The Fundamentals of Play (2 page)

I had intended to head home myself, but after hesitating a moment outside, I let myself back into the foyer of the Club. It was well lit; standing just inside the door you could see up a wide marble staircase that rose for several steps, split in two, curved around a gold bust, and rejoined in time to deposit the climber onto a brief mezzanine. Like all stairways, it gave the best view coming down, but the ascending prospect was more enticing because it was in looking up that one anticipated the rewards that lay beyond the mezzanine: ballrooms, there were, and bars.

Contrary to what Daniels had said, it was not my first time at the club. My grandfather had been a member, and I had childhood memories of drinking Tom Collinses “without the Tom” in the men’s bar upstairs. Looking back, I’m sure I returned to seek some evidence of this—our residual belonging: Grandfather’s name on a roster; a face staring out from the photograph of a men’s dinner half a century ago; or perhaps his old chesterfield hanging still in the coat check, the claim forgotten after a particularly raucous night.

But of course there was no coat. My mother wore it now. And as I stood there, looking up the stairs toward a muted, urbane din whose source the mezzanine concealed, my disconcerting childhood seemed to creep up and surround me. We didn’t, for instance, own our own house. My father ran a tiny pre-adolescent boarding school in western Massachusetts called the Rectory, for sixth- through eighth-grade boys, of the kind that the last thirty years had nearly wiped out. And so the school provided a house. My grandfather’s apartment had been sold years ago to settle some of his debts. There was more—a whole host of recuperative fantasies which someone like me swears by, growing up: I was going to buy back 1100 Madison …! Buy back Nantucket …! And I suppose the Town Club figured in there somewhere as well. In the meantime the running joke between my
sister and me was that we had the only kind of money that was respectable these days—the kind that was all gone.

I am not sure how long I had lingered there, just inside the door, when somewhere above me I heard a loud party come down from dinner and take over the main bar. Then, over the sound of men’s voices, I heard a girl laugh. “I’ll see if I know anyone,” I decided, and I went for the stairs. At the top I turned to see who was laughing. There were a couple of others passing with me, and they turned, too. It was impossible not to follow that laugh to its source.

A group of men her father’s age with big old-fashioneds in their hands were standing in a circle around my old friend Kate Goodenow. I remember, in the moment before she saw me, I had a dread Kate wouldn’t recognize me, and it seemed to me her face took an instant too long to change. Then she cried my name.

“George!”

Anointed, I stepped forward to embrace her.

“Why, it’s the most fun possible,” Kate declared.

With us both there, the men seemed to remember themselves, or their collective age, and rather than be introduced they turned in a single motion toward the bar.

She was all grown-up in a navy blue suit with a sprout of scarf blossoming from the neck. The cut of her suit was too severe to be becoming, but then Kate had never been stylish, really. Like a lot of thin girls, the clothes tended to wear her.

“I’ve been looking all over town for you,” I said.

“And where all over town did you expect to find me?” She was as tranquil as she ever was, and I suppose I had known she would be. That was why it wouldn’t have done any good to seek her out. One wasn’t allowed to want things of Kate. I had meant to “catch up,” for instance, and in a hurry, but against my intent was Kate’s demeanor—denying that there was any catching up to be done.

“I’ve been in Paris, you know,” I said anyway—to establish myself somehow.

“Really? I’ve been right here every minute.”

“Then it suits you to be home,” I said.

For though Kate was not beautiful, hers was a fresh face, to which you found yourself applying old adjectives—she had been called “game,” for instance. “Attractive” wouldn’t work, either. Attractive tells a slightly different story. The preternaturally pale boy who emerged, presently, from the bar would not have gone around with “attractive” women. In the first place, he wouldn’t have found them attractive. He had to squint at me through his wire-rims—

“Lenhart! Christ almighty!”

—and then I was wringing hands with my college roommate Chat Wethers.

“It’s about time you turned up! I thought we’d lost you to the demimonde. Didn’t I say, Kate, George’ll shack up with some Frenchie, start wearing berets, heh-heh?”

