The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  As for why she didn’t give Chat the nod and have done with it—well, one didn’t ask that the week before Memorial Day. No doubt I was vain enough, too, to see an opening in her distraction, however temporary, for myself.

  As the scattered, frenetic meal ended, Kate regained her composure so quickly and thoroughly it made me think she had never truly abandoned it, that perhaps even the “trouble last winter” Chat had referred to had been a symptom of boredom alone.

  “Dad’s tried to speak with him, too, but Nick doesn’t listen—not anymore.… You know, I really can’t get over how second-rate this place has become.” With a violent motion Kate pushed the untouched plate to the edge of the table and squared her shoulders as if to wrap up an unpleasant bit of small talk. “Do you have five minutes? Because I took the afternoon off and I’m going to Bergdorf’s. I’d love it if you came. You can be my second opinion, George.”

  We hurried up toward the park in the afternoon sun, speaking hardly at all. There was always that distance you could count on with Kate, to balance out the afternoon. Even in the warmth her smooth coloring did not change. I seized her hand and pressed it to my forehead. “My gosh,” she said, laughing, “what will you do in August?”

  In the high hushed room of the old store, Kate tried on twenty or thirty dresses. She wanted my opinion on each one, but they all looked the same—becoming, appropriate, pretty on her.

  Afterward we stood on Park, and I found I couldn’t even live up to Nicko’s example for an afternoon. All my AWOL attitude had seeped away in Women’s Designers. As I was composing my umpteenth excuse for Daniels, Kate rested her hand on my arm. “I have to cross here.”

  “Can’t we trade?” I said. “My boss would like you better.”

  “I would have been good on Wall Street,” said Kate, without irony.

  She was right, too. I was exhausted just thinking about the afternoon to come, but Kate exuded well-restedness. As long as I had known her, she had been a healthy girl. I had never seen her rundown or exhausted; I had never seen her with a cold. I would have put money on the supposition that she had never stayed up all night finishing a book. I gave voice to this theory.

  “What on earth do you mean?” Kate said. She wasn’t really surprised by the comment, though. Many men had been moved to make pronouncements about her, of one sort or another, and to her face.

  “You know—just read all night and then find you’ve read too long because it’s getting light out.”

  “But that’s not fair! I don’t think I’ve ever come across a book worth staying up all night for.”

  “I never thought of that,” I said.

  Then there was a curious moment. I bent to kiss her good-bye, and she turned her face so I caught her lips. They were quite dry. The downtown traffic had stopped for the light. “It’s funny,” Kate murmured—murmured against my lips. Her face was huge in my vision, magnified; a flower under a glass.

  “Is it.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Come back.” For I had straightened up.

  I did and then stopped. I glanced across Park, to where the cross street started in darkness. The May recklessness beat against my skull.

  “Let’s fly to Paris,” I said. “I could show you around.”

  Kate cocked her head back to look at me, and the light covered her face.

  “We’ll go for the long weekend.”

  “You’ll book a midnight flight out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Chat will be gone,” she added, “and I haven’t a thing to do.”

  Kate could get out a neat response, no matter what the situation. She was the kind of date who knew her lines. And she was only answering in kind, banter for banter, mindless chatter for mindless chatter. For instance, she might have said: “Wonderful. What shall I wear?” or half a dozen other things. What I mean is, it was probably only by chance that she happened to mention Chat.

  But I thought suddenly, blindingly—for the first time in nearly a year—of the money I owed him. Chat had never mentioned it; he would not mention it. But I saw all at once that it was going to prey on me. We weren’t in college anymore; I was a debtor now, a man in debt—suddenly the fact seemed to define me. I even felt a touch of paranoia that it was the money that had been behind the supercilious tone Chat had taken with me at Kate’s, and I wondered if New York hadn’t changed him, too. In college, even a conservative place like Dartmouth, he’d had to endure a fair amount of resentment about his background, and ridicule for the attitudes he assumed; perhaps now, in his hometown, he was basking defensively in his entitlement.

