The Fundamentals of Play (15 page)

“Kate,” I began, “about the other day—on the street, I mean …” But she stopped me with a look, a stubborn hardening of her eyes that yielded to disappointment. I closed my eyes and turned away from her. It was the disappointment I couldn’t stand.

The only thing I had that was different from the others was that I knew it was a game—all of it—and I played it with her. It wasn’t a game for Chat or Nick, certainly not for Harry. But I had played it with her from the moment I learned the rules. I wasn’t supposed to forget them now.

“Come on, then,” I said, “let’s go see the rest.”

“George?” Kate had moved from the dresser and she wasn’t looking at me, but at the square of the sea visible through the window.

“Yes?”

“You know.… You’re a very good sport, you know.”

I nodded. It was cold comfort, but I preferred my comfort cold. She knew that about me, perhaps better than anyone. In that way, we understood each other.

“Yes, dear,” I said after a moment. I ran my hands down the coverlet to smooth it out for Harry later.

Downstairs, traditional living and dining rooms had been abandoned in favor of one vast carpeted space minimally furnished with a long table and chairs at one end and a long, beige, L-shaped sofa “unit” at the other. Along the far outside wall, a pair of floor-length blinds, also in beige, sheathed a length of sliding glass doors. These opened onto the backyard. You could just see the pool, curving like an amoeba, and the tall Southampton hedge that flanked it, the one natural touch, the one touch of authenticity.

“Oh, my gosh—come, come and look at this!” came Kate’s voice from below me. “I’ve found it!”

I went through a large, new kitchen, glittering with appliances, and down into a basement room.

Kate was standing in the middle of the room pointing, with a strange expression on her face. “It” was a large sunken Jacuzzi, landscaped by a mass of green plants and topiaries. “Look—watch.” She flipped a switch on the wall and the overhead light changed from white to bright red. “What do you think it’s for, George?” She flipped it to white again. “Pornography?”

“No.” I laughed. “It’s to keep warm after you get out.”

“To keep … warm?” She’d hardly had a sip at brunch, but she was very nearly giddy. I was suddenly giddy too, in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol. She turned on the spigots of the Jacuzzi to show me the overwhelming force of the water pressure. I laughed, nervously, and then she did, and we both stood there giggling.
It was as if in that house we had been granted an unexpected reprieve, which we weren’t sure we deserved.

Upstairs, Harry started to call for us from the driveway.

“Guys? Guys? Hey, guys?” He sounded like a kid who wants to call off the hide-and-seek game. “Guys? Guys? I got mixers! Kate? George? Gonna make drinks in the blender! Guys?”

I caught her eye.

“Be quiet,” she mouthed, pointing toward a closet in the corner of the room. We crept over and I opened the door. It was a linen closet, stuffed with clean towels. Kate snatched them from the shelves two at a time, dumping them behind the Jacuzzi, mashing the top ones down so they wouldn’t show. I gave her a leg up and she wedged herself, doubled over, into the middle shelf. “Ow! Dammit!” She had scraped herself on the way in. I crouched myself down onto the closet floor below her and grabbed the door shut.

We could hear Harry searching the upstairs with increasing desperation. “Guys? Hey, guys? You out at the pool, guys?”

“Christ!” Kate hissed. “My neck is in
pain
!”

“Do you want out?”

“Of course not! Do you want to ruin it?”

It was the Kate I had met ten years before—the old wicked Kate, skipping chapel in the boys’ dorm. And just like then, my heart was pounding with the fear of being caught and the joy of the secret.

We gave up after half an hour, when we heard Harry dialing the Southampton police. I had never seen Kate so disdainful.

“But how was I supposed to know you were hiding down there? I mean, why would you go and do a thing like that?”

“Why
wouldn’t
you?” Kate said coldly.

The ocean air drove the humidity away. Upstairs, Kate turned on the shower. I meant to get that swim and changed into my trunks but dithered instead, eyeing the blue water, circling the pool. I gave up, finally, and took up chaise-longue position and a beer. It was touching to see how solicitous Harry was of a guest’s comfort. He toiled between
the kitchen and pool, panting a little, getting out the grill, setting it up, lugging a bucket of ice poolside, poking beers into it. On the last trip he produced an opener and a pair of cushions. “Sit up a minute. There you go. Isn’t that better? Huh? Isn’t that way better? Make yourself at home, George—really, I mean it. Comfort is everything. You want another beer? I got lotsa beer in the fridge after this, and if we run out there’s another fridge downstairs.”

