The Fundamentals of Play (26 page)

T
he door closed too loudly, as if she’d been going to slam it and had then thought better of it. Coming out of the bathroom once, I had caught her and asked her not to slam it again; our relations had been rather cooler since.

Cara’s high heels clicked on the parquet floor and then she made her entrance: the righteously offended woman. It was lovely to see her modify this in a flash of opportunism when she spotted Harry weeping.

“Hello, Cara,” I said.

“George,
hi
”—cozy, the good sport, finding nothing curious in the situation—“how’s it going?”

Harry gave another great snuffle and arranged his features into a dull placidity. “Cara.” He cleared his throat with determination. “Cara, how are you?”

“Fine, fine—just fine—great. Didn’t expect to find
you
here.”

“Yeah.” Harry gave a forced laugh. “Keeping George out of trouble.”

“We all do that! Georgie keeps us busy with that, don’t ya, George!” Her lips turned up to indicate gaiety, but her eyes were working a million miles an hour, drawing conclusions—leveraging, as they said in the office, her assets. She pranced farther into the room. “Hope I’m not interrupting!”

From the couch Harry made a slow, indifferent assessment. “You look good,” he offered.

“Aw, Henry—”

But he was right. The summer was the right time for a body like hers, and she was tanned to within an inch of her life. Everything else was frosted, her hair, her nails—I thought suddenly of the big boat in Sag Harbor: it wasn’t my kind of thing, her look, but you had to give it credit.

“No, I mean it. How you been?”

“Good! I been good! Real good.”

I was all set to ask her to leave, to save Harry more embarrassment. But as I got up to fix the drinks, it dawned on me that Cara was just the thing you needed at a time like this; she was just what the doctor ordered. I looked over at Harry, and he was kind of grunting and laughing at the things she said.

I found a stray beer for Cara and made two more feeble vodka tonics for Harry and me.

“That all you got, huh?” she said. “Too bad we weren’t at my place. I’ve got my collection. I collect all kinds of alcohol, so no matter what somebody wants, they can always have it.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Harry.

He dragged the recliner over and we all sat down and smoked a cigarette. It was static in the room, and yet comfortable somehow. “Hey,” said Harry, “why don’t blondes like vibrators?” He paused a beat. “Too hard on the teeth.”

“My virgin ears!” Cara objected. “Please!”

“Ha, ha, ha,” said Harry. “You used to tell—”

“Shut up!” she cut him off. Then she snickered and said, “All right, listen up. What do a tornado and a redneck divorce have in common?”

“You’re bad, Cara, you know that.”

“Somebody’s gonna lose a trailer!”

“God, even George liked that one,” remarked Harry.

They went on like that—blondes, feminists, rednecks. Then Harry wanted to do a card trick, so I found the cards. Then Cara tried to do one but it didn’t come out right. “That’s not your card?”

“It’s not my card,” I said.

“Are you sure it’s not your card? It’s gotta be your card!”

“It’s not my card.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think I know what card I picked.”

“Don’t laugh, it’s not funny!”

“It is funny,” said Harry. “It’s fucking hysterical!”

“George, tell him not to laugh at me! I’m gonna kill you if you laugh one more time!” Cara stood up and play-punched him.

Her body had been stair-mastered and sculpted and treadmilled into its lean, taut, menacing form, and the very presence of it was like a compliment, and Harry was man enough to take the compliment. As for me, I liked her more that night than ever before. Cara could sense my indulgence and she began to tease me and tap my arm to emphasize a point, and then she and Harry put their heads together because they were going to set me up, they were going to find a girl for me, a really great girl.

“I got tons of friends for you, Georgie! If you’d only ever asked. If you woulda said something, I coulda had you introduced to all my girlfriends by now!”

“George wouldn’t like your friends,” Harry said.

“That’s an obnoxious thing to say!”

“He wouldn’t,” Harry said, taking a last drag of his cigarette.

Some time later we had run out of card tricks and jokes and Harry had taken off his jacket and his tie and he was still hot.

