The Fundamentals of Play (7 page)

“Hey—George, right?”

“Yeah, hey.”

I sat up to be polite. It was funny, but he was the last person I would have expected to ditch the schedule.

He did not introduce himself then; in fact, we were never introduced. He came to me as Chat Wethers’s emissary. “Chat wants to know if you want to play hearts.”

“He sent you?” I said skeptically.

“Yeah, he’s …” Harry said, and put a fat stubby index finger and thumb to his mouth and sucked in air in the least convincing pantomime of smoking a joint I had ever witnessed.

“Are you saying he’s in your room smoking marijuana?” I said coldly—cleverly, I thought. For I was not so grown-up, after all, as to deny myself the easy target. Besides, the guy had irritated me on sight, and besides that, it was the first week of freshman year: one had to draw the line somewhere.

I still remember the look of reproach I was given. When I went on in a more conciliatory tone, startled into graciousness, Harry made an odd gesture, batting the air as if in pain, to stop me from being nice. It was to become a pattern with us. He would embarrass me with his clumsy attempts to drop into the vernacular; I would pointedly dissociate myself from these attempts; he would register my scorn; I would try, too late, to soften the blow; he would wave my efforts off. From Chat, Harry took it all, every baiting, insulting word; but even from the beginning he seemed to expect something more in the way of tolerance from me.

We went next door. How incongruous it was to see the Portrait of an Ancestor firing up a two-foot bong. It was duly held out to me, but I shook my head. I didn’t like to get stoned with people like Chat, people who were meant to be drinkers and who got stoned simply because they thought they ought to. I like to think Chat respected my abstaining. He gave me a look that was both measured and measuring as we shook hands, and I saw that he had registered the point I was making, and it seemed to me that in that moment we understood each other. For the other great theme that had been borne in on me in my adolescence was that while it was always cool to partake, it was sometimes even cooler to abstain. It meant you were above all that. I had learned it at Chatham from Nick Beale, Kate Goodenow’s boyfriend, who some would say forgot his own lesson. I didn’t know it yet, but Chat had learned it from Nick, too. There was a whole generation of us who had learned everything we knew from Nicholas Beale. He was constantly being quoted by people who didn’t even know they were quoting him. But Chat and I had learned firsthand.

We sat on the floor, Harry and I on one side and Chat on the other, with a wicker settee between us. On the opposite wall was a huge black-and-white photograph of one of the old J-boats that raced for the America’s Cup in the thirties. It reminded me of my father; I remember thinking that Pop would have known the boat’s name, her history, perhaps, as well. My father had grown up on Long Island Sound, sailing every kind of boat, and he had made a habit of taking me down to Newport when I was little, to watch the trials. Looking at the picture, I could hear the stories he would tell—of escapades at Indian Harbor, Larchmont, Manhasset—the great American yacht clubs which are strung along the Sound like pearls—

“Enterprise,”
Chat said, not unkindly, catching my glance.

“Right,” I said. I had learned to sail, as well—on the pond behind my father’s school.

Chat dealt, explaining the rules to his roommate as he snapped the cards down.

“You’ve never played before?” I asked Harry.

“No, no—I think I did,” Harry said. “I’m pretty sure I played, but we called it something different.”

“Spades?” I inquired. “That’s a different game, you know.”

“No, no—I know. I think—”

“He’s never played before,” Chat said. “Have you? And yesterday,” he went on, brightly, “we tried to get ‘high’ for the first time, didn’t we, Henry? It’s a whole new world up here in ‘college,’ isn’t it? You’ve got a checking account now, and you’re responsible for laundering your own clothes.” Beside me Harry was methodically arranging the cards in his hand, suit by suit, panting a little as he worked. Chat lit a cigarette from a pack in the breast pocket of his bathrobe. “Tomorrow I’m going to teach him how to use a fork.”

Harry giggled. No sound brings back freshman year to me—not the songs they played in the basement of Psi U, not the maniacal musical interlude in
Jeopardy!
—more sharply than that low uneasy giggle which was Harry’s response to each of Chat’s taunts.

“Do you want to play one hand open?” I asked. “We’ll lay our cards down?”

“Oh, no, I’ll be fine.”

“He’ll be fine,” Chat said.

