The Fundamentals of Play (25 page)

“All right.”

Harry’s eye contact was relentless, searching my eyes for a latent bias. “My father never went to college,” he said. “I’m one of those kids who got into Dartmouth based on intelligence alone.”

It was highly comic, the way he phrased it, and pathetic, too—not the information but his conviction that it was news.

“Didn’t want Harvard. Didn’t want Yale. I wanted the Big Green all the way.”

“So you got what you wanted,” I suggested, but he had warmed to his confessional. I could feel a headache starting behind my eyes, and I had to force myself not to look at my watch.

“You know, I used to tell people I was from Glen Cove. But I never lived there more than six months. We never lived in any of those houses long enough to set them up. And two guys—you don’t really need much furniture, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

Evidently my empathy was not convincing, however, for Harry added hurriedly, “It’s not that we didn’t have a good time, don’t get me wrong. Hell, we had a
great
time on our own. We threw some sick parties, let me tell you. My dad used to party right along with us. You know, it was a rite of passage at the high school to shotgun a beer with Daddy-o. I kid you not, George, I kid you not.”

He paused as if to consider the implications of the fact, and there he was: trapped like everyone between self-pity and the brag. His mom had split for Florida when he was twelve, with the two younger brothers, but he had stayed on Long Island with Daddy-o. “I couldn’t just
leave
the guy!”

Most people wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, a monologue like the one Harry gave me that night; most people would have started apologizing for talking too much. But perhaps when confession is a part of your religion, it is only natural to want to run through the whole guilty spiel in front of an audience. And at the end, perhaps I would absolve him of being guilty of that happy American sin, of making a hell of a lot more money than he had grown up with—not that his dad had done badly!

“Not at all, don’t get me wrong, occasionally there was a cash flow problem—”

And then of the sin that the first sin begot so naturally, of casting a belatedly covetous eye toward a new milieu—of upgrading from a Cara to a Kate. I suspect it says more about me than Harry that this was the absolution I thought he was after.

He touched in a desultory fashion on the salient points—his belated conversion, for instance, from heavy metal to classic rock—and as he talked I could see the shrunken concert T-shirt, feel the heat rising from the tar of the beach parking lots where he had hung out, trying to get girls like Cara McLean to give him a chance.

“I got that over with early, George, as it turned out”—the circumlocution was marvelous—“and all through high school I had a pretty good run. Now, I’m not a good-looking guy, I’m not saying that. But I was persistent, George. Persistent as hell. I learned that lesson very, very early.”

That night I understood more fully the kind of man Harry was. He was the kind of guy whom girls would lie to one another about sleeping with, not simply because they had—anyone could get drunk and have a bad night, after all—but because they had enjoyed it.

It was a dark, trashed house, the house they went back to, the only one they managed to keep—tiny, with three or four cars in the driveway which together were worth twice the house. “My dad was really into cars, see.”

Sometimes a girl would take a fancy to Mr. Lombardi. “Oh, no, nothing like that. But you know how sometimes one of these kinda lost girls will have a thing for an older man? The most he ever did was hug ’em a little, and if they really had no place to go, Dad’d let them sleep on the couch.” In the morning the girl might do a little housekeeping to ingratiate herself with the Lombardi men, “or one time a girl made pancakes.” But there were long stretches where it was just beer and microwaved hot dogs, and the families at St. Catherine’s turning around in their pews to stare when the two skulked in ungroomed for a Saturday night Mass.

The computers he taught himself. It was the only thing he really liked to do, play video games and mess around with programs in the basement. It kept him busy when his dad was out and kept him out of the way when Mr. Lombardi was home with a lady friend. It wasn’t even that he was good at it; he was, but that never occurred to him; it was just something he did.

“I guess that was lucky,” I offered.

“Lucky?” Harry said quickly. He scrutinized me from his stance in front of the window. “In what way was it lucky?”

“Broder,” I said, “of course, and now the company, and you’re only twenty-four.” But reassurance about specific accomplishments wasn’t what he was after; it never had been. He wanted a grand pronouncement. He wanted to know how it would all add up. But only the green screen of his monitor could help him there, and I very much regretted introducing the topic.

