The Fundamentals of Play (31 page)

When the woman stepped into the room, I recognized my companion of the alcove. “Oh—
hello
,” she said. Then she noticed Kate. “I see you found Katie!” she added brightly, retreating from the room.

“Don’t call me, Katie, Linda,” Kate said. “And you’re interrupting.”

“All right, Kate. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry—I was just trying to sleep next door and I heard the little girl crying—”

Now Kate rose from the floor, her dress hanging in distorted folds. Before I could even guess what her expression meant, she had gone to the door and, astonishingly, slammed it in the woman’s face. “How do you know her?”

“We met downstairs,” I answered.

“Linda Van Wijck is a slut,” Kate said.

“A big slut,” Mr. Brown said gaily.

“A bigger slut!” the little girl cried, clapping her hands.

“But you’re a slut, too, Katie.” Mr. Brown gave a wink in my direction.

“Ha ha, that’s very funny.” Kate was sitting on the bed, picking carpet shards off of her gold top.

“She’s not a virgin, is she?” taunted her cousin. “Is she? Is she, is she, is she?” By now he was pointing at Kate and dancing a little jig around the room. “You’ve had it in you! You’ve had it in you!”

The little girl was banging on the bedpost with one of Kate’s shoes.

“Kate, please—let’s leave,” I urged. “They’ll be wondering where we are—”

Mr. Brown walked toward Kate, his arms outstretched like a sleepwalker’s, his hands fixed in a strangle grip. There was a horrifying moment when I went to pull Kate up from the bed and away from him at the same time that her cousin grabbed hold of the gold top. Kate shrieked as the material ripped away from her. Mr. Brown held up the top, brandishing it triumphantly. “I capture the castle!” he cried. “I capture the castle!”

For a second or two, like the stunned expression of a child that falls down, Kate’s face could have gone either way. Then she went with laughter. Her arms folded defensively over her bare flat chest, Kate sat on the little twin bed and laughed. They all did, all three of them, and they had the same laugh—Mr. Brown, Kate, and the little girl. I don’t mean the same timbre or that they laughed on the same vowel—I mean that the intensity was the same. I felt like a real spoilsport. I had to push and push myself to keep laughing while their laughter went on effortlessly into the night.

They played for hours. I sat on the floor outside the bedroom and read the history of the America’s Cup. I learned all kinds of things, such as who the first skipper was, and what year they invented the Park Avenue boom. At two or three a maid came up and told them to quiet down. Mr. Brown picked a fight with the woman and was sent to his room, and the little girl’s mother finally came back, drunk, from town and took her daughter away. I had a bad feeling, crashing in the room with Kate, that the adults in the house would think I’d try to take advantage of our solitude up there on the third floor, but in retrospect I’m sure no one gave it a thought.

I never mentioned my conversation under the alcove to Kate, or heard the rumor Linda Van Wijck told me confirmed or denied. I am sure I probably misheard the woman, or misunderstood her—or
more likely, that she misspoke out of drunkenness, or some lingering envy from her school days with Kate’s mother. For what I thought I heard her say was that Mr. Goodenow was not Kate’s father. It is strange, perhaps, that I did not try harder to learn the truth. But the idea of doing so behind Kate’s back was more inconceivable only than asking her to her face. I had trouble believing it was true, and yet there were times later on when I felt it would have explained a great deal. A third possibility occurred to me the next morning, when Granny’s car drove us over to the regatta: maybe it was true, and they had never told Kate. Or perhaps—I stole a look at her, dozing lightly across the seat from me, at the jaunty chin, which no messy, irrelevant past had ever brought down—perhaps poor Linda Van Wijck knew more than she knew she knew: maybe it was true, and the women had never told Art Goodenow.

In any event, in the wake of Nick’s dramatic departure, there were no repercussions about our overnight absence.

A
fter Kate’s engagement party Nick found a job steering a boat from Rye, New York, down to the West Indies. At my urging, he’d waited around for a week while I did what I could to penetrate the Goodenow fortress that had sprung up to protect Kate. But it was no use. They wouldn’t take my calls; they wouldn’t let him see her. Kate didn’t answer at home or at work, and it was only when an aunt mistook me for someone else on the phone that I learned she had taken a leave from Sotheby’s.

