The Fundamentals of Play (17 page)

“Oh, no,” said Kate. She had an odd, abstracted look in her
eyes that was not like Kate at all. “No, no. We just … we stopped because …” She swallowed and tossed off the last remark: “Well, you reminded us of someone we know.”

“Yeah?” the kid said, bored. “I get that a lot.”

“No, but you really look like someone we know,” insisted Kate. She held up a hand to block the sun. “In fact you could be him—couldn’t he, George?”

“Ten years ago,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Kate objected. “Not that long.”

“What happened,” the boy asked skeptically, “the guy die or something?”

Kate gave an artificial laugh, walking down the dock as the kid walked aft on the boat. “Hardly. The guy leads a very nice life not doing much of anything, running around the Caribbean all winter. He doesn’t do much more than sail.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oh, yes.”

This drew a long understanding nod. He wasn’t, after all, as good-looking as Nick. The nod made him look dull-witted, whereas Nick had an omniscient expression. “I just came from there,” he volunteered after a moment.

“From where?”

“B.V.I.’s. Brought her up from Lauderdale to Hatteras and from Hatteras last week.”

“You and who else?” Kate said, calling his bluff.

“Just a couple other guys!” the kid said hotly. He had gone from writing her off to trying to win favor in about two minutes.

There was a silence then, not unpleasant, and I thought we would take our leave. Harry had wandered on ahead, as if to assert his independence. But Kate wasn’t quite ready to leave. She coaxed another invitation from the boy—it was easily won—and this time she said, “Yes, I wouldn’t mind having a look, after all.” A certain change in her voice made me wonder what she had in mind.

The gunwales were quite high, and the boy took Kate under her
arms, leaning over the lifelines to hoist her up. It was wonderful to see someone take that liberty with her.

I went over to the side of the boat and reached up and belatedly shook the kid’s hand. Immediately I felt the pointlessness of the gesture: the boy had a weak, noncommittal handshake, as if he didn’t quite believe in the custom.

“You coming on, too?”

“All right.”

To help me aboard, he gave me his hand for real. He was very strong, despite being so lean and slouchy, stronger than you would have thought. He had no idea what to make of us, that was clear. Kate was looking at him with an almost parental expression, pleased and patient. “Are you here for the regatta?” the kid inquired finally, directing the question to me.

“No, no,” Kate explained, “we’re here …” But her voice drifted off absently; she couldn’t seem to remember why we were there.

“Wow—late night, huh?” said the kid. “I’m all messed up, too, ’cause of the delivery.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Starving, too—it’s Cook’s day off.”

With a diffident eye on Kate, Harry came shuffling over.

“Guys?”

The whole exchange was beginning to feel rather surreal to me: the boy looked so much like Nick, and he was living Nick’s life. And yet it is never as rewarding as it should be, in life, to meet a representative of one of the types you know. You want to sit them down and have them confirm your suspicions—“And don’t you do this? And don’t you do that?”—but unless you are a sleuth in a detective novel with a murder to solve, the implications remain inconclusive. There is nothing at all to be done with the information. All you know is yes, they are just like someone you know.

From the dock Harry set about coughing and clearing his throat. That way he had around Kate, of hanging back—presuming not even so much as an introduction to a stranger—seemed pathetic to
me. I wanted to tell him to speak up for himself for God’s sake—have it out with her.

“This is a friend of ours,” I said.

Turning toward the pier, Kate seemed to consider the premise of my statement. “Why, yes,” she corroborated, “he is.”

There was an awkward moment when Harry boarded and got tripped up on the lifelines and fell to his knees. His eyes watered, as when he’d drunk the Bloody Mary in the diner. “Oh, gee, I’m sorry—” The kid was beside himself, but Harry wouldn’t take the apology. “I’m fine! I’m fine!” He was clearly in pain. The kid suggested a shot of rum and darted below to get the bottle.

“You know I’m fine,” Harry claimed, limping forward and aft with a proprietary frown, as if to establish himself as a Man Who Knew Boats.

“Take the shot of rum,” ordered Kate, ever so pleasantly.

We went and sat in the cockpit and passed the bottle around. “Isn’t this funny?” Kate said. It seemed to please her enormously that we had been able to make inroads with the boy. She was strangely, overly friendly. They began to talk about the delivery, and Kate plied him with questions. Was it cold? Was it lonely on the watches? Did it blow hard? A gale? A real gale? I didn’t like to see her like that. I didn’t like to see any woman with an agenda, but particularly not Kate. I didn’t like to see her stooping to draw a man out.

