The Fundamentals of Play (9 page)

“I’d be happy to,” Kate said. “What’s his number?” and her eye got that prankster’s glint in it. “Chattie, let me go!” She was on her feet. “Come now, George, give me his phone number.”

“Crank call?” Chat inquired merrily.

“It’s all right, Kate,” I said, knowing she would ignore me. “He’s not
that
bad.” She got the number from information and made a pouting face when Daniels failed to pick up. I saw my livelihood snatched away as Kate began to leave her message: “Hi, this is Annie Roth and I met you about a week ago? At that Fordyce party? It was
great
talking to you and I’d love to, you know, finish what we started.
I don’t know what your schedule’s like—I hear you’re a total slave driver—but please give me a call as soon as you can.”

“Annie’s going to
kill
you!” cried Chat. I made a weak effort to keep up, laughing hollowly. And yet I wasn’t sorry she had made the call. I thought of Daniels coming home to the blinking light, playing his messages, racking his addled brain, but though I projected the most personal kind of sympathy onto the man, I began to glow with a strange kind of gladness, with the leaping us-against-them superiority of being in on a joke.

“See, George?” Kate joined us at the table. “I put my money where my mouth is, didn’t I?”

“I hope you washed it first!” Chat said, and cracked himself up. “Money’s dirty, you know.”

Hearts was still our game, and Kate played the quick, sure game I remembered from Chatham—she sat right up at the living room table, back straight, feet on the floor, and threw the cards down with a snap. She played each hand hard, to win, but she wouldn’t stop to think, and when she lost, it was from careless mistakes. Beside her, Chat was cold and methodical, inexorably sipping his drink; and across the table from them, I did all right. My problem was that I hedged my bets too much (I don’t mean literally; there is, of course, no betting in hearts), but I felt rusty after Paris and wouldn’t shoot the moon for fear I would fail and embarrass myself.

So the three of us were evenly matched—too evenly matched, perhaps: I found myself thinking we could have used someone or something to shake up the game. As it turned out, though, I was the one to do it. After a couple of hands, I ducked a trick full of hearts and made the mistake of attributing the move to a classic Nick Beale strategy I had learned to imitate long ago.

“Nicko all the way, baby!” I shouted, tallying up the scores.

“That
is
Nicko’s move,” Kate said slowly as if to herself. “He always holds the queen and the ace, but I get rid of them as fast as I can.”

The present tense threw me, and I took it to mean she had seen
Nick recently. “Where is Nick now?” I asked, shuffling the deck. “Does he ever come through town?”

Chat took a slow sip of his gin. “This could use another lime, Kate,” he said.

Kate looked up brightly. “Could it? I’ll get you one. Don’t get up—let me get you one.”

She rose from the table and I shuffled the cards feeling I had made a blunder of some kind, and disliking that feeling with friends. “Does he ever come through town?” I repeated.

“George, have you ever heard of making polite conversation?” inquired Chat.

“I’m sorry,” I said, surprised by his tone, as he had never taken it with me before.

“There are certain things you don’t want to go dredging up.” He had pushed his chair back from the table as if to give me a little talking-to, and crossed his legs at the knee, the way some men won’t.

“Of course not,” I agreed. “But—”

“When she talks about him that way,” Chat instructed, checking my protest, “it’s not a good sign, all right? It’s not something you want to dwell on. Her doctor thinks—”

“Her
doctor
?” I interrupted.

“Look, she’s over it now,” Chat said dismissively, lowering his voice with a glance toward the kitchen, “and we all want her to be well.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” My voice trembled slightly with some sudden emotion I struggled to suppress.

“It’s not something I can go into now,” replied Chat. But then he seemed to relent and, leaning forward, confided, “In my opinion the whole thing was overhyped. It’s just a little trouble she had last winter. She wasn’t getting out enough, she wasn’t having fun—”

He broke off as his girlfriend returned to the table, bearing a tray.

“Look what I did, you two—I made everyone another so we won’t have to be interrupted again,” announced Kate.

“That’s lovely, sweetheart,” said Chat, lighting a cigarette.

