The Game Player (3 page)

I absorbed this, my first perception of subconscious desires in other people, in silence. Awed silence. Brian paused for a comment and that encouraged me to ask, “But isn't that just as good as winning?”

“Huh? You mean, people thinking you're a winner?” I nodded. Brian looked at me searchingly and again told himself something that caused his smile to show. “No, it's only half of winning. Winning is doing something right.” Again he stopped to watch for my reaction.

“Yeah, I guess you're right.”

Brian leaned back as if the subject were closed, but I couldn't halt my questions. “But Danny does think he's doing it right.”

“Don't you see that because he's losing he knows, somewhere, that he's not doing it right? That's why he's always insisting that he's doing it right. Because he's trying to convince himself.”

I could follow Brian's reasoning and, even though both his facts and logic were inescapable, I found their conclusion astounding. I didn't doubt it—I didn't feel competent enough to do so—but I reserved absolute agreement. “Doesn't Danny ever win?” I asked.

Brian looked at me with a quick glance of disapproval and then relaxed. “Starting to think I'm crazy?” He smiled. “Of course, Danny wins sometimes. We've played eight football games this year. He has won one time.” Brian now smiled at me with glee. “The first time we played,” he added.

I waited to hear the reason, but Brian just looked at me with that obnoxious smile. “He was lucky?” I offered.

“No,” he said. “He was on my team.”

I remembered his look of self-satisfaction about that last remark for the rest of the day. I envied how happily he could think of his accomplishments, but I begrudged him my complete admiration by deciding it was foolish of Brian to think winning football games was important. Still, I knew that he had left a deep and favorable impression, because when my mother, while serving lentil soup to begin dinner, said, “Did Brian apologize?” I was outraged.

“Apologize! For breaking my arm?”

“He came over today?” my father asked with a look of interest that surprised me.

“Well, yes,” my mother said to me. “Is that so unreasonable?”

“But it was an accident. Why should he apologize?”

“You can apologize for an accident, you know.”

“That's interesting,” my father unexpectedly commented. “Because Brian's father, Mr. Stoppard, called me this afternoon. About three-thirty.” My father, to this day, always states the time of events no matter how irrelevant. I caught my breath at this news: conferences between fathers seemed ominous.

“Why?” my mother asked.

“He had the crazy idea that we might sue him because of Howard's arm.”

“Oh, so goyish.”

“Yes,” my father agreed. He slurped his soup. “So he offered to pay the medical bills.”

My mother had stopped eating. She put her spoon down and regarded Dad with amazement. “What kind of a neighborhood have we moved into?”

“Oh, Sara, don't talk that way.” My father glanced at me while saying this and, of course, I knew I was the reason she should censure herself.

“Herman,” she answered. “I don't think there's any point in pretending about our feelings in front of our son.”

“You know, he did apologize, Ma.” I said this suddenly, a little frightened of how it would be taken.

“What, darling?” she asked.

“He
did
apologize.”

“You see,” my father said. “You've made him feel self-conscious about his friend. Howard, what Mr. Stoppard did has nothing to do with his son or your friendship with him. It's just that I was insulted by his suggestion that we accept money.”

There was an unpleasant silence, during which I was aware that mother was annoyed by Dad's correction of her talk in front of me and also that they expected me to respond to my father's admonition. “Why was it insulting?” I eventually asked, in the small voice I thought I was growing out of.

They both looked appalled at the prospect of explaining so adult and complicated a thing as that. But my father took a deep breath and tried. “It's just not friendly. You see, Mr. Stoppard is assuming that we would do an unpleasant thing. If he had called to express his regret that you had broken your arm and asked if he might pay for it, that would be different. But he called up to say that if we were thinking of suing him, it would be better to settle it personally.”

“It's not the greatest thing in the world,” my mother said, “that he offered money at all.”

“If he had put it the right way, it would have been a nice offer.” Dad returned his attention to me. “Do you understand why it disturbed me?”

It was hard for me to speak. I felt overwhelmed and suffocated by this issue. I said yes very quietly.

