The Fundamentals of Play (36 page)

I lived out the lease. In March I found a studio closer to midtown,
in a no-man’s-neighborhood advertised as “Walk to Work!” It took me one cab ride to move. There was the problem of furniture, but that, too, was presently solved. The answer came in the form of a letter from my father, the envelope addressed in his curious World War II, typewriter-like script. It was the first letter I’d had from him since I went away to Chatham a decade before. I didn’t open it for nearly a week, the way one puts off a bill in the hopes that it will go away. When I did, I saw that it was a joint letter to my sister and me. We were advised to come home before a certain date to claim what of the remaining furniture, dishes, clothes, books, and boxes of school papers we wished to keep. Pop was retiring from the Rectory, the letter said, and they would have to give up the headmaster’s house come summer.

So that I wouldn’t worry what was to become of them, I’m sure, my mother had added an encouraging postscript: “Your dad and I have found a lovely place in the condominium complex on the edge of town!”

I got some good stuff. I got the armchair I wanted and its ottoman, the painted bureau, the partners’ desk, and a vast mahogany sideboard. But when I took it all back to the city, I felt as if I’d broken into one of the decorative arts salons at the Met and was living there on the lam. Robbins said there was a simple answer to my problem: “Storage.” So I joined the ranks of the dispossessed owners that people New York.

The books I kept. Among them were a number of children’s picture books that I didn’t need—
Babars
and
Madelines
; the entire
Frog and Toad
oeuvre. I made up a separate box for them, and on the first nice Sunday I brought them over to Harry.

He had kept the same apartment, an unapologetic bachelor pad on the West Side below the park. Things hadn’t worked out with Rhonda, and so his father had moved in temporarily. Mr. Lombardi acted as a kind of personal assistant to his son, referring business calls to the office, dropping off and picking up the dry cleaning,
keeping the refrigerator stocked. They had a woman for the baby, but Harry liked to come home at lunchtime and see how she was doing. It was part of the whole new kinder, gentler entrepreneurial approach: family time was just as important as grind time. Supposedly the new breed of entrepreneurs wore turtlenecks to work, as well. But not Harry. “Oh, no, George. I’m in a suit every day. You gotta be—it’s professional, right?” He had learned all the rules only to find that they no longer applied.

We sat in the kitchen and played with the baby, and Harry showed off her pictures. “The way she’s looking up like that? You oughta be in pictures, baby!” He swung her up in her white nightie and bounced her and clapped her hands together. Self-promotion, so lacking in the man, was happily justified in the father. The baby was called Marie, after his mother and an old Dartmouth girlfriend; as far as I knew, I was the only one who knew that Cara had decided on Priscilla.

She was more like Harry every day, and yet his looks translated remarkably well into a girl’s face: the big eyes, for instance.

Eventually the nanny took the baby away, and Harry and I sat and drank a beer at the kitchen table.

What an odd life he was going to have! I suddenly thought. He of all people had veered wildly, inconceivably off track. What on earth were they saying at his old firm?

“You wanna come in, Dad?”

“Naw,” called Mr. Lombardi over the television. “I’m watchin’ the game.”

“How about that, George, huh?” Harry said.

“Yeah,” I said noncommittally, as I hadn’t a clue what he was referring to.

“Never thought I’d have a kid with a trust.”

“Aw, come on,” I said. “Sure you did.”

“Shoulda gone in with the ten, George,” he said later, shaking his head. “We’re going to make a lotta people rich.”

“Maybe next year,” I said, but I knew I would never invest now. I
had missed my opportunity by settling an old debt, and I had never learned to put much faith in second chances.

“Next year?
Next
year?”

I took the ribbing, and then I said: “You know me, Harry. I’m just too conservative.”

“You gotta get over that, George,” he said, “if it’s the last thing you do.”

We went in to watch the baseball with Mr. Lombardi. Harry dragged the box of books in and squatted down to examine them. He took them carefully out of the box, one by one, occasionally stopping to flip through one. He wasn’t much of a reader himself. A certain book piqued his interest, though, and he sat down heavily in a leather armchair to read it, turning the pages without a word. When he got to the end he asked, “Do you know this one.”

