The Game Player (19 page)

“You don't know my father,” he answered in a low voice. “I'm supposed to live on this money. Period. I'd have to get a job until the summer if I ran out and then he'd give me more money. He's an orderly man. A deal is a deal. I go to Yale, and then I get into law school, and he keeps giving me money. Otherwise, zero. Nothing. Forget it.”

“So why the big life-style? Why offer to pay half my rent? The money you spent on furniture, everything, all that, why not live within its limits? You can't say he didn't give you enough.”

“Oh,” he said, drawing the word out, and shaking his head from side to side, “no amount of money is sufficient payment for controlling my life. I refuse to allow him to make my life safe.” He stood up and put his head all the way back to be able to drain the can of all its liquid. “He can't decide what it's worth,” he said, once he had swallowed. “He doesn't know what it's worth to make me perform beyond my capacities.”

8

Love, like singing, is something to be taken spontaneously.

—Alex Comfort, J
OY OF
S
EX

B
Y
1972,
OUR
third year of Yale, Brian and I had become known throughout those parts of the university that cared about any of the following things: gambling, literature, meeting people for sex, listening to a fifteen-hundred-dollar stereo system, watching color television, and seeing one of the hardest workers (and most successful) that Yale had ever had, relax at home. Brian took the maximum number of credits possible for his sophomore year, careful to select the most rigorous courses (law schools are not as impressed by A's in Western civilization as they are by A's in quantum mechanics or anatomy) and managed to rout, by this cavalry attack of educational earnestness all the obstacles but one—the Law School Aptitude Test—to his entrance into Harvard Law.

His friends were almost exclusively oriented to law; occasionally a future medical student would invade the group, but, just as my friends were all headed towards graduate work in comparative literature, or related fields, his were all scheduled for that nightmare judgment of the LSAT's. Our apartment had the distinction of integrating students from these two distinct areas of study, life-style, and expectations. The grubby literature student who, under the pretext of discussing with me the connection between Walter Scott's romanticism and the elaborate paranoia of Thomas Pynchon, would come over to make it with one of the girls; and the endlessly “outward” conversations of the small, muscled, dapper law students, confused as to whether this weekend would be better for skiing or for tennis. The law students, unlike my friends, would
not
keep an eye on one of the women while having an extended conversation with Brian about their common area of study. God, no, they would genuinely concentrate on the subject for a half-hour or so and then forget it completely to get up and bear down on the object of their lust with an almost sullen straightforwardness.

A typical day would begin with Brian waking me for my first class. No matter how much later he had gone to sleep, he was capable of instant rousing on hearing the alarm, and he would begin the coffee, wash up, and then come into my room, never reacting to what he found. If a girl was awake and naked and she screamed on his entrance (this did happen once) he would ignore her and tell me what time it was; if he found me alone after I had retired to my room with a girl, he never asked what happened to her. (Once I asked him why he hadn't been curious and he said, “I presumed that you murdered her.”) If he found me sitting at my desk writing, my eyes bloodshot, the room full of stale tobacco smoke, he wouldn't ask whether I wished to sleep or what I'd been doing; any more than I, after more than a year of it, felt uncomfortable at breakfast because the girl who emerged from Brian's room had, up till then, always come as the serious, steady girl of one of our friends. If I'm giving the impression that there was a different girl in our beds each night, forgive me, my fucking was not that frequent and certainly not that diverse. But Brian's was. If he went to bed alone, it was because he had a decided aversion to company.

