The Fundamentals of Play (20 page)

“Yeah. Split. Bastard lives over here in Pawanis. You know Pawanis?”

I shook my head.

“No? You sure? You ever go to the mall?”

“Yes, George, don’t you ever go to the mall?” said Chat.

I felt myself turning red. “Sometimes I find it can be useful,” I stammered.

Deb shrugged. “It’s not that great,” she said. “Only reason I go is it’s close. And they got Kid ’n’ Caboose now, and Katie-Lynn
loves
Kid ’n’ Caboose. Don’t you, Katie? Don’t you, Katie-Lynn? There! You got all your bows, girl! And now you’ll be a little heartbreaker!”
She held the child out proudly. Against my better judgment I glanced at it, and I happened to meet its eyes. I couldn’t look away fast enough. Their expression was intensely bright, almost feral; she had pierced ears and looked the “little lady.”

“Ya wanna hold her?”

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said.

“It’s okay—g’head. She won’t bite.”

Blanching, I opened my arms and drew the child into my lap. “Hello.”

Chat was trying to suppress his mirth. He sat himself down in front of Nick’s paraphernalia to pack another bowl.

“She’s a—cute little girl. You said her name is …”

“Katie-Lynn.”

“Hi, Katie-Lynn.”

“It’s like Katie plus Lynn. You like it? It’s a combination of my two favorite names.”

“Very pretty.”

Katie-Lynn’s mother smacked her hands down on her thighs. “Fuckin’ A!” she yelled. “I fagotaget cigarettes!”

“You shouldn’t smoke, Deb,” said Chat, languidly inhaling. “Not with the baby.”

“Fuck you!”
Deb leaned over and punched him in the chest. Chat coughed, laughed, then gave himself up to a full-on coughing fit. “You always did fuckin’ cough,” said Deb.

“George,” gasped Chat, “help me!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Deb said good-naturedly. She groped around in her bursting handbag and a fist came up, clenched around a handful of bills. “Dannit! Will you lookit this? I’m poor already!”

“You’ve got to budget, dear—”

“Stick it up your ass! Three, four … Wait a minute: secret stash! I always have my secret stash.” Her other hand felt inside the bikini top and removed a twenty, which Deb held up triumphantly. “They nevalet me down!” she cried, cupping her enormous breasts. “Neva-yet!” I felt a small cold hand finger my watch. “Ha-ha! You wanna
go on a beer run wit me up the deli and get cigarettes while we’re at it, Chattie?”

“In a sec,” said Chat. He took another hit and laughed. “Where’s Nicko? Contemplating the universe?”

“Conaplating his ass!”

“Kate come around much?”

“Every time she does she trashes shit!”

“How often would you say she came?”

“Who gives a shit?”

“Well, George and I—”

“Come
awun
, I wanna go up the deli and get a carton of cigarettes. I wanna get cigarettes! Now, Chattie, goddammit!”

“All right, all right, give a man a chance to recover.”

“Pansy-ass!” shouted Deb. She dragged him to his feet.

“Excuse me, but …?”

Deb laughed down at me, the angry sunburn undulating across her massive chest. “Yasicka Katie-Lynn? Yasicka Katie already?” Deb plucked her kid from my lap. “Yajust like her fatha!”

The moment they were gone, I stood up and dug out the ice cream from the bag of groceries and took it into the back. The tub was sweating and sagging from the heat. I put it into the freezer.

Nick was standing at the kitchen table fiddling with a piece of line. The table was covered in nautical hardware, pulleys and shackles and the long elegant rudder of an Olympic-class dinghy.

“Georgie Len,” he said, taking in my presence anew. He had always been a little like this, like a kid you played peekaboo with. Every time you showed up, Nick would look glad to see you, whether he had seen you ten minutes or ten months earlier. He had his own inner timetable, and he functioned according to it alone.

“So Kate graduated,” I said.

“Yeah.” He stared at the array of hardware. “Pass me that shackle, will you?”

I passed him the fitting, and he spun it several times in his hands to see where it stuck.

“She’s moving to New York, so we’ll probably just see each other on weekends. Maybe … every third weekend.” He sounded as if he were quoting someone.

“What are you going to do?”

“Me? I’m going to do an Olympic campaign, Georgie Len. Soon as I get the funding.”

