The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “I thought I saw you!” he gushed, in a way no man ought to. “Had a buddy amine look you up in the Fordyce directory. How do you like that? It must be fate, huh, Lenhart?”

  I felt the old defensiveness come over me, and wouldn’t admit to having seen him as well. “You work around here now?” I said instead.

  “Naw, I was in to see you guys for a meeting. I’m not really ‘office-based’ these days. Couldn’t stand the heat, you know?”

  Despite the disclaimer, there was something in the way he answered that made me think he was doing very, very well, perhaps even better than I’d heard, and on an instinct I congratulated him.

  “Yeah, thanks, it was time I got out on my own,” he said briefly.

  “So, what are you, starting your own fund now?” I pressed him. “Advising the Feds?”

  “I hope to be getting something off the ground soon,” Harry said, automatically, like a witness taking the Fifth.

  I tried it one last time, but beyond mumbling an acknowledgment of his “stake in China,” he wouldn’t be tricked into elaborating.

  He hadn’t changed. In an inverse of the rest of the world, when talking about himself Harry Lombardi was permanently distracted. Chat had been his roommate at Dartmouth for a year, and yet we’d been the last to know he was some kind of computer genius; it wasn’t until Eastern European graduate students started leaving messages on the answering machine and lurking around the room discussing theoretical cryptography that we got him to admit to it. He had never so much as alluded to any such ability. It seemed that nothing the man had been born with, no natural faculty of his own, could hold his interest.

  “So speaking of China, I guess your buddy Chat probably told you I saw him over there this winter?”

  “I guess I did hear that,” I said slowly.

  “Hell of a time, George. Hell of a time. Chat’s a riot.” That voice, coming at me after so many years, inevitably pumped enthusiasm. Lombardi could spin anything—even Chat’s disgusted commentary—into a “riot.”

  “I heard you saw a lot of each other.”

  “A lot?” Harry’s tone was reproachful. “We met up every night! We were drinking buddies, George!”

  I had to stifle an urge to congratulate him again; no doubt in his mind this achievement was by far more laudatory than anything professional—like, say, starting his own venture at the age of twenty-three. As we spoke I found myself turning the fact over again and again, like a coin, in my thoughts: he was twenty-three years old—he was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout, rather, and he was hoping to “get something off the ground.” There was no way around it. It was unique as hell.

  “So what about you, George? You heading into your second year now?”

  “First year,” I said stiffly. “I was in Paris till last month.”

  “Paris?” He was clearly—needlessly—impressed. “That’s original.”

  “It’s anything but,” I protested.

  “Do you speak the language? That is, do you speak French?”

  “I get by.”

  “Yeah? You’re lucky. I got a tin ear. Juh nuh parlay pah fron-say. Although even I was better than Chat. You should have seen him trying to pick up girls in Xiaojiang.”

  “Well, for Chat it’s a matter of principle to speak all foreign languages abysmally,” I explained, half-jokingly, before I remembered that the grossest of ironies were lost on Lombardi.

  Sure enough, he said earnestly, “He’s a very principled guy, isn’t he—Chat?”

  It was absurd: Lombardi didn’t speak the language. Either that or he wasn’t listening, which I suspected as well. Harry’s mind raced rudely ahead in conversation, seizing on points that could be of further use to him, discarding the rest. It could be trying, or downright offensive. In college I had given up introducing him to people, even open-minded people, who might have seen what I saw in him—for even then I’d had some perverse investment in the guy, against my better judgment. But even then it wasn’t worth the effort. He couldn’t stick around long enough to get their names.

  “So you see him a lot, George?” he wanted to know. “You see Chat a lot? Funny, his starting out at Broder, isn’t it? I mean, just the way I did.”

  “Look, I really just got back,” I said.

  “Oh, right, right.… You probably haven’t had time to … connect. He’s probably with Kate all the time—his girlfriend, Kate? They hang out, like—like most couples but probably even—”

  “Something like that,” I interrupted.

  “And I bet it’s hard for him to get out—or for you to get out, for that matter! Do you get out much, George? Do you get out at all?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I replied, provoked, absurdly, into a retort, “I’m seeing Chat tonight.”

  You could almost hear the mind turning, processing the information in ones and zeroes, before the deathly casual: “Oh, yeah? Where are you guys going? You having dinner—you going out for real? Or you just—”

  I named the bar.

  “Killian’s on Lex? Sure! I used to go there all the time.”

  “Did you.” It was the obvious midtown pub, and had been for thirty or forty years.

  “Oh, sure, sure—”

  “Join us if you want.”

  “Join you? Tonight?” Harry stumbled audibly. “I think I’m—well, what time? What time were you thinking? I wonder if I could make it. I don’t know if I can make it. I’ve got a dinner with these guys—Europeans—Eurotrash, ha ha—gotta take them out.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what? I’ll try to make it anyway. What time you think you’ll be there till? Eight? Nine?”

  “We’re meeting at eight.”

  “Oh, meeting at eight. I didn’t realize that you were meeting at eight. Then I’ll definitely see you. I should be there nine, nine-thirty latest. Does that work for you? If you’re not there, where will you be? Think you’ll move on somewhere—go downtown maybe?”