After breakfast and until the late afternoon, our schedules varied greatly, and contact was generally infrequent. We shared no classes or interests and I can't think of having run into him more than once on campus. But the evening we spent completely apart was rare. On Sunday nights (and, for our sophomore year, Tuesday nights) we played bridge. However, by our junior year the other bridge players were mysteriously ill or remarkably studious on Sunday and Tuesday nights. And the ones who continued to come would say that they couldn't play longer than midnight, and go then, if they were losing, but stay if ahead. Their behavior can be explained by the fact that Brian and I won fifteen thousand, four hundred and thirty-three dollars in our first year of play. Half of my seventy-five hundred or so in winnings paid my rent and, in a flourish of admirable Jewish garment-worker thinking, I saved the rest, concealing its existence from my parents and using their money for luxuries. Brian paid all the necessary bills and blew the excess on objects whose desirability seemed most acute among the law students, who, without regard to the money habits of their ethnic heritage, seemed to consider life valueless unless it involved the acquisition of the latest Bloomingdale's ensemble, Sony's most recent improvement on color television, engineering's best synthesis of stereo breakthroughs, the trimmest and most powerful of cars, and the ability to travel to the most vibrantly fashionable spot in the world. I've heard contempt-laden tones that any actor would love to master inspired by some poor fool being two weeks behind the fashion. And I have sat in a room with the best legal minds of this generation working on the niceties of whether silk shirts are worth the bread or even, in a stunning heresy, too nouveau.

These were concerns based on expectations of wealth. To be sure, each of them had cajoled their parents into purchasing one of the many desired objects, but Brian had them
all.

And the ones he didn't possess, he simply didn't want. The lawyers could come to admire the life-style they would have in a few years, but Brian had nothing to gain in experience by being successful.

He had accomplished this by simultaneously being one of the best students and by the perfection of our partnership at bridge. We didn't hope or expect that our second season of bridge playing would even equal our previous result. But in one third the playing time of our sophomore year, we won nine thousand dollars in our junior year. And the end, though anticipated, was still a shock. “Bastards!” I heard Brian say along with the rattling of the phone's insides as he slammed the receiver down.

“They're not coming?” I asked, pausing in my movement of chairs to set up for play. Brian said nothing, his head down, and walked past me towards the bridge table. His stride was too determined and I said, “Watch it!” just moments before he, in a freakish-looking action, walked right into it, the table quivering for a second before the cards and glasses flew off, and it flipped over. And then he started kicking it in the center, the cardboard surface, covered by thick, cheap black vinyl making loud hollow sounds of anguish as it began to tear. “Come on,” I yelled. “We may need it.” But he kept on and I, after a few more protests, just settled down to watch.

Finally, he accomplished breaking through the cardboard and vinyl, his foot getting stuck for a moment, forcing him to yank furiously and that knocked over one of the tall-backed chairs for the butcher block table. I jumped out of its way and watched Brian pick it up before he let himself flop onto the couch.

The phone rang and I went to answer it. “It's Joan,” I called to him. “She wants to know if we're playing.”

“Why does she care?” he said in a low voice.

I laughed. “Because if we're not—of course, I'm guessing now—she wants to come over. Is that right?” I asked the phone. “Yeah,” I said to Brian, “that's it.”

He rolled over to lie on his side. “She can come,” he mumbled.

I told her and agreed to her suggestion that she bring some pizza. I returned to the living room and looked at Brian's face, but his eyes were closed. “Can I clean this up?” I asked.

“I'll do it in a while,” he said, not moving.

“I'd like to do it now.” I paused, but he said nothing. It was depressing to handle the crippled table, its folding mechanism twisted, and the tear like the mouth of someone screaming. To put it in the foyer closet, to sweep up the broken glass, and gather the scattered cards—queens and kings looking at me with their offended faces—took some time. When the chore was finished, after seeing that Brian's mood hadn't changed, that only his position (now face down, his head slightly off the couch, his eyes staring at the floor) was different, I turned on his Trinitron television to watch “Sixty Minutes.” He became interested in their report on the San Diego Chargers football team having hired a psychiatrist to see if his therapy could improve their miserable record, even laughing heartily, so that when Joan called to say she had run into some other members of our crowd and could they come over as well, I agreed.

