The Game Player (16 page)

I felt my childhood had ended that evening.

I was too entranced by that feeling to sleep or to leave. When the pool players quit and the remaining lights were doused, I stayed in the chair by the pool table, listening to occasional whispers from the lovers, or their furtive maneuverings of clothing and hands. It was so dark (only a silvery gleam from the moon appeared through the one cellar window) that I could wonder if the rustlings were from intercourse. I hoped so.

After a while, I got hungry, and I felt my way to the buffet and helped myself. I was sipping coffee when I heard the cellar door open and saw a figure make its way down the steps. It paused at the foot of the stairs and whispered, “Howard.”

“Here,” I whispered back, and, when the head turned, waved.

It came towards me in sure, silent strides, only a slight flashing of white about its neck. It bent over to see what I was eating. “Good idea,” the voice whispered. I watched him get food and carefully walk back with it.

“You gave a great performance tonight,” I said.

“Which one?” Brian asked.

“The first. I didn't believe your second one.”

“I know,” he said, his voice distorted from chewing food. “How?”

“Drunks don't reason so quickly how best to hurt people.”

He made a noise and hurried his chewing to swallow. “You
know
it's better to let her think I'm a neurotic shit.”

“Hmm.” I sipped my coffee. “This is super.”

“Yeah, the coffee's good. I hope it means you're staying up.”

“Oh, of course.” We sat silently and I watched the leaves, silhouetted by the moon, make a pattern on the floor. “Did you manage,” I finally asked, “to bed Sandy?”

“Yeah.” His voice was clipped. “Did you win the pool game?”

“Yes.” I heard myself hiss the word into the night.

7

The
competition was stiff, but I realized from the outset that my chief adversary was myself.

—Jackson Stanley, G
AMESMAN
B
RIDGE

M
Y PARENTS HAD
behaved, throughout the year or so that preceded my acceptance by Yale, while I was applying for entrance into good universities, as if they were indifferent to my success. But when Yale came through, they went all out on money, supplying me with a used VW bug, making no complaint about the cost of tuition, dorms, and my extravagant wardrobe. Brian and I roomed together with another fellow for our freshman year. Our quarters were an example of social change: we three squeezed into two rooms that, in the old days, were for one wealthy student and his manservant. Although we managed to talk the third fellow into taking the small servile room, I still felt we were too cramped. The freshman year, in general, was the worst. I had flattered myself that I had read an enormous amount of English literature and it was hard, when our instructor kept coming up with novel after novel, poem after poem, play after play, that I had never heard of, not to suspect Yale of chaining several writers to desks somewhere in the reaches of the library to write them.

There were many reasons for our freshman year's unpleasantness: among them being the end of school deferments, which meant we had to sweat out our lottery numbers. The fall of 1970 also followed hard on the deaths at Kent State
and
Jackson State College; the Bobby Seale-Ericka Huggins trial was taking place just outside our ivy walls and in and out of them came pleas for support, national figures from both the left and right to accuse or justify, and, even though our being youngsters excluded us from most of these debates, we knew there was a movement on to shut the school down in protest of everything from the draft to the trial, from capitalism to simple cruelty.

But Brian and I led a charmed life (or, if you prefer, since you'll get no argument here, a cursed one) because our lottery numbers, short of a World War, excluded us from being drafted; and we were in that gray area, as the White House might call it, between the highly courageous, political students of the late sixties, and the cautious, introspective, superstitious collegians of the seventies.

Our sophomore year, the political heat was off our campus, though there were the early amusements of coeducation, our age group getting the vote, and the freedom to move off campus. Brian and I took advantage of the last ferociously and I began searching the papers for advertisements of the mostly gray, two-story houses that were rented to college students. They were dingy, but large houses and I was content to get one. But Brian was not.