“Whatta you have the A.C. on?” Cara asked me.

“I don’t know—it’s Toff’s.”

“And so you’re not allowed to touch it? Please!” She rose and
clicked into Toff’s bedroom. “I cranked it way up,” she said when she came back. “
Way
up.”

“Thank God for that!” Harry said.

“C’mere.” Cara scooted to the corner of the couch so she could lay a hand on his forehead. “Jeez, you’re hot. You sure you’re not sick or anything?”

“Naw. I’m not sick. I’m just hot.”

There was a silence then, of a kind that I hadn’t heard since college but that anyone who has ever had a roommate could not fail to understand. And as always with this kind of silence, I wondered how I had failed to hear it earlier, and I had the same sensation I had always had, though it lasted only a second or two. It was like being slapped in the face. I mumbled something about having to be up early and stood up to excuse myself, taking my glass with me.

“Don’t go to bed now, George!” cried Cara predictably.

“Yeah, George,” Harry breathed, “you should stay up with us.”

With my back to them I raised my glass to demur and to say good night. I didn’t want to turn around and see the guilty gladness on their faces.

In the early hours of the morning I woke to hear them moving on the couch. They were talking still, murmuring to each other in low voices. I heard Harry say, “You are truly heaven-sent.” It seemed to me the one compliment that could make Cara blush.

But the night was not quite over. Coming out of my bedroom at six or seven, I met Harry sneaking through the living room.

“Jesus! I thought you were the goddamn boyfriend!”

“Toff’s
home
?” I said.

“He’s in bed with her! I’ve been hiding in the fucking closet for an hour!”

“So get the hell out of here,” I hissed.

“I can’t—I can’t find my shoes!”

“Borrow a pair of mine,” I said grimly.

“I can’t! I can’t! No offense, George, but these are four-hundred-dollar loafers from Italy that you can only buy …”

At the door he stuffed his tie into his pocket, licked his hand, and plastered his hair down against his skull. “How do I look?”

“Frightening.” I meant to be funny, but I was sorry the minute I said it. He was crestfallen. You couldn’t talk that way with Harry.

Wearily, I made the gesture of following him out to the elevator. “Listen, George,” he began nervously. I knew what was coming, and in order to prevent him from saying it, I fixed him with as black a look as I could muster. But the bastard couldn’t help himself. “Listen, George,” he said again, passing his tongue over his lips, “don’t tell Kate, okay? I mean, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell Kate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t trust you …”

I think it was their lack of a sense of humor that tried my patience, more than the general sordidness of the evening. I had the sneaking suspicion both Harry and Cara saw this, their second and (one presumed) final episode together as the third act in a little tragedy about star-crossed lovers. Each of them had a dangerously melodramatic narrative bent, which the other’s presence must have reinforced.

In light of what happened later, however, I have had to revise my opinion slightly. Cara’s performance that evening was much, much better than either Harry or I observed. Even her body had underlined it, as if, like a Method actor, she had gotten into the right shape for the part. We had presented her with so many opportunities to give herself away and yet she had the wit to wait. I wish I could say to her now, Well played, Cara, well played.

A
fter Kate and Harry got engaged, Kate’s crowd splintered for a little while. I didn’t hear much from either of them, nor from Chat, but I had not expected to. I knew Chat wouldn’t like to call me out of the fear that I would try to sympathize with him, which would have been intolerable to him, and I didn’t like to call him for the same reason, lest he think I was checking up on him, to make sure he was all right. As for Kate, I gathered she was going around with her girlfriends most of the time; Annie Roth used to call me and keep me informed.

She was much too polite to say a word about Harry. “We’re thrilled for Kate, we all are. It’s just what she wanted. We couldn’t be happier.” And yet there was the slightest note of jealousy in her voice, which indicated Harry had been right: it did mean something to them that Kate was going to be first.

“And who are you saving yourself for, George?” she wanted to know. “We ought to get you out with us one night.”

