The Fundamentals of Play (28 page)

At the far end of the inlet, the white triangle dipped once more and bobbed around the corner out of sight. Behind me I heard Mr. Tompkins curse Nick for his talent and his disrespect, and I thought: I will always watch till I can’t see them anymore.

Just over nine years had passed since that day. I wasn’t ready to draw conclusions, however. I had come to the address on Forty-fourth Street, and I went inside.

F
ifty or sixty of the Goodenows’ family and friends, as well as Mr. Franklin Lombardi, Jr., and his live-in girlfriend, Rhonda, had assembled in the biggest toy room in Manhattan—the Model Room of the New York Yacht Club, with the half-hulls in all colors crowding the walls.

I had been nervous; at the threshold I wondered, about what? The crowd gave off the feeling of having just enjoyed a mildly funny joke. Nothing was going to happen, it seemed clear. In the middle of the room, Kate, in a square-cut black dress, was laughing up at a florid, gray-haired man whom I took to be her uncle. I felt a sense of relief that the party was in her hands; I have since reflected that she was the only hostess of whom I thoroughly approved.

I spied Harry at the bar and was making my way over when a stout woman in a pink suit stood herself before me. “Have you seen the article?” she demanded. A section of yesterday’s
Times
was thrust into my hands. Under the caption N
EW
G
ENERATION
S
EES
N
O
P
OINT IN
W
AITING
, there was a picture of a young bride being fitted for a gown.

“Not the picture—read it: look.”

I scanned down the column. It was, according to the piece, an emerging trend of my generation to be married earlier, defying the precedent set by feminists of the sixties and seventies to delay settling down until thirty or after. Katharine Goodenow, of the American paintings department at Sotheby’s, was quoted. “It’s silly to sit around saying ‘Why?’ for years and years, when you can just as easily say ‘Why not?’ My parents were married when my mother was twenty-three. I’m twenty-five now—I feel like a late bloomer!” Harry was not mentioned.

“Oh, Goodie! There you are!” panted the pink woman. “I’ve got to show Goodie, but make sure you finish reading it later. Don’t forget,” she ordered. “Come find me and read the rest.”

Harry had vanished into the crowd, and after a couple of halfhearted steps in either direction, I spotted, across the room, the only person in the place I actually wanted to talk to. He saw me, too, and gave a bemused nod when I joined him.

“Where’s your date, buddy?”

“She ran away,” I said. “Yours?”

“She heard you were coming.”

“But you’ve got two drinks,” I pointed out.

Chat held up his two fists to examine them. “ ’Deed I do, ’deed I do. You’ve got to protect yourself at these kinds of things. All the same,” he added suspiciously, “I guess you’d better take one.” I hesitated. To everyone else, perhaps, his courtship of Kate had seemed offhand at best. But I knew better, and if there was any night when a man was entitled to be double-fisting …

“Go on! They’re brand new! Mixed ’em myself when the bartender wasn’t looking.”

We stood in our corner and drank. I tried to detect a brittleness in Chat’s bemusement; he caught on immediately and ridiculed me for it. “You’re the melodramatic freak—maybe
you’re
bitter. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re bitter. If you were in my position you’d be very glad to see Lombardi so high on life, Lenhart. So ambitious. He’s a very ambitious guy, you know.”

“Your position?” I inquired.

“I’m invested up to here.” Chat held a hand to his jugular. “You ought to be, too, you know. He’s moving into office space—he’s got seed money for eighteen months. This thing gets big, baby—”

Everyone was getting in. Only I stood by, conservative; with my Christmas bonus I could pay Chat back. “Chat, I want to give you your money,” I declared, without preface. “I’ll have it next month.”

Chat’s answer sounded careless enough, and yet there was something surprising about it—its alacrity, I suppose. What I mean is that the reply was clearly something he had thought about: he knew what he would say if I mentioned it. He wasn’t
surprised
to hear me mention it, as he might have been.

“Lenhart,
p-p-please
. This—this—this is an engagement party!”

“All right, but after,” I insisted. “I want to make arrangements to pay you.”