I thanked Kate and took up my glass, baffled and annoyed. With almost any other girl, Chat’s intimations would have been grave but understandable. But Kate—Kate was supposed to be above the psychological fluctuations the rest of us had to endure.

Chat stood up to look for an ashtray.

“I’m going to beat you both now,” boasted Kate. She gathered up her cards. “I’m unbeatable now, aren’t I, Chat—I mean, when I try.”

“Yes, dear—unbeatable.”

“You see, George? And oh, what you’ve dealt me. You are not going to believe the brilliance—”

“Christ, is there a goddamn ashtray in this apartment?”

“I don’t
smoke
, Chattie—”

“Well, I do.”

There were two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built into the walls of Kate’s living room. In the open spaces, where the books left off, Kate had put framed photographs, vases, candlesticks, and the like—and, resting at eye level, a little silver cup.

“Here, I’ll use this.” Chat plucked the cup from the shelf, set it on the card table, and retook his seat. “Is it my go?” He took a long drag on the cigarette and tapped the ash into the cup.

The John Scarum Memorial Trophy, 1979
, I read.
First place: Nicholas Beale, “Lucky Duck.”
The trophy had been offered by the Cold Harbor Yacht Club. “Kate,” I started, “are you sure—?”

“Is there something you’re trying to say, Lenhart?” Chat inquired.

Kate caught my glance and, when our eyes met, looked scornfully away. I stared dumbly at Nick’s little trophy. At the end of the hand I excused myself and went back to work. The next time we got together it was with other people.

As for the rest of what passed for my “social” life that spring in New York, the particularities I can remember are pathetically few. The parties were all the same, and the same people threw them. When the girls threw them there would be refrigerator Brie and the beer would run out and the mixers would run out, but you would
have a slightly better time, drinking straight Popov on ice. Some of the girls who threw parties worked in publishing and were temporarily impoverished but had character, or their apartments did—crummy, crammed sixth-floor walk-ups, with alphabet magnets on the fridge and an antique or two slowly getting trashed. This was when that trend of childhood regression was flourishing. Like talking about what television shows you used to watch—endlessly. Or the girls would play
Grease
on the stereo. The stereo would be a cheap one. All girls have cheap stereos.

When the guys threw them, there would be top-shelf liquor and a subwoofer and too many of us standing around. Harry had been right about the liquor. Often, while searching through the rubble to fix myself a drink, on York Avenue or Eighth Street or up at Columbia, I would think of him and of our odd, isolated gesture toward resuming a friendship—if that’s what the evening had been—that had never really existed. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he’d gotten the bartender into bed with him; either way, he wouldn’t have dwelled on it. I figured I would throw a party myself one of these days. I wanted to see if I could pull one off. But there was no time, and there was Toff to deal with. I would run into my roommate occasionally, with Cara doggedly, unhappily, staked at his side, fending off other girls like herself, with equally aerobicized arms. I always got a kick out of seeing him, though the neutral settings didn’t change the fact that we never had much to say to each other. Still, Toff, I felt, in some obscure, fundamental way, was toeing the line.

As for me, I worked, doing spreadsheet homage to Daniels, nursing paper cuts that wouldn’t heal and other emasculating office injuries, like backaches and desk bruises, until a week or so before Memorial Day, when the weather stayed absurdly pleasant for days on end, and I got sick. It was a spring flu that was going around, but I liked to think I had made myself sick from working so hard. And what with the flu and the perfect days that I read about on the 6 train, one day I lounged into work late and interrupted Daniels’s morning castigation of me and told him he had a stain on his tie.

Or perhaps it was the time of year. Nick Beale had gotten kicked out of Chatham on Memorial Day weekend eight years earlier, and as it was the defining event of my adolescence, ever since then I’d been wont to cop a devil-may-care attitude around the end of May in memory, and imitation, of Kate’s old boyfriend.

When she herself called up saying it had been ages, I told her I would meet her for lunch, and left the office pumped up with about a minute’s worth of attitude, mumbling the weak man’s mantra: “What are they going to do? Fire me?”

We went to one of those big-menu coffee shops on Lex and got hamburgers. That’s all you ever ate with Kate. You could reel off half a dozen suggestions of places to go, and she would half listen and get a look in her eye and say, as if it were a rather subversive suggestion, “Or we could go to X——and get a
burger
.”

