The Fundamentals of Play (16 page)

“Don’t you want to go in?” I said.

“No. Not this weekend.”

The way the ground floor was laid out, you could sit in the hot tub and watch television on the big-screen TV at the same time. We made a cozy après-ski party—in the middle of June. Kate seemed to have become a cold-blooded animal that turns the temperature of the environment. “Aren’t you hot?” I asked, perching on the side for one of my breaks.

“No, I could sit here all night.” Her face wasn’t flushed, but her eyes were so bright I worried she would faint.

Like me, Harry could stay in only so long. He trundled up and down the stairs, working the blender and bringing down daiquiris and plates of food from the grill which nobody ate. Every time he came down, he made a big deal of settling in, only to jump up five seconds later with something he had to “take care of.” The room began to smell of barbecued meat. After a few of Harry’s trips the tile floor was covered in water and used towels, and here and there were pink splotches of spilled daiquiri.

When Harry came down a final time, I announced I was going to bed.

“Oh, do you have to get up early for chapel?” Kate inquired. I had risen from the tub to dry off.

“That’s right,” I said. “Acolyte duty tomorrow.”

“Torch or cross?”

“Torch.”

“Harry is a Catholic,” Kate remarked. “Did you know that, George?”

I didn’t say anything.

Our host took a breath and slid his head down the edge of the tub till it was fully submerged. He came up, loudly, for air. “Yup,” Harry said for me.

“I’ll bet you’re a very poor Catholic,” Kate teased him. “Can you say a Hail Mary?”

“Hail Mary, full of Grace,” he recited. “The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women—”

“All right, all right.” Kate thought for a minute. “Can you do the seven deadly sins?”

“Pride, envy, anger, lust, avarice, gluttony, and sloth.”

“Say them again!”

Halfway through the list, Kate began to laugh, a rather derisive laugh. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!” she cried. “The seven deadly sins in a hot tub!”

I’m not quite sure how he did it, but Harry managed to clamp a hand over her mouth and pick her up and get the two of them out of the tub. “Past your bedtime, too,” he grunted.

“No!” Kate protested, and wrenched his hand away. “I don’t want to go to bed! Don’t make me!”

“Come on, Kate—don’t you wanna go to bed?”

“No!”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No!”

“Well, whadda you wanna do?”

“I don’t know …” Her eyes sought mine.

“Let’s dance,” I said. “Fox-trot.”

I took her, dripping, in my arms. She was just the way she had been on my lap in the car—her balance was light but firm—and she let me lead.

“Slow, quick-quick, slow,” chanted Kate. “Slow, quick-quick, slow—but you’re good! Did I know this about you?”

“You did, but you forgot,” I said.

Harry couldn’t stand it and cut in. “Here, let me! I’ll show you some stuff.” He had flipped the stereo on and he began to dance her around clumsily, because he wasn’t tall, and roughly, and to sing the lyrics of a popular song. There was one like him at every high school gym or college party, in every club, on every dance floor: the guy who
thinks he can dance. Not that Harry’s rhythm was bad—it was probably better than mine—he just didn’t know any steps. It took him all of two minutes to get Kate doing the Pretzel.

“Don’t spin me!” cried Kate. “Don’t—you’ll drop me!” Clutching for her as she fell, Harry knocked one of the daiquiri glasses off the side of the tub and it shattered.

“Oh my God, Kate—I didn’t meana—”

From the floor Kate began to laugh the high bright laugh again, and when Harry offered her a hand, she tried to yank him down with her.

“Watcha glass!” Harry yelled, struggling to keep his footing. A line of blood streaked the tile. Kate reached out her hands to him, and he scooped her up in his arms like a bride or a doll.

“God, you’re something, Kate,” he said huskily.

In my elevated consciousness I remember I saw her, kicking in Harry’s arms, as the embodiment of some primal girlhood. I tried to imagine the two of them in bed, and my imagination failed me.

