The Fundamentals of Play (13 page)

I suppose I could have at least made it clear that on this point, she didn’t have to convince me.

“He lost it to me!” Cara cried. “That’s how!” As I was trying, half asleep, to remember what “it” signified in this context, she clarified the reference: “On my parents’ water bed!”

J
ust last summer I was finally able to complete an empirical proof that I began to lay out my first summer in New York. I call it the Law of Summer Displacement. This is how it works: my parents’ friends the Beverlys live on Sixty-eighth and Third and spend their summers in Litchfield, Connecticut. But Mr. and Mrs. Beverly’s neighbors in Litchfield, the Clarks, make Connecticut their home all winter, so they like to spend July and August on Martha’s Vineyard; they have rented the same house in Tisbury for fifteen years running. Now, a guy I know from Chatham called Billy P. made the bold move after college to become a year-rounder on the Vineyard. The idea worked out well for a while; he sailed and washed dishes and played guitar, but eventually he couldn’t stand the summer crowds, so a couple of Junes ago he took off for Nova Scotia, where his grandparents have a farm. He met a girl there named Val Breton; they went out for two summers, then last summer I heard that Val, who was still in college, had gotten herself an internship in New York and was subletting the Beverlys’
daughter’s apartment in the East Village.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.

That was the way it worked. I remember how amusing I found it when I first became aware of the phenomenon—that people in Manhattan went to, say, City Island; people from City Island went to Stamford; people from the suburbs went to the country; people from the country went to the islands; and people from the islands came here. And I used to look forward to the day when I would hear that people from Soho were summering on Fourteenth Street, so that I could prove the absurdity of it all—that one man’s meat is, in fact, another man’s grilled steak. But after a few summers of my own, I came to understand, as even the most benighted New Yorkers eventually do, that the important thing wasn’t where you went but
that
you went, that you committed yourself to the drives there and back, to the endless coming and going. The getting there wasn’t the point, because summer, at least the American summer, is one long moment in the present. The other seasons have their years and their private histories, but every summer is a part of every other summer. Different rules apply, which one must learn in youth.

“In the summer,” Chat put it to me once—the summer we spent up at Dartmouth—“nothing counts.”

I had, nevertheless, paid Robbins fifteen hundred dollars for the privilege of showing up every other weekend in Southampton, well north of the highway, to share a room with one of his fraternity brothers from Pennsylvania. On the two or three weekends I made it out there, however, hastily formed couples took the rooms and the beds and I and two other luckless guys flipped for the good and bad couches.

I couldn’t have made a move for any of the girls Robbins drew. They were friendly, cooperative girls, and good sports; when we barbecued, the lot of them would go to work rustling up platters for their signature hors d’oeuvres. But I couldn’t get a handle on their muscular arms and plain faces. And I couldn’t remember where any of
them were from. Like an idiot, I kept repeating the question until one girl complained, “I’ve told you three times!” and named a town upstate. I had a horrible sense of vertigo those weekends. The entire time was like one afternoon when I had to go to the drugstore for aspirin and a buddy of Robbins’s offered me a ride to the mall. It was a strip mall, and the pharmacy was one of a discount chain. I went inside the store and walked up and down each aisle, but I couldn’t find the right one. I kept wandering around looking for the aspirin under the fluorescent lights until, standing by the greeting cards, I suddenly felt as if the air inside the store were thinning. It was difficult to breathe. My headache was so bad by this point, it occurred to me that I must have a brain tumor. So this was it: death at the strip mall. At last a middle-aged clerk showed me to the painkiller section. I walked back out to the parking lot and swallowed two dry and waited for Robbins’s pal. Something was wrong. I was standing in a parking lot of a strip mall on the nicest day of the year. Something had simply gone wrong. My ride came trundling across the parking lot clutching a bag of fast food. “Hey, you wanna go ride the go-carts?” he asked, stuffing in a bite. I declined as politely as someone in my condition could.

The Long Island Rail Road on Sunday, with the passengers sunburned, bitchy, defeated by the size of the
Times
, standing all the way from Bridgehampton with rackets sticking defensively out of their bags—that at least was a lovely embraceable misery. And every Monday morning was like a baptism. There was work to be done, money to be made. Without the money I reckoned we would surely have all gone away for good.