“Listen to me,” Chat said. He was so rarely serious that I did his bidding. “If you’re holding off on Lombardi’s thing be—be—because of me …”

He let my silence serve as an answer.

“I thought so. I thought so. Well, forget about it. We’re all going to cash in
big
on this thing.”

“You really think so?”

“Hasn’t poverty taught you anything, George?”

“All right,” I said evenly.

“All right, then.”

The woman in pink came by again holding out the newspaper. “Have you both—”

“We saw it,” we said.

The crowd dithered, and shifted in a circular direction, like children playing musical chairs. “Oh, good,” said Chat, refocusing. “We’ll say hello.”

I followed him to the side of an upright woman balanced on extraordinarily thin legs. The woman’s hair was ash-blond, coiffed immaculately in a style quoting the 1960s. Her face was tan—the whole
party was filled with parents who had better tans than their children—and she wore pink lipstick that sat on her lips and beamed when they beamed. Chat introduced Mrs. Goodenow.

“Isn’t this a very nice occasion. My husband’s brother’s giving the party. Make sure you say hello, Goodie’s right over there by Mrs. Pall. Lenhart, you said? There are Lenharts in Maine. Puce married a Lenhart. Chatland, have you managed to get yourself a drink? Oh, yes, I see that you have. You’ve probably had several.”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Goodenow—”

“Now, Chattie, I want you to do me a favor, dear, and it’s rather important.” They didn’t make voices like hers anymore, rich and clipped at the same time, drawling swallowed vowels to Boston and back, stowing R’s away for safekeeping. “This young man can help you—Mr. Lenhart, you give Chattie a hand, will you. Mr. Lombardi is standing over there. Yes, go and talk to him, will you.

“Oh,
have
you met my other daughters. This is Vivi and Cecily.”

I nodded at a Goodenow taller and more oblique than Kate, and then at a stocky brunette whom the milkman must have begotten. “Excuse me, darlings. I have
so
many people to see. Have a good time, won’t you? Please enjoy yourselves. It’s so
nice
to see you again. Vivi, have Chat remind you about Charles Pall, dear. He’s a
very
good-looking boy. Chat, reintroduce her to Charles Pall.”

“Hey, Vivi.”

“Hey, Chattie.”

“How’s school?”

“Good.”

“You transferred, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You like Denison better?”

“Yeah, way better.”

“You playing tennis?”

“Number three.”

“Good girl. That’s what I like to hear.” To me he added, “Kate could have played in college, but she didn’t care enough.”

The girl shrugged.

“Are you … in college?” I tried with the younger, stockier one, who looked older.

“Not yet.”

“Are you at Chatham now, Celes?” Chat intervened.

Vivi spoke up. “No! She wouldn’t go. She’s such a baby. She stayed home.”

“No!”
Chat said.

The two girls nodded, showing teeth.

“Bad deal, Cees—you’ve
got
to go away.”

“I don’t want to.”

“
Nobody
wants to at first—back me up here, George.”

“It’s true.”

“
Sucks
at the beginning. But you gotta go. You don’t want to be some homebody freak, do you, Cees? Huh? Huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“Those girls never turn out right. Coddled in day schools—”

“Neither do the girls who go away,” I interrupted.

“You’ve got a point, Lenhart. For once in your life, you’ve got a point.”

I left him grilling the Goodenow sisters and went to study the model ships in a case.

Kate came by and clutched my arm, laughing and grimacing by way of greeting, and left a girl in her wake: the willowy Jessica Brindle, delivered out of Kate’s grossly untapped girlfriend world.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” she said spacily, and rather disconcertingly.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I assured her. Presently the two of us drifted toward the bar, where a heavyset man was punching words into a crowd of boys.
“Henri père,”
whispered Miss Brindle in my ear.

“So I says, ‘Kid knows which side his bread is buttered on!’ Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

“Remember,” Jessica murmured, “we’re not laughing at him, we’re laughing with him.”

I didn’t laugh much at all.

