wasn’t hard,” she conceded. “Considering.”

  Three years afterward, and I can still remember the exchange. She kept dangling pointed remarks in front of me which I kept batting away. It was fun not letting her get a rise out of me. And she—she must have been dithering between fear and triumph, dithering at such a fever pitch that she held back and held back and held back, almost in spite of herself. I remember telling her she ought to go take an aerobics class, to get rid of some of that excess energy, and she mentioned her “condition.” She must have been out of her mind not telling me, and yet for the first time in her life she must have sensed the security that a great secret affords: time. You can wait and wait and wait; for once, you have enough time. You can detonate the bomb any time you wish, and it still explodes and ruins things.

  Of course I deserved to miss every clue. I paid her no heed, I never did; because she was Cara.

  I consider myself a fairly perceptive person, I mean when it comes to dime-store psychologizing. I’ll admit I take a certain pride in understanding the desires and fears that drive the behavior of my friends and acquaintances, in understanding where these feelings come from and how they are manifested. All too often I am aware of the ulterior motives beneath the thin veil of convention or cant that people use to explain their behavior. But as an analyst of human nature I have one critical failing. And despite my awareness of it, I cannot seem to correct it. I cannot seem to teach myself otherwise. Year after year I go on assuming the wrong thing: I never expect people’s lives to fall into cliché. I never expect a man to cheat on his wife, I never expect a woman to run off with a lover, and if someone were to tell me that a beautiful girl was marrying a rich old man for his money, I would dismiss the idea as too Hollywood. When time and again I witness just such trite scenarios played out around me, I am amazed. Amazed and a bit abashed, too, that whoever it is could get it into their heads not only to act at all in such standard situations, but to act in so hackneyed a fashion. The predictible is the thing I am incapable of predicting. I don’t know where my own predilection for originality—my expectations—comes from, but I am betrayed by it, nearly always.

  I worked Christmas Eve and spent a freezing, endless New Year’s Eve with Chat. The actual hour of midnight we spent in the all-night post office on Thirty-fourth Street, express mailing Chat’s business school applications, which he’d been too drunk all Christmas to finish.

  “Bastard. It’s A.A. for you.”

  “I don’t need to drink to have fun.”

  Afterward we went outside and did shots of vodka with the homeless, on the steps of that massive gray building.

  “Good,” I said. “Because we’re too late for Annie’s and too early for Twelfth Street.” Not that I minded, really. New Year’s, like all evils, was made worse by New York. We ought to have skipped the rest; we ought to have called it a night then and there.

  “Have you met Roth’s new boyfriend?” asked Chat. He took a final drink. “Now, that man is a serious alcoholic.”

  We capped the bottle and started down the steps, coats and scarves flapping. Then we were running for the warmth of the subway stairs—there wasn’t a cab to be had anywhere.

  “You know what Kate told me about her father? ‘Dad says Alcoholics Anonymous is ruining this country, and Mom and I just say …’ ” I quoted drunkenly.

  Chat’s teeth showed in the night. “Goodenow?” he cried. “Now, that bastard is an old-school alcoholic. You should see him when he can’t get a drink. He punched a neighbor once! Mr. Godfrey! In Maine!”

  “Something to work toward!” I cried. In the meantime, I suspected, the general rule of thumb would continue to prevail: anyone who drank more than you was an alcoholic; anyone who drank less was a crusader, a cramper of styles, or simply odd.

  All night we were too early for the party or too late. The people we wanted to see had not arrived. The people we wanted to see had just left in the only available cab in the five boroughs. “This is no good, George,” Chat complained as we stood in a fluorescent hallway watching another apartment empty out. “Find us a party.”

  We picked up Pam Allen and a friend of hers in the vicinity of Murray Hill, and the four of us went, around three in the morning, to a Fordyce party in a rented bar. The line to get in was so long it had turned into a party itself. A nervous, one-night-stand camaraderie pervaded, of the sort that is particular to the largest cities during holidays and disasters.