Once in a while there would be an empty Saturday, devoid of plans and meaning, and on one of those Saturdays I got a call from Harry. It was a few weeks after my party, a day in late June; sticky, with a high, halfhearted overcast, as if the weather were hedging its bets. I had worked most of the night before and was contemplating how to endure the next day and a half—it wasn’t one of my allotted
weekends in the share—when Harry offered salvation in the form of brunching with him. It was his verb, not mine; I myself have never been able to eat pancakes after ten o’clock without a kind of moral malaise setting in. He named one of the popular brunch spots in my—both of our neighborhoods, actually, there being a branch on either side of the park. It was one of those pseudo-fifties diners that advertise a free mimosa or Bloody Mary with your $12.99 eggs, as if life weren’t tragic enough. The choice of restaurant was so repellent to me that I hesitated, as much as I wished to leave the apartment, when a woman’s voice spoke up in the background and a moment or two later Kate got on the phone and told me I had better come, because if I didn’t, she wasn’t going to go, either. “It’s true,” Harry said, reclaiming the receiver. “She says she won’t go unless you go, George. She’s been saying it all morning.” And that was how I learned that she had taken up with him, just like that.

I was the first to arrive; it was a depressing two o’clock when I got there. It was late enough so that a few minutes’ wait yielded a table, a booth no less (the hostess indicated that this was a great stroke of good fortune for me) and late enough also that the booth wore the effects of the ten previous parties it had seated that morning. Bits of egg and mayonnaise clung to the surface of the table, and you could see the hasty path the busboy’s sponge had taken, drying now in a gray-brown figure eight. In the next booth I watched a heavy, sunburned young man with a crew cut pour ketchup on his eggs and eat them in a continuous shoveling motion, hunched over his plate as he highlighted for a buddy the sexual conquest of the night before. When their plates were nearly clean, the two of them came up briefly for air, pounded their Bloody Marys, and set the empty glasses down. The buddy took up his fork to spear a last bite when his face suddenly resembled that of a man who has been punched in the stomach. He gripped the table, eyes goggling wildly, saliva forming at the corners of his half-open mouth. The ketchup-and-eggs man suspended his shoveling to watch. After a moment the stricken man lurched to his feet and made for the men’s room. He returned a few
minutes later, wiping his mouth on his shirttail with a gratified air. “You lose it?” grunted the companion.

“Lost it all,” the man confirmed, making a loud vomiting noise.

I ordered tea and a negligible cup of water appeared, too cold to bleed the tea bag. I sat dunking it anyway, waiting.

They were half an hour late. Neither of them seemed to notice the place, which irked me, since they had chosen it. Floating in like a tractable kite on Harry’s arm, Kate alit on my side of the booth.

“Oh, you wanna sit with George, huh? You wanna sit with George?”

I felt my hand seized by both of her cool ones. “Of
course
I want to sit with George!”

“Oh, you do, huh?”

I began to dread the rest of the afternoon.

There is a phase in every new relationship when it cannot be seen to exist by its constituents unless reflected by a third party. During this phase one makes plans ardently, exacts double dates from any existing twosome, and preys upon mutual friends for dinner. For Harry and Kate this phase would be dramatically foreshortened, or at least narrowly focused: I was the only person both of them knew.

“So you wanna sit with George, huh?”

“Read your menu, Harry.”

As Harry dutifully scrutinized it, Kate flipped her sunglasses up on her head and whispered in my ear, “I’m
so
glad you could come!
You’re
the reason I came out at all.” She was tan, but not ostentatiously so; Kate was one of the few people left who got tan from sport.

The waitress came. Harry did the ordering for the two of them, or, rather, the two of them and the six imaginary friends who were to show up later: waffles, French toast, eggs over easy and scrambled, a Spanish omelette. “That oughta do it.”

“But I want french fries,” Kate said pleasantly. “Did you order french fries? That’s all I want.”

“Awright, add a fries to that. And Bloodys all around. You’ll have a drink, won’t you, George?”

As the day was lost already, I could think of no reason to refuse.

