The Fundamentals of Play (10 page)

Halfway through the meal she got up to go to the bathroom but returned almost at once.

“George, dearheart.”

“Kate?”

She pursed her lips for a moment, studying my face, and it was odd: I suddenly got the feeling that there was something she had to say to me, something she had to sell me on, but she couldn’t quite work her way around to mentioning it lest the pitch be too obvious. I sensed, too, that everything up to now had been a warm-up—vocal scales of nonsense syllables—and that I had been an idiot to try and discern meaning in any of it. She tapped her fork against her plate distractedly. It was quite loud, and I said, “Aren’t you going to eat any more?”

“No, it’s too rare. You know, I haven’t seen Nick in almost two years, and frankly it’s a relief.”

“I …” But the juxtaposition left me speechless.

And yet here, where anyone else would have leaned forward, Kate sat up straighter.

“Two falls ago he came to town—it was in October. He used to make one of his ‘appearances’ every six months or so. He would show up in the city and call me, leave me a message—‘It’s Nicko, Kath, I’m in town,’ as if I was supposed to invite him over on the spot and tell him nothing had changed. I really think that’s what he expected to hear. It’s so … grim, George, it really is.”

“Where is Nick now?” I asked finally, regaining my voice. “What does he do?” I clarified this: “For money?” It was a stupid question. It wasn’t as if Nick himself, wherever he was, would have been worried about money. But for years I worried for him, not seeing the patronization in this.

“Oh, I can’t keep it straight,” said Kate, and proceeded to give a detailed account of his endeavors the last two years. “He was going to do an Olympic campaign but he couldn’t get the funding. Then for a while he was working at a sail loft in Newport. Last winter he delivered a boat down to the Caribbean with Donny. They got jobs
working on a charter …” Unexpectedly, a lone spasm of emotion twisted across her face. “Why doesn’t he learn, George? It’s not
cool
to be the way he is, to smoke pot every day! He doesn’t have resources, George! He does. Not. Have. Resources! Chat’s tried to reason with him, but what can he do?

“I almost do want to see him, next time, and tell him, ‘Nick, we’re not in boarding school anymore. You can’t sail for the rest of your life! We’re too old for that, for God’s sake. We’re old!’ ”

It was a phase, I decided later. She was going through one of the few phases of her life that didn’t suit her. She had been out of school nearly three years now; perhaps she no longer saw any point in being a young unmarried woman in New York. Possibly, there wasn’t so very much to think about; the distractions were not quite so absorbing as they once were. It was only natural that she would set her mind on what next.

As for why she didn’t give Chat the nod and have done with it—well, one didn’t ask that the week before Memorial Day. No doubt I was vain enough, too, to see an opening in her distraction, however temporary, for myself.

As the scattered, frenetic meal ended, Kate regained her composure so quickly and thoroughly it made me think she had never truly abandoned it, that perhaps even the “trouble last winter” Chat had referred to had been a symptom of boredom alone.

“Dad’s tried to speak with him, too, but Nick doesn’t listen—not anymore.… You know, I really can’t get over how second-rate this place has become.” With a violent motion Kate pushed the untouched plate to the edge of the table and squared her shoulders as if to wrap up an unpleasant bit of small talk. “Do you have five minutes? Because I took the afternoon off and I’m going to Bergdorf’s. I’d love it if you came. You can be my second opinion, George.”

We hurried up toward the park in the afternoon sun, speaking hardly at all. There was always that distance you could count on with Kate, to balance out the afternoon. Even in the warmth her smooth
coloring did not change. I seized her hand and pressed it to my forehead. “My gosh,” she said, laughing, “what will you do in August?”

In the high hushed room of the old store, Kate tried on twenty or thirty dresses. She wanted my opinion on each one, but they all looked the same—becoming, appropriate, pretty on her.

Afterward we stood on Park, and I found I couldn’t even live up to Nicko’s example for an afternoon. All my AWOL attitude had seeped away in Women’s Designers. As I was composing my umpteenth excuse for Daniels, Kate rested her hand on my arm. “I have to cross here.”

“Can’t we trade?” I said. “My boss would like you better.”

“I would have been good on Wall Street,” said Kate, without irony.