At the door Harry stopped. He stretched his face down to hers. It was too quiet, I thought; I realized he was kissing her. Then Kate spoke up—

“Now, George! You go to bed, too!”

—and I was alone in the room.

In the middle of the night I found myself standing at the deep end of the pool, steeling myself against the cold. I dived in. But the shock never came, and I realized, as I paddled to the shallow end and floated languidly to the top, that the pool was heated, too.

T
he next morning I woke in the fine, condescending mood that comes of believing one is the first awake in a house. I threw on a shirt and a pair of shorts and stole downstairs, not wanting, in my condescension, to wake anyone. I did a few stretches and was contemplating a grand pancake-making gesture when I heard a car in the driveway—
the
car, rather—and who should come through the front door but my host, in a rumpled suit and tie, carrying a box of doughnuts, with the newspapers tucked under his arm like mounted guns.

“You’re up early.”

“No, you are,” I replied.

“Hadda go to Mass. Now I’m going back to bed.” Harry surveyed my attire. “What’re you up to?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a plan,” I admitted.

“Here.” He pressed the keys into my hand. “You wanna drive somewhere, take the car.” He left the
Times
, tucked the Long Island paper under his arm, and trudged upstairs.

I went out to the driveway. I’d been itching to get my hands on the wheel. But the more I thought of it, the more the idea was too stupid, driving around in a car like that with no place to go. And the possibility of running into Robbins or someone else I knew was intolerable. It seemed to me there were two kinds of men in the world: men like Harry, who were ridiculous enough to buy a car like that and drive it; and men like me, who would become ridiculous driving it. I went for a run instead—just like that, in my flat old tennis shoes. I was so out of shape I turned back after a quarter of an hour. When I staggered in, Kate was sitting in the passenger seat of the car with the door open and her feet up through the open window.

“Where’ve you been?” she said crossly. Stretched out like that, her legs looked much longer than they were.

“Down the road and back. Barely.”

“I’ve spoken to Harry. We’re going as soon as you’re ready.”

“Fine,” I said. It was all the same to me whether the weekend had turned on us now or would turn on us later, for it would turn on us. That much I had understood from the outset.

We packed the car in ominous silence. Harry couldn’t do anything right. He beat on his suitcase with a frenzied determination to make it fit. “It’ll go! It’ll go! It went in before!”

The car itself seemed to have changed sides: it was no longer a favorite toy but an eyesore of ostentation. It was annoying to have Kate sit on my lap, whether she liked it or not. There is nothing more depressing than having to hold a carefree pose when one is full of cares.

Breakfast in Sag Harbor cheered us a little, and we might still have gotten away in the hopeful hours before noon except that in dropping us off, Harry had parked in a lot behind the main street, and to get the car we had to walk by the harbor front. The marina was crowded, it being June; the masts stretched on like a forest of emaciated trees.

“Oh!” cried Kate. “Let’s go and look at the boats!”

“Sure, sure,” Harry agreed. “Whatever you want, Kate. We got plenty-a time.” But he looked at his watch as if to convince himself of the fact.

We walked down the pier along the water, stopping here and there to admire the boats. It was a perfect day for looking at boats. The stalled front had passed, there was an eight- or ten-knot breeze out of the southwest, and in Shelter Island Sound a fleet of one-designs were racing; you could see the uniform set of white triangles tacking and dipping in the distance. “There must be a regatta on,” remarked Kate. Her voice had a bright, hard tone, as if it alone could persuade the day to behave itself, as if she were saying, “Now isn’t this pleasant?” the way you speak to a child, to force him into good behavior after a temper tantrum. “What do you think they’re sailing, George?”

I guessed the name of a racing sloop. “Do they sail them out here?”

Kate shook her head. “You’re wrong, George,” she said lightly. “It’s a dinghy regatta.”

“Dinghies?” I protested. “They wouldn’t look that big from here!”

“Still,” insisted Kate, “I say it’s a dinghy regatta. The hotshot skipper’s a fourteen-year-old from the high school out here.”

“The hotshot skipper’s a fat old man from Greenwich,” I countered happily.