  I watched Kate’s unchanging face as she explained that he was going up to Maine on Thursday to open up and would stay the weekend. Chat was famous for being fanatical about that, about never missing certain weekends—Memorial, Commissioning of the Yacht Club, Fourth of July—even going to infamous extremes like driving up on a Saturday, eight hours, spending twelve hours in Maine, and turning around to drive home on Sunday.

  “And I just don’t know what I’ll do …” Kate was saying.

  I was sure she had half a dozen offers, from Blue Hill to Watch Hill, but with a last flash of bravado, I took her up on it—on this last point at least.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” I decided. “Because he’ll miss my party.”

  “You’re having a party?” she said curiously. “What kind of a party?”

  “Nothing special,” I said. “Kick off the summer.”

  “Oh,” said Kate. “Goodie.”

  The light changed. I hurried away.

  I was a literature major in college, but I never went in for the criticism that was popular with most of my peers. “I’d rather just read the books,” I would smugly declare. So when I say now that I have subjected the afternoon I spent with Kate and the events it germinated to a truly rigorous deconstruction, I have to confess I never knew what the word meant. Still, I couldn’t help myself from trying to understand certain things that happened afterward in and of themselves—I mean, to imagine what would have happened without me as their inadvertent author. I don’t know why I decided to throw that party, except that I couldn’t let the day slip away like that, not without salvaging something for myself.

  CHAPTER 7

  When I got back to my desk, the phone’s red message light was on. Before I checked it, I mentally updated my résumé and composed the gloss-over: Yeah, I wanted to land in a smaller shop, anyway—less red tape to deal with … The message was from duplicating. They had called to say my Xeroxing was ready. Robbins looked up from next door. “Long lunch?”

  I tried to read meaning into this but failed. “Yeah.”

  “Get a load of this,” he said.

  He forwarded me a phone message that had been forwarded to him. I wasn’t in the mood for Robbins’s kind of humor, but this one was a keeper. By the time I got it, pretty much all of Wall Street had heard it. Anyone who was our age in New York at the time will remember it. It was the story of a blind date, a blind date in the age of voice mail.

  “You’re never going to believe this,” said the unsuspecting woman, who talked straight Queens oh-my-gawdese. Oh my gawd, indeed. She’d had sex with her blind date in a movie theater, and then again back at his place. His place had mirrors on the ceiling, and the woman said, “Oh my gawd, I was climbin’ the walls! I was buggin’—you could fuckin’ see everything,” and then she told what she saw, in the most extraordinary detail. It was gorgeous, that message. It was rich. It was the kind of thing that made you love New York like a little kid.

  I spent the afternoon forwarding it to everyone I knew, with a witty preface inviting them to my party. The last person I invited was Lombardi. I hated to do it, in a way. I could almost hear him panting over the message, replaying it, acting, for his colleagues’ benefit, as if he and I went “way back, way back—Lenhart and I—great guy, great guy—oughta be a good time, if I can manage to turn up, a’course … don’t know, schedule’s pretty tight”—but I ha
d promised, and when I thought of going back on my promise, the sneaking guilt that I associated with Lombardi drove me to the phone.

  As for Toff, he got a note on the bathroom mirror.

  Thursday night when I got home from work, I found Cara McLean waiting on the couch. “You still having it?”

  I told her I was.

  “I’m here to help you carry.”

  The two of us went around the corner to the liquor store and bought gin and rum and as much tonic as we could carry. “I really think we ought to get tequila, too,” Cara said. “People like tequila.”

  I was out of cash, so she paid for it herself. “You’re not going to regret this, George. I promise you. Wait’ll you see—people’ll be getting wild. Tequila really makes a party wild.”

  We called the deli for beer, and then we got the place ready as fast as we could. I took out the trash and cleaned the bathroom sink, and Cara set everything up on the kitchen table, a bit too tidily for my taste. At the last minute Toff—God bless him—Toff came through brilliantly. We had forgotten the ice, and he said he would buy it on the way home.