When the food came, however, Kate surveyed it impassively. I was starving and couldn’t seem to eat fast enough.

“And? In the mad, mad world of finance?” She salted a fry and ate that.

“Oh, you don’t want to hear—”

“Yes, I do!” she insisted. “Tell me about it, George. Who your friends are and—and everything.”

“Well,” I said dubiously, “I suppose there’s Robbins …”

“Oh, Rob Robbins?”

“No.”

“It must be his brother, then.”

“No, this Robbins has sisters.”

“Cousin, then.”

“I doubt it.”

“Should we put a little money on it? Lady’s bet?”

“My Robbins, Kate, is so far from being the cousin of anyone you know—”

“How do you know? Have you asked him? I know a lot of people.”

“You do not. You know about … ten people.”

Kate considered. “Yes, that’s right—ten or maybe twelve. Don’t you love getting hamburgers?”

“Yes.”

“And Cokes?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.”

“But you’re not eating yours,” I pointed out.

She took a large, fake bite. “Yes, I am. See? Anyway, I don’t want to talk about what I’m eating, George.”

“All right. How’s your job, then?” I asked.

“It’s great. I love it.” And there was that topic gone for good.

I was so delighted to be out of the office and out with her that it took me a little while to notice that Kate wasn’t quite herself that afternoon. I suppose I didn’t particularly want to notice, as I hadn’t particularly wanted to dwell on the revelations of the evening at her apartment. I had not broached the subject with Chat since; it just didn’t stand to reason, knowing Kate the way I did, that she should suddenly fall prey to that kind of internal uncertainty. When I did notice what was different about her at lunch that day, it, too, was a quality so atypical that I had trouble associating it with Kate. To put it simply, there was a restlessness about her.

“You like it here, don’t you, George?” she asked me at one point, and before I could answer, she had called the waiter over to ask for a new Coke, as hers tasted funny. That was the way it went: she spoke briefly, intimately toward me and then past me, unable to concentrate on whoever it was sitting across from her, making plaintive, pointed pronouncements, such as: “I grew up here, but I would never raise children in New York.”

“Nor would I,” I said, for I could conceive of no childhood that wasn’t lived mainly out-of-doors.

“It’s so dirty!” Kate went on, her gray eyes resting, disturbed, on a point outside the window. “Look at that woman out there. How could anyone let herself get so fat? If I weighed that much, I’d go on a diet! I wouldn’t sit there stuffing a hot dog into my face.” She gave
a vacant, perturbed glance around the diner. “You know, I can’t ride the subway anymore. It’s like the Third World down there. It’s worse than the Third World, it’s … the Fourth World! These men leer at you! These people come on with strollers … and everyone’s so unbelievably rude!”

Again I took notice slowly, for while this trait was not new in her, it was something New York had brought out, or something about a particular kind of money that I associated with New York: girls like Kate really detested the middle class. I can remember the first time I saw it, in a girl at Dartmouth. Then, as now, I found the attitude a rather repellent fascination, with its disregard for the most basic lesson of the nursery, to pity those who had less than you.

Also, she was amusing. “People
are
getting ruder. I’ve noticed it, and Chat’s noticed it. Why is that, do you think?”

“Hmm.”

“And here’s something else, George: Why is it that secretaries don’t have to wear pants to work? Do you know what I mean? Do you know the kind of
ensemble
to which I refer? Annie and I have noticed this, and we think it’s very unfair.
We
have to wear dresses or suits to work, but the registrar’s office is allowed to wear those—those maternity tunics and stretch pants, or whatever they are. Now, why should that be?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said gravely. For while many responses were possible, the only one that came to mind, as ever, was an infinite indulgence of Kate. She was made to be indulged; she made you believe in predestination—or something.

“My mother thinks I ought to get married, but why should I be in a hurry? I like Sixty-sixth Street. I’m going to live there until I do get married, I always said I would. And besides: I’m young!”

This fact was asserted not to me but to the general audience in the café. It was as if she suffered from the affliction schoolchildren claimed of late: attention deficit disorder. I had an urge to say, as if she were one of them, “Kate, you need to sit quietly and drink your soda.”