Chat’s bank had sent him to China for three months, but he seemed more concerned with matters on the home front now that he was back. “Business school applications—they’re hell, George! What am I supposed to write about a major setback I’ve encountered? You tell me. The time the Diesel died on the way to Vermont? But maybe I won’t go next year. I don’t know. See if my recommendations pan out. Otherwise do a third year—”

“I’ll bet George wouldn’t do a thing like that for a living,” said Kate, who could interrupt a conversation without raising her voice. “Would you, George?”

“I’m afraid so,” I confessed.

Chat drained his glass. “They got you, too, Lenhart?”

I nodded. “Corporate finance. Fordyce, Farley.”

“What about the expat plan?”

“I just couldn’t—I don’t know,” I started, struggling toward an articulation I myself had not quite formed.

But Chat nodded as if he understood. “I know exactly what you mean,” he asserted. “You think
Paris
was tough.”

“No, not exactly—”

“Try China, George—
Chow-jang, China
. Two Western bars in the whole town.”

“Yeah?” I couldn’t picture it till Chat added, “One newsstand.” Then an image came to mind of a tall, oblique scowl on legs trying to get hold of a
Journal
in a remote Eastern city, then settling grudgingly when by some miracle somebody produced a day-old
Trib
. He had always been bent on travel, yet travel without any wish for, or—my mistake—pretense of, assimilation. I guess he was the old sort of American abroad.

I had stories of my own to tell and was about to expand on Paris when Kate announced, looking pleased with herself: “If someone gave me the chance to go anywhere in the world, do you know where I’d choose?”

“Where?” said Chat and I.

“I’d choose Maine. I’d choose Cold Harbor, Maine. I’d choose it over France, Italy, Spain—” She ticked continental Europe off on her fingers. “Is that horrible of me? Is that the most horrible thing you’ve ever heard?” Her gray eyes looked happily from one to the other of us for confirmation.

“I’ll drink to that,” Chat said curtly.

“You?” Kate said, affecting scorn. “You were hardly up at all last summer. George, he was hardly up at all—do you believe that?”

“I
work
, Katie, remember?” Chat said, and gave me a burdened look that seemed to say: “Women!”

And yet from the inflection he put on the word I got the sense that the job remained a novelty. “Guess what, George?” he’d announced our senior spring, with the air of someone who has done something rather devilishly clever: “I got a … 
job
.”

“Now who’s having what? George? What are you drinking now, straight absinthe, heh-heh?”

I hardly needed a drink. Kate’s patriotic provincialism—and Chat’s cinematic picture of Paris, with men in berets sipping liqueurs—went down like a tonic after my sojourn across the pond.

We had settled on something when Kate got a silly look on her face, like she was going to tell a joke. “No, Chattie,” she said. “I have a better idea.”

“Yes?”

“George will have a vodka and lemonade.”

“Sorry?”

“A Popov and lemonade,” Kate went on, making her voice silly and dreamy. “
Dining
hall lemonade. Dining hall lemonade mixed in an athletic department water bottle.”

“Oh, yes,” I said warmly, catching on. She was referring to a habit of ten years earlier. Kate and I had gone to boarding school together; I had met Chat in college based on our mutual acquaintance. Or to put it more precisely, our friendship there had been predicated on my knowing her.

“Will you have one, too?” I asked quickly, flattered by her turning this into a landmark, and in front of Chat.

“Of course.” She laughed.

“One quart, you mean,” I supplied.

“Yes! And if I drink too much—!”

“If we should get sick, you mean—”

“Why, we’ll go and vomit our guts out behind the science building!”

“I don’t want to hear about you and George behind the science building!” Chat bawled. “Wouldn’t surprise me if you did want vodka and lemonade!

“I’m telling you, George,” he went on, petulant, gesturing with his empty glass, “I don’t know what anyone drinks anymore. In China, it’s one thing, get a little tropicallee, but I swear, the next corporate
tool
I hear ordering a Kamikaze, I’ll—”

“I want a Sex on the Beach!” cried Kate. “I want an Orgasm!”

“Don’t say that word, Katie. I hate that word. You know I hate that word.”

“Get me an Orgasm!”

“They should never have let women into the Town Club,” said Chat gloomily.

“Oh, have they?” I said. I meant this to be ironic somehow—as if I would know the inner workings of the admissions policy—but the irony was lost on Kate.

“Well, not really,” she said seriously. “Only till we’re thirty.”

“Then what?”

