The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “You talk to Nicko recently?” Chat inquired, eyes downcast, taking a last drag on the cigarette.

  “No.”

  The cards lay thrashed on the table from the last hand. Harry began to pick them up and turn them over quietly.

  Chat scowled: his roommate was a mouth-breather, as oblivious to the sound he made as a sleeping child. “Think I’ve heard your name.”

  “How do you know Kate?”

  “We go to Maine.”

  At this oddly chosen moment Harry interjected: “You went to Chatham?” Pronouncing it wrong, as if he hadn’t been listening at all, he rhymed the first syllable with “bath” instead of “bat.” Neither Chat nor I corrected him. “That’s on the Cape, right?”

  “Near it,” I said. It was a common mistake; the school was across Buzzards Bay and thirty miles west of the town of the same name, which marks the tip of the Cape Cod elbow.

  “Did you know John Lash?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “John’s a great guy!” Harry gushed. “John’s from my hometown!”

  As he clearly wanted me to feed him the next line, I asked him where he was from.

  “Glen Cove,” he said.

  “Oh.” Except that he wasn’t. The sophomores had put signs on the doors with our names and hometowns. Chat was from New York. Henry was from Millport. I didn’t know Long Island—the discrepancy would ordinarily have meant nothing to me, other than its being a discrepancy—but I wanted to sit the guy down and tell him to play life like cards. Surely he could make the discards less obvious.

  He went back to reassembling the cards.

  “We ought to go down to New Haven some time,” Chat said. He laughed deprecatingly. “Road trip!”

  “I’d love to see Kate,” I said.

  Chat nodded. “So you haven’t talked to Nicko recently?” he asked again.

  “No. Why? Have you?”

  “Well, I mean—I saw them in Maine this summer.”

  “Well, anytime you want to go … I haven’t seen Kate since she graduated. Or Nick.” They were two years older than I. And Nick, keeping himself legitimate, had gotten himself kicked out their fifth-form year.

  Harry had the cards in a neat stack ready to deal, waiting for his cue.

  “You know,” Chat volunteered, with a touch of sheepishness, “I should have graduated with them.”

  “Really.”

  He twisted the end of his cigarette in the ashtray. “I kind of did the five-year plan at Hotchkiss.”

  I opened my mouth to reply but found, to my embarrassment, that Chat’s admission had left me tongue-tied.

  “And then, you see, I traveled for a year,” he went on, in a rather mechanical tone of voice. “I went to Africa—went on a safari. You see, I’ve always had an interest in traveling, and my parents support that. It was a great year.”

  Still I was silent. I didn’t care, I didn’t give a damn if it had taken Wethers two extra years to get into college, and yet I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t sound patronizing.

  “Hey!” Harry piped up, to my relief. “At least you got in here! I mean—eventually!”

  The response seemed to both delight and astonish Chat. He looked amazed that Harry had spoken—impressed, almost, that he would dare to. “What the hell, Lombardi! ‘I mean—eventually!’ What are you, my little consoler?” He clobbered him, but good-naturedly. “Can’t you breathe through your goddamn nostrils? Come on, try. You can do it! In-out! In-out!”

  After endless hands and long after our hall had come shouting back from orientation and left again for dinner, Chat’s roommate stood up and rather formally excused himself. He was leading by such a large margin that Chat and I were taking bets on who could lose worse. “I have to go to a meeting,” he added.

  It is always awkward in a room after someone tells an obvious lie for an unknown reason. None of us spoke until he had left, lugging a small duffel.

  “Guy has a job delivering pizzas,” my host informed me. “I saw him trying on the fucking outfit. It kills me about him—kills me!”

  Chat stood up from the floor, stretched languidly, and lay down on their long shabby couch. “That’s why I’m not letting up. I figure if I’m a big enough asshole to him, see, he’ll get fed up and tell me to fuck off and the net result will be positive. Right now, for Chrissakes, I’m like a goddamn Pygmalion. Why won’t he just admit he has a goddamn job?”

