The Fundamentals of Play (21 page)

“You must miss those summers,” I said. “You and Nick.”

“Miss them? Oh, we still go there,” Kate corrected me.

I struggled to explain. “No, but I mean—the high school summers, and before. They must have been—great.” I was going to say “carefree,” or something that I hoped would prompt Kate into giving her childhood a name, but somebody switched a light on behind us and at the illumination it gave to her clean, practical profile, I shied from the word.

“Yes, they were great,” Kate concurred. She let herself have a smile over the memories—I think it was the closest I’d ever seen her come to nostalgia—and there wasn’t anything more than contentment on her face when she added, “But now is so much fun, too. You know?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

The past was fun; now was fun. We cracked open some more beers from the case at our feet.

The thing was, I’m sure Nicko would have agreed.

“N
ick Beale was a very good-looking kid,” Chat had said, turning to me at the first red light between Nick’s sister’s and the highway. “He never went through the awkward stage. It was very unfair.”

That was the premise. The story followed. Chat must have told it over and over, polishing and embellishing, making it more his own. Each of the Cold Harbor kids must have had his own version; each of the parents as well. It was too good a story not to repeat.

“All the moms were in love with him when he was like eight or nine. They used to go down to the wharf and have him fish their lobsters out, and if he wasn’t there they’d ask Ma Beale, ‘Isn’t Nicko working today?’ ‘Playin’ hooky,’ she’d say. ‘Kid’s just like his father.’ Ma worked behind the short-order counter. She smoked when all our moms quit, and the ash always needed ashing and looked like it was about to fall on us or the food—the lobster rolls, you know, or the hot dogs. Pa Beale was a lobsterman. Oldest kid Timmy took after him.
Deb got pregnant, had an abortion, dropped out. Donny got away, went halfway through Maine on a hockey scholarship. Now he delivers boats for people, works some charter line down in the Caribbean. Nick was a mistake. Ma had him when she was forty-something and Pa was in his fifties, looked about a hundred. Fat. Could barely get in and out of the boat. Needed Nick to help him.

“It just happened there were a bunch of us Nick’s age. Cold Harbor baby boom, I guess. There was me, Katie and Vivi, the Palls, Jess Brindle and the step-Brindles, Jay Cushing—he only came up every other summer—Tim Hertzlich (guy had a cute sister). And Nicko used to hang out with us. We’d play roofball down the wharf with him. Our moms would be like, Go and play with Nicko while I talk to Ma. He used to ride his bike over to Chillyick and rig a boat and take it out and sail in the fleet with us. Nobody said anything. One time this instructor tried to pull rank, and she got laughed off the water. We used to have races at the end of the lessons. Nick won more than anyone else, and at first I thought it was talent, but then I realized it was because he cared. It was kind of sad how much he cared. He wouldn’t just win the races; he’d win, like, the cone drill and the tacking duels. He’d win the capsize drill, for God’s sake. And he always got to the dock first and got his boat unrigged first. It was annoying as hell.

“The moms used to watch out for him, make sure he got invited to stuff. I remember one time my mom screamed my head off because I invited a bunch of kids to go sailing on my dad’s boat for my birthday and there’s Nick Beale standing on the shore watching us go off. Mom took him home and fed him my fucking birthday cake. He ate the whole goddamn thing. She said she felt so bad for him, he was so thin. The thing that pissed me off is he just was thin. It wasn’t like he was starving. He wasn’t some Victorian fucking pauper. Ma Beale fried him up a huge fried dinner every night, for fuck’s sake. But you couldn’t go telling that to my mom or Mrs. Brindle—they’d go ballistic. We all knew it was something about trying to make up for his having to stay there when we went away, but beyond that we didn’t
get it. Christ, what does a kid know. I hated going home in the fall. I used to cry in the car the whole way back to the city.

“We started partying when we were around twelve or thirteen. Nick knew about that, too. He was always one up on us. He could get Timmy to buy for us, and he could get pot off his sister. And he knew how to smoke it. Ha! Then he got to go on my dad’s boat all the time. We’d have the launch drop us off at
Rum Punch
and row the dinghy back. We used to get baked off our asses and look at the stars and think up funny boat names. Charles Pall wanted to name his
Morning Wood
. Isn’t that good? ‘Morning Wood.’