She was right, too. I was exhausted just thinking about the afternoon to come, but Kate exuded well-restedness. As long as I had known her, she had been a healthy girl. I had never seen her rundown or exhausted; I had never seen her with a cold. I would have put money on the supposition that she had never stayed up all night finishing a book. I gave voice to this theory.

“What on earth do you mean?” Kate said. She wasn’t really surprised by the comment, though. Many men had been moved to make pronouncements about her, of one sort or another, and to her face.

“You know—just read all night and then find you’ve read too long because it’s getting light out.”

“But that’s not fair! I don’t think I’ve ever come across a book worth staying up all night
for
.”

“I never thought of that,” I said.

Then there was a curious moment. I bent to kiss her good-bye, and she turned her face so I caught her lips. They were quite dry. The downtown traffic had stopped for the light. “It’s funny,” Kate murmured—murmured against my lips. Her face was huge in my vision, magnified; a flower under a glass.

“Is it.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Come back.” For I had straightened up.

I did and then stopped. I glanced across Park, to where the cross street started in darkness. The May recklessness beat against my skull.

“Let’s fly to Paris,” I said. “I could show you around.”

Kate cocked her head back to look at me, and the light covered her face.

“We’ll go for the long weekend.”

“You’ll book a midnight flight out.”

“Why not?”

“Chat will be gone,” she added, “and I haven’t a thing to do.”

Kate could get out a neat response, no matter what the situation. She was the kind of date who knew her lines. And she was only answering in kind, banter for banter, mindless chatter for mindless chatter. For instance, she might have said: “Wonderful. What shall I wear?” or half a dozen other things. What I mean is, it was probably only by chance that she happened to mention Chat.

But I thought suddenly, blindingly—for the first time in nearly a year—of the money I owed him. Chat had never mentioned it; he would not mention it. But I saw all at once that it was going to prey on me. We weren’t in college anymore; I was a debtor now, a man in debt—suddenly the fact seemed to define me. I even felt a touch of paranoia that it was the money that had been behind the supercilious tone Chat had taken with me at Kate’s, and I wondered if New York hadn’t changed him, too. In college, even a conservative place like Dartmouth, he’d had to endure a fair amount of resentment about his background, and ridicule for the attitudes he assumed; perhaps now, in his hometown, he was basking defensively in his entitlement.

I watched Kate’s unchanging face as she explained that he was going up to Maine on Thursday to open up and would stay the weekend. Chat was famous for being fanatical about that, about never missing certain weekends—Memorial, Commissioning of the Yacht Club, Fourth of July—even going to infamous extremes like driving
up on a Saturday, eight hours, spending twelve hours in Maine, and turning around to drive home on Sunday.

“And I just don’t know what I’ll do …” Kate was saying.

I was sure she had half a dozen offers, from Blue Hill to Watch Hill, but with a last flash of bravado, I took her up on it—on this last point at least.

“Well, that’s too bad,” I decided. “Because he’ll miss my party.”

“You’re having a party?” she said curiously. “What kind of a party?”

“Nothing special,” I said. “Kick off the summer.”

“Oh,” said Kate. “Goodie.”

The light changed. I hurried away.

I was a literature major in college, but I never went in for the criticism that was popular with most of my peers. “I’d rather just
read
the books,” I would smugly declare. So when I say now that I have subjected the afternoon I spent with Kate and the events it germinated to a truly rigorous deconstruction, I have to confess I never knew what the word meant. Still, I couldn’t help myself from trying to understand certain things that happened afterward in and of themselves—I mean, to imagine what would have happened without me as their inadvertent author. I don’t know why I decided to throw that party, except that I couldn’t let the day slip away like that, not without salvaging something for myself.

W
hen I got back to my desk, the phone’s red message light was on. Before I checked it, I mentally updated my résumé and composed the gloss-over:
Yeah, I wanted to land in a smaller shop, anyway—less red tape to deal with …
The message was from duplicating. They had called to say my Xeroxing was ready. Robbins looked up from next door. “Long lunch?”

I tried to read meaning into this but failed. “Yeah.”

“Get a load of this,” he said.

He forwarded me a phone message that had been forwarded to him. I wasn’t in the mood for Robbins’s kind of humor, but this one was a keeper. By the time I got it, pretty much all of Wall Street had heard it. Anyone who was our age in New York at the time will remember it. It was the story of a blind date, a blind date in the age of voice mail.

