The Fundamentals of Play Page 9

  Or perhaps I had simply had too much to drink. There were shots to be done with my roommate, shots to be done with Robbins, shots to be done with Daniels, whom I had rashly invited and who had, predictably, come. A guy I didn’t know in a cap was working the door, and another guy in another cap was roundly and vocally dismissing me as “the freak who never got out of vinyl,” when an hour or so into the full swing there was a flurry at the door, and as the song on the stereo ended a clean, dry voice across the room said, “Oh, so this is George Lenhart’s place, then. I’d better introduce Delia, what was it, Ferrier? Delia Ferrier, we’ve just met in the elevator.”

  Not just the song, it seemed, but the entire album’s side had ended, so that as Kate came in with this other girl, the entire party stared across the room at them. Cara McLean, I’d venture to guess, stared hardest of all.

  I went to greet them. The girl with Kate was taller and brunette, with glasses that were rather severe and obscured her eyes; she was dressed all in black. It was a look, and not one I disliked. It impressed me that Toff had procured her when, even more improbably, Harry Lombardi stood up yet again and claimed her as his guest. This he did by shouting her name across the room. “Delia!” But the name was an aural fake; he barely looked at the girl. She seemed to take this with a certain amount of irony, and on this shared note the two of us shook hands.

  “You look familiar,” I said, already too drunk to be embarrassed at starting so poorly. And I would finish worse.

  “We all do,” came her unexpected response.

  “Really.”

  “Yes, except we’ve all dropped a size and started waxing our eyebrows.” She looked straight at me and you could see why she wore the glasses. “New York does that to girls.” I absorbed this as, with his usual finesse, Harry walked heavily—I might now say inexorably—through the crowd to Kate Goodenow. I remember thinking that he walked like a man defeated—a man who, lacking alternatives, keeps going, his shoulders hunched into the wind, his cross on his back. Yet there was something reassuring about his resignation in the midst of all our glib expectations. I hoped he wouldn’t take it too hard when Kate shot him down.

  He stared at her for about three seconds—she was charming the Cap at the door with some nonsense about a cab shortage—before interrupting her with an important bulletin: “I’m Harry.”

  Cara he had utterly forgotten about the instant the door opened. She was left openmouthed and furious on the couch, her knees tucked up underneath her in a provocative pose, now provoking no one.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m Harry.”

  Something about the stolidity with which he repeated this seemed to amuse Kate. She shot me a droll look. “Just ‘Harry’?” she said. “Harry, Harry, quite contrary?”

  Harry failed to get the implication; what was more, he didn’t pretend to get it. I think the latter might have impressed Kate ever so slightly. He said—nothing; he stared at her, unembarrassed, his large head poking out through his shoulders. In the background, music started again, after a moment of static, as the needle touched a new record.

  Kate didn’t have the kind of complexion that blushes, but she lowered her eyes for half a second to indicate where the blush might have come. “Do you have a last name, Harry?” she said softly.

  Harry grunted. “Lombardi.” He took her hand and shook it, methodically, serious, not smiling. Kate fluttered her eyes in my general direction, as if for help, but not particularly wanting help.

  “Kate Goodenow.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure.”

  “And how—”

  “I wenta Dartmouth.”

  “You—you went to Dartmouth with—”

  “Chat Wethers. And George here. They told me about you.”

  “You did? George?”

  “I never said a word.”

  “Well,” Kate said happily, “I’ve never heard of you.”

  “Yeah, I dropped out.”

  Kate seemed to miss a beat as, against all expectations, her curiosity was piqued. I had missed nothing, but I was giving Delia Ferrier short shrift as I observed this encounter. Of course, I thought: Kate would cotton to that fact—his dropping out—as much as I had. It was something new in her world, at least new in her New York world. He was talking so closely to her that she was pressed up against the wall. I stepped forward to assert myself. Instead I heard myself asking what I could get them to drink.

  “You choose,” Kate demurred.