We ambled on. We passed a pretty sloop with teak decks and a black mast. A gray-haired group having a picnic on their old wooden yawl raised their glasses to us. “That’ll be us someday,” remarked Kate. A little farther along there was a tender the size of a small house.

“Talk about big—get aloada that!”

Harry had been trailing a little ways behind us, and it seemed to startle Kate when he spoke up then. She turned around with a vague look of annoyance, as if she’d been jostled in a crowd.

He pointed toward an enormous cruising boat—the companion, evidently, which the power yacht tended. I made this assumption when I saw a boy come down from the top deck of the tender and hop across to the other boat. There was no denying the sailboat was
huge—120, 130 feet, and fat through the middle like a giant’s bathtub. Her hull was painted bright aqua, in contrast with which a lurid hot pink script proclaimed her name:
Oral Fixation
. At one time people had named their boats
Reliant
or
Courageous
or
Intrepid
. But nowadays people would name a boat any stupid name. They would name it after a rock band or a bad movie; they would name it after a psychological disorder. People would build ignoble boats and give them stupid names.

“Whaddaya think?”

“It’s not my kind of thing,” I said. She was tricked out with every kind of gimmick: Jet Skis, mountain bikes, a sea kayak, a rubber raft.

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “It might be fun.”

I didn’t answer, as she was only enjoying being contradictory.

“How much you think the owner’s worth?” Harry asked.

“A hell of a lot,” said Kate. The little tour had improved her spirits immeasurably, and like most people with money, Kate loved to talk about how much money people had.

“Why don’t you ask him?” I said.

“Who?”

“The boy.”

“You think he works on the boat?” she said.

“Works?” I said. “I bet it’s the guy’s son.”

“I bet you a dollar he works on the boat.”

“Dollar it is.” We shook hands on the bet.

“He’s gone below.” Indeed the boy had vanished from view.

As we waited, I chided Kate for not taking a more democratic view of the world. “But my view
is
the more democratic,” she protested.

“You think the boy’s a little lackey,” I said.

“I think he’s a kid with a great job,” she said. “You always romanticize things, George—unnecessarily.”

The stereo came on playing Caribbean music, and a few minutes later the boy reappeared through a hatch in front of the mast. He was barefoot now, and began to spray off the top deck.

We stood watching him; it is always pleasant to watch someone take care of a boat.

When he came around to our side of the bow, the sun was to our right and the boy’s profile was toward us, outlined by a long lock of hair. “So, ask him,” I prodded Kate.

“Why—”

“Go on.” She didn’t answer. I was about to call out myself when the spray of water stopped, because the boy had let it stop, and as the last few drops evaporated into the air, Kate clutched my arm and my own heart began to pound wildly. The boy bore a dead-on resemblance to Nick Beale.

“It’s not him,” Kate murmured faintly, steadying herself on my arm. “My God, I thought it was Nick.”

It was Nicko ten years earlier. The kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but he had Nick’s brown coloring; he had Nick’s thin, lithe body. He had Nick’s hair in his eyes, and as he looked at us with no more than mild curiosity, he had the same habit: he put his hand under his shirt and absently stroked his stomach, squinting into the sun. It was not only Nick’s gesture but the universal gesture of thin pothead boys with hair in their eyes who worked on boats.

“Do you work on this boat?” Kate demanded, going up to him.

The boy looked her over in a squinting manner. “I do, indeed.” You could hear the derision even in the one phrase; you could see he thought we were tourists—non-sailors—going to waste his time with foolish questions.

“You do? Where’s it out of?” She walked around to the stern, very businesslike. “Says Anguilla. Is that true?”

The kid shrugged. “Guy’s from L.A.”

I was watching him to see if he would do something else like Nick. I was sure he would if we waited long enough; I think Kate was half waiting for him to recognize her. When we didn’t go away, the kid turned the hose back on, and when we still didn’t go away, he stopped the water again and said dubiously, “You wanna … check her out or something?”