  “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in line to get into a bar,” Chat said disgustedly. “Let’s go back to my place. There’s plenty to drink.”

  “You mean my place,” Pam corrected him.

  “Oh now, Pammie, don’t be stingy! It’s New Year’s Eve!”

  “You guys! You guys!” A voice, dogged and eager, broke out of the line and then the man claimed it, trundling forward, gesticulating with a bottle of booze.

  Chat’s eyebrows rose in merriment. “I do believe we have found our ticket to ride.”

  “Who are you?” said Pam, listing a little to one side.

  “May I present Henry Lombardi, Junior,” Chat announced with aplomb. “This, Pamela, is Kate Goodenow’s fiancé.”

  “Oh, you’re the one?” said Pam. Her friend could barely rouse herself to nod hello.

  “Where is the little woman this evening?”

  “Kate’s in Saint Kitts,” Harry said dully.

  “Oh, is that where they took her.” Chat nodded. “I see.”

  “She’s coming home tomorrow.”

  “Ahh, start the new year right? Clean slate? Fresh plate? Ring out the old—and yet one might think that down in the Caribbean, certain, pernicious influences of old—”

  “Where are you headed, Harry?” I broke in.

  “Oh, I don’t know. How ’bout you guys?”

  I gestured to the stalled line. “Are you going in here?”

  “I don’t know. I was, but … but now I don’t know.”

  “D’ya know of any other parties?” Chat demanded.

  “No. No, I don’t know of anything.”

  “The hell with it. Let’s go to Pam’s,” Chat decided. “We can drink there.”

  “How are we even going to get up there?” Pam’s friend wailed, seeming to lose patience with our scene all at once.

  “She’s right. There aren’t any cabs.”

  “Goddammit, New Year’s sucks!”

  “I hate it too,” I said.

  “I’ll take you guys,” offered Harry.

  “Take us?” Chat said. “The hell you mean?”

  Harry shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. He wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf; I guessed it was an old habit from high school—that back then, keeping warm hadn’t been cool. “I have my car.”

  “Your car? Well, that’s … crazy!” slurred Chat.

  “Heh, heh, heh.”

  “Where is said car, er, situated?”

  Harry gestured up the block. “Garage.”

  “Garage? Jesus! That is fucking incredible, Henry. You guys—Lombardi has his car. Did you hear that, George? Lombardi has his car.” Chat looked balefully at the rest of us. “Well, come on, everyone; we’ll take the car.”

  “Oh, say,” I said quietly, walking up the block with Harry while Chat played sweep with an arm around each girl, “I have something for you.”

  Harry gave me a look like the one I imagine a father would give a son who has finally taken his
advice after all these years. He knew exactly what I was referring to. “George—you’re a good man, George. And a smart man. Send it to me at the office.”

  “Office?”

  “Yeah. I’m finally outta the apartment. Got office space now.” He pressed a business card into my hand.

  “It’s not much,” I warned.

  “It’ll do,” he said. “It’ll do.”

  Halfway to the garage the girls cut their losses and decided to go back and join the line. Deserted, we waited unhappily for the car. “This is—this is tragic!” Chat wailed. “I mean, there’s got to be a party somewhere! It’s New Year’s Fucking Eve!”

  “I know of a party,” said Harry after a moment.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought you said you didn’t. I thought that you said that you didn’t know of anything.”

  “I just remembered.”

  “So what is it? What’s the party?”

  “It’s a Millport party,” Harry said. “I was going to go there later.”

  “It is later!” Chat complained. “It’s four—five—four in the morning!”

  “If you want to go, hell—let’s go.”

  I asked him where it was.

  “Jersey City.”

  Chat’s face lit up, his eyes reflecting the infinite possibilities indicated by this location. “Jersey party?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!” exulted Chat. “New Year’s Eve! Jersey road trip! New Year’s Eve! Jersey road trip!” He did a little drunk, anticipatory dance in the parking lot. I had forgotten that about Chat: how sour he was, how put out and difficult, and yet how frequently affable underneath.