“I’ll pick it up,” said Harry.

And he did. He was a natural card counter. I don’t think he even knew that card counting was a thing people did, playing cards—it was just the only way he could think of to stay alive: to remember every card that was played. He ate the hearts on the first hand, but it was strange the way he cursed himself. Not for misunderstanding; no, he was angry at himself for making mistakes. It was like watching a natural athlete pick up tennis. I played the same game I always did—conservative. I stayed at zero for several hands, and I was beginning to think I would pull out the win when Harry blew my defensive game away. “You little bastard—you got aggressive on us!” cried Chat, when he realized what was up. “How fucking dare you?” Harry giggled the even, low-pitched giggle; evidently it could mean anything he liked.

When people at school would ask me if Lombardi was as smart as
everyone said, I never thought to cite the crazy computer invention he was supposedly working on or the astronomical-level math classes I heard he was acing. To me the more plebeian achievement was infinitely more impressive: he shot the moon, I used to tell them, on the third hand of hearts he ever played.

“You realize you have to mix the drinks now,” Chat announced.

“Oh, sure, Chat,” said Harry. Amazed, I watched him hoist himself to his feet, kneel down again in front of the mini-fridge.

It made me nervous just to see the vodka bottle in a dorm room in daylight. I almost wanted to get up and check the hall for teachers—a reflex from Chatham. “I feel like we’re going to get busted,” I confessed.

I felt foolish the minute I said it, but Chat cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, I know.” Then some mutual fear or indecision seemed to silence us for a moment. We both looked down at the pile of cards, then away, listening to Harry crack the ice trays and rattle cubes into the glasses. I think it was the first time either of us had tried it out on anyone else—saying “I got through it, too”; the four previous years of cold comfort—and we had to wait a moment to see if the other would let it stand. The falseness of the notion struck me at once. I thought of the appalling first nights away from home third-form year, as Chatham, fancying itself an English public school, had eschewed “grades.” But in the next moment Harry came rattling back with the drinks, and Chat and I had tacitly agreed to hold up the one thing we had in common as the greatest of connections. Chat asked me: “You went to Chatham?”

“You went to Hotchkiss?”

“
I
should have gone to Chatham.” He laughed a laugh so affected one suspected it might have been natural. “I could have been Chattie the Chattie! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Instead I was Chattie the Kissie!”

Harry sat absolutely still, his hands folded in his lap. It must have been then that my host realized his roommate might have a purpose beyond the occasional bartending: he was that rare thing, the perfect audience, trapped and interested. His presence somehow lessened
the subsequent embarrassment of our stooping so readily to play do-you-know.

“So you know Kate Goodenow,” Chat said.

“Of course—Kate and Nick,” I answered, for I thought of them only as a pair. And who didn’t? At Chatham they had been the couple,
the
couple that transcended other high school romances as surely as God and country, in its happily myopic motto, transcended Yale. Kate was there now; I’d had a postcard from her with the phrase on it, and had stuck on my bulletin board.

“You talk to Nicko recently?” Chat inquired, eyes downcast, taking a last drag on the cigarette.

“No.”

The cards lay thrashed on the table from the last hand. Harry began to pick them up and turn them over quietly.

Chat scowled: his roommate was a mouth-breather, as oblivious to the sound he made as a sleeping child. “Think I’ve heard your name.”

“How do you know Kate?”

“We go to Maine.”

At this oddly chosen moment Harry interjected: “You went to Chatham?” Pronouncing it wrong, as if he hadn’t been listening at all, he rhymed the first syllable with “bath” instead of “bat.” Neither Chat nor I corrected him. “That’s on the Cape, right?”

“Near it,” I said. It was a common mistake; the school was across Buzzards Bay and thirty miles west of the town of the same name, which marks the tip of the Cape Cod elbow.

“Did you know John Lash?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“John’s a great guy!” Harry gushed. “John’s from my hometown!”

As he clearly wanted me to feed him the next line, I asked him where he was from.

“Glen Cove,” he said.

“Oh.” Except that he wasn’t. The sophomores had put signs on
the doors with our names and hometowns. Chat was from New York. Henry was from Millport. I didn’t know Long Island—the discrepancy would ordinarily have meant nothing to me, other than its
being
a discrepancy—but I wanted to sit the guy down and tell him to play life like cards. Surely he could make the discards less obvious.