  “Nnn … I doubt it.”

  “I tell you what, let me give you my mobile phone number just in case, okay?”

  “Your what?”

  “My phone—I’ve got a mobile phone—you know, one of those things you walk around with. That way you can reach me, you know, if your plans change.”

  He was the first person I knew to have one. Everyone else thought they were a joke. He read off the number, and feeling a bit ridiculous, I copied it down.

  “You got it?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “If we don’t connect, if I miss you for some reason, tell Chat I said hi,” Harry urged. “Tell him, you know, I’m back, and I say hi.”

  The fawning repulsed me, and that evening I made a joke of it to Chat. It was a Thursday, the best night of the weekend, and Chat turned up a little drunk already.

  The long narrow bar was jammed with guys like us, no more than two or three years out, and the occasional corporate girl holding court. You couldn’t get near the bar, but Chat’s high-pitched whine easily asserted itself over the crowd, to whose chagrin we were served right away.

  I thought I had better get the worst over with. “You know Lombardi’s back in town,” I announced, when we had found a corner to protect.

  Surprisingly, this elicited a dismissive shake of the head. “I don’t think so.”

  “No—I saw him.”

  Chat, surveying the crowd with a lax expression, did not seem to have heard. “Those guys look alike—short, you know?”

  “No, but I saw him—”

  “Really short,” Chat insisted. “A couple of times I thought I saw him, too. He’s got that kind of face. But it was some other short guy.”

  “Christ, he’s not that short.”

  “He’s five seven, George! He’s down here on me.” Chat held a hand to his hip. “He’s like one of those little guys in the cartoons—you know those guys, their legs go around in circles to keep up.”

  “In any case—”

  “Six two’
s not even tall anymore,” Chat added disconsolately. “In the old days, that was tall. Now it’s only average.”

  “Look: Lombardi’s back,” I affirmed. “He called me, and he’s showing up here later.”

  Oddly, it was not the prospect of seeing the man that seemed to concern Chat. “He called you? What’d he want with you?”

  “You, I think,” I said honestly. “He told me to tell you he says hi.”

  Chat snickered. “What a little suck-up. How’d he find you?”

  “Saw me going into Fordyce. He was there for a meeting.” I looked sidelong at Chat. “I do believe he’s doing pretty goddamn well.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Chat admitted. “Conniving little bastid.” We both chuckled.

  “I always wondered if the rumors were true.”

  “You would, Lenhart.”

  He had me there. “Didn’t you?”

  “What rumors? I never heard any.”

  “But you must have—of his hitting it big? Come on—didn’t you ever wonder what happened to him?”

  Chat shrugged, draining his beer. “I figured he found his own scene.”

  “He did.” I laughed. “The mail room of Broder, Weill, and Company.”

  Harry had dropped out after freshman year. He had dropped out without any notice, any hint to Chat or me, or expression of dissatisfaction—just simply had not returned to Dartmouth with the sophomore class. It was a fact I had privately come to admire. It was the one cool thing about Lombardi—infinitely cooler now, in the light of his success. That whole first year in New York, I used to think that if only he had learned how to capitalize on it, the way he did on the fluctuations of the market, he might have seen phenomenal personal returns.

  “He didn’t really come up from the mail room?” Chat pressed me.

  “No,” I admitted, though I knew Harry would prefer the old-school sound of it. “Systems, I think. With that computer brain?”

  “ ’S true. Even I remember that—he was taking comp sci ten thousand freshman year.”

  “What the hell—none of this came out in China?”

  “I guess not,” Chat said, as if he hadn’t been there himself.

  “Didn’t you wonder how he happened to be running things over there?”

  “I’m telling you, Lenhart,” Chat protested, “he used to drink me under the table! You have no idea what that guy can put away.”

  “You must have made conversation,” I insisted.

  Chat considered the question blankly for a moment before answering: “Kate. We talked about Kate … and Nick. We talked about school …” All at once he seemed overcome by the perplexity of it, and put on the set, obtuse expression I associated with his having an economics test in the morning. “God, that place was strange!”

  “Dartmouth?” I said, surprised.

  Chat gave me a pitying look. “Dartmouth? No. Dartmouth was not weird, George. Chow-jang was weird. It was all just … the landscape wasn’t normal.”

  “Huh.”

  “Do you know how normally you have—well, pine trees or buildings? Buildings if you’re in New York, say, or maybe palm trees if you’re in the Caribbean? Well, this wasn’t like that.”

  “You were in China.”

  “I know, I know! I’m just telling you, George! It was strange!”

  As I waited for him to say more, it crossed my mind that the Eastern sojourn might have warped Chat’s outlook a little bit. But he seemed to shake off whatever was bothering him and gave a peremptory laugh.

  “What a freak. He’d always be grilling me in the strangest way. Asking me all these questions about things—school, you know, after he left.” Chat focused suspicious eyes on me. “Your name came up more than once. It’s funny—I think he respects you.”