  There was some dispute over who would ride where.

  “Look, I’ll go home and you two go.”

  “Oh, no,” said Chat. “Oh, no, Lenhart. I saw that coming two hours ago and I’m not letting you off the hook. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  Harry wouldn’t hear of it, either. “No, listen. You two take my car and I’ll take a car service. It’ll be better that way. No, really—really. I’ll give you directions and when you get there, just tell ’em you know me. Just tell ’em you know me, they’ll let you in.”

  “We’ll be sure to tell ’em!” Chat promised. “We’ll tell ’em Harry Lombardi sent us. Good ole Lombardi!”

  Had I been sober, I hope I would have had the grace to beg off. But as it was, it seemed reasonable enough that Chat and I should take the convertible and that Harry should follow in a car service, despite it being his car, his friends, his party, his everything. I insisted on driving, as the lesser of the two evils, and as we left Harry pressed a twenty into my hand. “For gas and tolls, George. She might need a top-off.”

  It took an hour to get through the tunnel, and Chat, after turning on the radio and changing the station twenty times, fell fast asleep. Seeing the two of us in that cream puff of a car, the beefed-up drivers of more than one lane-changing vehicle called us some very uninspired names. When we got past the tolls it was nearly five. I was so relieved that it was still dark out I didn’t care. I drove about ten miles an hour and stopped at every stoplight for years; I made a few circles, puzzling out Harry’s directions, but it’s funny how one’s sense of direction kicks in when the other senses are dulled. I felt my way there, down real little streets of real little houses to a yellow one with a mesh fence around it. Cars were parked at rakish angles up the street and on into the yard. The party was on the second rickety story. Chat stumbled up the stairs, chanting, “Lombardi sent us. We friends of Lombardi.” As we went in, I had a flashback to college fraternity parties: the familiar smell of beer and bad carpet; the familiar shock at the spectacle of a house, not just a dormitory room, getting trashed.

  It was a good, friendly crowd inside—Harry’s friends from home, not the Catholic WASPs of Manhattan and Westchester but the lower-rent partiers who made Thanksgiving and Fourth of July such crazy “You kids!” bashes every year. I fought my way through the pink, sweaty faces to a keg in the bathroom. Automatically I had picked up an empty pitcher to fill—get the most beer possible—and when the guy who was manning the tap apologized for the head on it, it seemed like the kindest thing anyone had said in a year. Chat had made a noisy entrance and then headed for a bedroom, presumably to pass out. I just wanted to be allowed to stand in a corner and drink my pitcher of beer.

  A girl was putting on a show in the middle of the room, demonstrating a new dance that people did together in a line, not touching one another. A few rhythmically minded young men had stood up behind her and were echoing her movements. It seemed like a sweet, safe party, where the worst thing anyone did was get trashed, smoke a lot of cigarettes, maybe have sex. I went to refill my pitcher.

  The dancing girl joined me presently. “Aren’t you going to say hi?” she said, giving me a genial elbow.

  I stopped pumping the tap. Of course she was there. “Cara,” I said, giving her a kiss. “Happy New Year.”

  “That’s right, Georgie, Happy New Year. It’s gonna be a big happy new year for me. Lemme see that; it’s all foam.” She took the pitcher and poured it off into the grimy bathtub, then refilled it with an expert tilt. Perhaps it was the hour, or the idea of the new year, but I seemed to be falling into a soppy frame of mind. I found myself thinking Toff ought to stop screwing around—she would make some man a good wife.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” Her face was red from exertion, and she looked uncharacteristically bloated.

  “So, Geoff is here, too?”

  “No! The asshole wouldn’t leave Manhattan.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “He doesn’t love me,” Cara added.