  “I’ll choose,” said Harry. “I know what you want. I’ll get you something good.” He ordered by brand name; fortunately, we had his brand on hand.

  “Shall I help you, George?”

  “I’ll manage,” I said, and realized that my girl had slipped away—as, of course, she ought to have done.

  “All right,” Kate agreed. “I’ll stay and hear more about myself from your charming friend.”

  I tried to press forward, but the way to the kitchen was blocked.

  “You’d be surprised what I know,” Harry asserted.

  “Would I,” she said, unimpressed, not really believing him.

  “Sure—like, Wednesdays were square dancing,” Harry offered. And he began to recite the facts of her childhood like multiplication tables. “Thursdays were Coggywog nights, and Fridays were—wait, hold on! I know this. Fridays were—Fridays were—shit, what were Fridays? Don’t tell me!”

  Kate’s face was immobile but her eyes were paying attention to him, something they almost never did.

  “Don’t tell me! I know this.”

  “Don’t tell him, Kate,” I mumbled. “Don’t tell him what Fridays were.”

  “Fridays were Top of the World,” Kate said. I pushed my way into the throng.

  I laughed at a dirty joke of Robbins’s and was aware of Cara’s unmerited attack on Geoff coming from their bedroom. I agreed with Daniels that all was forgiven—of course, of course—in the interest of friendship, and somewhere between the door and Harry’s top-shelf liquor I understood what had passed between Kate and me on the street before. I labored the ten feet toward the kitchen, and all the time it was dawning on me until I knew it as surely as I knew her name. She would have gone to Paris with me. A large bag of ice was melting in the sink. She would have gone, only I hadn’t seen it quickly enough, or clearly enough. You couldn’t throw a party with three trays of ice. Toff was a good roommate to remember the ice. She would have gone, only I had thought of the money. It was still the same question it had always been. I had missed my chance because of the money. At the moment I’d realized she was playing to my hand, I was down an enormous sum.

  Or so it seemed to me at the time. It is only recently that another idea has come creeping into my consciousness—that it was not the ten thousand dollars I owed Chat but the sum, rather, of my years. Twenty-three was a stupid age, a know-nothing age. It was the age when it seemed quite likely that that kind of debt could have consequences. It was a guilty age. And I was guilty enough already, guilty of the same old thing since grade school, guilty of having come from a family that had had the lack of foresight—the poor taste, really—to come down in the world. It was almost anti-American, losing money the way we had.

  And yet there was Kate, nodding at me across the room, perhaps saying something about me to Harry. Her face hadn’t changed. But to act now? Under false pretenses?

  “Lenhart, how many feminists does it take to change a light-bulb?”

  “I don’t know, Robbins. Is your mother one of them?”

  I gave Kate a pointless little wave through the crowd. It was like the feeling you get in bridge when the bidding ends and you see you are to lay down your hand as dummy. You see you are going to sit this one out. And in my place Harry Lombardi, of all people, had stepped in. I felt my jaw clench with anger. What right had he? I wanted to go over and invoke Wethers’s name, even if he was eight hours north. But there was, of course, no point in mentioning
Chat. Unlike me, Lombardi didn’t owe Chat Wethers a thing. Unlike me, Lombardi had found it more practical to trade debt than acquire it. I took my hands away from the block of ice as the chill penetrated my fingers.

  When I had the two drinks made, I elbowed my way back through the jammed kitchen. At the refrigerator I met Delia Ferrier all in black wedged between the open door and a wall.

  “For me?”

  “No,” I said thoughtlessly, “they’re for Lombardi.” I ought to have taken that as a sign—that with her, I would never get a decent line off.

  “Harry can take care of himself,” she suggested.

  “I meant yes, by the way,” I said, and handed her a drink.

  “I know you did.”

  “Harry brought you?”

  “Invited me. I brought myself.”

  “How’d he happen to—”

  “He thought we might get along.”

  “He’s smarter than he looks.”