I glanced at the cover. “Let’s see … the girl loses a tooth … and then what?” I tried to recall. “Oh, I know, her father takes her to town in the motorboat and they get ice cream cones.”

I looked at Harry for corroboration, but he was lost in the black-and-white world of a Robert McCloskey picture book where traffic “cops” make way for ducklings and “Sal” picks blueberries and a couple of kids spend one morning in Maine. He finished and set the book down on the coffee table. He said, without emotion, “Their childhood was
One Morning in Maine
.”

When I left he came down in the elevator with me and we lingered outside the building, looking across the street at an empty playground. I didn’t feel like going back to my starter studio. I didn’t feel like making another start.

“School’s out, I guess,” Harry observed. “About time. They keep them forever. That’s public school for you. I ‘member one year on Long Island we had like twelve snow days and went till the Fourth of July … My dad was like, ‘Fuckin’ bureaucrats!’ ”

But he couldn’t hold the expression. His mouth dropped and then his eyes. “Did you know she kept the same date?”

“I saw the paper,” I admitted.

Then both of us spoke at the same time, pronouncing the name we had never said aloud, had never heard till we read it that morning.

“Strange, isn’t it?” He turned to me with a kindly, searching expression. “It’s funny, you and she were always so close. I’d’ve thought she would’ve—I mean, afterward, George, when—”

“You know what Chat would say,” I broke in. “Bit of a random choice, eh?”

“Chat Wethers,” Harry said. He shook his head and laughed, as if the name were the punch line to a grand joke.

“Chat, indeed.”

“Supposedly the new guy has a lot of money,” Harry added, his voice speculative. For a moment he seemed to be on the verge of making a connection. He raised a thumb to his mouth and worried a hangnail. But with an emphatic sigh he gave up the effort. “Anyway, you can’t blame her.”

“No.”

“There’d be no point.” I braced myself for the platitude that was sure to come. “All you’ve got is your youth and your hobby, right, George?”

But I wasn’t going to let him get away so easily. “Isn’t that all anyone has?” I said.

“No.” Harry frowned in surprise. “Oh, no. I never had a childhood.”

I had a sailboat when I was little, bought for my tenth birthday, though we couldn’t afford it. She was a wooden catboat, gaff-rigged, twelve feet from bow to stern. She was called
The Bluebird
for the usual reason, that she had a navy hull. On summer weekends I used to sail her in the races the faculty got up on Knox Pond, and one year we decided to campaign her a little, so I went around to all the local regattas. I was never very good, and I was terrified of anything over ten knots, but I went anyway and Pop would drive me there to watch. He loved going to the regattas. He loved the color and the motion and the fresh air.

The summer before I left for Chatham I tried to tidy up the life I was leaving behind. I thought that if I could get my papers into folders and my pictures into albums I could finish with the years they represented as well. In the end the mess got the best of me and all I managed to do was clean out a few shelves of my bedroom closet. Buried there I found a box stuffed with the sailing trophies. A second place from the Sunrise Pond Annual Summer Regatta. A First in Fleet from the Junior Division at the Lake Ponkapog June Series. And so on, until I had counted five or six of them. So I had done all right, I thought. But all I could remember, sitting on the floor and holding the cheap metal in my hands, was the white dread of the drives to the regattas in the mornings and the gorgeous satisfaction of the rides home afterward—taking off my hat and laughing at my plastered hair, eating the soggy lunches out of the cooler, Pop and me stopping for ice cream.…

Habits creep up on you in childhood. I got so used to packing up my gear and going—going, going, going every weekend—that when the regattas ended for the fall and later, when
The Bluebird
was sold and they ended for good, staying at home seemed strange, wrong, like going to the movies on a nice day. I missed the going, with the indulgence of “after.”

With Kate you always felt like you were going.

I walked across the park and I thought about what Harry said. If he was right about youth and hobby, then weren’t the Goodenows to be commended, and shouldn’t we all do as they did, practice one and preserve the other, like so many Fairisles in camphor?

