The Fundamentals of Play (11 page)

I took an ice tray from the freezer to make us drinks. “That all the ice you got?” He was frightened again; scandalized.

“Yes, don’t you think it’ll be enough? I mean—three trays—”

But Harry never got jokes, even stupid ones, so I had to give up and explain that my roommate was on his way.

“Thank God!” he burst out, taking a rumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiping it across his brow. “I didn’t want to say anything, but Jesus Christ! You can’t throw a party with three trays’a ice!” He surveyed the living room with a disapproving frown. “Coulda had somebody in, but oh well.”

I had proposed a toast when Cara came out of the bathroom, into which she had disappeared for a final reckoning—or in order to make an appearance. She had abandoned her usual attire of black leggings, athletic shoes, and an oversized T-shirt for black leggings, high heels, and an undersized T-shirt. At the strip of linoleum that marked the beginning of the kitchen, she paused, looked sharply at Harry, and made a purposefully audible intake of air. This drew no immediate reaction, as Harry was busy readjusting the liquor display—at any moment I thought he was going to take out the handkerchief again and go to work dusting—so Cara shrieked his name.

“Henry! Oh, my god, Henry!”

Harry’s hands clenched themselves into fists; he turned as if someone had shouted an insult at him on the street. But before he could give back worse than he’d gotten, Cara had her arms around him and was pressed against him in an ecstatic, vocal embrace.

When they parted he shuffled back a step and picked up the bottle of gin he had brought and examined it as if it puzzled him in some way.

“Jeez, Henry!”

“How you been, Cara,” he said to the bottle. “Long time no see.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed, Henry!” she exclaimed, touching his arm. “We were kids, for Chrissake! It’s me, for Chrissake!”

What significance this last remark entailed I couldn’t venture to guess. She herself was over the moon. Between tugging on my sleeve and, with the evening’s newly coined flirtatiousness, demanding that I make her a Tanqueray and tonic—“I always switch to gin in the spring!”—she reeled off tidbits from Harry’s and her wild and crazy days at Millport Junior High. She seemed to exult in the connection; there was no end to her reminiscences. “When I was a freshman and you were in seventh grade! Oh, my god! We were so bad! I taught him how to smoke! Remember that? Sure you do! You didn’t know how to inhale! You weren’t doing it right!”

Harry’s head sank farther into his shoulders where his neck ought to have been. He still hadn’t looked her in the eye. His focus, when it encompassed her at all, remained firmly fixed on her taut mid-section.

“The parking lot at Brady Beach!”

With something like fondness, I recalled a favorite in Harry’s freshman-year wardrobe—a shrunken black concert T-shirt, “Brady Beach,” with something or other obscene on the back. Chat liked to try it on from time to time and come out in the middle of the room and play a vigorous air guitar with his amplifier turned up too high.

“Hey, you want one? You want a cigarette now? Look: I still smoke Marlboros. I never changed my brand!”

“You smoke?” I said.

Cara put an arm around my shoulder. “Only when I party, Georgie!”

Releasing me, she stuck a cigarette in her mouth and looked around the cramped excuse for a kitchen as if at a great view, as if there were twenty men who might have come running from the esplanade with matches.

The matchbook Harry removed bore the logo of the bar downstairs. He must have been waiting down there, I realized, watching the clock, for the previous half hour to be up.

When the buzzer rang again, I excused myself and went to get it. It was Toff, haggard from lugging the ice, and a few guests of mine he’d ridden up with, to whom he had, in Toff-like fashion, not introduced himself. “We thought he was going to another party,” said one of the girls, “or we would have helped.”

The early turnout was a bit
too
promising. A number of people slinked in whom I didn’t recognize, and as I couldn’t believe Toff had that many friends, it seemed to mean that word had overly gotten around, as sometimes happens. But then I noticed that a lot of them seemed to know Harry. In fact he was hosting a sort of sub-party in one corner of the room, taking drink orders and pointing out the bar. A little while later, I caught him pointing me out, so I went over and thanked him for inviting all of his friends to my party. “Hey, anytime, George. I know how it can be—first party in the city.… No worries, no worries … all is good among friends.” Cara, standing beside him the way she normally protected Geoff, looked at me contemptuously and remarked, “Looks like half the people here are friends of yours, Henry.”