All evening, people took their turns with Mr. Lombardi. A group would edge up, make his acquaintance, and go off pressing their lips together, their eyes large with seeking other eyes. Everybody wanted a story to take home—not the stories Mr. Lombardi told, but that didn’t matter.

He was a short, shy man who drank to cover up his shyness. He eyed Jess Brindle sideways over the top of his drink. “Who’s this you got, Chad?”

“Oh, I’m not Chat,” I corrected him, and stuck out a hand. Mr. Lombardi pumped it with enthusiasm. “I’m George—George Lenhart.”

“George is a good friend of your son’s from college,” said Jess Brindle, who seemed to be rather well informed.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yes,” said Jessica.

“Didn’t know the guy had any friends! Except girlfriends, that is! Ha ha! Hey, Henry! Henry! Aw, he’s busy talking—gotta get in good with the in-laws. I was gonna say, where’s he been hiding you?”

“Why, thank you, Mr. Lombardi!”

Harry’s father seemed to include me in a confidence. “You know, there’s girls in Millport still call for him. Hell, there’s girls in
Norwalk
still call! ‘I hate to dis-o-point you,’ I say, ‘but my son is engaged to be married.’ Disappoint them—what about disappoint me, ha ha? Kid had some pretty cute girlfriends. You two boyfriend and girlfriend? You make a cute couple. Speaking of girlfriends, where’s Rhonda? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

By eight the waiters had stopped coming round with canapés, and Dick Scarum was saying wistfully that he wished he could come out late-night but ever since the splash on Park Avenue, Lori had been cracking down. Chat was suggesting venues, which the eligible Charlie Pall was dismissing, when an altercation at the room’s entrance arrested the discussion. A young man was attempting to join the
party but had been stopped at the threshold by the bell captain because he was not wearing a coat. As we turned to look, a uniformed employee hurried up the stairs with one of the blazers the club kept on hand. But the boy protested. His face was so dark it looked black, and I cringed, thinking it was some kind of racial incident, when Chat’s voice rang out into the hush: “
He
doesn’t need a jacket, for Chrissake!” He strode forth under every eye. “Nicko, good buddy! It’s Chat!”

Somewhere behind me a woman dropped a drink, dropped it flat on the floor, as if she’d let go of it for fun.

Hush, murmur, hush, we went, like a roaring tide. Nick Beale had returned from the tropics.

He stood as if the floor were hot tar, balancing on the far outside of his arches. The hoarse question, when it came, was natural enough: “Is Kate around?”

Chat grinned lustily. “
Sure
, Nicko—she’s around!”

Everyone turned to his left or right, fifty adults trying to pretend that if they could not see anyone, no one could see them. At last it emerged that Kate had gone down to the bathroom. Through the ensuing silence, one voice went on imperviously. “… to come up and see us. And don’t be stingy, Pris. We never seem to see you for more than a day or two and that’s not
long
enough. You promise me right now you’ll tell Boos that you’re expected at Hedgeway for the middle week, Sunday to Saturday …”

Inexorably Kate returned with a giggling entourage.

“Kate, look—”

“Kate—”

“Oh my God, Kate—”

She took it all in with her eyes. They opened wide, marveling. She moved forward as if to embrace him but seemed to check herself, and in her hesitation a tall, gray-haired man cut through the group. The man walked as if he were trying to catch up with the pointed index finger of his right hand.

“Look here, Beale, I don’t know who told you to show up, but you’ve no right—”

“Dad,
Dad
!”

“—to come crashing in here. That’s what you’re doing, I needn’t tell you.”

Edging back a step, Nick did not meet the eyes of his former benefactor.

Mr. Goodenow spewed on, eyes goggling. “This is a private party. If you’re trying to prove something—”

The spectacle was ridiculous. It was like watching someone yell at a servant.

“Stop it, Dad!”

I don’t think Harry came forward out of strength of character or a moral propriety. It was just that he had been trained, growing up, to do the right thing. His behavior was automatic, like one of his computer functions. From the chair that he had claimed, Mr. Lombardi watched his son with slightly menacing eyes, ready to chastise if the boy should fail to carry out the instilled approbations of the middle class: “Say thank you to the lady, Henry!”