He drove me in his Volvo to the place he had found. It was one of the tallest buildings in New Haven, twenty stories, built three years before with young professionals in mind. The rent for this two bedroom, huge living room, kitchen complete with dishwasher, central air conditioning monster was six hundred a month, an incredible price for the area. I looked out the window that stretched across one side of the living room thinking how much I wanted it when Brian said, “We can go downstairs and sign the lease.”

“We
can,
but I may not,” I said, laughing. I turned to look at Brian. “I can't pay three hundred a month. My folks don't live this well.”

“Sure they do,” Brian said in his humorless, factual way.

“Yeah, but only after twenty years of living in walk-ups.”

Brian, rolling up one of his sleeves, asked, “How much can you pay?”

“A hundred and fifty.” I met his placid glance. “I thought they were being generous.”

“I'm not attacking your parents, Howard. It's no problem. I'll pay the other one hundred and fifty.”

“You'll pay four hundred and fifty a month! What for?”

“The privilege of your company.” He had finished rolling up his other sleeve and he looked intently about him as if searching for work that he was only now ready for. “Let's go.”

“Wait a minute.” I sighed with frustration, looking for a nonexistent chair. “If we get into an argument about”—I couldn't think what—“dishes, vacuuming, anything, you can toss me outta here.”

“Through the window, or down an emptied elevator shaft?” He waited for a reaction, but I just shrugged. “It won't do any good for me to promise—”

“No. I want to feel I can make a demand about something to do with this place without feeling I don't have a right to it.”

“Howard, the bedrooms are separated by the foyer, living room, and kitchen. You have your own bathroom. What could we conflict about? We don't have to leave because of a girl.” He finished gesturing to each of the rooms and looked at me expectantly. I shook my head. “You could sell your car for—”

“Forget it. We'd fight over the Volvo.”

Brian made a sucking noise with his teeth. “I have plenty of money in a bank here. I can simply give you—”

“No!”

“Wait a minute. It'll be yours, legally and morally.”

“Not morally, my friend.” I moved towards the foyer. “There are guys you can find with the money.”

He stopped me by holding onto my arm. “Can you play bridge?” he asked.

I was too used to him to be surprised by this non sequitur. “You know I don't. And I can't afford those stakes.”

“I told you about that?” he said with a smile.

“Ten cents a point, right?”

He let me go. “It's not much.”

“That's about fifteen bucks a rubber! How long does it take
to
play a rubber? An hour?”

“More or less. All you have to do is win ten times a month and you've got the extra hundred and fifty.”

I felt mischievous at his suggestion and stood for a moment relishing the image of being a gambler. “Brian, I'm not like you. I lose quite often, especially under pressure.”

“But since you'll be my partner, Howard, you won't lose.”

“You said you lost three hundred dollars because of that bozo Charles, remember? You need a good partner to win in bridge.”

“Three hundred bucks of money that we
should
have won. He missed three slams. But we still won two hundred bucks.”

“Whatever. I don't care. It's ridiculous.”

“I see,” he said, with his closed-mouth smile. “You'd prefer to live in an endless, slovenly routine of hasty departures because girls are coming over, dragging laundry ten blocks, sweating in the summer, damp in winter. You don't mind spending two days painting the new place—”

“You're going to run through all of it?”

“Live, damn it, Howard! Live! It'll blow people's minds that we have this place. You don't even have to wash dishes, for Christ's sake!” He stared at me. “All right, I've got the clincher.” He moved closer and lowered his voice. “There's a cigarette machine in the basement.”

I signed the lease.

I did so under the guise that I should pay my way by becoming Brian's partner and playing in the virtually endless bridge game that the wealthy members of the Knaves, Yale's bridge club, had started years ago. It included many people not a part of it, or, indeed, even of Yale. At least half of the group were musicians, a fact that seemed to be true for the elegant reason that when, as teen-agers, the musicians went to the many summer music camps around the country, the only group sport played enthusiastically was cards. Chess was big, also, I found out, but that seemed to attract the more introspective types, while poker and bridge were perfect releases for the tensions of concerts and competitions.

