The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  There was one more thing going on with the woman behind the bar, something I had never quite understood before. At some early point in their flirtation, she must have sensed that she herself was not the focus of Harry’s ambition; the distracted quality surfaced even in the midst of his pursuit. And because he didn’t like her any more than she liked him—though, for a million reasons, he should have—she liked him much, much more. It was like his telling me, freshman year, when I thought I was condescending to be civil to him: “I’ve got no worries about you, George.” Lombardi threw the playing levels out of order.

  “I’ve gotta work tomorrow,” I said to Harry, and then to the young woman standing to my right.

  “So go home,” the woman replied.

  This struck me as an excellent idea. I still had a drink to drink, though. It was fresh and seemed a shame to waste so I took it with me. It was one of those nights in early, early spring when people go prematurely coatless and late at night are overcome, tumbling out of bars, by a desire to walk a few blocks. I started up Third Avenue, and thirty-three blocks later tagged home. I looked forward to having a word or two with Toff—he was more relaxed late at night after a few drinks—but I found his bedroom door closed. There is something so dismal about a roommate having sex.

  Then I thought I would watch some television, but that thought depressed me, too. I wasn’t exactly lonely, the way I had been in Paris, where loneliness had taken on the form of an enjoyable pastime. This was somewhat worse. I had the horrible conviction that somewhere in the city at that very moment a great party was going on without me. All of my friends were there and I had been invited, too—I knew the date and time—but I had either forgotten to write the address down or had lost it, carelessly, or thrown it away. And as I emptied out my suit pockets, I had a dreadful premonition that this was to be the case, a permanent post-collegiate syndrome of missing out, of driving around in pointless circles the way Harry and I had earlier, just to have something to do. When the reason for my rotten mood came to me, it was more humiliating than any homesickness. I was school-sick. I missed school, the lovely order and the sense of limitless yet defined forward movement. Kate had said it was so nice, but there were men at work who ran marathons and jumped out of planes just because they didn’t have any more homework.

  In college Chat and I had had an endlessly evolving roster of character tests and dire predictions for people who failed them: like the man who won’t take a dare, or the man who fixes himself a drink and doesn’t drink it. I remember making a promise to myself that night not to admit a relaxing of standards now that I was in New York, not to become one of those people who yell at one another on the subway—not to end up a Lombardi. I still had the vodka tonic; it was watery now, but I sat on the edge of my mattress and downed it. But the truth was the fridge was empty, and I drank it out of thirst more than anything else.

  CHAPTER 5

  I had a single my freshman year, which meant it was up to me to make friends. There were two rooms of guys on the hall—at least two that anyone noticed. The first, and by all accounts the dominant room, was Mike Murray and Craig-O’s; they cornered the hall the way a department store anchors a mall. Mike was a scrappy kid from southern New Hampshire who looked like he ought to play football but didn’t; Craig-O was a half-back from Detroit. Privately I was rather fond of Mike and Craig-O because they did all of the things I and my putative friends never would have—shooting hoops in the courtyard, collecting money for kegs; they even had a moose head hanging above their fireplace. At parties it would have a long straw in its mouth so it could reach its drink. Most people you met, if you told them you lived on Mike and Craig-O’s floor, that was location enough. At the beginning of school they had a keg every night, and except for the half hour of silence from seven to seven-thirty when Craig-O watched Jeopardy!, blared WDCR out the window from their massive, shitty speakers. The whole freshman class must have passed through that room, with the exception of the other two guys on the hall.

  Next door to me lived Chat Wethers, with a roommate he detested. Before I knew Wethers’s name I had a nickname for him. I called him “Portrait of an Ancestor,” and hung him in somebody’s living room beside “Martha, his wife.” Shining above the boy’s pallid, peaked nose was a forehead so high you could have dived off it. His chin was a touch weak, which added to the eighteenth-century look, and he moved like an arthritic old man, creaking down the hall to the bathroom in a dressing gown and a preposterous pair of velvet slippers, black, with red devils on the vamp. That he couldn’t stand his roommate the entire hall knew. Before I’d identified either of them I heard Chat whining through the wall, “Lombardi, what—what kind of a weird freak are you?” and giving Lombardi hell. It was easy enough to figure out who was who.

  Several times I was taken to task for the pair’s bad behavior, sheerly on account of the proximity of my room to theirs: “You live next to them: what the hell, Lenhart?” Those first few weeks of school, around Mike and Craig-O’s kegs of ever descending qualities of beer—and after, I’m sure, when I was no longer privy to such conversations—friendships were formed over what a total fucking asshole Chat Wethers was. He incurred hatred just walking out the door: a girl claimed she had met him at the freshman tea and that now he pretended not to recognize her. (She also claimed he had let the door slam in her face, but I didn’t believe that part.) Then there were the disinterested, impersonal forms of arrogance, which, oddly enough, people seemed to take even more personally: the stupid tape Wethers always played, for instance, whenever he was in his room, the same stupid cliché of a reggae tape, on and on and on inexorably. As I later learned, it was one of two tapes Chat had brought to school. It was the tape that got to Mike; Mike who prided himself on a collection of CDs two hundred strong. “Wouldja knock it the fuck off!” he used to shout, and then he would bang on the walls, and, rather than confront Chat, turn up his own stereo even louder, to the approbation of the entire hall, who would toast the asshole’s impending demise at the pigskin-callused hands of Mike and Craig-O.