Nick put off the job for a weekend, but then they had to go and one Monday in November we had our last breakfast. During his stay in my apartment I’d gotten back into the habit of a morning meal. Nick had learned to cook going down to Bermuda on one of the maxis and he said it was funny now, using a stove that didn’t tilt. He made omelettes for Toff and me every morning but he tried to keep it healthy, leaving out a yolk every other white.

“I guess I’m not going to see Kate this visit.” Nick had a habit of
sopping up his eggs with toast, of combining several dishes into one and eating them as a kind of stew, of finishing his juice and using the empty glass for milk, but with him you attributed all this to the galley, and you admired the practicality.

“I’ll tell her you were here, that you waited,” I said.

“Sure. I’ll be back.”

We finished our coffee.

It was true that Nick had gotten married, just like the kid told it—on a boat off Anguilla one Race Week. At odd times his wife’s name would come up. I would be on the brink of asking, “Now, who’s Stacy again?” and then I would remember. “I’d like Kath to meet Stacy,” Nick said, pushing his plate aside. “I think they’d get along.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “I’ll tell her you said that.”

He nodded reflectively. “That guy she’s marrying. Harry. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“Seemed it. Seemed like a really nice guy.”

“I’ll tell
him
you said that. I don’t think anyone’s told him that before.”

“Yeah? Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s very … ambitious.”

“Ambitious?” Nick said, after a moment, as if he hadn’t heard right. “But that’s great, George. Ambition is great.”

“Sure it is, Nick.”

“Who doesn’t know that? Don’t people know that?”

“They know,” I said. “But sometimes they see it in someone else and—I don’t know—it bothers them.”

“Why would it do that?”

“It’s stupid, I guess.”

“It is. Stupid.” Nick tipped back from the table and used his fingertips to balance on the back legs of the chair. I picture him that way, suspended in an adolescent’s posture that he had never outgrown.

“Maybe I should have had more ambition,” he suggested finally,
in the manner one might say, “Maybe I should have taken a cab,” and let the front chair legs back down to the floor.

“Come on, Nick,” I argued, “you’re doing better than all of us. You’ve got it figured out. You do what the rest of us only—”

“But, George,” Nick said, with a patient smile, “we don’t know where I would have been if I had had ambition. Yes.” He nodded solemnly. “Ambition is good and people shouldn’t knock it. I’m going to write that guy a postcard and tell him so.”

I was late by then so I took a cab down to work. On my way down, I thought about my second, abortive date with Delia Ferrier, and the excuse I had made of my job. It was a breezy day and the wind seemed to mock me and my ambition—the puffs rippling down the East River; the pointless, metropolitan gust. Since coming to the city, I had done my best to ignore the wind, but sometimes it found me anyway.

Harry was anxious on the phone: “I’m-unna—I’m-unna—I’m-unna see her soon. Soon as she’s back. She can’t be bothered, George, and I can’t tell you any more. She’s resting, all right? Leave it at that. I’m-unna see her soon, and soon as I do, I’ll tell her you were asking for her. You and she are very good friends, I know. You and she go way back, and I know she’d want to see you if she was seeing anyone. But right now she’s not seeing anyone. So leave it at that, okay. Leave it at this.” I suspected Harry didn’t know where they were keeping her any more than Nick or I did, but felt he had to keep up a semblance of being in the familial know. I didn’t blame him, nor did I press him. I left it at that. For I felt rather lucky to have gotten rid of Harry for the time being; I always did.

It was nice, chatty Annie Roth who finally filled me in. Kate was indeed gone from work, and the rumor was that she and her mother had gone away somewhere warm. “We tried to visit her in the hospital,” Annie volunteered, “but they wouldn’t let us in.” I very nearly asked her what had happened—I was picturing Kate with a broken leg or arm—before I grasped the truth. “But Mr. Goodenow took Jess
and me out to lunch at the yacht club. Wasn’t that sweet of him? Poor guy, they’re
really worried
. I mean, this is the second time, you know. You see, Kate never had any of the adolescent rebellion problems the rest of us did. Well, okay, there was the eating thing, but hell, who wasn’t starving themselves in high school? I just wasn’t very good at it! That’s sad, isn’t it, George? A would-be anorexic!”