He went back to reassembling the cards.

“We ought to go down to New Haven some time,” Chat said. He laughed deprecatingly. “Road trip!”

“I’d love to see Kate,” I said.

Chat nodded. “So you haven’t talked to Nicko recently?” he asked again.

“No. Why? Have you?”

“Well, I mean—I saw them in Maine this summer.”

“Well, anytime you want to go … I haven’t seen Kate since she graduated. Or Nick.” They were two years older than I. And Nick, keeping himself legitimate, had gotten himself kicked out their fifth-form year.

Harry had the cards in a neat stack ready to deal, waiting for his cue.

“You know,” Chat volunteered, with a touch of sheepishness, “I should have graduated with them.”

“Really.”

He twisted the end of his cigarette in the ashtray. “I kind of did the five-year plan at Hotchkiss.”

I opened my mouth to reply but found, to my embarrassment, that Chat’s admission had left me tongue-tied.

“And then, you see, I traveled for a year,” he went on, in a rather mechanical tone of voice. “I went to Africa—went on a safari. You see, I’ve always had an interest in traveling, and my parents support that. It was a great year.”

Still I was silent. I didn’t care, I didn’t give a damn if it had taken Wethers two extra years to get into college, and yet I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t sound patronizing.

“Hey!” Harry piped up, to my relief. “At least you got in here! I mean—eventually!”

The response seemed to both delight and astonish Chat. He looked amazed that Harry had spoken—impressed, almost, that he would dare to. “What the hell, Lombardi! ‘I mean—eventually!’ What are you, my little consoler?” He clobbered him, but good-naturedly. “Can’t you breathe through your goddamn nostrils? Come on, try. You can do it! In-out! In-out!”

After endless hands and long after our hall had come shouting back from orientation and left again for dinner, Chat’s roommate stood up and rather formally excused himself. He was leading by such a large margin that Chat and I were taking bets on who could lose worse. “I have to go to a meeting,” he added.

It is always awkward in a room after someone tells an obvious lie for an unknown reason. None of us spoke until he had left, lugging a small duffel.

“Guy has a job delivering pizzas,” my host informed me. “I saw him trying on the fucking outfit. It kills me about him—kills me!”

Chat stood up from the floor, stretched languidly, and lay down on their long shabby couch. “That’s why I’m not letting up. I figure if I’m a big enough asshole to him, see, he’ll get fed up and tell me to fuck off and the net result will be positive. Right now, for Chrissakes, I’m like a goddamn Pygmalion. Why won’t he just admit he has a goddamn job?”

That reminded me. “Christ, I skipped the job fair.”

“You’re getting a job?”

“Have to,” I said.

Chat stretched again and yawned. After a second or two, he sat up and said, “That’s a drag.”

“Yeah.”

I felt him look at me and away. “How many hours are we talking?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Might cramp our style,” Chat added thoughtfully. He reached underneath the table for a pair of cards.

“Yes, well,” I said, as he held them up, frowning, to examine them.

We wandered to the dining hall and back; I went to my room and he to his. I had only been back a few minutes, and was wondering what I would do, when Chat paid me his first visit. I invited him in but he remained standing, just inside the threshold. It was barely eight o’clock, but he had already gotten back into his robe and slippers.

“This—this is appalling of me but—but how much do you need?”

I thought about it, understanding now the formality of the posture, dreading what was to come. But it was a fair question. “A couple thousand this year for books and, I don’t know …”

“Books and beer,” Chat supplied.

“Right.”

“Look, why don’t I lend you the money.”

“Oh, no.”

“You can pay me back later.”

“No, I just couldn’t.”

“I mean much later, when we graduate.”

“No—but thank you, Chat.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

When I continued, naturally, to protest, Chat grew more and more uncomfortable. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and a stutter appeared, which quickly worsened.

“This is a hell of an awkward conversation, and I wish you’d put—put—put an end to it right now, George. In two days you’ll have forgotten you—you borrowed it and I’ll have forgotten I lent it. And that’s—that’s—that’s all there is to it. Other option is for you to work fifteen—twenty hours a week. And—and I don’t see that kind of effort fitting in with the—the grand scheme.”