  That reminded me. “Christ, I skipped the job fair.”

  “You’re getting a job?”

  “Have to,” I said.

  Chat stretched again and yawned. After a second or two, he sat up and said, “That’s a drag.”

  “Yeah.”

  I felt him look at me and away. “How many hours are we talking?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Might cramp our style,” Chat added thoughtfully. He reached underneath the table for a pair of cards.

  “Yes, well,” I said, as he held them up, frowning, to examine them.

  We wandered to the dining hall and back; I went to my room and he to his. I had only been back a few minutes, and was wondering what I would do, when Chat paid me his first visit. I invited him in but he remained standing, just inside the threshold. It was barely eight o’clock, but he had already gotten back into his robe and slippers.

  “This—this is appalling of me but—but how much do you need?”

  I thought about it, understanding now the formality of the posture, dreading what was to come. But it was a fair question. “A couple thousand this year for books and, I don’t know …”

  “Books and beer,” Chat supplied.

  “Right.”

  “Look, why don’t I lend you the money.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You can pay me back later.”

  “No, I just couldn’t.”

  “I mean much later, when we graduate.”

  “No—but thank you, Chat.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  When I continued, naturally, to protest, Chat grew more and more uncomfortable. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and a stutter appeared, which quickly worsened.

  “This is a hell of an awkward conversation, and I wish you’d put—put—put an end to it right now, George. In two days you’ll have forgotten you—you borrowed it and I’ll have forgotten I lent it. And that’s—that’s—that’s all there is to it. Other option is for you to work fifteen—twenty hours a week. And—and I don’t see that kind of effort fitting in with the—the grand scheme.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “No, no, listen here—don’t be stupid about it. Simple business transaction. In—in—interest-free, of course,” he added gently. “I’ll talk to my … guy tomorrow.” He was too delicate to say “accountant.” It was only later, after I’d heard him snap into the stutter half a dozen times, that I realized the whole thing was an act. He put it on—his discomfort—to make it possible for me to take the money. For it was strange how it happened: I suddenly began to feel that I was protesting too much. It started to feel like a tacky scene in a restaurant, when the people next to you argue over the check so vehemently—and neither couple will back down but each of the men is deathly set on paying, driven by some perverse egocentric need of his own—that you want to lean over and yell, “Just let Bob pay the goddamn check!”

  The subject of money embarrassed both of us; I felt myself going hoarse from arguing and heard my fatuous arguments with distaste. I couldn’t back them up with any kind of support, nor, most of all, did I want to go into the details of exactly how poor I was. Part of the problem was that I was not—had never been—quite sure myself. There had never been enough money, but I knew that more from feelings accumulated over the years than from empirical evidence. In our odd kind of poverty, puzzling inconsistencies had existed side by side for years. My sister had had a pony growing up, for instance. But we couldn’t afford a color TV, and every towel in the house
was stamped with the Rectory’s athletic-association blue. And as I pondered how to explain all this, Chat would not come in and sit down but stood in the threshold, where I knew he was uncomfortable.

  “My parents—my father would not approve of this,” I said finally. I had the feeling Chat’s father wouldn’t, either.

  “Your father go here?”

  I nodded. “Yours?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  Before I knew it, he had thrown me the change of topic, another consideration, and dropped down into the club chair I had salvaged from home. We got to talking and I told him the easy things to tell, how Pop had gone to Chatham in the school’s best days, the days of ora et labora, and cold showers, and baggy knees from so much kneeling in chapel, and then to Dartmouth; and that I, lacking inspiration, had always figured I’d do the same. We discovered that we both had fathers who were a little older than most of our classmates’ fathers—the Ice Box Age, Chat called their generation—and mothers who had dropped out of college to marry young. We both had much older siblings, but while Chat was the last in a long line of Wetherses, my sister and I were the two lonely Lenharts. The longer we talked, the more little similarities we turned up—we had both taken Latin, we had both taught sailing a couple of summers; we even figured we had been at one of the same rock concerts, in Massachusetts two summers earlier. I think that night with Chat, comparing our relative experiences, was the first time the pointlessness of it truly struck me—that my family simply hadn’t been able to figure it out—something so basic: the simple having of money.