He was distracted for a moment, thinking, perhaps, about the force of a thirty-knot puff on a two-foot spar. There was the same entrancing economy to his movements that I remembered, and it struck me, as it often had before, that a hundred years ago he would have been a soldier or a sailor—a sailor, same as he was now, except doing two years before the mast; that he might have ended up a hero out of the sheer dexterity of his limbs. Except that he had been born into a generation that required of its youth no service. There was no place on earth, really, for people like Nick. And I thought with a sinking feeling of the office job that awaited me in the fall, and then again for good in a couple of years, and of all the years it would take to find out if the possibility of middle-aged comfort was worth it. Then Nick looked up and giggled, that little inward giggle. He kept chuckling to himself until finally I said,
“What?”

I thought he was going to poke fun at me. But what he said was: “Utor, fruor, fungor, potior, and vescor take the ablative.”

Startled out of my daze, I laughed out my breath. “You’re right,” I said, “they do.” After a moment I said, “Goddamn slides of Pompeii!”

Nick tilted his chair back and balanced there on the back legs, his fingertips splayed on the table. “How many times did she make him show them.”

“Must have been eight, ten …”

“So was Mr. Davis senile?” Nick said seriously. “Was that the problem?”

“I think he was, Nick,” I said. “I think he was.”

“Georgie Len, Kate and I still owe you, you know. We haven’t forgotten.”

That was for standing—or rather sitting—guard, with my pupil
desk in front of the closet the slide projector came out of, to give them a knock when Vesuvius erupted. “Pater! Pater! Vesuvius fumat!” Kate would crawl out of the closet giggling, her hair in place, loving the game of it; Nick would appear a moment later, his eyelids at half-mast, and slink to his seat, as if in a dream. “Thanks, man,” he used to whisper. “We owe you.”

We talked boats for a while. Nick reheated some coffee, and we sat at the kitchen table and drank it black, because Deb had forgotten to buy milk. Nick kept remembering bits and pieces of school, and every few minutes would say something like, “
Muckrakers
, George—
The Jungle
!” in a tone of delighted disbelief. “Paris is well worth a mass!” or
“N’avez-vous pas vos vélos? Non, nous sommes à pied.”
I guess I reminded him of his education.

Chat and Deb were gone a long time. When we finally heard the Diesel sputtering in the driveway, Nick stood up and stuck his neck out the kitchen window, craning it toward the water. “You wanna go waterskiing,” he asked. “It’s a perfect day—no air, flat water.”

“But the boat’s wrecked, isn’t it?” I said.

“Nah, it still works. You can still drive it.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It’s not like she crashed into Halftide and blew up the motor, too.”

At the word “she,” I felt a coolness start at the base of my spine and creep up my neck. “How’d it happen?” I said dryly.

“Usual.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you know—night before Fourth of July. We were drunk. Forgot about Halftide.”

“You and Deb.”

“Deb?” said Nick. “No, sad part was, Deb was stone-cold sober, and was she ever ripped at me. It’s her boat, see. She got it off Katie-Lynn’s father when they split.”

“Oh, really.”

“See, I shouldn’t have been standing up. That’s why I flipped over the bow.”

“And Kate?” I said, because that’s the way you talked with Nick: you didn’t have to contextualize anything, because he never did; you just tried to keep up.

“Kate was okay. She got a little whiplash. That was a good thing, see, ’cause she had to drive up to Maine the next day, and you know, that would not have been a fun drive with a broken arm.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I agreed. “No, it wouldn’t.”

“So, whadda you say, man?”

It wasn’t the fact that Kate was responsible for breaking his arm that decided me, but the uninflected serenity with which he defended her. I still remember the false composure with which I stood up and said we had to be going. “Maybe another time, Nicko.”

“Really?” I felt him looking at me. He hadn’t expected me to be a phony like the others; to go with him only so far.

“Yeah, I’ve actually got to get Chat and we’ve got to get on the road.”

Chat and Deb were having a companionable cigarette by the car when I came out. The baby on Deb’s hip was looking around with that strangely independent look babies can have when they’re being held—as if they’re only using their mother for the lift. But the look on Chat’s face, when I “reminded” him that we had to go, was equally strange, before he arranged his features into an expression of reluctant remembrance—it was very much like triumph. “You’re right, George. We’d better get on the road.” He dashed his cigarette to the tar. “So sorry, darling.”

“You really have to go? Shit, guys,” Deb lamented. “We were just stattin’ to have fun.”

