The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “No,” I said. “So, let me see now. You’re entirely decided, aren’t you?” At the party, he and Cara had disappeared for half an hour. When they returned, she was leaning on him tearfully. He wanted to drive her back, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “Beer and bagels,” she had sniffed. “I can’t miss the beer and bagels. I promised.”

  “You’re going to be quite the martyr, aren’t you?” I said.

  “It’s funny, we throw that word around—”

  “Don’t, Harry! Don’t subject me to it!”

  He was silent several minutes, contrite.

  “Do you ever go to church?” he asked.

  “Twice a year,” I told him.

  “Of course.” He beamed. “The Christmas and Easter Episcopalian.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I believe in a God who looks like a cross between my father and my high school headmaster. I believe in the Nicene Creed with a couple of hymns on either side. Why can’t you leave your theology at that?”

  “Oh, George …”

  “But she planned it! She plotted the whole thing!”

  “The only thing she ‘plotted,’ ” Harry objected quietly, “was keeping it. I would have asked her to do that.”

  I ranted on: “Are you going to let yourself be sucked in? Are you going to be stupid enough—”

  “See, that’s where we differ, George,” Harry interrupted. “I don’t think of it as a question of my intelligence.”

  “Kate needs you, you know,” I said a little later, but I could feel my belligerence ebbing from me. “She had some kind of—breakdown when Nick showed up. You ought to remember that. You ought to remember the raw deal you would be giving Kate.”

  “Yes,” he said seriously. “I know she needs me. I’ll have to be a very good friend to Kate in the next few months.”

  “God,” I said. “I hate religious people.”

  He smiled faintly, in an infuriating way. “But we love you,” he said. I think it was the first joke I ever heard him make.

  It felt like a funeral—the way one ends up telling jokes on the drive there, understanding precisely how long the reprieve will last, the length of the drive, and exactly why one tells them: it makes life easier to bear.

  In Manhattan we drove up Eighth Avenue past Penn Station, where in high school Harry must have waited, carded at every bar, for the last train out. On the East Side the sidewalks were crowded with the old frat boys stumbling home, straggling out of bars like it was any town in America, and the lone girls doing the walk of shame in prom dresses and tennis shoes, carrying their pumps and awake to see the dawn.

  I stayed the morning with him. He didn’t want to go home, so we went to a diner. It was packed with the morning-after, demanding Bloody Marys. Harry ordered one. “Come on, George! Hair of the dog!”

  “No,” I said, “I’m never drinking again.”

  He looked at me curiously. “You didn’t cause this.”

  “It was a joke.”

  “Oh.”

  We hadn’t slept, of course. Harry wouldn’t touch his food, and after three or four cups of coffee he had worked himself into an ecstatic state.

  “I can learn to love her, George. I do love her in a way.”

  I stared stonily at my cup.

  “She was the first person who ever gave me a chance.” This last remark he made completely without irony, as if he’d forgotten the nature of the chance.

  I was furious by now, and I couldn’t do a goddamn thing. Harry made me feel as if I were going to throw a temper tantrum in front of a psychiatrist, or a priest. Even the way he had taken the news had been alarmingly calm. He had not lost control for a moment. If one had had a tape of Cara’s announcement, of her immediate and appalling marshaling of the evidence to prove it was his, one would have had to zoom in on Harry’s face and replay his reaction half a dozen times in slow motion even to see that there had been one at all.

  I sat at breakfast with him that morning, and it occurred to me that in the days to come I would mourn the passing of the old Harry. It was too early for him to go! But they had gotten him so young. That sinner had been looking all his life for the sin to fit him.

  I had found a Bible in the end table of my room out in Southampton. I recalled it suddenly, my amusement at finding it there, as if Harry had taken his cue from the Holiday Inns and wished to have a summer house as nice as … any cheap motel! It was what I generally think of as a Roman Catholic Bible, covered in white with color plates of Moses at the sea and Lazarus getting a second go-round with a funny expression on his face. Harry had marked certain passages for further study. One of the bookmarks had a Technicolor sunset with a psalm embossed on it, and on the back Harry had written:

  BAD: Doing_______.

