The Fundamentals of Play (27 page)

At seven I strolled over. It was late November, and what passed for foliage in New York was nearly gone. But as I started east on that treeless block I got a whiff of the true autumn that had gone on elsewhere. And as I walked, I no longer walked on the sidewalk but on a stone path between two dormitories, with a chapel bell tolling in the near distance. The school season came up and overwhelmed me, the streaming sinuses and the wool clothes and the notebooks. And in that meager half-block stretch, I remembered the day I met Kate.

I had passed a horrible first week away from home. All I wanted was to get my work done and get along with everyone. Instead I kept getting into trouble out of an eagerness to obey. One morning I had missed chapel because I had gone too early; another time I had helped a boy with his work program job and forgotten about required breakfast. I had consequently been warned by the dorm master about getting off to a bad start. As this was so far from my intentions, the week had left me profoundly shaken and a bit paranoid. At Chatham I lived, from the very first moment, in a morbid
fear of being kicked out. For instance, I was certain that my much rowdier roommate’s contraband would somehow be mistaken for mine, if and when one of the administration’s notorious raids transpired. At the end of the week when I found myself alone in the chapel for the second time, I was very close to tears. I couldn’t understand it; I had made a note of the time, I had come right over after English. It simply wasn’t fair that I had somehow missed it again. Two absences from chapel meant a black mark and three black marks meant something very bad, though I could not remember what. We were reading
L’étranger
in French class, and, unlike most of my classmates, I identified wholeheartedly with the alienated, wrongly accused narrator. I heard someone walking in the sacristy—a teacher, I assumed—and without a second thought I jumped up, hurried out of the chapel, and ran across the campus to my dorm. That I might have pleaded my innocence and been excused never occurred to me. I went first to my room, but then I remembered the dormitory sweeps the teachers supposedly made. So I stole out to the common room and found a janitor’s supply closet and opened the door to hide.

An electric bulb lit up the space. There was, to my horror, a girl inside, sitting on an overturned bucket; worse yet, I knew who she was: she was one of the five or six upperclassmen who had already been pointed out to me in dining hall and whose name I had heard repeated a sufficient number of times to have learned.

“You can’t skip chapel here!” the girl said disdainfully. “I skip chapel here.”

But I was desperate, and desperation gives courage. “Look, can you just let me in,” I said wearily. “I can’t get caught again. I’ve skipped already.”

Kate Goodenow surveyed me coldly as I pushed my way in beside her. “You have to be quiet,
George
, so I can finish this.” She had taken my name from my name tag; we were all required to wear them the first week. Embarrassed, I unpinned mine and stuffed it into my blazer pocket. She didn’t have hers on, which confirmed my fear that nobody worth anything was wearing one.

The girl bent her head and proceeded to scribble answers on a Latin work sheet. The closet was narrow and extremely cramped with the mops and brooms, and it was all I could do not to touch or jostle her. I stood very still, pressed up against the door, and peered down at her paper. Presently she got a noun ending wrong and I told her.

I had spoken without thinking, and in the intervening silence I saw whatever hopes I still had of a future at Chatham ruined by the contempt of one pretty girl. But she said calmly, “All right, I’ve erased it. Tell it to me right.” When I had finished she asked, “What Latin are you in.”

“Latin Three,” I said uncomfortably.

“Oh, really. So am I.”

This surprised me; I was certain I would have noticed her.

“You’re new?”

I nodded.

“Third form?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty early to be skipping chapel, isn’t it?”

“I tried to go! But no one was there.”

The girl looked up from her paper with scorn. “It’s Founder’s Day. They have it out in the woods. Didn’t you see everyone hiking out there after Father Grossman? Holding up the sacrament?”

“No.”

“Time for a stronger prescription,” she said rudely.

She opened up her notebook and began to doodle sailboats on a fresh page.

“Do you sail?” I said, eager to make a connection that might last beyond the next half hour.

“D
o you
?” she said.

“I do at home.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“I
do
—”

“So prove it,” she said unexpectedly, after a minute. She glanced up at me with a menacing look. “Let’s see you tie a bowline.”

I watched in horror and fascination as she untied the knot in the line of rope she was wearing as a belt, and pulled it from the loops. “Come on, let’s see.”

It was green-and-white flecked quarter inch. I stared at the bitter end for a moment with the blind panic that comes of forgetting something so automatic that one could never hope to remember it consciously—one’s telephone number, say.