  I didn’t particularly want to sit on the couch with his girlfriend, who had staked it out, so I fiddled with the stereo and went into my bedroom to change my shirt. When I came out she handed me a shot glass and said, “Come on, George, you and I are going to do a tequila shot to get this party going, ’cause we did everything else, didn’t we?”

  “I guess we did,” I said.

  We did the shot and the buzzer rang.

  Cara ran over to it, pressed the intercom, and yelled, “Send ’em up!” With some displeasure I recognized it: her wild-’n’-crazy party mode. I had seen it once or twice before, when she and Toff came home late, and I just hoped Toff would have plenty to drink himself.

  There are many ways to show up at a party. One can show up late hoping to create an impression of being insouciant, wildly busy, and sought after. One can show up on time, because one is beyond needing to create that particular impression. Chat Wethers always showed up on time. “Come on, George,” he would urge seriously, in college. “They said the party’s starting at nine and it’s quarter to!” One can, of course, show up incredibly late, at one or two in the morning, because one is insouciant, wildly busy, and sought after. Or one can show up the way Harry Lombardi did, exactly half an hour after the party is slated to begin, expecting to be quite late but instead finding oneself the very first to arrive. He stood for a moment in the hallway, peering fearfully into the empty rooms.

  “Would you like to come in, Harry?” I asked.

  He took a cautious step through the doorway. Then he seemed to make a decision to face the facts squarely. “Don’t worry, George,” Harry said in a low voice. “More people will show up soon.”

  “I was hoping they might,” I said.

  Dispensing with further pleasantries, he walked past me into the kitchen. He was lugging a paper bag from which he removed three large bottles—of gin, vodka, and Scotch. My bottles were hidden under the table. Having this task to do seemed to put him at ease. “You can use these for backup, George—nothing wrong with that.” I was on the point of arguing with him about a thing called trying too hard when I remembered a particular habit my mother had at dinner parties. Her silver set was missing so many pieces that there weren’t eight complete settings to go around. It was my job to set the table, and she would tell me, “Give me the flatware, George. No one will notice.” I would do it, but it used to bother me enormously, the one dull setting that didn’t belong; her, not at all. I don’t know why the memory came to me just then, but it stayed the protest on my lips. My parents were never very far from my mind, and I would think of them at the oddest moments, especially since coming to New York—when I spent more on cabs, for instance, than they spent on a week’s groceries.

  I took an ice tray from the freezer to make us drinks. “That all the ice you got?” He was frightened again; scandalized.

  “Yes, don’t you think it’ll be enough? I mean—three trays—”

  But Harry never got jokes, even stupid ones, so I had to give up and explain that my roommate was on his way.

  “Thank God!” he burst out, taking a rumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiping it across his brow. “I didn’t want to say anything, but Jesus Christ! You can’t throw a party with three trays’a ice!” He surveyed the living room with a disapproving frown. “Coulda had somebody in, but oh well.”

  I had proposed a toast when Cara came out of the bathroom, into which she had disappeared for a final reckoning—or in order to make an appearance. She had abandoned her usual attire of black leggings, athletic shoes, and an oversized T-shirt for black leggings, high heels, and an undersized T-shirt. At the strip of linoleum that marked the beginning of the kitchen, she paused, looked sharply at Harry, and made a purposefully audible intake of air. This drew no immediate reaction, as Harry was busy readjusting the liquor display—at any moment I thought he was going to take out the handkerchief again and go to work dusting—so Cara shrieked his name.

  “Henry! Oh, my god, Henry!”

  Harry’s hands clenched themselves into fists; he turned as if someone had shouted an insult at him on the street. But before he could give back worse than he’d gotten, Cara had her arms around him and was pressed against him in an ecstatic, vocal embrace.

  When they parted he shuffled back a step and picked up the bottle of gin he had brought and examined it as if it puzzled him in some way.

  “Jeez, Henry!”

  “How you been, Cara,” he said to the bottle. “Long time no see.”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed, Henry!” she exclaimed, touching his arm. “We were kids, for Chrissake! It’s me, for Chrissake!”