  WORSE: Thinking about______.

  WORST : Lying about______.

  It was all there in the omissions and the ordering, the relationship to the sin a greater offense than the sin itself. Kate would have absolved him of it, of all of it, and he couldn’t bear it. He had to go back and root around with Cara in the trashed house in Millport, with his dad upstairs getting some, too, praying he wouldn’t get caught—doing—thinking about—. It was a congenital curse: for some people getting off scot-free was unbearable.

  “God damn you!” I said presently, not quite knowing whom I was talking about. At that point it could even have been Kate.

  “Heh, heh, now, George—”

  Harry excused himself then; his cellular phone was ringing and he had to take the call.

  CHAPTER 23

  I’m still not sure how he persuaded me to go over and wait with her, except that it was Harry, and at my first show of reluctance, I swallowed the feeling and stammered out guilty apologies. The breakfast over, Cara had gone home and changed her tune. She had called sounding “hysterical.” She didn’t want to be alone; she was worried she might “do something.”

  “Like what?” I said, highly skeptical.

  “I shouldna let her ride back alone. She’s worried and upset, George. She needs somebody with her.”

  “I’ll bet she does.”

  “Now, George …”

  “What?”

  “I want you to—I’m asking you to go and see her.”

  “All right, all right!” I conceded. “Just don’t look at me like that.”

  “Good.” He was satisfied. “You just go over there and make sure she’s all right, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “You want me to stay with her?”

  “Yes, George. Try to be charitable, George. You have the day off, don’t you? Take the car.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “Coupla things I’ve got to do. I’ve got to go talk to a priest.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then I’ve got to talk to Kate.”

  I was settling the check when Harry came panting back to the table. “Oh, say, George, don’t forget,” he reminded me. “I mean about the money.”

  “The money?” I said suspiciously. “It’s only twenty bucks.”

  “No, you know, the, uh, investment. You didn’t lose my card, did you?” He put up a hand to stop my protests. “Good, good—just checking. Send it to me at the office this week, soon as you can.”

  She lived four flights up, on First Avenue in the Seventies. It was one of those staircases that seem to have been built especially to insult one’s pretense of physical fitness. The landings didn’t come fast enough. On each of them, unsavory plastic bags of garbage had been set out, and a smell like rotting Chinese food grew stronger and stronger as I climbed, until I was holding my jacket over my nose and breathing into that. But soon, I guessed, Cara’s walk-up days would be over. She’d move into Harry’s high-rise, start ordering the doorman around.… On Cara’s floor, an old woman opened a dilapidated door. She peered out at me for an instant, disapproving, then retreated into the darkness of her apartment.

  I suppose Harry had told her to expect me, but the alacrity with which the
buzzer had sounded outside, cutting me off before I could say my name, gave me the impression that they were in the habit of buzzing, oh, just about everyone up. The door was open, propped on its dead bolt, and I pushed my way in, wondering what pose she would have struck. Her apartment was a two-bedroom serving as three; one person—Cara—had the living room for a bedroom. There was something indecent about it, about stepping into someone’s boudoir without a hiatus of even six feet of hall.

  She was sitting up in bed, spooning frozen yogurt out of a Styrofoam cup. She was wearing a tunic over the black leggings, and except for the position she was in, I wouldn’t have guessed her condition. Cara was one of those pregnant women who only get the stomach, while the rest of them stays thin.

  Beside the bed, on top of a stack of milk cartons, was a large framed photograph of Geoff Toff. “Hello, George,” Cara said weakly, affecting a deference to me, as she used to do when she greeted me in my own apartment.

  “The two of you survived the festivities, I see.” But I had promised to be charitable.

  The room itself was rather pitifully neat. The main piece of furniture besides the bed was one of those pine stands that ought to be used as bookshelves but more often hold, as the one in Cara’s apartment did, a glass bowl, a teddy bear, a picture of a bunch of girls, and a row of yearbooks and photo albums plus five books of popular fiction.