“Rabbit runs around the tree—” the girl began patronizingly.

“I don’t do it that way,” I said, and remembered. Despite Pop’s efforts, I learned the knot backward and have tied it that way ever since.

The girl examined it. “Bizarre method you’ve got there.” She untied the knot and threaded the line back through her belt loops. As she was retying it she looked up and caught me staring, and she laughed wickedly.

I cursed her, Kate Goodenow, and her pathetic pop quizzes. Then she said indifferently, “Ever raced dinghies before?”

“Some.”

“Where’d you learn to sail?”

“Knox Pond,” I said.

“Knox Pond? I’ve heard of Knox Pond. Oh, you mean behind the Rectory School?”

“That’s right,” I said, surprised she had heard of it.

“What are you, a fac-brat?” she guessed, but the mockery in her voice was all but gone.

“My father’s the headmaster.”

“Really. Well, the men in my family, they all went right through the Rectory. They’ve all put their masts in the mud of Knox Pond, every one of them.”

I laughed, not really at the substance of the remark, but at the girl’s sudden generosity.

“It’s different here,” she said after a moment. “Open water.”

“That’s all right.”

“Yes,” the girl admitted, “you’ll get used to it. Listen,” she went
on in a professional manner, “do me a favor: run down the hall to Nicko’s room and give him this.” She pressed the Latin homework into my hand.

“All right,” I said.

“Then come back and get me if the coast is clear and I’ll get you excused from chapel.”

Even I knew where Nick Beale’s room was. Everyone did. I can still remember the empty, echoing sound of the corridor as I walked down it to his room, clutching the paper. I have had ample time to wonder since then how different the texture of my life would have been if I had never taken that walk. I was a retiring fourteen-year-old, I was not athletic, I did not have brothers and sisters at Chatham to pave the way for me. It’s true I was reasonably smart, but Chatham was no Exeter, and intelligence alone was not particularly respected there. I suppose I would have ended up like the kid who lived across the hall from me, David Henwood, the only other third-former in geometry. David played thirds soccer and acted in plays and founded the Latin club and went to Harvard. I have run into him in the city from time to time; first year out he was already editing a conservative political journal. And that he should somehow still defer to me when we meet has to do with nothing but my having been friends with Kate and Nick our third-form year while he was not. A lot of the older girls made pets of the freshmen, and I became Kate’s; before I left Nicko’s room that morning I had a sport and a nickname and more marijuana than I had ever seen or knew what to do with. It wasn’t that I ever reached Nick’s level—I wouldn’t have even tried—but I had the credentials a little bit earlier than my classmates. I was datable, somehow, when so many boys like me were not. I never partied much at school, but I didn’t suffer from abstaining the way some people did; my teachers liked me too, and my final year the combined faculty and student body elected me Head of School. My whole career at Chatham was wildly beyond expectation.

And yet perhaps I sacrificed something doing things the way I did.
I remember an awkward exchange with Henwood in our senior year. It was just after the early acceptances came out. David came into the dorm looking as if he’d been knighted. It was clear he was too modest to say anything, so I said, “You got in, right?”

“That’s right!” he exulted and brandished the letter. “The work paid off—it all paid off!”

When I congratulated him he began to look ill at ease. “Don’t worry—I got in, too,” I said, to reassure him.

“Jesus, I knew it!” He whacked me on the back. “I knew if anybody was going to get Harvard it was going to be you and me, Lenhart. We deserve it! We worked so goddamn hard! Hey, do you know what house you’re in yet? Maybe we’ll be together again.”

“Oh, no,” I explained. “I didn’t apply to Harvard. I got into Dartmouth early. My dad went there and—”

“Dartmouth?” Henwood repeated, his face falling. “Oh, jeez, Lenhart, I’m such an idiot. I thought you meant Harvard.”

“That’s okay—you didn’t know.” I was as eager as he was to discuss college and what it would all be like, but David began to edge away down the hall. It irritated me when I realized afterward that he pitied me and that his pity made him think he had made a faux pas. In my yearbook, David Henwood wrote: “Sorry you won’t be joining me in the fall—you were smarter than I was third-form year.”