“Why don’t you have one with me?” I suggested.

He passed a hand over his head distractedly. “Oh—yeah. Yeah, I’m going to. Thanks.” I opened a bottle and passed it to him. He took a long drink, and the Lombardi grin flashed on as he surveyed his surroundings. “This is it, isn’t it, George? I mean, this is
really
it: barbecue by the pool, beers in the great outdoors. It doesn’t get much better than this, does it?”

“I can’t imagine it does,” I said.

“I come out here, I think to myself, Christ—this is really it!” And yet almost before he had gotten the words out, the grin had ebbed from his face. He took a cigarette out of his breast pocket and smoked it miserably.

The shirt, a muted mauve, was cut Hawaiian-style, with a long open collar, and went halfway down his shorts. Like many men who had learned to dress at the firm, he hadn’t quite mastered the leisurewear. The old trader’s habits were catching up with him, and he had put on another five or ten pounds.

“You comfortable, George? You need anything?”

Embarrassed, as if he could read my thoughts, I took a swig of beer. There were details about his life that I had always wanted to know. I found myself asking him, point-blank, to fill me in.

“You serious?” I kept prodding him when he would have changed the subject, and so that evening, on the lawn of Harry’s rental, I finally got the full story of his astronomical rise in finance. Harry didn’t brag, but the false modesty was gone, perhaps because he was moving on now and could think of the Wall Street chapter as closed. He was the kind of person who is forever passing the present into the
past at a desperate, sweaty-palmed rate, like nothing so much as a kid playing hot potato; nothing was real to him unless it was over, lost, cast in color-by-number sunset yellow and orange, and he was as comfortable in the nostalgia of the past as he was ill at ease in the present.

“Gonna tell it to you straight, George, ’cause I know you won’t do anything with it. I know you just wanna know.”

“Go,” I said. “I’m listening.”

I had been right about systems.

After quitting Dartmouth, he’d gone home to Long Island, lied about his age, and talked himself into a summer job at Broder. “Don’t ask me how I did it, ’cause I’m not sure myself. I kept my head down, that’s for sure—did my work, made sure I didn’t make enemies. So after a couple of months I kinda got a reputation, you know? I was, like, the psycho computer guy. Everybody on the floor knew you went to Lombardi when things fucked up. Lombardi would deliver. Lombardi would put in the extra time.”

When he fixed a systemwide bug that had stumped his bosses, he caught the eye of one of the partners, Donald McCance, and McCance took him under his wing. He was trading by Christmas. He hadn’t exactly lied about college, just fudged the details—he certainly didn’t look too young to have graduated—and by the time the truth about his degree surfaced, first in murmurs around the trading floor, then in self-congratulatory tones upstairs, he had already made the firm so much money that his lack of a college education became the stuff of insider legend. McCance had known from the beginning; he had guessed the truth and called Harry on it, and with a trader’s instinct for a position he should get out of, Harry had been straight with the guy. Most of the old guys took it as a good joke, but it just about floored the Ivy Leaguers. Lombardi had done it the old-school way, back office to front, no B.A. That took
balls
.

As for the new company, I still couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had always been a bit of a technophobe, and proud of it. At least I made the most of that attitude, for it was the last year one could wholly get away with it.

“You don’t hafta understand it, but understand this: it’s gonna be huge.”

“What is?”

“The computer network—the interconnected networks. The ‘World Wide Web.’ And I’m going to be providing a, a, like an entrance to it. Or like, like a navigation tool. A, ah, whatchama call it—on a boat. You know.… A six ton—”

“You mean a sextant?”

“Yeah! Just like that, right? You’ll use it to get around. Navigate your way through choppy seas to a new world.” He took a swig of beer. “I got guys throwing money at me. ’Nother frienda mine came in for fifty yesterday.”

“Is that the minimum?” I inquired.

“Naw, I’d take half that, a quarter that. Hell, I’d take anything from you, George. You wanna give me ten, twenty thousand, I’ll put it in water and grow it like a Chia Pet.”

“By when?”