“You’re never going to believe this,” said the unsuspecting woman, who talked straight Queens oh-my-gawdese. Oh my gawd,
indeed. She’d had sex with her blind date in a movie theater, and then again back at his place. His place had mirrors on the ceiling, and the woman said, “Oh my gawd, I was climbin’ the walls! I was buggin’—you could fuckin’ see everything,” and then she told what she saw, in the most extraordinary detail. It was gorgeous, that message. It was rich. It was the kind of thing that made you love New York like a little kid.

I spent the afternoon forwarding it to everyone I knew, with a witty preface inviting them to my party. The last person I invited was Lombardi. I hated to do it, in a way. I could almost hear him panting over the message, replaying it, acting, for his colleagues’ benefit, as if he and I went “way back, way back—Lenhart and I—great guy, great guy—oughta be a good time, if I can manage to turn up, a’course … don’t know, schedule’s pretty tight”—but I had promised, and when I thought of going back on my promise, the sneaking guilt that I associated with Lombardi drove me to the phone.

As for Toff, he got a note on the bathroom mirror.

Thursday night when I got home from work, I found Cara McLean waiting on the couch. “You still having it?”

I told her I was.

“I’m here to help you carry.”

The two of us went around the corner to the liquor store and bought gin and rum and as much tonic as we could carry. “I really think we ought to get tequila, too,” Cara said. “People like tequila.”

I was out of cash, so she paid for it herself. “You’re not going to regret this, George. I promise you. Wait’ll you see—people’ll be getting wild. Tequila really makes a party wild.”

We called the deli for beer, and then we got the place ready as fast as we could. I took out the trash and cleaned the bathroom sink, and Cara set everything up on the kitchen table, a bit too tidily for my taste. At the last minute Toff—God bless him—Toff came through brilliantly. We had forgotten the ice, and he said he would buy it on the way home.

I didn’t particularly want to sit on the couch with his girlfriend, who had staked it out, so I fiddled with the stereo and went into my bedroom to change my shirt. When I came out she handed me a shot glass and said, “Come on, George, you and I are going to do a tequila shot to get this party going, ’cause we did everything else, didn’t we?”

“I guess we did,” I said.

We did the shot and the buzzer rang.

Cara ran over to it, pressed the intercom, and yelled, “Send ’em up!” With some displeasure I recognized it: her wild-’n’-crazy party mode. I had seen it once or twice before, when she and Toff came home late, and I just hoped Toff would have plenty to drink himself.

There are many ways to show up at a party. One can show up late hoping to create an impression of being insouciant, wildly busy, and sought after. One can show up on time, because one is beyond needing to create that particular impression. Chat Wethers always showed up on time. “Come
on
, George,” he would urge seriously, in college. “They said the party’s starting at
nine
and it’s quarter to!” One can, of course, show up incredibly late, at one or two in the morning, because one
is
insouciant, wildly busy, and sought after. Or one can show up the way Harry Lombardi did, exactly half an hour after the party is slated to begin, expecting to be quite late but instead finding oneself the very first to arrive. He stood for a moment in the hallway, peering fearfully into the empty rooms.

“Would you like to come in, Harry?” I asked.

He took a cautious step through the doorway. Then he seemed to make a decision to face the facts squarely. “Don’t worry, George,” Harry said in a low voice. “More people will show up soon.”

“I was hoping they might,” I said.

Dispensing with further pleasantries, he walked past me into the kitchen. He was lugging a paper bag from which he removed three large bottles—of gin, vodka, and Scotch. My bottles were hidden under the table. Having this task to do seemed to put him at ease.
“You can use these for backup, George—nothing wrong with that.” I was on the point of arguing with him about a thing called trying too hard when I remembered a particular habit my mother had at dinner parties. Her silver set was missing so many pieces that there weren’t eight complete settings to go around. It was my job to set the table, and she would tell me, “Give me the flatware, George. No one will notice.” I would do it, but it used to bother me enormously, the one dull setting that didn’t belong; her, not at all. I don’t know why the memory came to me just then, but it stayed the protest on my lips. My parents were never very far from my mind, and I would think of them at the oddest moments, especially since coming to New York—when I spent more on cabs, for instance, than they spent on a week’s groceries.