The Fundamentals of Play
Acclaim for Caitlin Macy’s
T
HE
F
UNDAMENTALS OF
P
LAY
“Well-written and thoroughly conceived.… Macy has crafted a well-honed story that builds with tension and surprise. It’s a promising beginning.”
—
The Washington Post
“A noteworthy debut.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Reading Caitlin Macy’s fine first novel,
The Fundamentals of Play
, is a bit like being invited, unawares, to the party.… Macy’s portrait of prematurely conservative rich kids … is richly evocative. Her narrative swings gracefully from present to past and back, slowly revealing the secrets in the shadows.”
—
Salon
“An insightful first novel.… What resonates is the style and sharp eye for detail.… Macy finds the poetry of regret without stumbling into sentimentality.”
—
People
“A slick drug-free
Less than Zero
for the relatively buttoned down ’90s set.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“
The Fundamentals of Play
is a graceful, poignant tale of thwarted love.… The book works because of an all-too-rare quality in first novels—its grace.”
—
The Hartford Courant
Caitlin Macy
T
HE
F
UNDAMENTALS OF
P
LAY
Caitlin Macy graduated from Yale and received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia. She has been published in
The New York Times Magazine
and
Slate
. She lives in New York City.
First Anchor Books Edition, July 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Caitlin Macy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it are inventions of the author and do not depict any real persons or events.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Macy, Caitlin.
The fundamentals of play : a novel / Caitlin Macy
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82900-9
1. Young adults—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A3387 F86 2000
813′.54—dc21
99-086625
Author photograph © Sara Barrett
v3.1
For my father
,
Peter Tarr Macy
,
and my mother
,
Claire Canapary Macy
I would like to thank the George Gorham family; the Carballals—for letting me keep my hand in; Tim Scott, Ron Irwin, Jenny Offill, Jeremy Barnum, and my sister, Jem.
I would also like to thank Daniel Menaker, whose editorial presence had a wonderfully steadying effect; and Dan Mandel, this book’s first friend.
“He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!”
—Great Expectations
I went to Paris after graduation but it was too late to do me any good. Under the stipulations of the fellowship, I was to stay for a year; I barely lasted the winter. I cited, in my letter to the committee, the weakness of the dollar, which had eaten up the stipend. Touching down in New York in gray, frigid March, I had a great sense of relief. The truth was I couldn’t wait to put on a coat and tie and go to work and have the next ten years go by. It was only later that I associated the feeling with the realization that Kate was right. She had always maintained that she and I shared this quality—call it a fundamental conservatism, associate it with whatever you like: the Latin motto of your youth; Budweiser in cans; the moral imperative of fresh air. Or as Kate would have put it, I am one of those Americans who would rather go to Connecticut than France.
HAPTER
1
I
t was the year they changed the name on the building that ruins the view down Park Avenue. My firm was midtown—Fordyce, Farley—and I was that lowest form of post-undergraduate life: the first-year analyst. We worked hundred-hour weeks in fabric-upholstered cubicles of four feet by six. The guy in the one next to mine didn’t so much as acknowledge me till one morning when he came in late and was compelled to share the latest outrage. “They changed the name!” I was indignantly informed. “They went and changed the name!”
I remember I told Robbins not to worry, that everyone would go on calling it the Pan Am Building. I was wrong. Everyone started calling it the MetLife Building. This isn’t really important—I certainly never heard anyone try to make a metaphor of it (the change in the city’s most visible corporation from airplanes to insurance)—but it stuck in my mind, and it is from that point that I always date my arrival in the city.
I was like any other foolishly young face in pinstripes. I lived on the barren top of the Upper East Side in one of those high-rise dormitories called the Something Arms. My roommate was Geoff Toff—Will Toff’s brother, whom I’d known at Dartmouth. Geoff was paralegaling as a means of getting into law school. We didn’t live together so much as run into each other in the apartment every couple of weeks. When we did, Geoff was amiable, aggressively amiable, agreeing with my opinions before I had fully uttered them.
“I really think this whole mess about the Long Island—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know—me, too.”
The television was Toff’s. So was the sofa bed, and a large fake-leather reclining chair from which he affected an ironic distance that I didn’t quite believe. I had the stereo and a glass coffee table and hung three prints of the Seine on the wall.
In my bedroom (the smaller of the two; I lost the coin toss), as in the living room, the floor was carpeted blue. I slept on a mattress on the floor which I planned to upgrade to a bed. The night I moved in we made spaghetti and jar sauce, and that was the last time either of us opened a kitchen cabinet.
Recently I was depressed to read in the
Times
that the idea of catching up on sleep is a myth. Nevertheless, I’m planning my Rip Van Winkle revenge. I took a poll of some friends of mine, and we all agreed the last time we were well rested was in 1982. I remember one particular morning that first spring at Fordyce when I discovered myself lying on a stretch of the blue carpet, the L-shaped inlet which joined my bedroom to the hall. I did not know how long I had been lying there. I believe that I was having a breakdown, from pulling two or three all-nighters in a row, but I don’t know—maybe I was upset about something. Eventually I stood up and went to work. It seemed funny to me, in the cab downtown.
But then everything seemed funny. The money—or the idea of money, for I had none yet—and the never-ending work weeks gave the year a wired, comic tinge. It was all such a ruse. One pretended
to be an adult and did adult-like things: one had the
Journal
delivered; one had a morning coffee order. The coffee order—
order
—was everything. If you imposed enough order on your life you would wake up your boss, you would wake up old, the imposition would no longer be necessary because the habits would be fully acquired. And in our generation we wanted to be old. Not all of us, of course, but among those of us who went to Wall Street, it was a prevalent posture. I looked forward to the day when I could creak around in threadbare seersucker and indulge in my baffling idiosyncrasies; when I would be chastised by my wife for sneaking out to the local diner for an old-school, high-cholesterol breakfast. My parents were a little older than most parents with kids my age—closer to World War II than Vietnam—and I and a number of my peers were of the opinion that their generation had gotten it right. And perhaps the habits had stuck all the more in my family because they were all we had been able to hold on to. I hadn’t come to Wall Street for nothing.
I thought of calling Kate—of course I thought of calling her—but the time was never right. Monday was too early in the week and Wednesday too late. The daytime seemed too casual for the initial call, the evenings much too formal. The weekends were impossible. Chat Wethers would know where to find her, but I didn’t want to go through him. And in the back of my mind, I cherished the idea of running into her. I had envisioned various settings, each triter than the next—crossing Grand Central, hailing a cab up Park on a rainy night. Then one evening she materialized, right where you would expect her to, at the Town Club, on Sixty-second Street.
The partner in a deal I worked on took us there the night the company went public. It was the partner and I, a director and two associates, shooting endless after-dinner pool in an inner sanctum three or four flights up. My direct boss was the associate Daniels. He was the kind of man who buys the Harvard Business School sweatshirt, the Harvard Business School key chain, and any number of Harvard
Business School bumper stickers. He got drunk and said more and more loudly, “You’re having a good time
now
, eh, Lenhart? First time at the Town Club, eh, Lenhart?” Eventually he picked a fight with me over a shot I didn’t call, and looking for an excuse to escape the scene, I volunteered to put him into a cab.