  “If you haven’t learned that yet, I can’t help you.”

  “You probably can’t help me, anyway,” I said.

  She had great teeth when she smiled.

  CHAPTER 8

  The party peaked and went inevitably downhill. Toff had invited an unsavory bunch of people from the law firm who kept turning the television on. Daniels got trashed and made further apologies to me while hitting on Robbins’s date. A handful of girls, including Cara, wanted to dance in the helplessly determined way that drunk girls want to dance, and they were dragging people off the couch to dance with them. And in the early hours of the morning Harry had, as it turned out, a final request: “Borrow a pen.” He held up a gnawed ballpoint. “You got a pen? Mine’s out.” I had finally gotten Delia Ferrier onto the couch with me, and I shook him off two or three times. But he was as persistent as a mosquito in a silent room. Excusing myself finally, I went into Toff’s bedroom and rummaged around on his desk, a great pen repository, and found one of the cheap Parkers he liked to use. When I came out I saw that the party had thinned to practically no one. The few that were left had the stupefied air that overtakes a party at which there is nothing left to drink.

  Delia was reclining on the couch, watching one of the remaining pockets of people with her eyebrows raised in a detached air. Her face in repose wore a curious, ready expression; she looked as if she were going to be delighted or appalled by whatever happened next.

  It was painful to watch the other two women interact, or rather fail to. Cara was trying to get her arms around Harry’s neck while he, awkwardly, with both hands on her forearms, attempted to keep her from doing so. “I wanna dance, Henry!” she was yelling. “Come on, le’s dance! Wha’s a party if you don’t dance?” Beside them Kate was standing quite erect, quite sober, with a pleased expression on her face which indicated: “This has been such a nice party, George. I’m so glad I came—it’s really been fun!” She said as much to me, as I joined them and, leaning close to my ear, murmured, “Where did you find him? He’s unbelievable.”

  “Gotta get your number,” Harry asserted. I handed him the pen. Cara took the opportunity of his lowered guard to get her arms around him. “Let’s dance, Henry! I wanna dance!”

  “I don’t give out my number,” Kate said.

  “Address, then.”

  “It’s no party if people don’t dance!”

  “One-ninety East Sixty-sixth Street,” said Kate.

  Harry sat down to write out the address on the back of a business card, squeezing himself onto the couch with Delia and me; Cara moved with him, sitting as he sat, settling for the arm, glowering up at Kate.

  “Apartment fourteen.”

  He didn’t know how to use the pen. He held it too tightly, the way a child holds a crayon, and pressed down hard, so that the point scratched and the ink came out unevenly. It was a small thing but it embarrassed me, and I looked away, the way I’d pretend not to notice when Daniels scraped up his food with his knife at our “team” dinners.

  “Now I’m afraid I must fly.”

  “Coach turning into a pumpkin?” Delia Ferrier remarked.

  “Never,” I asserted. “That will never happen.”

  “Walk out with you,” offered Harry.

  “Oh, no—no, no—I’m gone.”

  He stood up with Cara like a poncho around his neck. “I wanna dance, Henry!”

  “Kate.” It was the first time he said her name to her, and I seemed to hear it anew, all dentals and stops—it was a clean, hard name. “Kate, are you doing a share or anything this summer?” he got out.

  “Am I—? What did you say? Am I ‘doing a share’?” She turned around with a studious frown. “Is that something financial?” I walked her to the door. “I think my investments are sound! At least,” her haughty voice came back to us from the hallway, “they ought to be!”

  When she was gone, we seemed to have lost all impetus for conversation.

  “Good riddance!” said Cara, and no one bothered to reprimand her.

  I was the host and I ought to have broken the silence, but no appropriate comment came to mind.

  Cara seemed to take our silence as an insult. “Fine!” she snapped. “Go home alone!” She stalked off to Toff’s bedroom, whence another quarrel presently arose, followed by Toff’s emerging, saying nothing, walking directly to the front door, and closing it behind him. In the bedroom Cara began to sob.