  I didn’t tell Chat everything. There were a few points I might have added but left out because they seemed redundant, revolving, as they all did, around that central fact. I didn’t add, for instance, that my mother had gone back to college eventually, to the local branch of the state university, so that she could finish her degree and earn money tutoring. I neglected to mention certain benefits of growing up at the Rectory, such as the milk we could get gratis from the old school dairy. I had made a friend that evening, and I didn’t want to bore him with the details.

  A week later, in the mail alongside a letter from my mother, there was an envelope from a Manhattan accounting firm with a check inside for ten thousand dollars. I went straight to the bank and deposited it. A couple of times in the next few years I woke panicked from my sleep, overcome by a black dread of the size of the debt. But undergraduates are largely indifferent to money, so long as it’s there, and the rest of the time I hardly thought of the loan at all, except to make sure a decent amount remained. It seemed a perfect piece of good fortune had befallen me, like manna from heaven; frequently I forgot to attach the good luck to its source.

  Chat’s reputation on the hall never lost its initial taint, but we found our group of friends in time, and in the spring we rushed and were accepted at our fraternity of choice. Say what you will about Wethers, and people said plenty—and I myself might reluctantly cede a point or two today—he is the only man I know from whom I could have accepted a loan like that and not felt ashamed, beholden, and a dozen other debilitating emotions. Chat himself almost never had cash on him, and it became his habit to borrow from me—tens, twenties, once $250 to buy an amplifier. There was never anything odd about the way he asked, however, as there would have been with most people, and he always paid me back right away.

  As for Chat’s roommate, we saw less and less of him. Classes started, and Harry spent his time holed up in the basement of Kiewit, where the computer lab was. He quit the pizza delivery job before Chat got him to admit to having it, and instead troubleshot for humanities majors like me, casting spells on our printers to make them spew out papers that had been eaten, making himself the object of daily prostrations of love and gratitude: “Oh. My. God. You saved my life!” About the middle of the fall, one of the girls whose deleted document he salvaged took a fancy to him. Around the same time I kissed Ann Callow from my Shakespeare class, with the result that the two of us found ourselves with girlfriends. Each of us made an independent decision to downplay, in my case, or to hide, in Harry’s, the existence of said girlfriends from Chat. Harry’s girlfriend was called Marie. She was a Mike-and-Craig-O regular—a smart, determined girl from Rochester, half a head taller than Harry, who eventually did big things for student government. Chat found out about her soon enough. He had to be polite to me about Ann, no matter that he thought my married state was putting a damper on the fun, and I’m sure this constraint, doubled with the fact that he himself remained girlfriend-less, increased his venom toward Harry.

  The tone changed in their room. Before Chat had been outrageous, certainly—there was no escaping it—but there had been a kind of creativity in his attacks, and a certain underlying hope. Now Chat lit into Lombardi in a way that was just boring. He made fun of the way the guy dressed, right to his face. He used to take periodic inventories of Harry’s wardrobe, of his black concert T-shirts and his two ugly ties and his quasi-oxford shirts in odd patterns.

  Harry got so much flak from Chat about Marie that finally he dumped her rather than deal with it, and went around looking hunted. She really liked Harry, though, and one night that fall she came over, blind drunk and blubbering, to see why they couldn’t give it another shot. Marie didn’t usually drink. That was one of the many things Chat had found to ridicule about her. She didn’t drink, she didn’t put out. As it happened, Harry wasn’t home; Chat and I and Will Toff were sitting around trying to get a plan together. Toff finally gave up on us, and I went to my room without much hope to call Ann, who would have gone out to get drunk long ago, disgusted with our lethargy. I couldn’t get hold of her, so I went back next door. Chat had fixed another drink for Marie and she was drinking it and talking about Lombardi. “It’s really over now!” she cried. “And I don’t even care!”