  “Do you want something to drink?”

  “God, no.” I looked around. Above her bed were two collages made of photographs and magazine headlines, the kind girls make for one another for high school graduation.

  “Not thirsty?”

  “No.” I was disappointing her, I knew, by not getting more into the spirit of things. Her work was done: this was supposed to be the fun part. Probably I should have volunteered to run out for ice cream and pickles.

  “Well, I’m gonna have something.” She slid off the bed and went into the kitchen. She was still wearing her party shoes, balancing precariously on the tiny heels. She poked her head out and beckoned to me. “Come see my collection.”

  A little card table had been wedged in between the stove and window, with a lace doily on it, and two folding chairs pushed underneath, as if to prove that the advertisement had not lied—that one could, indeed, “eat in.” Cara opened the cupboard above the sink. It was filled with miniature shot bottles of alcohol, forty or fifty of them. “I collect them,” Cara said proudly. “I bring them back from all my trips. See? I’ve got Tia Maria, I’ve got Frangelico—I could probably make you any drink there is. I could make you a White Russian, or a Long Island Iced Tea—anything. Anything you want.”

  “Wow.”

  “So you don’t want something?”

  “Not today, Cara.”

  “Boring. Boring, boring, boring.” After some deliberation she mixed herself a Kahlúa and milk and got back into bed.

  I followed her back into the room, and that was when I noticed another picture, hanging on the wall opposite the bed. It was a drawing of a pair of rampant lions on either side of a cross. In cursive script below the drawing (which appeared to be a page torn out of a guidebook) the caption said: THE MCLEAN FAMILY CREST. The absurdity of that endless day was now complete—or so I thought.

  “Whatever you think about this, George, you’re wrong,” Cara said petulantly. She was now sitting Indian-style on the bed with her back up against the wall. “I didn’t plan anything. Not a thing! When we hooked up the night of your party, I had no idea—”

  “You know, you shouldn’t drink when you’re pregnant,” I interrupted.

  “Big deal! It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “It’s not, actually.”

  “New Year’s Day, then!” she snapped. “Don’t be so pedantic! Anyway, one day isn’t gonna kill her.”

  “Her?” I said curiously.

  “It’s a girl. I was kind of hoping for a boy so we could name it Henry, but now I know it’s a girl we can name it—”

  “Cara?”

  “No. Priscilla.”

  “Priscilla?”

  “Yes. Priscilla.”

  “Er, why—?”

  “ ’Cause I like it! That’s why!”

  Somehow we got through the day. Cara turned the football on and we argued stats and rooted against each other. I tried Harry a couple of times, but his phone was turned off. Still, it gave me a funny picture: “Father, I have sinned. I—oh, could you excuse me a moment? I’ve gotta take this call.”

  Eventually I did run out to the deli for snacks, a long list of them, from barbecued potato chips to a chocolate bar I brought the wrong version of. “You got nuts and raisins!” wailed Cara. “I hate nuts and raisins! I wanted plain!”

  “I’ll eat it.”

  “Good! You take it. Good riddance! Hey! What are you smiling about?”

  “Never mind.” I’d been thinking that it was all working out rather well, that Harry would be working off the errors of his ways for a lifetime, pushing a stone up the hill of nuts and raisins and barbecued rippled and the good kind.…

  “Well, I do mind!” She sucked on the straw like a pacifier, her eyes moving back and forth with untold wounds. Every so often a hand would move to the little bottle of Kahlúa on her bedside table. It would dash a few more drops into her drink and return to rest, complacent, on the inflated abdomen. It terrified me, the idea that she had been able to go out and get herself pregnant, seemingly by herself—Harry’s involvement almost seemed superfluous.

  But the heat was cranked up and the television was large. And by late afternoon I was sufficiently settled in to resent the harsh ring of the buzzer. I remember thinking that at least I would get Harry to give me a ride home before he did anything else. He owed me that.

  Cara labored out of bed and made for the door as if I were going to race her for it.

  “Hello? Hello?” she said breathlessly.