“George,” Harry demanded, “would you say that overall, I mean speaking in a very overall sense, I’m a lucky person?”

I don’t remember how I got out of that one, but shortly thereafter Harry seemed to be seized by an internal claustrophobia. He loosened his tie in jerks and stuck his neck out through the shirt collar like a swimmer gasping for air. “Jeez, it’s hot! What do you have the A.C. set on?”

“I don’t know. It’s in Toff’s room.”

“You mean you only got one? Jeez, George! What are you, some kind of twentieth-century martyr?”

“Do you want some water?”

This was dismissed with a shake of his head. He took a deep, shuddering breath, as if to calm himself, and when he did speak again, he clasped his hands pompously behind his back. With the interruption, the story of his childhood had been forgotten, tucked away and written off. Evidently it could hold his attention for only so long before his mind latched onto some new topic and he abandoned the previous one, as he had abandoned Cara McLean on the couch at our party.

“George—” There was an irritating note of condescension in his voice. He pronounced my name gently, gravely, as if he were afraid of spoiling some notion of mine with the hard facts he was about to present: that he had slept with my girlfriend, perhaps.

“George.”

“Yes, Harry?”

He had the air of a child who has received an embarrassingly good Christmas gift. “Kate has accepted me.”

It was gorgeous, the pomposity of the statement. I had a great urge to laugh. He sounded as though he had been practicing it for years—“Kate and I are getting married,”

“Kate said yes”—before settling on something he read in a book somewhere.

“That’s wonderful!” I heard myself saying, and adding, irrelevantly, for we had none, “We—we ought to break open champagne!” I managed to stutter out a handful of inadequate congratulations and then asked, “When did all of this happen? I haven’t spoken—”

“Last night,” he interrupted, searching my eyes again, looking from one pupil to the other, yet oddly silent for a man who appeared to have the world to say.

“Last night? And where is Kate now? I want to call her.”

“Oh, no,” he said reprovingly. “Kate’s gone up to Maine. She’ll be asleep by now. Oh, yes”—he glanced at his watch—“definitely by now.”

“Gone up to Maine? This weekend?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t ask her to miss it.”

“I know. I just meant—”

“She had it all planned, George.”

“I see.”

“I coulda gone!” Harry insisted. “It’s not like I couldna gone!”

“Well, yes, of course, you could have gone. Next week, then. We’ll have to have dinner together …” I groped on in a surreal fashion. “I had a feeling this might—”

Harry gripped my arm. “You did? This had occurred to you before, then?”

“You told me the other night.”

“No, but before that,” he pressed me. “Before I said anything?”

“When you started dating, of course I wondered, or expected—”

“Are you telling the truth?” he demanded.

I was spared from telling the whole truth when Harry’s face cracked and every pretense of taking the fact in stride fell away. With a convulsive sob he sank down into Toff’s reclining chair. I wished very much he had sat on the couch. It was hard to watch a man bawling on a La-Z-Boy.

“Look,” I began, with no idea of how to continue. I myself hardly felt the effect of the news at all. It was like watching a play so thinly plotted that when the dramatic twist arrives, one only wishes it to pass as quickly as possible, to save the audience the embarrassment. But the actors go on saying their lines, because they have to. “What’s wrong, Harry?” I asked. “You should be happy.”

Harry raised his face. “It’s not true, is it George?” he murmured. “I knew it was half a joke—I asked her on a lark! I got my stake out
of China, spent fifty on the ring. One, two, three, sapphire, diamond, sapphire, little blue Tiffany box. I asked her on a lark, she must have said yes on a lark. She’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be off, won’t it?”

He called seven years’ labor a lark. And yet that was precisely it: she had said yes on a lark. And yet again, that did not mean it would be called off, that did not mean that the lark could not continue indefinitely. With Kate, that did not really mean anything. I think that was the first moment the news took on an element of reality for me.

“It’s just new, that’s all. And it’s what you said: you’re the first.”