“This was just the boys. The girls didn’t party, really, not that young. They, you know, hung out at home more. They had slumber parties. Once in a while, one of the older girls would come out with us. One of the sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds. Marnie Pall—God, she was gorgeous. If anyone was getting any play, though, it was with the au pairs. There was this Swedish girl one summer. ‘Please to help me with my rucksack.’ Jesus. But mostly we’d see ’em—I mean the real girls—at square dancing Wednesday nights.

“Pa Beale was Caller. Every Wednesday at the yacht club, right-hand star, allemande left, allemande right, swing your corner, do-si-do your own. Warm up with Alley Cat. Close down with the Virginia reel. Dads and daughters. Old slacker kids with old slacker kids. Mr. Cushing with Mrs. Pall,
quel scandale, quel scandale
. So anyway, one night Pa doesn’t show up. Guy’s never missed a Wednesday in like forty years. They find him down the wharf, dead on the floor by a barrel of chum. Heart attack. It must have been his third or fourth. Big surprise, the guy ate lard for breakfast and smoked about a carton a day.

“Nick disappears. Steals a whaler and takes off for three days. Nobody knew where he went, and he never told. The girls wrote him these stupid little notes with flowers in them and like, haikus. They rode their bikes over to the Beales’ and shoved them in the mailbox because they were too scared to knock on Ma’s door. That’s the first time I heard about him and Kate. Some stupid girl told me how sorry
she felt for Kate Goodenow. I said, ‘Why Kate?’ And she was like, ‘Well, obviously.’ I bet she just liked him. I don’t think Nick could have even said who she was. I don’t think Nick could have told her from Jess Brindle or Heidi or any of them.

“Next Wednesday there’s a big meeting, the dads go to the club to decide what they’re going to do for Pa. I went with my dad because Mom was away. I was the only kid there. They planned a whole big memorial service, but I don’t remember if they ever had it. Maybe they had it and the kids didn’t go. That was it, we went up to the Hertzlichs’ and partied—that was it. Played quarters on the kitchen floor, went up to Top of the World and got fucked up, probably, I don’t know …

“At the meeting Artie Goodenow, Mr. Goodenow stands up and says what about taking up a collection to help out Ma—pay off the mortgage, put Nick through school, something like that. It’s totally fucking crazy. Everybody jumps on the bandwagon. Everybody’s forking over a couple thousand. My mom gave her own donation besides my dad’s, and she wasn’t the only mom who did. In less than twenty-four hours they’ve got fifty thousand dollars. Mr. Goodenow’s the ringleader and he’s taking suggestions, and next week when they meet again—still no square dancing—he stands up and says, ‘Why don’t we send Nick Beale to boarding school?’

“And that’s what they did. St. Paul’s? Exeter? No, that would have been pushing it a little. Katie and one of her friends from home were going to Chatham, and I’ll bet you anything she begged her dad to send Nick there, too. Daddy Goodenow is loving it. Overnight the guy’s a fucking Pygmalion. Calls up admissions, pulls the requisite strings, does the give-a-kid-a-chance routine, poor-family routine, says ‘potential’ a lot, Nick’s in like Flynn.”

Closing my eyes against the oncoming traffic, I knew the answer before the question, that one could never say was his going for the better or the worse.

“Now you know as well as I do, George,” Chat went on, with the arrogant air of one who knows, “that a lot of people reinvent themselves in boarding school. The whole school knows you when you go
in and the whole school knows you when you leave. Maybe you won’t touch a drop when you go in and you leave filching the chapel wine. And maybe you spend four years as an Exeter loser and the next four years at Harvard name-dropping Exeter for prep-tool credibility. And maybe you go in wearing flammable slacks and leave wearing Nantucket reds. I knew a guy at Hotchkiss who got ragged on for wearing sixty/forty shirts. Guy’s mom had bought them for him because she thought they’d be more ‘practical’ than hundred-percent cotton. Kid took those twenty practical shirts out behind the dorm one day and set them on fire. The disciplinary committee was like: ‘Why didn’t you at least give them to charity?’

“Nicko goes in, he’s got dork-out L.L. Bean outlet-wear and this green blazer. It wasn’t hunter green, either. It wasn’t the green of the
forests
. I guess Goodenow was a little sketchy on the details of shipping the kid off. They made a big deal of presenting Nicko with a patch from the yacht club to wear on his jacket pocket. Never did inquire if he had a jacket. He was supposed to write letters to Mr. Goodenow, and Goodenow was going to forward them to the others—the Association, or whatever the fuck it was they called it.