“Then we have to marry in or we’re out.”

“Put out or shut out,” they both said, and they both gave half a laugh.

Chat took himself off to the bar.

Alone with Kate, I was self-conscious, suddenly, as if I had forgotten my lines. Their particular brand of droll urbanity was not entirely new to me, but it was the first time I’d seen them in situ, as it were, and their casual indifference to the setting made me feel like a very young boy, with shiny shoes and his hair slicked down, who has been allowed to make an appearance at the grown-ups’ party before bed.

I thought that Kate and I might now talk for real, but she said, rather annoyed, “Did you hear Jess Brindle was engaged, George?”

“No, I hadn’t,” I said.

“Yes, but she broke it off.”

“Oh, good,” I said, glad of this, for some reason, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever met the girl.

“Yes, bit of a … random choice …”

Kate proceeded to give several more names I had never heard and to account for their whereabouts. Marnie Pall was in town, and her cousin Dick had married Loribelle Betz up in Maine, and Granny had gotten drunk at the wedding—which was a rather
elaborate
affair—and Granny had said, “That girl is climbing as fast as she can, isn’t she?” and it was very embarrassing …

I heard it said once, by whom I can’t recall, that true beauty always has one flaw. As Kate went on, blithely chattering, I fell into the habit I had of looking for that flaw—the thin lip or feature out of place—which might have meant her entry into that elite society. And yet those frank good looks of hers had always seemed to suggest that there was something distasteful about beauty, something a little tacky about a quality that by its very nature draws attention to itself, like coming overdressed to a party, or throwing a black-tie wedding
in the country. But Kate—Kate was what you wanted, somehow, in this infinitely ironic age. She was the kind of girl about whom other girls used to say, “All right, so she’s
thin
but,” trying vainly to suss out the appeal. And even now, when her name comes up, and with it the sulky protest it invariably evokes—“She’s not
that
great”—I do not feel compelled to argue in her defense. That was the whole point: she didn’t have to be.

“You’re not still with that one girl, are you?” she wanted to know.

“Hmm. What else do you want to know?”

Kate thought, frowning. “What you ate for breakfast.”

“Poached eggs on toast,” I lied, finally getting up to speed.

She liked it. “Where did you eat a poached egg? Where did you
get
a poached egg?”

“In my kitchen.”

“You poached the egg yourself, George? How did you learn to poach eggs?”

“My mother taught me.”

“She did? I wish my mother—”

“Come over sometime; I’ll make you one.”

“Breakfast date?” she said curiously. “Do you think Chat would approve? You know he and
I
are supposed to be engaged,” she added, as if it was an afterthought, and she grinned.

“I lied,” I admitted suddenly. “I didn’t eat breakfast.”

“You didn’t?”

“No, I just had coffee. That’s all I ever have.”

“That truly disappoints me.”

“I meant to say—best wishes.”

“Oh, it’s not … 
official
,” she said. For some reason this made both of us laugh. There was no promise in Kate’s laughter; in fact it was just the opposite note that seemed to resound, an expression of utmost faith in today, of total absorption in the moment as it passed. “You know, George, the main thing is to have fun,” she asserted.

“I don’t know,” I said after a moment. I put my hands in my pockets and took them out again. “It’s just New York, I guess. I’m still getting used to it.”

“I understand completely,” Kate said. “Isn’t it dirty and awful?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But it’s fun,” Kate continued. There was something in her voice that made platitudes like that sound fresh. “It’s so, so, so, so fun. You just go out and everyone’s around and—and you don’t have any homework. It’s so
nice
not having any homework.”

“Oh, Kate.”

“And you know, George, what else would we be doing? We have nothing better to do, do we? Or …? I should speak for myself, shouldn’t I?
I
have nothing better to do.” She said this cheerfully. “Do you?”

“Well, sometimes I work about a hundred hours a week,” I said.

“Right,” Kate replied. “Work—play—that’s what I mean.”

Presently Chat returned with the drinks.

“Cheers, then,” I said, making an effort to rally. This was cardinal with Kate; one always rallied. I think she had invented the word, at least in this context. She and Chat lived by certain imperatives, such as “You have to rally,” and “You never bail out on a scene,” and the principle, when throwing parties, of never running out of tonic.