“Except for the few truly rich kids,” Brian told me, “they're all good, good players. All of them play out the hands beautifully. Their weakness is bidding. And the fact that some of them just get destructive about money.” He paid the huge security for our apartment and furnished all the rooms, except for mine, within a week. One by one our friends were led into this bourgeois paradise and their reactions were predictably snotty. No matter how apolitical our class was, their revulsion at materialism was no less intense than the student rebels of the late sixties, perhaps even more so, since their lack of opposition made them more vulnerable to guilt. Oddly, it was I who resented their cracks about suburbia, about us being a nuclear family; Brian would sit calmly, with the sunset glowing through the window behind him, his hair hardly any longer than when I first met him, often with a day's growth of his thick black beard, and listen to their sarcasm. His smile would be accompanied by a quick, quiet chuckle as he listened to a long-haired critic sit in one of his director's chairs and smoke his grass.

I had, of course, mixed myself up with the other literature students at Yale and, despite their disgust at my living quarters, soon they made it their watering hole. Whether it was because I subscribed to
The New York Review of Books,
or because it was such a fertile subject for their wit, I don't know, but Brian never complained of or curtailed their visits.

Again, oddly, I would. Sometimes bitching so vehemently that it might seem to an observer that they were Brian's friends. He would always say, “Howard, you want to head all their magazines, don't you? You don't want to lose the stature of being the only published writer in the school.”

“How can I lose that?”

“By not having all this,” he said with the exaggerated pose of a presenter. “What a wonderful reinforcement! They can't fathom your living in this any more than your being published.” It was largely Brian's great capacity for savoring the jealousy of other students that encouraged me to continue work on a follow-up article that I hoped the
Times
would take. After my two-hour session with the piece in the evening, I would join Brian in his room.

The decoration of his bedroom surprised me. He had been lavish with the other rooms: two couches for the living room and a big rug, a large square butcher block table with six appropriate chairs, a sufficient number of lamps for one to be able to read in any corner of it, and similar expenses for the foyer, kitchen, and bathrooms. But there was no rug in his room, just the sometimes dizzying parquet floor, no fancy thin Venetian blinds, just the thick ugly square ones, usually pulled all the way up. He had a bed, to be sure, but it had no spread so that his gray blanket (always neatly tucked in all around) and two fluffed pillows resembled an army cot. No bookcases or shelves, no radio or stereo, no pictures or posters on the walls, only two lamps, one of them a Tensor beside his bed, the other on his desk—the only big piece of furniture in the room. It was a slab of oak set on two heavy legs that were joined by a long piece of wood. Unless in use there was never anything on it, not even an unpaid Con Ed bill. All his papers, and his few books, were kept in two large, locked, bright yellow file cabinets that stood against the wall behind his bed. One of them also served as a night table.

It was from the other file cabinet that he would take out the bridge books and decks of cards for us to practice. He taught me a system of bidding that was quite new at the time—the Precision System. Brian relished the name, he would say it over and over during his lectures as if it were a lullaby: “In Precision, this problem wouldn't arise. In Precision, every bid from here on out is a cue bid.” It
was
a fascinating system that people had been working on for nearly a decade. It held my interest, distracting me from any anxiety about the amount of money I would soon be gambling for.

Each night, we went through one of the chapters. Brian arranged a deck of cards to fit the example hands in the book, and drilled me on the bids, not by a recitation of memorized openings and responses, but by supplying me with the abstract requirements and then giving me a hand to bid. He never praised me when I was right, and when wrong, he merely said so without impatience and then asked me why I made my bid. I always answered that I had memorized the bid incorrectly.

“You mustn't do it by rote. Understand the logic of it. Precision is immensely logical. Spades and hearts, the major suits, are never opened unless you have at least five of them. That's so an eight-card fit can be found easily. And any hand over sixteen points is opened with one club so that you have more bidding space.”