There was low, thumping music coming from Nick’s room. I knocked several times but no one answered, so finally I pushed the door open and went in. Tapestries covered the walls. I nearly tripped over the guitar on the floor, and through a haze of smoke Nick Beale looked up from his book and nodded at me.

“I’ve brought your Latin homework,” I announced.

He waited for me to continue. When I remained silent, he replied, “That’s really, really nice of you.” He set his book down and took the work sheet. I glanced at the cover; he was reading
Moby-Dick
.

“Oh, do you like it?” I said, to make conversation, for I felt that a great deal depended on the next few minutes.

Nick looked surprised, as if my question were beside the point. “I always like sailing stories,” he said.

“Are you reading it for English?”

“No. I’m reading it for my own … personal edification. Are you reading it for English?” he asked politely.

“No,” I said.

“Why not? You should always do your homework,” Nick advised.

“No, I mean it hasn’t been assigned. We’re reading something else.”

This didn’t seem to make much of an impression on him. That was when I noticed that he was wearing two name tags. One said “Kate Goodenow” and the other said “Nicholas S. Beale.” It was the first sign I got that he was not only cool; he had co-opted cool.

I explained that I had promised to go back for Kate.

“You do what you need to do.”

I was now in the awkward position of feeling rude if I left to get the guy’s girlfriend for him. “I could come back here, too,” I said.

“Come back whenever you like,” said Nick Beale. “You’re always welcome.”

When Kate and I returned, she began to tidy up the small room, folding sweaters and arranging pillows, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that she should be tidying up in a boy’s dorm in a boy’s room during morning chapel. Nick fiddled with a pipe and watched her with a bemused, far-off expression. “Nick, you should at least open a window. I mean, really.” To get to the window she had to pass Nick. He reached out his long thin arms and slipped them around her and pulled her onto his lap. I felt myself blush. Our host seemed to have been asleep and in one gesture to have come alive.

“Nick!”

“Shut up—you love it.”

“Right, I really like—”

Looking at her on his lap, I saw how small she was. Nick was so thin, but Kate, I saw, was one of those hipless girls whose figures were so in vogue. She was tan, too, like Nick, but in the freckly way
blondes get tan. Her face looked like it had been sunburned over and over, until the burn had mellowed and sunk into her skin. It was nearly October, and they both looked like summer.

“Who’s afraid of Kathykins?” said Nick hoarsely, his cheek against her back.

“I’m
serious
!” Kate protested when she had struggled to her feet. She yanked the window open. When she turned, she put her hands to her ponytail, adjusting it a notch. “Now are we going to play some cards before Latin? Nick? George? What should we play?”

We had crossed some bridge, on the far side of which all of the questions would be benign.

“How about hearts?”

“I don’t know how to play,” I admitted reluctantly.

“You don’t know how to play hearts?” Kate sat down on the floor by Nick’s feet and gave the deck an expert shuffle. “Did you hear that, Nick?”

Nick shook his head, grinning. I had pinned my name tag back on. “Georgie Len,” he said. “Very bad, Georgie Len. I would call this a very bad omission in your edification thus far.”

In the afternoon I went out sailing with them. While the returning students rigged boats, the coach gave us a pep talk about the long, proud history of yachtsmanship at Chatham School, thanking Art Goodenow for this season’s new sails. Then he put all the new people into a Whaler and drove us out to where they ran the practice races.

It had been windy on campus and it was still blowing hard now, even in the harbor of the Bay; it seemed to me that Kate and Nick were the only ones who were doing much of anything, tactically—everyone else was just trying not to flip. When the breeze picked up another notch or two and two boats turtled, the coach—Tompkins—decided to call off practice. He cruised around in the Whaler, blowing his whistle to summon people to the docks. But Kate and Nick seemed not to have heard. Instead of following the others in, they
headed up closer to the wind to make the point that marked the harbor entrance. Frustrated, Mr. Tompkins decided to drop us off and go after them himself. I turned around on the seat to watch them as we drove in. You couldn’t see much of Kate. She was tucked in on the rail in front of Nick, hidden. Her ponytail would bob out on one side like a brush dipping paint, then bob out on the other as she flattened the boat for Nick. So I focused on Nick instead. He slouched his way through the tacks, but his was the finessed slouch of perfection. I imagined him learning to sail when he was very, very young and then, almost as quickly, learning the slouch. It was the combination of the two—the juxtaposition of skill and indifference—that I vowed I would appropriate.