“Nothing would make
me
happier.” She was great fun, Annie was.
She was one of those chubby, tartan-wearing lacrosse girls—the daughter, perhaps, of a man who had wanted sons. She was good-natured to the core, and could hold her liquor, too.

When I got off the phone I sat at my desk brooding.
Kate was engaged
. It was time I dated someone—Annie or the elusive Jess Brindle, if she would have me, or even one of Robbins’s devotees. I guess it was just bad timing that that was the week Delia Ferrier got around to returning my call.

I had left the message weeks before, in an amnesiac moment, when the tone of our date escaped me. The words never matter, in books or on dates; it is the tone I’ve learned that survives. On the night we went out again, it came back to me with chilling clarity: ambivalence had been my attitude, covered up in desperation.

This time it was one of those dates on which you play out the entire relationship between seven and midnight. At seven, in a bar near her apartment, we were laughing about our first date, chalking it up to a ridiculous past.

“We shouldn’t have—”

“But we did. It was stupid. My fault.”

“But it doesn’t matter. I mean ultimately—”

“No, but I have to apologize.”

“No, but I don’t want you to apologize.”

At eight, we were having a burger across town.

“It’s crazy about Harry and your friend Kate, isn’t it?” she said.

“Don’t you love just having a simple burger and a Coke? I think I could eat here every night.”

“When are they going to get married?”

“Waiter! Next summer, I think. Kate wants a long engagement.”

“That’s not that long—it’s already November.”

At nine or ten we tried to go to the movies, but everything was sold out.

“Let’s go to a bar,” I said.

“Or we could just go somewhere and talk.”

“We could do that,” I agreed. We found a coffee shop. But I
couldn’t think of what I wanted to order, and I had already slept with her. Dating was a farce, an utter farce. The only people worth dating were the people you already knew.

“Next week a friend of mine is performing a show she wrote—”

“Oh, yes?”

“I don’t know if it’s your kind of thing, but—”

“No, no,” I insisted, “it sounds interesting.” I gave up trying to decide what I wanted and smiled vaguely across the table at her intelligent face. I worried about that face. I had started something. I had put something in motion when I shouldn’t have, and soon it would be too late to stop it. I remember a bunch of girls walked by outside then, laughing. One of them looked like Annie, but I couldn’t be sure. I had a great longing to be out with them, making frivolous remarks. Then the waiter came to take our order. “The problem is,” I told him, “I don’t really want anything.”

At eleven, we stood on the stoop of Delia’s apartment building and broke up.

She invited me in again, and this time I hedged vocally. I hated what my pathetic hemming and hawing did to her expression, and determined to tell the truth. “It’s just, I guess you should know,” I explained. “I—I really just want to have fun right now.”

“Fun,” Delia repeated.

“It’s just that I don’t have much time. I work all the time, and when I go out …”

“I see.” She frowned thoughtfully, looking down at her hands. “Is it still Kate Goodenow?”

It wasn’t, actually, that simple, but how could I have explained it? What could I have said to Delia Ferrier, of the tortoiseshell glasses? Could I have explained that the only true gaiety in life was played out against a static background and that girls like Annie and Jess Brindle—and Kate—provided the background? I stammered on about work till Delia put me out of my misery. The last thing she said to me was, “I suppose you’ll make vice president someday.”

A week later I got the invitation to Kate and Harry’s engagement party; the New York Yacht Club,
nos agimur tumidis velis
, cocktails, six to eight.

I went alone after a long dawdle at work but was early, or rather not late enough, and so I walked over half a block to the Algonquin to have a drink. It was the first time in my life that I had consciously fortified myself with alcohol for a social occasion. I sat at the bar fingering the invitation, a heavy card, bordered in blue, with blue sloops reaching into the lower corners. I kept thinking that they were the first, they were to be the first to take the ride and see what excitement could be summoned from its motion and turns. They were playacting, I thought, and yet long afterward, when Kate finally was married, the engagement party came to seem the only real moment in years of nuptial fuss. When I got other girls’ invitations I would think, “Now why should Annie be making a big deal over her engagement? Kate is already married.”