  Harry, breathing heavily through his mouth, and alternately tucking the business card into his breast pocket and then removing it to gaze on it further, didn’t even seem to hear her.

  “Kate Goodenow strikes again,” remarked Delia Ferrier coolly, from her corner of the couch.

  I very much wished she had not said that; it was a deal breaker for me, that kind of comment about Kate.

  “It’s just—I’ve met her before,” she added.

  “Oh, well, you can’t blame Kate,” I said.

  “Hmm …” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  “No, but you can’t,” I said, wishing I could explain myself without making the situation worse. So many girls, so many people who knew her, thought Kate was a bitch, and would have released a litany of complaints if I had ever indicated the slightest sympathy to their position. She was thought to be shallow, a snob, overprivileged, rude, cold. But Kate herself had hardly any criticisms to make. Occasionally I had slipped, with an offhand remark, disparaging someone we both knew. “You think so?” Kate would say doubtfully, if she even acknowledged the comment. Her mind simply didn’t work that way. She had one litmus test, which she herself was subject to: she hated it when people got in the way of having a good time. The worst indictment Kate could hand down was that someone was “un-fun.” Over the years this had come to seem rather profound.

  Of course, as I have already observed, I was twenty-three. And even at the time, it could be hard to explain to other people, to other girls.

  “I took four classes with her, and she thinks we met in the elevator.”

  “No, but you know what I mean,” I persisted miserably. “You can’t blame her for something like that.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Ferrier. “I see.” She sat forward and gave Harry’s arm a tap. He started in his seat. “Huh.”

  “Shall we share a cab?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You bet. Drop you off on the way home.”

  I showed them to the door, and she and I looked at one another across the threshold for an unhappy moment. Lenhart! Lenhart! What kind of an idiot defends one girl to another? Defends a girl like Kate to a girl like Delia Ferrier? My kind, the evidence overwhelmingly indicated.

  The elevator came. Delia got in and Harry made to follow her when suddenly he remarked, a little too loudly, “You know what? I forgot my jacket.”

  I almost laughed in his face. He was still telling bald-faced lies without any embarrassment at all.

  “We’ll hold the elevator,” Delia said, with the forcibly patient intonation of one who has endured much for a fr
iendship.

  Harry appeared momentarily stumped, as if he hadn’t thought of this possibility. “Uh … you know what? Don’t bother. It might take me a while to find it. George—could you, uh …?”

  “Come on, I’ll put you in a cab,” I volunteered equally impatiently. I always did feel that his rudenesses were reflected onto me.

  It wasn’t until Delia and I were riding down in the elevator that I realized I owed him for this second chance—this moment alone with her. I took her down and a bit too solicitously got her tucked into a taxi: that was easy to do.

  “Listen, can’t I call you?” I said.

  “I’m in the book.”

  “Really?”

  “Really—Ferrier on Ninth Street.”

  “So this wasn’t a total fiasco.”

  She was kind. “Hardly,” she said.

  “Then we have Harry to thank.”

  “Inadvertently.”

  “No, I mean for right now.”

  “So do I.”

  “But he must have gone back to … give us a moment alone,” I suggested.

  “You think so? I’m sure he’s gone to seduce your friend.”

  “Kate?” I nearly cried, at once losing all the ground I had regained.

  I still remember her expression, full of comprehension and foresight, and a touch of a kind of pity I had no interest in but would have to take. I had betrayed myself again.

  “No, George,” Delia said. “Kate’s gone home. I was talking about your homecoming queen.”

  Indeed I met the two of them coming out of the elevator, Harry and Cara, she triumphant, cozy, Harry licking his chops until he saw me and dropped her hand guiltily. That he could on the same night meet Kate Goodenow, after five years of anticipation, and leave with Cara McLean—but perhaps that was the key to his triumphs on the Street. He set his sights high but took what he could get.