“Honey,” Mom said, leaning over and kissing me on the forehead. “Don't look as if you're being scolded. We're not upset with you or Brian.”

“I know,” I said in a brusque tone, as if nothing like that had ever occurred to me. In this fashion, over the years, I have wasted a lot of my mother's love.

The next day, much to my satisfaction, Brian came by. My mother must have decided to do her best to reassure me that she approved of our friendship, because she wouldn't allow Brian's polite refusals from dissuading her that we ought to be fed. I disliked the idea because it would mean sitting in the kitchen in her company and I knew that would make Brian and me uncomfortable. But Mom was clever enough to sense this and she said, “Don't worry that you'll be stuck with me. I'll bring it up on a tray.”

“I wasn't worried about that, Mom.”

“Sure, sure. I have to go shopping, anyway.”

As soon as she was gone, Brian said, “I really like your mother. She's very, very nice.”

“Oh, good. Sometimes, you know, she's a nudge.”

“A nudge?”

“You know, she insists on interfering in what I'm doing.” It was brought home to me, during the next few months, in little ways such as this, that I was no longer in New York, where all people understand Yiddish expressions.

“She's unusual,” Brian said.

That was the last thing I should think of to say about my mother, but it was nevertheless flattering. “She was a dancer until I came along.”

“Really? A ballet dancer?”

I laughed at the idea, though I shouldn't have. “No, you know, modern dance. Martha Graham.”

“She gave it up to have a family?”

“I think money was also part of it. She had to work.”

Brian cocked his head to one side and blinked his eyes. “Your father wasn't earning enough?”

I hadn't been clever enough to realize that talking of my mother's former career would lead to this: I had to decide prematurely how much I could trust Brian. “My father was a lawyer.”

Brian waited to hear more, but I was silent because of my indecision. Finally, he said,
“Was
a lawyer? He isn't one anymore?”

“No.”

“He was disbarred?”

“Oh, God, no. No, nothing like that.”

Brian laughed. “Well, what then?”

“Okay, I'll tell you. But you really can't tell anybody else.”

He regarded me with his eyes at their blackest; his lips in a slight smile. “If it's that big a secret, maybe you shouldn't tell me.” Of course I knew I was being teased, but it was effective, because there was no good response.

“Okay,” I said, crushed.

“Come on, I'm kidding. I won't tell anybody.”

“You really can't.” He nodded. “My father was a member of the Communist Party, so during the McCarthy period he couldn't get any work.”

“Why? How did his clients find out he was a Communist?”

“Well, he handled contracts for the movie studios and he also did that for entertainers. And checked the tax stuff, too.”

“In Hollywood?”

“Yeah.” I was impressing him, which was my reason for ignoring my parents' advice to keep this part of their past secret. “He was really important and the FBI made it their business to let everybody know he was a member.”

“You mean, he wasn't brought to trial or anything?”

“He didn't break any law.”

“So, how did they tell people?”

“Two agents would show up and say, ‘Did you know Mr. Cohen is a member of the Communist Party?' And then they would start asking them if they were members or if Dad had tried to get them to go to meetings.”

“I get it,” Brian said. “So if they didn't fire your father, then the FBI could call them Communists too.”

“Right,” I said, and put my finger on my lips, because I heard my mother on the stairs. She came in, unsteadily holding a large tray in front of her. Brian, immediately on seeing her, got up and took it. “Thank you,” she said in a surprised tone.

“On the desk?” he asked.

“Yes.” She gave me a look I feared meant she suspected the correctness of Brian's behavior. Mom distrusts anything too good or too bad.

“We'll be okay, Mom. You go ahead.”

“You two aren't planning to blow anything up, are you?”

“Not with his arm,” Brian said. “But after it heals—”

Mom laughed. “Well, in that case it's all right.” After a few intrusions about the food, she left us.

“Was your mother also a Communist?” Brian asked.

“Oh, of course.”

“Of course! You mean, out of loyalty?”