The kid’s jaded manner fell away (but we, knowing Nicko, had known that it would) and he carped happily about the owner of the boat, who didn’t know the first thing about sailing. “Not the first thing. We’re taking her out of the harbor for the first time, going out the channel, and he says, ‘What do I do with that red thing?’ and I say, ‘You leave the nun to port,’ and I go below and come up two minutes later and he’s leaving it about two inches to starboard!” Kate gave the pleased, patient smile, but Harry guffawed loudly. Meanwhile his eyes looked up the rails desperately to see—would there be some indication? Did they label port and starboard? Wasn’t port the one, on the cruise that time—or was that starboard? I wanted to reassure him that there would be no test.

“You see the name?” the boy asked.

We nodded.

“You hear about these dentists? These celebrity dentists?”

“Um—” I said.

“
What
did you say—celebrity
dentists
?” exclaimed Kate. “George, did you hear that?”

“My gosh,” I said.

“Must be pretty successful, though,” said Harry, asserting himself into the conversation at last. “I mean a boat like this must cost, well, at least—”

“Five,” said the kid coldly, picking up immediately, as teenagers do, on whom he could be rude to without repercussion. “Five and six zereos.” He stretched the tail of his T-shirt out to wipe off a winch. “I have to get her in shape, ’cause the kids are coming,” he allowed.

“You mean the dentist’s kids?” asked Kate.

“Yup,” he said, “and they don’t even like sailing. They don’t even like sailing! Dentist has to force them to come out at all, and then they just take the Jet Ski out, and go out for dinner.”

“How do you put up with them?” cried Kate. “It must be awful!”

“Oh … they’re not
that
bad.” The kid relented, with sudden largesse. “Actually, they’re not really kids. They’re about … our age.”

“Our age!”

“Well …”

“How old do you think we are?” I asked.

“I duh-know,” said the boy with a scowl.

“No, how old?” Kate insisted.

“Maybe twenty,” said the boy, after a long hesitation. He had to keep Kate within his range, or the whole conversation—and the day and his job on the boat and probably his life—were pointless. I understood this need; I had played the same game at Chatham, when she was sixteen and I was fourteen. But Harry cried, “Twenty?” and smacked his thigh. He seemed to be made up of a series of broad theatrical gestures—a thigh-smacking, throat-clearing, fist-clenching player. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

“Not you!” cried the kid, indignant. “You’re older! But you other two?” He turned to Kate on a note of appeal.

“You’re right!” Kate spoke up in his defense. “We
are
about twenty. And you’re also right about him.” She pointed at Harry as if he were her wicked stepfather. “
He’s
older. Much older!”

Even Harry didn’t know what to say to that, but he seemed determined not to take offense, to prove that anything—anything—was all right by him, that he was just a roll-off-your-shoulders kind of guy. “Say, you got a bathroom on this thing?”

The kid took him below to the head and returned, coiling a length of line into a long, lazy circle.

“So who’d I remind you of?”

“You remind us of a kid who was the best sailor—” Kate began, her voice softening to paint the picture.

“Yeah?” the kid broke in impertinently. “Was he all-American?”

“No.”

“No? Well, then he can’t have been that great,” concluded the kid. “Anybody who’s good in college—”

“He didn’t go to college.”

“Oh. Okay.” He took this in. “Why not?”

“He couldn’t afford it,” I said.

“Now, George, you know that’s not true. He didn’t apply himself.”

“I don’t ‘apply’ myself either,” said the kid.

“I know,” Kate said simply.

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Nick,” she threw out, after a fraction of a pause.

Then it was funny, because the kid said, nonchalant as hell, “Oh, I know Nick.”

“Of course you don’t know Nick.” Kate laughed. “You have no idea who I’m talking about.”

“Still—I know him.”

“No, you don’t,” Kate said. “That’s stupid.”

The kid shrugged. “Works on a boat called
Troubador
. Hangs out down the Caribbean.”

It was as if he had now called her bluff of flirtation—and was demanding
that she reckon with him. Kate turned cozily, patronizingly, to me. “George, wouldn’t it be too funny if—”

“Look, I know who you’re talking about. Tall kid …”

“Not that tall!”