Cara, whose presence of late had been refreshingly muted, resurfaced after Nick left. She seemed to be possessed of a great, secret energy, and this energy prompted her to bring over her vacuum to clean the living room, and to mop the kitchen floor and go around spraying spots on the wall. The apartment had never looked so good. She found a torn flannel shirt of Nick’s in the couch he’d been sleeping on and used it as a dust rag and then threw it out. “Good riddance!”

“He is coming back, you know,” I told her. “He’s coming back tomorrow, so you’d better get used to sharing your space, dear.” I loved to needle her.

“What?” Cara cried, pausing with spray bottle in hand. “How long’s he gonna stay?”

“Two, three months. Probably for good.”

“What? How can you say this? Don’t you know you’re being taken advantage of?”

“Um …”

“But he was here on the couch every night!”

“Ye-es. Well, so have, ahem—”

Cara was the kind of girl who looks surreptitiously into every reflective surface she passes, and she had been fixing her hair in the window. But now her hands flew to her hips as she spun around. “That’s different! I’m Geoff’s girlfriend!” Till the very end, she was always Geoff’s girlfriend. “I have a right to be here! He’s not … anyone!”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“Well, you should tell your friend to clean up his act. You know he
smokes
all day! That’s very bad for me. For … someone like me,”
she finished rather meekly, momentarily deserting her indignant stand.

“Come on, you smoke yourself.”

“Cigarettes!” shrieked Cara. “And not any
more
.”

When I didn’t reply she positioned herself between me and the television. “Yes?”

“I quit.”

“Congratulations.”

“Well, it wasn’t hard,” she conceded. “Considering.”

Three years afterward, and I can still remember the exchange. She kept dangling pointed remarks in front of me which I kept batting away. It was fun not letting her get a rise out of me. And she—she must have been dithering between fear and triumph, dithering at such a fever pitch that she held back and held back and held back, almost in spite of herself. I remember telling her she ought to go take an aerobics class, to get rid of some of that excess energy, and she mentioned her “condition.” She must have been out of her mind not telling me, and yet for the first time in her life she must have sensed the security that a great secret affords: time. You can wait and wait and wait; for once, you have enough time. You can detonate the bomb any time you wish, and it still explodes and ruins things.

Of course I deserved to miss every clue. I paid her no heed, I never did; because she was Cara.

I consider myself a fairly perceptive person, I mean when it comes to dime-store psychologizing. I’ll admit I take a certain pride in understanding the desires and fears that drive the behavior of my friends and acquaintances, in understanding where these feelings come from and how they are manifested. All too often I am aware of the ulterior motives beneath the thin veil of convention or cant that people use to explain their behavior. But as an analyst of human nature I have one critical failing. And despite my awareness of it, I cannot seem to correct it. I cannot seem to teach myself otherwise. Year after year I go on assuming the wrong thing: I never expect people’s
lives to fall into cliché. I never expect a man to cheat on his wife, I never expect a woman to run off with a lover, and if someone were to tell me that a beautiful girl was marrying a rich old man for his money, I would dismiss the idea as too Hollywood. When time and again I witness just such trite scenarios played out around me, I am amazed. Amazed and a bit abashed, too, that whoever it is could get it into their heads not only to act at all in such standard situations, but to act in so hackneyed a fashion. The predictible is the thing I am incapable of predicting. I don’t know where my own predilection for originality—my expectations—comes from, but I am betrayed by it, nearly always.

I worked Christmas Eve and spent a freezing, endless New Year’s Eve with Chat. The actual hour of midnight we spent in the all-night post office on Thirty-fourth Street, express mailing Chat’s business school applications, which he’d been too drunk all Christmas to finish.

“Bastard. It’s A.A. for you.”

“I don’t need to drink to have fun.”

Afterward we went outside and did shots of vodka with the homeless, on the steps of that massive gray building.

“Good,” I said. “Because we’re too late for Annie’s and too early for Twelfth Street.” Not that I minded, really. New Year’s, like all evils, was made worse by New York. We ought to have skipped the rest; we ought to have called it a night then and there.

“Have you met Roth’s new boyfriend?” asked Chat. He took a final drink. “Now, that man is a serious alcoholic.”