  In view of the rest of the evening—day, rather; dawn was threatening even as we spoke—I remember our brief discourse about my roommate as a blessed moment of convention; it seems polite in retrospect, how we discussed whether Toff loved Cara or had ever loved her, as if we were discussing the weather at a funeral. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is: perfect. I know Toff just used me for sex.”

  “Oh, dear, are you hot? But there’s such a nice breeze. Come toward the window.”

  “Why did he do that, George?”

  “Toff would have enjoyed this party,” I said. “Beer?”

  Cara held up a cup. “All right, now, where’s Henry hiding?”

  “He’s not here yet.”

  “No, I saw the car. She’s with him, right? I knew that the minute he didn’t come right up.”

  “Who—you mean?” I said, purposefully omitting Kate’s name. “Well, they are … engaged.”

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Where is she?” pressed Cara.

  “No, she’s not here. God—she wouldn’t come out here.”

  “No? No sense of adventure, huh? Just like Toff. Maybe she doesn’t love him, either,” Cara speculated.

  “I drove the car,” I explained. “With a friend of mine. Harry’s coming in a car service.”

  She was highly doubtful of this explanation, as well might she have been. “Oh, yeah? Well, soon as he gets here, tell me, okay? I got a surprise for him.”

  “What do you mean you’ve got a surprise for him?” I said coldly. I envisioned Harry, come out to Jersey for a final, final nostalgic tumble. It was getting a bit ridiculous, even for them.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Lenhart!” Chat had rallied from the dead. “Man-man-man here says he knows you. Name of Lombardi. Should we let him in?”

  The telltale giggle was like the bass line to Chat’s chorus: “Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh.”

  Cara flinched at the noise. She stepped tentatively into the middle of the room. Her heels were so high I didn’t know how she could balance on them. “I have an announcement to make!” she said in a strained voice. “I have an announcement to make!”

  “Heh, heh, heh. Cara: heh, heh, heh.”

  “Henry, this
concerns you.” With the room’s attention, Cara looked around rather wildly, like a child at an audition, who suddenly finds herself alone on the stage. “I hope everyone’s listening—”

  “Who’re you?” Chat asked rudely.

  Cara focused on him as if she couldn’t quite believe what he’d said. She stared, astonished, digesting the question. It seemed oddly to inspire her. She threw her shoulders back. “I,” she declaimed, patting her abdomen instead of her heart, “am the future mother of the son of Henry Lombardi.”

  “What does that make you, his aunt?” cracked a guy in the background.

  At the door where he had come in, Harry’s face was motionless. Only his eyes were alive, moving, in intense perception.

  Noting the rather blank reaction that her revelation had prompted in the rest of the crowd, Cara relinquished her front-and-center stand. She put her hot face close to mine and said, menacingly—and somewhat bizarrely—“He made his bed, he can lie in it!”

  After a moment, Harry turned to a group of people by the door and wished them a Happy New Year.

  CHAPTER 22

  It is a source of perpetual vexation to New Yorkers who live and work in Manhattan that the best views of the city are had by the outer boroughs and New Jersey. But this geographical injustice can be turned on its ear: “We create the view,” I have heard a man rationalize, “and they all look at us.” And yet one remains suspicious, heading back in, that they do nothing of the kind; that one is a rat on a wheel whose observing scientist has gone home for the night. We spin and we spin and we spin, and no one notices.

  It was dawn when I drove Harry back above Chat’s protests; it was, finally, dawn. It was a lead gray, ashen dawn, more a diminishing of darkness than an infusion of light; an anticlimactic dawn. I kept the car lights on, for safety’s sake, as if there were anything left to protect. Harry had asked me to drive, he said so he could think. But I recognized the gesture for what it was—a concession to my agitated state, which he knew the driving would help assuage. And Harry did not think. He sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap, taking steady, modulated breaths. It was the first time I had sat beside him and not watched him bite his nails or touch the back of his head or drum his fingers on the nearest surface. I gunned the car down the back streets. When we got to the highway Harry cracked his window. “Is this too cold for you?”