“It certainly does, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Hey,” Harry said, “don’t feel bad or anything, George—”

“I’ll try not to.”

As I turned away, Cara smirked and put a hand to her mouth to whisper in his ear.

When I next remarked the two of them, she had him monopolized on the couch. By then, however, I could see that it was no one-sided communion.

“You’re kidding me! You gotta be kidding me—that’s crazy!”

“I know it’s crazy, but it’s the goddamned truth! You wanna hear how it happened? Lemme tell you how it happened.”

Harry had warmed to her considerably; he looked relaxed, expansive, as he pontificated to his circle of guests for her benefit. It dawned on me that perhaps it had been my presence that had cowed him earlier, not Cara’s. I looked around for Toff, to see what he made of this, and found him in the kitchen pounding beers, the flirtation was so obvious. “Great party, George!” called the poor guy, straining for a lighthearted note with a grimace of a smile. What was even stranger, at least to me, was that the new Cara McLean, flushed and animated under Harry’s steady, rather menacing gaze, had all but obliterated our forlorn weeknight couch denizen. She looked robust; she looked as if she’d had a steak for dinner. I remember thinking that Harry
ought
to take her out for a steak—it would do her good, from time to time: woman cannot live on fro-yo alone—and thinking also that a maniacal commitment to aerobic exercise was not such a bad thing after all.

Or perhaps I had simply had too much to drink. There were shots to be done with my roommate, shots to be done with Robbins, shots to be done with Daniels, whom I had rashly invited and who had, predictably, come. A guy I didn’t know in a cap was working the door, and another guy in another cap was roundly and vocally dismissing me as “the freak who never got out of vinyl,” when an hour or so into the full swing there was a flurry at the door, and as the song on the stereo ended a clean, dry voice across the room said, “Oh, so this
is
George Lenhart’s place, then. I’d better introduce Delia, what was it, Ferrier? Delia Ferrier, we’ve just met in the elevator.”

Not just the song, it seemed, but the entire album’s side had ended, so that as Kate came in with this other girl, the entire party stared across the room at them. Cara McLean, I’d venture to guess, stared hardest of all.

I went to greet them. The girl with Kate was taller and brunette, with glasses that were rather severe and obscured her eyes; she was dressed all in black. It was a look, and not one I disliked. It impressed
me that Toff had procured her when, even more improbably, Harry Lombardi stood up yet again and claimed her as his guest. This he did by shouting her name across the room. “Delia!” But the name was an aural fake; he barely looked at the girl. She seemed to take this with a certain amount of irony, and on this shared note the two of us shook hands.

“You look familiar,” I said, already too drunk to be embarrassed at starting so poorly. And I would finish worse.

“We all do,” came her unexpected response.

“Really.”

“Yes, except we’ve all dropped a size and started waxing our eyebrows.” She looked straight at me and you could see why she wore the glasses. “New York does that to girls.” I absorbed this as, with his usual finesse, Harry walked heavily—I might now say inexorably—through the crowd to Kate Goodenow. I remember thinking that he walked like a man defeated—a man who, lacking alternatives, keeps going, his shoulders hunched into the wind, his cross on his back. Yet there was something reassuring about his resignation in the midst of all our glib expectations. I hoped he wouldn’t take it too hard when Kate shot him down.

He stared at her for about three seconds—she was charming the Cap at the door with some nonsense about a cab shortage—before interrupting her with an important bulletin: “I’m Harry.”

Cara he had utterly forgotten about the instant the door opened. She was left openmouthed and furious on the couch, her knees tucked up underneath her in a provocative pose, now provoking no one.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m Harry.”

Something about the stolidity with which he repeated this seemed to amuse Kate. She shot me a droll look. “Just ‘Harry’?” she said. “Harry, Harry, quite contrary?”

Harry failed to get the implication; what was more, he didn’t pretend to get it. I think the latter might have impressed Kate ever so
slightly. He said—nothing; he stared at her, unembarrassed, his large head poking out through his shoulders. In the background, music started again, after a moment of static, as the needle touched a new record.

Kate didn’t have the kind of complexion that blushes, but she lowered her eyes for half a second to indicate where the blush might have come. “Do you have a last name, Harry?” she said softly.