The announcement had been a rather long one, as the editors had to spend a good three paragraphs summarizing the Goodenows’ history of achievement and benefaction in this country before going on with all the irrelevant details about Kate herself—how she’d graduated with honors, and worked at Sotheby’s. Somehow they’d managed to leave room at the end for a couple of lines about the groom, I suppose to explain why he had felt himself at all justified in staking his claim.

The picture showed Kate alone, of course. It became a habit of mine to take it out and to study her face for the clue that the text omitted. But it revealed nothing. It was just Kate—Kate in the costume of a bride. She didn’t look noble or exalted, the way some brides do, transformed for a moment by a consciousness of their role in the human drama. No: Kate would have called that nonsense, and she was too well bred to be beautiful. But the square, correct Goodenow chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were full of mirth.

M
other New York went on spinning us to the far ends of her web. Occasionally you crossed through the center again, and when that happened you ran into Kate. Coming home from a weekend last year, I happened to meet Mrs. Carter Smith.

In New Haven the train from Boston stops for ten minutes to allow the switch in power from diesel to electric. The lights go out; somewhere a baby always cries, and frequently a passenger is left proclaiming fatuities that ought to have been drowned out, such as: “I don’t care how it looks! We’re moving!”

There was the sound of a couple taking a mass of luggage down, then walking it up the aisle. I had one of the double facing seats at the middle of the car, now to myself, as a pair of Yale sweatshirts had just departed.

“George?” cried the man’s wife. It was as if she were calling me to service, the way she said my name, for some yet to be defined purpose of her own. A passing trainman caught her imperative wave,
and as the bags were hoisted up over our heads, Kate and I sat down like old friends.

“What a miracle that we found you! Carter had us sitting in front of an awful woman with two horrible, screeching children.” The man himself joined us, his oblong face set in dull disapproval.

“Yale friend?” he inquired.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Carter thinks all Yale people are communist liberals,” Kate explained.

“That’s not true,” interjected her husband. “I think you’re all fags!”

The Smiths chuckled. Kate wanted to be caught up on all the news and all the gossip. I told her I had left Fordyce for Fayer-weather, Dean, and she congratulated me on the implied promotion. We went through the list of mutual acquaintances, a larger number than I remembered.

“Oh, here’s something, George. Listen to my brilliant idea. Carter and I were thinking of chartering a boat in the Caribbean this winter, and I was thinking, wouldn’t it be fun if we chartered the one Nick works on?”

I seemed to have turned into a spoilsport these intervening years. I simply couldn’t make the effort to nod and agree.

Kate began to hedge. “I mean, not that we’d make him do anything—”

“We sure as hell would!
I
sure as hell would! Those boats go out for fifteen, sixteen thousand a week! You think at that price we’re going to watch the crew sit on their asses while we grind winches?”

An irrelevant thought came to mind: that if Cara had taken Kate’s money she could have rented a luxury yacht in the Caribbean—for about two months.

“Carter, where are the cards?” Kate was asking.

“I don’t know—left them in Maine.”

“Can you go and buy some? Do they still sell cards on trains? Will you go check?”

When he returned with a new pack, Kate started to deal three precarious hands on the empty seat. “So, George, tell us,” she said coyly, “where on earth are you coming from? You seem … lost in thought.”

“I’m sorry.” I laughed. “A wedding in Boston.”

“Oh, yes? Anyone we know?”

“Friends of the family.”

“Well,” Kate said generously, “they’re the best kind.”

“Depends on what family,” Carter Smith asserted.

“How’s your family, Kate?” I asked.

Kate grimaced, neatening the piles of cards. “I guess you could say—not terrific. Cees is having a little trouble …”

“A little trouble! She ought to be committed!”

Kate giggled. “She just got kicked out of Miss Porter’s.”

“Oh—sorry.”

“That’s all right.” She raised her face to me, disarmingly, and the two of us laughed, the way we used to, at a thing that no one else would find amusing.

“The money your dad has spent trying to get that girl a goddamn high school diploma—”

“Oh listen,” Kate went on contentedly, ignoring him, “have you heard about Chat’s latest scandal at the Town Club? George,
you
will appreciate this …”

We picked up our hands and began to play.