“The Bloodys are free with the meal,” Harry announced. He pulled a fistful of paper napkins from the dispenser and shredded them methodically. “Not that I care, but you gotta live it up when you get the chance, right?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“See, George knows what I’m talking about. You gotta live every day like it matters—like it’s your last.”

I glanced at Kate. It was her practice to live no day like it mattered. She sat demurely, pressing into me slightly, utterly retracted into herself. From the blank, pleasant expression on her face, you would have thought she could see no farther than the inner surface of her own eye. At last the drinks came.

“They call this spicy?” Harry protested. He seized the pepper from the next booth, deserted now, and shook it methodically into his glass, ten or twelve shakes. Then he repeated the procedure with the Tabasco sauce. “But you’ll burn your mouth off!” cried Kate, aghast.

“No, I won’t—I
like
it hot!” declared Harry. “The hotter the better!” He drank it down and his eyes watered terribly.

“How
could
you?”

Choking, he summoned the waitress and ordered another round.

“I’ll skip it,” I said, with a view of what was to come. Harry was evidently bent on getting trashed in the middle of the day.

“Don’t be a teetotaler, George,” Kate chided me, though she had not touched her drink.

This was her way of telling me I had better be a good sport. “All right,” I said giving up. “I don’t care either way.” And I really didn’t.

“There’s nothing Dad detests more than the teetotaler,” Kate went on contentedly, as if a string in her back had been pulled and she had been mechanized into conversation. “Dad’s always saying that Alcoholics Anonymous is ruining this country, and Mom and I just say …”

There is a certain kind of person who refers to his mother and father as “Mom” and “Dad” instead of “my mom” and “my dad,” as
if his parents were the only parents in the world, and the listeners are presumed to be acquainted with Mom and Dad and their endearing idiosyncrasies. Previously I had taken this as a minor flattery from Kate; now, watching Harry make the same assumption, it occurred to me that it was in fact a minor rudeness. He breathed a little more heavily at the mention of Mr. Goodenow.

“When do I get to meet your dad, Kate? He sounds like my kind of guy. I’ll bet he and I would get along great! Didja ever think of that—that your dad and I would probably hit it off? We got lots in common, you know. I mean, when you think about it.”

“Dad?” Kate said coolly. “You’ll get to meet him one of these days.”

“You promise, Kate?”

I shot her another look; I couldn’t help myself.

“Why shouldn’t you meet Dad?” she said mildly. “Maybe you’ll come up to Maine—”

“Maine?” Harry shouted. “Kate, you mean it?” If the table hadn’t been in the way, I believe he would have jumped into her lap. As it was, he made a helpless, truncated gesture in her direction, as if to embrace her across the expanse of Formica. “You and me at Chillyick? Jesus, Kate! That’d be the best!”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Kate, retreating into herself once more.

“I mean, Chillyick—!”

My hamburger came and I ate it, studying the blue plate specials above the grill as if to memorize them. Chillyick was their nickname for the yacht club, Kate’s and Chat’s and Nicko’s, the Cold Harbor Yacht Club—C.H.Y.C.—they called it Chillyick.

Harry had ordered so much food that the plates wouldn’t fit on the table, so he scraped the three egg dishes onto one. “That oughta do it!”

He got down to eating. Kate didn’t want to eat, not even the fries, but he cut off a square of waffle and ran it through the syrup on his plate and poked it toward her. “Just try it.” She took it, gingerly.

He inquired politely after my job.

“Harry’s starting his own company, did you know that, George?” Kate asked.

“I did hear that,” I said. Both of us spoke to Harry as if he had suddenly become the satellite through which we beamed our communications.

“Give this software thing a shot,” mumbled Harry. Midbite he seemed to be weighing a conversational risk. He swallowed, put his knife and fork down European-style, sat back in the booth, and spread his palms on the table. The nails were bitten down to the quick, but at the thought of the company he was going to start, his face went absolutely clear and focused. “I’m looking for backers, George. This could really be a good thing for you … I wouldn’t even mention it if I didn’t think it was one hundred percent rock-solid. I mean, I don’t know where you’ve got your money, but—”