“No, not that tall,” the boy said quickly. “I mean, pretty tall. He’s built … like me. Brown hair.”

It was impossible to read the emotion on Kate’s face. “I don’t believe you,” she said evenly. “You don’t know Nick.”

“Yes, I do. I
do
.”

“How could you?”

“I just do!” The kid was utterly frustrated, practically to the point of hysterics. “I’m telling you, I
know
the guy.”

“What’s his last name?” Kate inquired.

An indifferent shrug. “Got me.”

“Then how do you know him?”

We waited, acutely tuned to the boy’s answer.

“Just ’cause … everybody knows Nick,” he said helplessly.

“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Kate said. And yet oddly enough it was the kind of thing someone would say about Nick, and I know that’s when I, at least, made up my mind that the kid probably did know Nick Beale. His description sounded like Nick, for one thing. For another, every experience seems to prove it: the world isn’t just small, it’s smaller than you would ever think.

“You haven’t told me one thing to make me believe you’ve ever laid eyes on him,” Kate said.

She had him stumped for a moment, and he repeated, “Thin guy, really good sailor.… Wait, I know! Ha, ha! I got you!”

“What?” Kate said carelessly. She had lost interest in the game.

“I know his wife! Stacy! See, I do know him! I know Nick’s wife!” The kid threw his head back and reveled, laughing, in his victory.

“His wife,” I said.

“It’s not the same Nick.”

There was a creak down the line of boats as they adjusted themselves, unhurriedly, to a three- or four-degree shift in the wind.

“Stacy! She’s an Aussie. I met her in a bar last Race Week. She got
bumped off her charter, so I was gonna get her a job on
Fixation
—she’s a cook. Blond hair. Dyed blond hair.” The boy appealed to me: “I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right!”

“When did they get married?” I asked.

“Last winter,” he answered triumphantly. “She didn’t take me up on
Fixation
, ’cause they’d just gotten married.”

“Where did they meet?” I said.

“Same as everyone—in a bar down there, right? And wait, I know.” The kid finished coiling the line and looped the end that was in his hand through the coil. Then he slung the coil over his shoulder and patted it against his side, companionably, to neaten it out. “This Nick’s from Maine,” the kid said.

Across the Sound a new race was starting. The mass of white quivered together, fluttering along the line in an agony of anticipation for the gun. Then they were off. It was a clean start. We heard the echo of the shot.

“Where are you from?” I inquired.

“Marion,” the kid said proudly. “Massachusetts. It blows all summer.”

“A nice southwesterly.”

He met my eyes quickly. I think he was surprised I knew anything. “You got it. I mean, out here it’s cool—you can see they’re getting races off—”

“Not like Sippican Harbor, though.”

This got a laugh, again, of surprised recognition. “We used to sail on Buzzards Bay,” I volunteered.

“Whereabouts?”

I told him. “We went to Chatham.”

“Yeah? You still sail dinghies?”

“No,” I said. “Not anymore. We live in Manhattan.”

“So? You could still get out on weekends.”

“I guess.”

“You guess? Come
on
, man,
frostbite
or something. At least keep your hand in.”

I shrugged.

“I mean, don’t take this the wrong way,” the kid told me, “but that’s pretty lame of you.”

He had opened a hatch to lay the line inside and when he came up he seemed to really notice Kate, finally, and she smiled at him across the cockpit in an anguished sort of way. “Hey, you!” the kid said. He went and sat down beside her and put his arm around her and squeezed her tight. “Hey, you!” he said again.

Harry came trundling up the companionway and announced: “I’d like to get a boat like this. How much did you say it would cost?”

No one said anything.

“Well, whatever it costs, if my company makes it, and it will, I’ll buy a boat like this,” declared Harry. “You guys should see it down there! It’s got real bedrooms! And a fucking art collection! On a boat! The bathroom’s made of marble! What do you say to that, Kate? Would you want me to buy a boat like this?”

Kate stared at him as if he were the most extraordinary person on earth.

“What kind of a company are you starting?” asked the kid, jumping up again. He remained in constant, deliberate motion. He didn’t stand, he balanced; he didn’t sit, he perched. They were all light on their feet, boys like Nick, from hopping around the bow in thirty knots of breeze.