Nick came out in cutoffs, carrying a homemade ski. “You’re really going?”

“Yeah, sorry about that, Nick,” said Chat.

“Sorry nothing. Deb’ll take me, won’t you, sis?”

“Yeah, I’ll drive forya, Nicko.” She threw her cigarette to the ground and shifted Katie-Lynn to the opposite hip. “You wanna take a beer for the road.”

“Oh, that’s all right—”

“You’re damn right I do!” Chat said. “I paid for it, madam, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Deb giggled. “Here’s a six—it’s cold.”

Chat tucked the beer into the backseat. I could feel the baby watching me as I walked around to the passenger-side door.

“Nice meeting you,” said Deb as I opened it to get in.

“Oh, you too. You too,” I said. It made me ashamed that she had to say it first.

“I miss you, Chattie!” Deb started to weep. She leaned her heavy chest into the window. Chat patted her fried peroxide hair. The baby began to cry. Chat revved the engine with a glint in his eye, Deb stood back reluctantly, and we drove away.

We made it to Manhattan by dusk. I took a long shower in the Wetherses’ creaky Upper East Side bathroom and stretched out on the divan and wished our plans for the evening would evaporate. Already I had my New York feeling on, of exhaustion and poverty, of not being up for the fight. I couldn’t think of a thing that would cheer me up, least of all going out drinking with Chat’s grade school buddies on my fake I.D. I wanted to go off alone somewhere and hoard the story Chat had told me to pass the time between New Haven and the Triboro Bridge, about when he and Kate and Nick were little. I had ruined Deb’s day by insisting we leave. “We were just stattin’ to have fun!” And when I closed my eyes to go over Chat’s story and get it all straight, I would picture Katie-Lynn’s mother instead, standing heavy and sad in the driveway, the color of the crayon nobody wanted—brick red—and, as Chat drove us away from their cottage by the sea, waving her daughter’s hand like a doll’s.

Then we went out and met Kate and her friends in a restaurant across town.

Just the sight of her made me instantly, profoundly optimistic. She was remarkably fresh, at any hour of the day. She was wearing her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I remember it seemed to me as jaunty, as promising, as an ensign flying off the stern of a sloop, reaching through a fair day. Her eyes lit up when Chat presented me. “George! How
fun
!”

She was all collarbone and straight lines. I took her in my arms for as long as I dared.

We got an outside table, and Kate sat beside me and told everyone in the group—her and Chat’s New York friends—how far we went back, she and I, six years, six formative years ago we had met, why we had practically grown up together (except that we hadn’t)—and all I could think to say when it was my turn to speak was, “Did you hear we saw Nick today, too?”

I remember that she didn’t answer me right away. It gave me time to search wildly for a change of subject—and to come up empty-minded. She took a long, unhurried sip of her white wine. It was a summer evening, the summer she turned twenty-two, and she was off on the grand tour with Granny come Labor Day. I’m sure she didn’t need reminders like that, but then, they weren’t going to throw her, either: she was out to have fun. “How nice for him,” she said eventually. “How nice of you to stop by, George. I’m sure Nick appreciated that.”

Her accent hadn’t quite decided where to go. It was a good measure St. Chattlesex, which at that time derived from California surfer (the hurried, telltale “No, totally, totally”), but there had been other influences as well. Now it was hovering a few shades shy of the World War II–vintage dahling-dahling her parents no doubt spoke. I could have listened to it all night, and every time she said my name it sounded like a compliment.

At some point I made another brilliant contribution to the conversation by asking her what she had majored in. Still, I was curious to know.

“American studies.”

“How’d you pick that?” I said.

“Same as anyone.” But of the other couple hundred students who had graduated with that degree, I doubt a single one would have given the same reason Kate did. “I love this country,” she said. I thought at first she was being disingenuous, but she got a look in her eye then which I have never forgotten. It was a look of highly intensified complacency—if that’s possible—which I was certain no feast or threat of famine would ever shake.

We ended up at Chat’s playing I Never, playing Thumper, playing Galley Slave—the version of Asshole that came out of Cold Harbor—and finally we ended up sitting around talking to one another in Nicko-speak, making decontextualized comments because we were too drunk to compose the lead-ins. Chat was trying to get some friend of Kate’s into bed, and I found myself cornering a little sofa with her at the other end.