  I had always rather suspected this as well, and tried not to dwell on the suspicion, for it failed to produce a corresponding desire on my part to live up to Harry’s respect. “Well, naturally—”

  “No, listen, when I told him you made magna or summa or whatever the hell it was you got, he was all … excited. He acted like you’d named your goddamn first kid after him. He kept saying, ‘I knew George Lenhart had it in him.’ ”

  I was silent under Chat’s scrutiny; I hadn’t asked for the guy’s faith in me, and I didn’t want it now.

  “Anyway, we used to drink a toast to you at the end of the night, Lenhart. You could at least be grateful.”

  I drained the foam from my glass. I, a financial aid student, had gotten good grades; Harry had dropped out of college and made bonuses I could only imagine. But I wouldn’t have traded places with him for anything. One doesn’t, after all, wish to trade places with the man one pities. And despite the trajectory his career seemed to be taking, I pitied Harry. I pitied him for a hundred things—his physical clumsiness, his utter lack of social grace—but most of all I pitied him for the nakedness of his ambition, for his inability to cop an attitude or bluff through a hand in sync, for once, with his blasé generation.

  What can I say now, other than that things are, naturally, quite different. Now I can see that like all pity, mine was misguided. It’s not that I don’t pity him anymore, for even with his success and everything else that happened, I do. But now I understand that my pity is my problem.

  I took out my wallet to get the next round. I assumed that having been interrupted, Chat would drop the subject, but he had that confessional air about him again, and, as it had previously, it seemed to be driving him to speak. It didn’t suit him any better tonight. Chat never talked about people; it was understood that the habit was a weakness of smaller men—the Lombardis of the world—and his usual conversation had two topics: things he did and places he went. But three months in the Far East having his life story wheedled out of him would have been hard for anyone to shake.

  “He’s got this bizarro memory, George,” Chat continued, as if the fact were an indictment. “It was really … weird. Like, once I got confused and said I was hanging out with Kate up in Maine and he said, ‘But you can’t have been hanging out with her—she didn’t come up at all that summer.’ Bizarro, no? I mean, tell me that’s not the limit of a warped mentality.”

  As one who had kept a chronicle of Kate’s life myself, what was stranger to me was that Harry was evidently still broadcasting the habit. I couldn’t understand why he never learned, but went on exposing himself again and again and again. He seemed to have no pride.

  “It happened a couple of times: ‘No, no, you’ve got it wrong. That was the year it rained all summer—come on, don’t you remember—and you and Nick just hung out at the yacht club playing chess and she never showed up.’ That kind of thing. Or, ‘I thought you said you were the first to kiss her.’ Annoying as hell. So one night I took matters into my own hands, kind of … turned the tables on him.”

  Chat glanced at me to see how this would settle in. When I failed to reply, he broke out angrily, “Damned if I was going to be corrected on—on Kate—on my own childhood, for Chrissake—by some fucking … Lombardi! I can’t remember every goddamn little thing that happened when I was twelve!”

  But Harry could. And if you met him now, when men twice his age fly across the country to drink a cup of coffee with him, he could tell you what sport your brother played and how cool you were in eighth grade and whether you summered in town or up-island. He wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell you, either—any more than you would be to show him your vinyl LPs or your model train collection. Harry has a collection, too—he collects backgrounds. And like many collections, his had started with one prized, chanced-upon item, given him for free: in the year he spent as Chat’s roommate, with me next door, he had first heard talk of Kate.

  “So what exactly did you tell him?” I asked.

  Chat snickered. “Most of what I said was true. Some of it I made up, gilded the lily a bit. I told him she’s never been the same since Nick, you know, showed his true colors.”

  I caught my reflection in the mirror above the
bar and looked hurriedly away. “So you told him about Nick?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah—Kate, Nick, boarding school, golden couple—you would have loved it, Lenhart. I was quite the narrator. I kind of got used to it—looked forward to the session every night. Oh, get this: at the end of it all, when Broder was packing me home, I told him if he ever got back to town he should look her up.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I thought it would be funny! Can’t you just see him calling Katie now? ‘Excuse me. You don’t know me but I can recite every detail about your life and I thought we could, like, get together for drinks.’ ” Chat broke off, laughing hysterically. “ ‘Don’t worry, honey, I’ll keep it tied around my leg so it doesn’t get out and bite you!’ Is that the funniest damn thing you’ve ever heard?”

  “Do you think he’ll call her?” I asked.

  The question disappointed him. “Hell if I know, George,” Chat said bitterly. “Or care.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Oh,” he added, “I told him she might ‘never fall in love again.…’ ”

  “Oh yes?” I tipped my glass up, but there was nothing left.

  “Yup.”

  “Gee.”

  “Hell!” Chat exclaimed vehemently, setting the empty stein down with a crash. “Maybe it’s true!”

  By nine the bar had emptied out except for some old guys in corners, partners in law firms you’d never heard of, plying secretaries with drinks. It was refreshing to know that sort of thing still went on, but whether it appealed to my generational cynicism or my own relative innocence I couldn’t have said.

  When Harry had not shown up at half past nine, Chat begged out of the second act.

  “You’re just going to go?” I hadn’t counted on this possibility.