“No, everybody—I mean, all their friends were Communists.” I watched him absorb this information while eating. He didn't seem to have any reaction other than surprise. “Your parents aren't political?” I asked.

“My father is a Republican.”

“You're kidding me! Really?”

“No, I'm serious. He thinks Kennedy is a Communist sympathizer.”

“He does?”

“Yep.” Brian's face was passive. “Don't your parents like Kennedy?”

“No!” I smiled to soften what might be an insulting amazement.

“Why not?”

“Well, there's the Bay of Pigs and the missile thing. And also Dad says that Papa Kennedy made his money in a horribly corrupt way.”

Brian laughed. “My father likes Joe Kennedy.” He thought for a moment. “He's sarcastic about him, but he obviously admires him.”

“Oh, so he doesn't think Joe Kennedy is a spy or something.”

“No, just stupid.” Brian ate his food steadily, unlike me—I ate in bursts, followed by disgust.

“So,” I asked, “do you agree with your father?”

“I don't know. I don't care.”

I accepted this because I didn't feel strongly that one should care, even though I thought intelligent people ought to.

“What does your father do now?” Brian asked.

“He owns a hardware store.”

“He had saved enough to buy it?”

“No,” I said, and stopped, hoping for a moment that Brian wouldn't ask anything else that would add to my father's schleppiness. But he did ask, so I was forced to admit that he had inherited it from my grandfather. “What does your father do?” I asked. Perhaps I hoped Brian's answer to this question would lessen my embarrassment about my father's work, or perhaps I was just curious.

“My father's a self-made man,” he said, addressing himself to my sore point. “He put himself through college by holding down a full-time job at the same time. He got, I don't know, something like four hours' sleep a night. One year, he says, he drove a cab on weekends on top of that.”

“That's amazing.”

“Yeah.” Brian was matter-of-fact about it. He didn't seem to be trying to impress me. “Yeah, he's kind of amazing. Anyway, he got an engineering degree and worked for the defense plants during the war. And in the evenings he got an architectural degree.”

“So why did he get an engineering degree in the first place?”

“To be able to get a job immediately. You get paid lousy when you're a young architect. And they really needed engineers during the war.” Brian hadn't looked me in the eyes during this speech. For a moment, I thought he might be lying. “Anyway,” he continued, “because he had already done so much work as an engineer, the firm he joined gave him a big building to do in Chicago. And they liked it and, in a couple of years, when another firm offered him a lot of money to leave, they kept him by making him a partner.”

“So he must make a lot of money.”

“Oh, yeah.” Brian, still uncomfortable, got up and went to the window. “He bought stocks and they did well. He doesn't have to work anymore, but he says he can't stand being idle.”

I looked at Brian's thoughtful face. He had a high brow covered ingenuously by locks of curly hair that made his cold eyes softer. “Are you gonna be an architect?” I asked.

“Huh?” He looked surprised. “No, I don't know what I'm gonna be.”

I thought this a sad remark, not because I felt he ought to know, but because of his tone.

“Do you play Monopoly?” he asked.

“Yeah, I love playing.”

“Do you have a set?”

“Yeah, in my closet.”

“Can I use the phone to get us some players?”

“Sure,” I said. It was exciting how quickly he turned my quiet afternoon into fun. Danny, Frank, and Adam—Brian's quarterback—all came over in minutes, as if they had been on call. After an agreement to stick to the letter on the rules, we began play.

The first three trips around a Monopoly board are crucial: most of the property is bought by that time and everything in the game depends on what property you possess. An unlucky round—say, landing on Chance twice and being placed on Water Works—is death. Brian's first trip around the board, except for the purchase of one of the unimportant light-blue properties, was a fruitless one. Frank bought two cheap pieces of land and Indiana Avenue, an important red property. Danny had the best round: after buying a railroad, he got red, yellow, and green properties. Adam, however, was only able to buy two deeds, both on the cheap side of the board—he even had to suffer the indignity of paying Danny twenty-four dollars rent on his green property. I got a railroad, which is silly land, but I am sentimental about it, and Pacific Avenue—one of the heavy green properties.