  But though I dropped by the parties for a beer or two, I couldn’t summon the requisite animosity, in the form of a grievance of my own, to really belong. Nor could I join in corroborating the initial judgments as they were handed down. I am as happy as anyone to make friends over a common enemy; the trouble was that I’d sensed Chat and I should probably be friends. It wasn’t that I particularly liked him—not from what I saw, anyway. It was more a suspicion I had that he would not annoy me, as ridiculous as he was, nor I him, and that this vague mutual approval would prove more sustaining than any instant, dazzling alliance formed of open admiration and emulation.

  There was one quality Wethers possessed, however, which I did admire. I couldn’t have put a name to it at the time, but it had crept under my skin at Chatham—where I’d gone after finishing at the Rectory—and, as it turned out, was there to stay. It was a weakness, I suppose—a peculiar weakness for unexpected, contrarian surfacings of originality. Even the muted idiosyncratic strain in Chat was enough to get my attention: that same embarrassing tape played over and over, when the depth if not the breadth of one’s musical taste said—Well, everything in college. What the hell did it mean?

  I knew that Chat had gone to Hotchkiss. Boarding school was as good a jumping-off point as any, but neither of us, I think, wanted to be too crude about it, like some desperate types who had put on their Exeter sweatshirts and gone running around the Green.

  So I held out for a few days when everyone was madly meeting and greeting, and by the end of the week my neighbor needed a fourth to play cards. Actually, they needed a third and a fourth, but as the rest of the dormitory had gone to hear an orientation address, Chat was willing to settle for dealing out the two and playing a limp game of three-person hearts.

  I had not skipped the address for any reason other than I knew I ought to. If I had learned anything at Chatham, it was the simple dictate that to get anywhere in life one had to sk
ip required events. To not skip would have been contrary to my personal code, so when three o’clock arrived I was lying fugitive on my bed, toying with a book and congratulating myself for being such an independent, rebellious soul. There was a knock at the door and Henry Lombardi came in. He was Henry then; Harry, with its echoes of princely sobriquets, came later.

  “Hey—George, right?”

  “Yeah, hey.”

  I sat up to be polite. It was funny, but he was the last person I would have expected to ditch the schedule.

  He did not introduce himself then; in fact, we were never introduced. He came to me as Chat Wethers’s emissary. “Chat wants to know if you want to play hearts.”

  “He sent you?” I said skeptically.

  “Yeah, he’s …” Harry said, and put a fat stubby index finger and thumb to his mouth and sucked in air in the least convincing pantomime of smoking a joint I had ever witnessed.

  “Are you saying he’s in your room smoking marijuana?” I said coldly—cleverly, I thought. For I was not so grown-up, after all, as to deny myself the easy target. Besides, the guy had irritated me on sight, and besides that, it was the first week of freshman year: one had to draw the line somewhere.

  I still remember the look of reproach I was given. When I went on in a more conciliatory tone, startled into graciousness, Harry made an odd gesture, batting the air as if in pain, to stop me from being nice. It was to become a pattern with us. He would embarrass me with his clumsy attempts to drop into the vernacular; I would pointedly dissociate myself from these attempts; he would register my scorn; I would try, too late, to soften the blow; he would wave my efforts off. From Chat, Harry took it all, every baiting, insulting word; but even from the beginning he seemed to expect something more in the way of tolerance from me.

  We went next door. How incongruous it was to see the Portrait of an Ancestor firing up a two-foot bong. It was duly held out to me, but I shook my head. I didn’t like to get stoned with people like Chat, people who were meant to be drinkers and who got stoned simply because they thought they ought to. I like to think Chat respected my abstaining. He gave me a look that was both measured and measuring as we shook hands, and I saw that he had registered the point I was making, and it seemed to me that in that moment we understood each other. For the other great theme that had been borne in on me in my adolescence was that while it was always cool to partake, it was sometimes even cooler to abstain. It meant you were above all that. I had learned it at Chatham from Nick Beale, Kate Goodenow’s boyfriend, who some would say forgot his own lesson. I didn’t know it yet, but Chat had learned it from Nick, too. There was a whole generation of us who had learned everything we knew from Nicholas Beale. He was constantly being quoted by people who didn’t even know they were quoting him. But Chat and I had learned firsthand.