  “Yes, dear,” Chat was saying, and stroking her hair. “Now drink your drink.”

  To me he murmured, marching me smartly back out the door, “Very sorry, George—party of two, you understand?”

  In the morning I started at Chat’s light rap on my door. We prided ourselves on getting up and going to breakfast, and belittled the others who slept the day away and tried to make up for it at night. This morning, however, I stalled. I folded up the newspaper on my desk and took my time about finding my keys. We were supposed to take the road trip to New Haven that weekend or the next. I imagined Kate’s approval when she found out that the two of us had become friends. It struck me how melodramatic it would be to start a fight, to make an accusation. I think it’s safe to say that was the very last thing I wanted to do.

  “While we’re young, Lenhart,” remarked Chat. I opened the door. He was wearing a gray overcoat over the dressing gown, a wry look on his face.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d make it this morning,” I said stiffly.

  Chat feigned insult. “Christ!” he said. “Give me some credit, will you?”

  CHAPTER 6

  It was fitting he should say “While we’re young” in that sarcastic tone—Chat, who had never felt the exigencies of youth. He had felt no obligation to “make the most of it”; he did not go around saying, as so many did, that those years—or these in New York, for that matter—were the best of our lives; or berating himself, as I did, for failing to live up to their promise. I guess that was the other thing I liked about him right from the beginning: Wethers took the edge off my moods. As we walked to breakfast through that fine, cold morning, the foliage—the color—was gone, and the trees were bare. The sense that I had backed down from a moral crisis quickly dissipated. Chat and I were up early, as we always were, while the rest of the college slumbered on, and I saw at once the wrongheadedness, the self-indulgence, of painting the world in gaudy colors of morality and crisis. Chat’s dour expression and the gray overcoat seemed more to the point, and much more reliable, than any overwrought conscience-wringing of my own. “Grow up,” his presence seemed to be saying. “Grow up and enjoy life.”

  It is
tempting, looking back, to make ritualized routines of favored outings—to say “We always used to” of an event that occurred perhaps twice. And I would like nothing better than to say that in Manhattan I was immediately caught up in a whirl of mutual engagements with Kate and Chat. But my work prevented that—happily for me, as Kate’s schedule and the cost of keeping up would have otherwise. I got the impression that they went to a lot of benefits together and that Chat spent most of his time at the Town Club, as he frequently called me from there to try to drag me out, convinced that the excuse of my job was a big farce covering up that secret double life of mine.

  But I had no such gratification.

  It was a dismal spring of five-dollar umbrellas, the rain seeping down the collar of my coat and Daniels on my case with a dreary kind of vengeance. One week, the week before we left for a road show out west, I saw the sun rise from the thirty-fifth floor of Fordyce three mornings in a row. Or I would have seen it, if I’d had a window, and it hadn’t been raining. In the antiseptic hours before the dawn of those all-nighters, I fell back into a sad habit I’d had in college, of picturing the world asleep in their beds. I wasn’t choosey; anyone would do. I would think of Toff and Cara, passed out after their perfunctory amours, the bottom sheet shrunk from its corners revealing naked Dial-a-Mattress underneath; or of a girl I’d known briefly in Paris, who had a brass bed; of Daniels, the bastard, dreaming of Y-curves with Mary Ellen Flynn, the secretary on 19 who commuted from Croton. Sometimes I would think of Nick Beale, strung up in a pipe berth in some stripped-down maxi off Bermuda, off Barbados, or anywhere the wind blew; or even—and here I would chuckle, laugh in the face of my dull fate—of Harry Lombardi here in New York, slack-jawed on his back, clutching some fantasy girl. I envied them all their slumbers, but it was Kate’s image that haunted those sterile vigils most, and hers that I ground away toward through the nights, as if I were striving to meet it and not the FedEx deadline. I told myself that I, too, would one day possess eight dreamless hours after midnight, clean-sheeted, and that my darkness, as hers no doubt was, would be still as a reflecting pool.