Harry grunted. “Lombardi.” He took her hand and shook it, methodically, serious, not smiling. Kate fluttered her eyes in my general direction, as if for help, but not particularly wanting help.

“Kate Goodenow.”

“I know who you are.”

“You
do
?”

“Sure.”

“And how—”

“I wenta Dartmouth.”

“You—you went to Dartmouth with—”

“Chat Wethers. And George here. They told me about you.”

“You did? George?”

“I never said a word.”

“Well,” Kate said happily, “I’ve never heard of you.”

“Yeah, I dropped out.”

Kate seemed to miss a beat as, against all expectations, her curiosity was piqued. I had missed nothing, but I was giving Delia Ferrier short shrift as I observed this encounter. Of course, I thought: Kate would cotton to that fact—his dropping out—as much as I had. It was something new in her world, at least new in her New York world. He was talking so closely to her that she was pressed up against the wall. I stepped forward to assert myself. Instead I heard myself asking what I could get them to drink.

“You choose,” Kate demurred.

“I’ll choose,” said Harry. “I know what you want. I’ll get you something good.” He ordered by brand name; fortunately, we had his brand on hand.

“Shall I help you, George?”

“I’ll manage,” I said, and realized that my girl had slipped away—as, of course, she ought to have done.

“All right,” Kate agreed. “I’ll stay and hear more about myself from your charming friend.”

I tried to press forward, but the way to the kitchen was blocked.

“You’d be surprised what I know,” Harry asserted.

“Would I,” she said, unimpressed, not really believing him.

“Sure—like, Wednesdays were square dancing,” Harry offered. And he began to recite the facts of her childhood like multiplication tables. “Thursdays were Coggywog nights, and Fridays were—wait, hold on! I know this. Fridays were—Fridays were—shit, what were Fridays? Don’t tell me!”

Kate’s face was immobile but her eyes were paying attention to him, something they almost never did.

“Don’t tell me! I know this.”

“Don’t tell him, Kate,” I mumbled. “Don’t tell him what Fridays were.”

“Fridays were Top of the World,” Kate said. I pushed my way into the throng.

I laughed at a dirty joke of Robbins’s and was aware of Cara’s unmerited attack on Geoff coming from their bedroom. I agreed with Daniels that all was forgiven—of course, of course—in the interest of friendship, and somewhere between the door and Harry’s top-shelf liquor I understood what had passed between Kate and me on the street before. I labored the ten feet toward the kitchen, and all the time it was dawning on me until I knew it as surely as I knew her name. She would have gone to Paris with me. A large bag of ice was melting in the sink. She would have gone, only I hadn’t seen it quickly enough, or clearly enough. You couldn’t throw a party with three trays of ice. Toff was a good roommate to remember the ice. She would have gone, only I had thought of the money. It was still the same question it had always been. I had missed my chance because of the money. At the moment I’d realized she was playing to my hand, I was down an enormous sum.

Or so it seemed to me at the time. It is only recently that another idea has come creeping into my consciousness—that it was not the ten thousand dollars I owed Chat but the sum, rather, of my years. Twenty-three was a stupid age, a know-nothing age. It was the age when it seemed quite likely that that kind of debt could have consequences. It was a guilty age. And I was guilty enough already, guilty of the same old thing since grade school, guilty of having come from a family that had had the lack of foresight—the poor taste, really—to come down in the world. It was almost anti-American, losing money the way we had.

And yet there was Kate, nodding at me across the room, perhaps saying something about me to Harry. Her face hadn’t changed. But to act now? Under false pretenses?

“Lenhart, how many feminists does it take to change a light-bulb?”

“I don’t know, Robbins. Is your mother one of them?”

I gave Kate a pointless little wave through the crowd. It was like the feeling you get in bridge when the bidding ends and you see you are to lay down your hand as dummy. You see you are going to sit this one out. And in my place Harry Lombardi, of all people, had stepped in. I felt my jaw clench with anger. What right had he? I wanted to go over and invoke Wethers’s name, even if he was eight hours north. But there was, of course, no point in mentioning Chat. Unlike me, Lombardi didn’t owe Chat Wethers a thing. Unlike me, Lombardi had found it more practical to trade debt than acquire it. I took my hands away from the block of ice as the chill penetrated my fingers.