“Mmm … better be by Christmas. You know,” he added, juggling the barbecue fork, the cigarette, and the beer, and still managing to get his hand to his mouth to bite off a hangnail, “I’m pretty sure Chat Wethers is going to come in for fifty thousand.”

“You spoke to Chat?” I said, surprised. “Recently?”

“Yeah, we took Chat out to dinner the other week. He’s a great guy, that Chat—a real original.”

“So the three of you …? Wasn’t it—a bit—”

“Naw,” Harry said casually. “Chat’s not gonna get upset over some girl.”

“Some—girl?” I repeated blankly.

“Yeah, you know”—he flashed a guilty grin—“pals before gals.”

Even the expression was Chat’s. Harry eyed me over the top of his beer. “I helped him outta something once, you know.”

“You,” I said, trying to get it straight. “Helped Chat.” I seemed to be out of my league. I couldn’t seem to keep up.

“Yeah … in China.”

“Oh.”

“He’s a funny guy, that Chat. He just about attacks this girl—”

“What? You mean a Chinese girl?” I said.

“Naw, it was nothing like that. She was like us, over there with the firm. You know, I take it back. What do I know, right?” He snapped the grin on; it had never looked more grotesque. “It was just, this girl … she was so, so, so drunk. You ever have that, George, when they’re just so drunk it’d be, it’d be … well, you just can’t figure out how it would be … enjoyable?”

He looked so guilty by this point I could barely look him in the eye. But with Harry you never knew what that look meant. Some men achieve guilt; many more have it thrust upon them by their fathers. But Harry had been born guilty.

“How exactly,” I asked with distaste, “did you ‘help him out’?”

“Aw, it was no big deal. I just took the girl out to dinner and cooled her off a little …” He left a rather pointed ellipsis. “It was a really nice dinner, I’m telling you. I musta spent three hundred bucks, with the wine.”

“Did you.”

“Oh, yeah.… Shit, what’m’I’unna do! This thing finally gets going and Kate’s still upstairs!”

“Why don’t you drink another beer.”

Harry contemplated this. “Okay. Okay, good idea. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll drink a beer.”

We were on our third or fourth when the screen door banged and Kate flip-flopped out into the evening, combing her wet hair into straight lines. She was wearing a man’s shirt, a long white oxford shirt, and she had her bathing suit on underneath.

Despite the setting, I got to my feet. “Will you go swimming with me?”

“No,” Kate said. “I just took a shower.” Harry glanced furtively at her and away, as if she were someone else’s girlfriend.

“You can take another one.”

“No, I don’t think I’ll swim at all this weekend. I’ll tell you what I’d like to do—I’d like to go get in the hot tub.”

Harry beamed. “You mean it? Great! Lemme go down and get it all going and everything and you guys can come down.”

“What about the grill?”

“Aw, hell, it doesn’t matter, George. We can eat anytime. Anytime we want. We got no hurry, do we? We got all night! There’s no need to rush things, is there?” But he himself was in a rush and panted off to the screen door.

I retook my chair feebly. I felt the old sense of vertigo returning. I couldn’t get my head around any of it: Harry’s having come to Chat’s rescue, Chat and Harry and Kate’s having had a pleasant outing together in New York. It was as if the world had suddenly turned professional, and all engagements were to be of a business nature, and those who struggled along as I did, with a remedial—or perhaps a romantic—conceptualization of how things worked, would soon be obsolete.

Kate sat down at the foot of my chair facing the pool and dangled her feet in the water. I kept focused on her hair. It reassured me, somehow, that the top of her head was ash-blond to the scalp.

“Sip of your beer?”

I passed it over her head. Kate took a sip and held it up, and we shared the rest of it as the last of the sun set through Harry’s hedge. You could smell the next-door neighbors’ barbecue through the hedge, and hear them jumping in and out of their pool and crying out. A child screamed, “Cannonball!” and there was an emphatic splash.

“Did you have a pool growing up, George?”

“No,” I said.

“No? I thought—in the country—you might have had a pool.”

“No.”

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

“We lived at the school,” I reminded her.

“You lived—”

“At the Rectory.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Kate said. But her boredom with the subject made it seem as if she hadn’t heard.

She set her legs on the surface of the water and let them break the surface and float down to the side of the pool.