They arrived within ten minutes: Joan, B.B. (this law student's real name was never used), B.B.'s girl friend Karen, and Frank Winslow, a colleague of mine. Joan, knowing our place well, went into the kitchen without saying a word and brought out plates while B.B. asked me in his humorless, gruff manner what was on the tube; and Karen, who did not know us well, nodded a nervous hello at Brian, getting a frown in return, and therefore she looked relieved when I pleasantly asked how she was.

Frank Winslow, a big, lanky, shy fellow entered the room in his halting, pleading way, a little like the manner of a large, faithful, contrite dog. “What the hell are you doing mixed up with these people?” I asked him.

“Hi, Howard,” Frank said quickly, relieved to have gotten over
that
hurdle. “I was at the pizza place,” he explained to me.

“How's the story going?” I asked him, referring to a short story he had been working on for three months. Frank warmed to this query immediately, seating himself next to me. “It feels good,” he began. “You know, I had a week of the most ordinary sentences—”

“
Or
dinary sentences?” I laughed and saw that Brian's eyes, suddenly quick with intelligence, were on us. “Does that mean a reader with an average vocabulary could understand it?”

My remark was a dig at Frank's pretentious narrative voice and my view of his reaction—I was curious because I rarely tested him on his weaknesses—was momentarily blocked by Joan's passage with a load of plates between us. “What's an average vocabulary?” Frank asked without any change of expression or of tone. “Using ‘concrete' as an adverb?”

I stared at him, surprised, for a moment, that he could accompany so rapid a reply with such a total deadpan. “I suppose so,” I said. “For a Marxist.”

Now Frank laughed heartily at my parasitic use of his wit, another habit of his that bewildered me. It was an unpleasant and spasmodic laugh. He shook his head up and down in short jerking motions, saying, “Right, right. That's beautiful.”

“Come on, people,” Joan said. “The food's over here.”

Frank and I stood up simultaneously and, noticing that Brian looked ready to say something private to me, I waited for Frank to move. But he stood stiffly as if looking for a cue from me. “Go ahead,” I said, and then urged him with a hand on his back.

“I didn't put in any money for the pizza,” he said.

I waited for more, but he just looked at me. “So? Neither have we.”

“Do you think there's enough?”

“Joan,” I began in a loud voice.

“For God's sake, Howard!” This was Brian, his voice arrestingly harsh and deep. “We can order more. Don't worry about anything,” he said to Frank, though he moved only his eyes, like a spooky painting in a haunted house. “Just go eat.”

Frank put up an open palm in the air as if to show he was weaponless. “Great,” he said, and went to the table. Brian instantly motioned for me to draw close.

I sat down on the couch and he lifted his torso so that his mouth was next to my ear. His whisper was like the rush a seashell causes. “Is Frank really like he appears?”

“What's that?”

“Like a vehemently repressed egotist.”

We shifted around so that I could whisper my reply. “Yeah, but you're not supposed to notice the repression. You're supposed to think he's humbly brilliant.”

“What are you two keeping secrets about?” asked Joan playfully as she approached, carefully holding two plates in front of her.

“It's sad,” Brian said to me earnestly in a normal tone.

“What is?” Joan asked, as she handed Brian a plate. I stood up so that he could get it. Joan sat down and leaned forward, her lips pursed for a kiss. Brian kissed her quickly, but she murmured, and he twisted his head slightly as they craned their necks for a long kiss that brought a mocking exclamation from B.B. and a “How sweet” from Karen.

“Thanks for the food,” Brian said when they separated.

“You're welcome. Go get some, Howard.”

When I got to the table I stared at the two huge boxes of pizza and the bloated soda bottles. I had felt a tug somewhere in the region of my sex while they kissed and I thought, with a weariness appropriate to a familiar complaint, that I had to reconcile my contempt for the character of most women with my lust for their presence. One of the nice things about my friendship with Brian was that it provided a constant blessing of females and, no matter how bad my reluctance to make myself vulnerable to rejection got, I could see them arrange themselves with men, I could hear their range of voices, from love to chatter, and I could smell the flowering of their odors, lingering in our couches and sometimes especially dank in Brian's bathroom.