Harry’s hands curled into fists and drummed the arms of the recliner. “We are the first. We are the first, dammit! There’s that. She’s beating all her friends.” He began to tick off the names of Kate’s girlfriends—Annie Roth, Jess Brindle, Vanessa Prince. It was curious to hear him recite the names of those girls, whom, except for Annie, I knew only enough to say hello to. It made him seem more entrenched.

I seemed to have hit the right note, however. He stood up abruptly and marched off to the bathroom. The tap ran for several minutes and then he returned, snorting loudly and swallowing. But when he spoke, his voice was hollow in his throat. “George, she doesn’t want me.”

“Stop it right now,” I ordered, with, I thought, foresight of what was to come: a tiresome, sleepless night of consolation in which I would fail to convince Harry that he was good enough for Kate. “Don’t go undermining yourself. It’s boring.”

“No,” Harry said. I felt his eyes on me then, assessing me. His voice had turned cold, clinical almost. “I don’t mean like that. I mean she doesn’t … desire me.”

I drew back, surprised into asking, “Don’t you sleep together?” as Kate’s rose and white bedroom floated up in my mind.

“Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,” he said, in the manner that he had said, “Don’t get me wrong, we had a
great
time,” and began to talk very quickly, pacing about the small room. I noticed how difficult
it was for a short man to pace convincingly; there was something emasculating about it. He was better standing still. “I’m over there all the time. I practically
live
over there, George. You ever been there? Yeah, well, you know. You should see us in the mornings. It’s so goddammed civilized! I read the
Journal
and the
Post
and she orders in coffee and—and it’s like we’re already married, you know? Like you know how when you’re married, you read the paper together? We read the paper together. I read the sports pages and the financial section.” He paused expectantly.

“And what—what section does Kate read?” I said inanely.

“Well, she doesn’t really read the paper,” he said, sounding annoyed.

“Oh,” I said.

“We’re going to work it all out when she comes back from Maine. We’re going to go up to Maine together at the end of the month and see where we want to have the tent. We’re going to have a long engagement—Kate likes that. She likes the fuss, you know?” The entire speech sounded like “gunna, gunna, gunna, gunna, gunna.”

“Kate could get married in New York if she wanted to, but we’re going to get married in Maine. We both like it better in Maine. We’re going to spend every summer up there. And our kids—our kids”—it took him three tries to get his head around the idea—“our kids are going to spend every summer there. They’re going to grow up there.”

He went on for another moment or two, building summer cottages in the sky, until he stopped quite dead. “And we’re gunna—” But he couldn’t think of another thing they were going to do. He looked across at me with the mute expectancy I’d been dreading. It was very awkward. He had chosen a confessor and evidently wanted this sin of omission coaxed from him.

“We have everything, George,” he murmured. “Everything.”

“But you don’t …” I started reluctantly. There was only one way to put it: “have sex?”

For a moment Harry looked through me to a point on the wall,
seeming to see the series of scenes that had led to this moment. He said hoarsely: “I
try
to … I don’t know. Sometimes we …”

“Harry, don’t tell me anything you—”

“It’s so strange,” he went on in an eerily calm tone, as if talking to himself. “We’ll be out somewhere, and I can tell, you know, that she—I mean, if it were any other girl, I’d
know
that the minute we got home—!” He looked wistful as he said this, as if in memory of simpler times, with simpler girls. The look faded; he seemed to take himself in hand mentally. “But then once we’re home …”

“You have trouble going—?”

“George,” Harry broke in abruptly, “is there such a thing as a girl being …” He ran a hand through his thick, receding hair several times. “As a girl being frigid?”

I laughed, an unconvincing, foolish laugh. “It’s such a fifties word,” I said. “I don’t know what it means, really.”

“I mean a girl who doesn’t like sex,” Harry said clearly. “Who gets no enjoyment out of the act. The actual act.”

“With the wrong person …”

“No, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean degrees. I mean is there a scientific diagnosis for—oh,
God
!”

He buried his face in his hands, I got up to make us another round, and that was how Cara found him when she let herself in with Toff’s key.