  What significance this last remark entailed I couldn’t venture to guess. She herself was over the moon. Between tugging on my sleeve and, with the evening’s newly coined flirtatiousness, demanding that I make her a Tanqueray and tonic—“I always switch to gin in the spring!”—she reeled off tidbits from Harry’s and her wild and crazy days at Millport Junior High. She seemed to exult in the connection; there was no end to her reminiscences. “When I was a freshman and you were in seventh grade! Oh, my god! We were so bad! I taught him how to smoke! Remember that? Sure you do! You didn’t know how to inhale! You weren’t doing it right!”

  Harry’s head sank farther into his shoulders where his neck ought to have been. He still hadn’t looked her in the eye. His focus, when it encompassed her at all, remained firmly fixed on her taut mid-section.

  “The parking lot at Brady Beach!”

  With something like fondness, I recalled a favorite in Harry’s freshman-year wardrobe—a shrunken black concert T-shirt, “Brady Beach,” with something or other obscene on the back. Chat liked to try it on from time to time and come out in the middle of the room and play a vigorous air guitar with his amplifier turned up too high.

  “Hey, you want one? You want a cigarette now? Look: I still smoke Marlboros. I never changed my brand!”

  “You smoke?” I said.

  Cara put an arm around my shoulder. “Only when I party, Georgie!”

  Releasing me, she stuck a cigarette in her mouth and looked around the cramped excuse for a kitchen as if at a great view, as if there were twenty men who might have come running from the esplanade with matches.

  The matchbook Harry removed bore the logo of the bar downstairs. He must have been waiting down there, I realized, watching the clock, for the previous half hour to be up.

  When the buzzer rang again, I excused myself and went to get it. It was Toff, haggard from lugging the ice, and a few guests of mine he’d ridden up with, to whom he had, in Toff-like fashion, not introduced himself. “We thought he was going to another party,” said one of the girls, “or we would have helped.”

  The early turnout was a bit too promising. A number of people slinked in whom I didn’t recognize, and as I couldn’t believe Toff had that many friends, it seem
ed to mean that word had overly gotten around, as sometimes happens. But then I noticed that a lot of them seemed to know Harry. In fact he was hosting a sort of sub-party in one corner of the room, taking drink orders and pointing out the bar. A little while later, I caught him pointing me out, so I went over and thanked him for inviting all of his friends to my party. “Hey, anytime, George. I know how it can be—first party in the city.… No worries, no worries … all is good among friends.” Cara, standing beside him the way she normally protected Geoff, looked at me contemptuously and remarked, “Looks like half the people here are friends of yours, Henry.”

  “It certainly does, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Hey,” Harry said, “don’t feel bad or anything, George—”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  As I turned away, Cara smirked and put a hand to her mouth to whisper in his ear.

  When I next remarked the two of them, she had him monopolized on the couch. By then, however, I could see that it was no one-sided communion.

  “You’re kidding me! You gotta be kidding me—that’s crazy!”

  “I know it’s crazy, but it’s the goddamned truth! You wanna hear how it happened? Lemme tell you how it happened.”

  Harry had warmed to her considerably; he looked relaxed, expansive, as he pontificated to his circle of guests for her benefit. It dawned on me that perhaps it had been my presence that had cowed him earlier, not Cara’s. I looked around for Toff, to see what he made of this, and found him in the kitchen pounding beers, the flirtation was so obvious. “Great party, George!” called the poor guy, straining for a lighthearted note with a grimace of a smile. What was even stranger, at least to me, was that the new Cara McLean, flushed and animated under Harry’s steady, rather menacing gaze, had all but obliterated our forlorn weeknight couch denizen. She looked robust; she looked as if she’d had a steak for dinner. I remember thinking that Harry ought to take her out for a steak—it would do her good, from time to time: woman cannot live on fro-yo alone—and thinking also that a maniacal commitment to aerobic exercise was not such a bad thing after all.