  We sat on the floor, Harry and I on one side and Chat on the other, with a wicker settee between us. On the opposite wall was a huge black-and-white photograph of one of the old J-boats that raced for the America’s Cup in the thirties. It reminded me of my father; I remember thinking that Pop would have known the boat’s name, her history, perhaps, as well. My father had grown up on Long Island Sound, sailing every kind of boat, and he had made a habit of taking me down to Newport when I was little, to watch the trials. Looking at the picture, I could hear the stories he would tell—of escapades at Indian Harbor, Larchmont, Manhasset—the great American yacht clubs which are strung along the Sound like pearls—

  “Enterprise,” Chat said, not unkindly, catching my glance.

  “Right,” I said. I had learned to sail, as well—on the pond behind my father’s school.

  Chat dealt, explaining the rules to his roommate as he snapped the cards down.

  “You’ve never played before?” I asked Harry.

  “No, no—I think I did,” Harry said. “I’m pretty sure I played, but we called it something different.”

  “Spades?” I inquired. “That’s a different game, you know.”

  “No, no—I know. I think—”

  “He’s never played before,” Chat said. “Have you? And yesterday,” he went on, brightly, “we tried to get ‘high’ for the first time, didn’t we, Henry? It’s a whole new world up here in ‘college,’ isn’t it? You’ve got a checking account now, and you’re responsible for laundering your own clothes.” Beside me Harry was methodically arranging the cards in his hand, suit by suit, panting a little as he worked. Chat lit a cigarette from a pack in the breast pocket of his bathrobe. “Tomorrow I’m going to teach him how to use a fork.”

  Harry giggled. No sound brings back freshman year to me—not the songs they played in the basement of Psi U, not the maniacal musical interlude in Jeopardy!—more sharply than that low uneasy giggle which was Harry’s response to each of Chat’s taunts.

  “Do you want to play one hand open?” I asked. “We’ll lay our cards down?”

  “Oh, no, I’ll be fine.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Chat said.

  “I’ll pick it up,” said Harry.

  And he did. He was a natural card counter. I don’t think he even knew that card counting was a thing people did, playing cards—it was just the only way he could think of to stay alive: to remember every card that was played. He ate the hearts on the first hand, but it was strange the way he cursed himself. Not for misunderstanding; no, he was angry at himself for making mistakes. It was like watching a natural athlete pick up tennis. I played the same game I always did—conservative. I stayed at zero for several hands, and I was beginning to think I would pull out the win when Harry blew my defensive game away. “You little bastard—you got aggressive on us!” cried Chat, when he realized what was up. “How fucking dare you?” Harry giggled the even, low-pitched giggle; evidently it could mean anything he liked.

  When people at school would ask me if Lombardi was as smart as everyone said, I never thought to cite the crazy computer invention he was supposedly working on or the astronomical-level math classes I heard he was acing. To me the more plebeian achievement was infinitely more impressive: he shot the moon, I used to tell them, on the third hand of hearts he ever played.

  “You realize you have to mix the drinks now,” Chat announced.

  “Oh, sure, Chat,” said Harry. Amazed, I watched him hoist himself to his feet, kneel down again in front of the mini-fridge.

  It made me nervous just to see the vodka bottle in a dorm room in daylight. I almost wanted to get up and check the hall for teachers—a reflex from Chatham. “I feel like we’re going to get busted,” I confessed.

  I felt foolish the minute I said it, but Chat cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, I know.” Then some mutual fear or indecision seemed to silence us for a moment. We both looked down at the pile of cards, then away, listening to Harry crack the ice trays and rattle cubes into the glasses. I think it was the first time either of us had tried it out on anyone else—saying “I got through it, too”; the four previous years of cold comfort—and we had to wait a moment to see if the other would let it stand. The falseness of the notion struck me at once. I thought of the appalling first nights away from home third-form year, as Chatham, fancying itself an English public school, had eschewed “grades.” But in the next moment Harry came rattling back with the drinks, and Chat and I had tacitly agreed to hold up the one thing we had in common as the greatest of connections. Chat asked me: “You went to Chatham?”

  “You went to Hotchkiss?”

  “I should have gone to Chatham.” He laughed a laugh so affected one suspected it might have been natural. “I could have been Chattie the Chattie! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Instead I was Chattie the Kissie!”

  Harry sat absolutely still, his hands folded in his lap. It must have been then that my host realized his roommate might have a purpose beyond the occasional bartending: he was that rare thing, the perfect audience, trapped and interested. His presence somehow lessened the subsequent embarrassment of our stooping so readily to play do-you-know.

&n
bsp; “So you know Kate Goodenow,” Chat said.

  “Of course—Kate and Nick,” I answered, for I thought of them only as a pair. And who didn’t? At Chatham they had been the couple, the couple that transcended other high school romances as surely as God and country, in its happily myopic motto, transcended Yale. Kate was there now; I’d had a postcard from her with the phrase on it, and had stuck on my bulletin board.