“The unbelievable thing was, he pulls it off. He’s just one of those kids who … pull it off.”

For a moment the obvious pleasure Chat took in the narrative seemed to desert him. In the fading daylight his long white face registered the utter inequity of adolescence: that after five years, nothing intervening—not even the visit we had just paid Deb—had changed the fact that Nick Beale had been born cool, while Chat and the rest of us could only hope to achieve it.

“In about three weeks Nick’s the big hero. By Christmas it’s
the
thing to wear the green blazer. Guys fight over it. Everybody walks around barefoot the way Nick does until it gets too cold and they wimp out. In the spring Nick’s the hot little skipper on the sailing team. They went undefeated and beat us in team racing for the high school championship. And of course it doesn’t hurt that he and Kate are friends from Maine.

“She was the perfect little girl first year away. Sailed J.V.; remedial
math; French Three; string bracelet; Jerry-bears on her notebooks drawn by Charlie Pall … 
headbands
. They started going out around March break. Holding hands, smooching after the dance. No one can decide who’s luckier, him or her, her or him. He makes her a tape, and every single girl who’s even halfway friends with Kate gets a copy made, and most of those girls still have that tape today, ‘Groovy Toons for Kate from Nick.’ Later there was a ‘More Groovy Toons.’ ‘Magic Carpet Ride,’ ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ … saw her at a lacrosse game in the spring.

“They were king and queen all summer, too; the rest of us were going to tennis camp, summer school—I guess we made some effort at being productive. Kate and Nick were sailing instructors. They just sailed their 420 and hung out on the porch of the yacht club. Kate was such a baby. She still couldn’t party with us. She and Vivi had to be home at eight. Artie Goodenow didn’t even know they were going out, she and Nick. They used to sneak out to the big boat and fool around. A couple times in the summer Goodenow had a talk with Nick about getting his grades up, but everybody’d figured it would take him a while to get up to speed, and they all commented on his appearance—‘vastly improved.’

“I only went up a few times that summer. I asked Nick how he liked Chatham, and he said, ‘It’s all right. The sailing’s decent and Kate’s there.’ He didn’t know he was supposed to have”—Chat smirked—“great expectations.

“And now Sex—heh, heh—rears its ugly head.” Chat cracked open a can of beer from Deb’s six-pack and took a long, thirsty swallow. “Nick was ‘experienced.’ The rumor was that he had lost it when he was twelve with one of Deb’s friends—as a joke at some party. There was a girl in Wamatuck he was supposed to sleep with on vacations, and I guess at some point Kate figured it out. Nick said he didn’t understand what it had to do with her, he said it was two separate things—he told everyone who would listen, and I honestly believe he meant it, but that only made it worse, and anyway Kate had convinced herself that she was going to have to sleep with him to stay
going out with him. And by now she wanted to keep him more than ever. Nick was—crazy. I heard he used to whip up frozen drinks in the kitchenette blender, and if a teacher came by, he’d offer them a glass.

“So she had it all planned out in her girly way. She wanted them to go down to New York some weekend her parents were away and sleep in her bedroom at home. But Nick didn’t know that part of the plan. So one Saturday night he took her out behind the science building and had sex with her.”

There was a long pause. I thought of a girl called Hallie Dryer.

“Kate was very … thin,” Chat said finally. “Very thin. And she got thinner.” With his free hand he picked absently at a blemish on his chin.

For the wrap-up Chat had adopted a soothingly businesslike tone, like the one Mr. Goodenow must have used to explain to his constituents that the experiment had failed.

“What can I say—you know the rest. Nick didn’t get asked back after their junior year. The rest of us were gunning for the Ivies; Nick didn’t care. Nobody had told him what came next. The money was mostly gone, and with Nick slacking his way through Chatham, nobody felt like putting up more. Mr. Goodenow told my dad he’d figured the kid would work hard, maybe get a scholarship somewhere decent. Nobody counted on his not caring at all, or his not ever caring.”

After a moment, I said: “They let him finish out the year.”

My interruption seemed to annoy Chat. He sped up, then cursed the car in front of him. It must have disconcerted him to be reminded that I had been there for this part of the story, that I could bear witness. He seemed to take no notice of the fact: somehow if I had been there, his story couldn’t have been true. And yet it was. I knew, because I
had
been there.