  “Maybe it’s Toff,” I suggested.

  “Ha, ha.”

  “This is Arthur Goodenow,” said a grim voice. “Let me in.”

  If Cara had recognized the name, perhaps she would have had the sense not to let him in at all. But her finger was poised over the buzzer, and in the instant before she pressed it, she appeared to feel only a deepening of the excitement that she alone had caused. Instinctively she turned to me, a question on her face.

  “It’s her father,” I said as she let the man in.

  “Kate’s father?” She looked around wildly, and straightened a perfect pile of magazines before retreating to the bed. Cara was a demon tidier, a fact that gave a curious pathos to the caught-in-bed artlessness she affected.

  “George, he can’t do anything to me, can he?”

  “What could he do?” I said. But I myself relinquished the sagging armchair and stood up. I didn’t want to be caught sitting down by Kate’s father; I knew that.

  “I don’t know,” she said nervously. “I just mean—he can’t do anything to me, can he?”

  He had Kate with him.

  The sight of her tan, erect figure in the doorway made me think that everything was going to be all right, in the end—that the situation could be resolved in a professional manner, and then we could all go out and have a drink together—call Harry from the bar to come and join us. I went to Kate and kissed her. But from the query in her voice I understood that I had been caught off-sides. “Why, George,” she said, drawing back and making a quick, critical survey of the room. “How funny to find you here.”

  Unlike his daughter, Mr. Goodenow showed all the signs of being painfully, angrily hungover. He had slicked his gray hair down and was immaculately shaven—all the exterior efforts undertaken to put things in place. But his hand, as he raised it to point at Cara, shook wildly. “I’d like you to tell us, Miss McLean: just what in hell do you think you’re going to accomplish with all of this?” Without taking her eyes off him, Cara’s hand closed around the shot bottle, and she shook alcohol into her glass.

  “Dad—”

 
“Let me go on, Kate!” He moved farther into the room. The poor furnishings seemed to cower in the presence of an older man in a very fine dark suit. “If you think for one minute that this contemptible little ploy of yours is going to see one dime’s net gain when I’m through here—”

  “Dad, Daddy—”

  “Kate, let me talk to her. I know how to handle the situation. Now listen here—”

  “It’s all right, Cara,” interrupted Kate. “We’re not mad at you. We—”

  “I damn well am!” shouted Mr. Goodenow. “You must think you’re pretty clever, pulling this stunt! I don’t think you’re clever at all. I think you’re a goddamn little conniving—”

  “Dad!” cried Kate, her two hands on his arm. “Don’t talk to her like that! You’re not going to get anywhere!”

  “I’ll damn well talk any way I please!”

  “Dad! Dad!” Kate forced him to look at her. “Dad, please—will you wait outside?”

  Mr. Goodenow frowned. The man had a look of stupid anger, as if he’d forgotten the cause and remembered only the emotion itself.

  “Yes, you go and wait outside. Here, I’ll go with you, all right?”

  “If that’s what you want—if that’s what you want, K.…”

  Kate turned momentarily to Cara. It occurred to me that she must have come straight from the plane. It was January first and she was wearing a sundress and sandals. “I’m so sorry. I’m terribly sorry. Please excuse us. I’ll be right—right back. I’m so sorry to trouble you like this.”

  Cara stared at Kate’s retreating back with a look of increasing marvel. One thing she had not expected that afternoon was Kate’s apologizing to her. We could hear Kate muttering angrily to her father on the landing outside, and then she returned, smiling slightly and shaking her head a little.

  “First of all, I just want to repeat that I’m not mad at you—Cara. I know what happened—Harry has told me what happened, and I want to say that I’m not going to blame you and I’m not going to blame Harry. That would be silly. It’s not … important.” She paused, concernedly. Cara, sipping softly, was spellbound. “What is important is that Harry and I are going to be married next summer.” Kate paused again, letting the fantasy establish itself; the striped tent; the striped ties. I remember wondering, in that illogical way that one considers the future as if it were tomorrow, whom I would be seated next to at the reception. Jess Brindle, I hoped.