The Fundamentals of Play (34 page)

“It’s her father,” I said as she let the man in.

“Kate’s father?” She looked around wildly, and straightened a perfect pile of magazines before retreating to the bed. Cara was a demon tidier, a fact that gave a curious pathos to the caught-in-bed artlessness she affected.

“George, he can’t do anything to me, can he?”

“What could he do?” I said. But I myself relinquished the sagging armchair and stood up. I didn’t want to be caught sitting down by Kate’s father; I knew that.

“I don’t know,” she said nervously. “I just mean—he can’t do anything to me, can he?”

He had Kate with him.

The sight of her tan, erect figure in the doorway made me think that everything was going to be all right, in the end—that the situation could be resolved in a professional manner, and then we could all go out and have a drink together—call Harry from the bar to come and join us. I went to Kate and kissed her. But from the query in her voice I understood that I had been caught off-sides. “Why, George,” she said, drawing back and making a quick, critical survey of the room. “How funny to find you here.”

Unlike his daughter, Mr. Goodenow showed all the signs of being painfully, angrily hungover. He had slicked his gray hair down and was immaculately shaven—all the exterior efforts undertaken to put things in place. But his hand, as he raised it to point at Cara, shook wildly. “I’d like you to tell us, Miss McLean: just what in hell do you think you’re going to accomplish with all of this?” Without taking her eyes off him, Cara’s hand closed around the shot bottle, and she shook alcohol into her glass.

“Dad—”

“Let me go on, Kate!” He moved farther into the room. The poor furnishings seemed to cower in the presence of an older man in a very fine dark suit. “If you think for one minute that this contemptible little ploy of yours is going to see one
dime’s
net gain when I’m through here—”

“Dad,
Daddy
—”

“Kate, let me talk to her. I know how to handle the situation. Now listen here—”

“It’s all right, Cara,” interrupted Kate. “We’re not mad at you. We—”

“
I
damn well am!” shouted Mr. Goodenow. “You must think you’re pretty clever, pulling this stunt! I don’t think you’re clever at all. I think you’re a goddamn little conniving—”

“Dad!” cried Kate, her two hands on his arm. “Don’t talk to her like that! You’re not going to get anywhere!”

“I’ll damn well talk any way I please!”

“Dad!
Dad!
” Kate forced him to look at her. “Dad, please—will you wait outside?”

Mr. Goodenow frowned. The man had a look of stupid anger, as if he’d forgotten the cause and remembered only the emotion itself.

“Yes, you go and wait outside. Here, I’ll go with you, all right?”

“If that’s what you want—if that’s what you want, K.…”

Kate turned momentarily to Cara. It occurred to me that she must have come straight from the plane. It was January first and she was wearing a sundress and sandals. “I’m so sorry. I’m terribly sorry. Please excuse us. I’ll be right—right back. I’m so sorry to trouble you like this.”

Cara stared at Kate’s retreating back with a look of increasing marvel. One thing she had not expected that afternoon was Kate’s apologizing to her. We could hear Kate muttering angrily to her father on the landing outside, and then she returned, smiling slightly and shaking her head a little.

“First of all, I just want to repeat that I’m not mad at you—Cara.
I know what happened—Harry has told me what happened, and I want to say that I’m not going to blame you and I’m not going to blame Harry. That would be silly. It’s not … important.” She paused, concernedly. Cara, sipping softly, was spellbound. “What is important is that Harry and I are going to be married next summer.” Kate paused again, letting the fantasy establish itself; the striped tent; the striped ties. I remember wondering, in that illogical way that one considers the future as if it were tomorrow, whom I would be seated next to at the reception. Jess Brindle, I hoped.

“Cara, I’m not mad. I’m not mad”—she tilted her chin up—“but I do think that what you did was low.” Kate looked the older girl in the eyes quite calmly. “I know that we aren’t good friends, but I would never, ever have done the same thing to you—or to any woman. I believe that there are standards, you see, moral standards …” But the patrician mask fell away for an instant as she snapped, “Frankly, Cara, I would have gotten an abortion!”

For all my mainstream notions, the word was uglier on her lips than I ever could have imagined.

“You can forget about that,” Cara retorted, but Kate was hurrying on.

“What I’m about to say may sound incredibly tacky to you at first. But I’ve talked it over with both my mother and my father and we feel it’s the right thing.

“I know you’re—” Kate started and then paused, with distaste. “I know you don’t have—” It was fascinating to watch her struggle to bring up the subject. She shot a peremptory glance at Cara, as if she expected Cara to have the good manners to finish the thought and save her having to wallow. Cara, however, didn’t know the code. There was the pathetic sound of her slurping up the end of her drink, after which Kate laughed and said, quite directly, “The point is, we want to give you some money.”

A curious look crossed Cara’s face then, which she quelled as fast as she could. But in the moment that she seemed to prick up her ears, I realized that the idea of a bribe had never occurred to her. Once the
opportunity came, she had plotted a scheme around it but never once had money entered into it—at least not that kind of money. She had contrived and connived, with the oldest trick in the book, and yet I stood there, ashamed, in the face of her relative innocence.

Once it was out, Kate seemed to enjoy the idea. She stood very naturally, as if they were haggling over Broadway and Park Place. “I was thinking … a hundred thousand,” she offered.

It was just as ridiculous as one would expect, hearing someone put a price on a life, as dismal and funny at the same time; and coarse, ultimately—that, too. But an even coarser thought immediately occurred to me: that a million would have been more like it. A connection established itself in my mind, but I managed to refrain from asking if Nick Beale had gotten severance when they cut him loose.

“Forget it. He’s marrying me.”

“Yes, Harry has—has spoken to me of his honorable intentions,” Kate said, “but you see I’m appealing to your sense of what’s fair, Cara. You know that we have been engaged for some time and that Harry wishes to marry me.”

“I don’t know that. I certainly do not know that. What I know is he wants to marry me.”

Kate pressed her lips together patiently. “He would say that, you see, because he knows he has to—”

“No!” Cara said. “He
wants
to!”

“You’re wrong, you see,” Kate said. Her voice was growing quieter and quieter, milder and milder. “He’s wanted to marry me for years and years. And he’ll be miserable—”

“Says who? You don’t know the first thing about us! Henry doesn’t want a prissy girl like you. I bet you’re no good in bed! Otherwise why would he come to me? Answer that! Answer me that!”

For a moment no one said anything.

Then Kate said, “George,” appealing to me, as one adult to another, to reason with a stubborn child.

“Kate,” I said gently, “why don’t we get your father to take you home now.”

Kate argued a little while longer; she was a good competitor, after all, and hated to lose an argument. Then, when it dawned on her that her case was hopeless, she clutched at the wall. “Daddy!” she sobbed. “Oh, Daddy! Daddy!” She began to shudder, as if the sudden return to the winter weather was too much for her.

“Kate!” I said.

“My God,” cried Cara, pushing herself to the edge of the bed. “Are you all right?” I think she was genuinely worried. She hurried unsteadily to the alcohol cupboard as I made for the door to get Mr. Goodenow. “I’m gonna find you some whiskey. You’re overwhelmed, I know, at losing Henry. I was, too.” Cara went on, chattily, rummaging through her collection, oblivious to the tone in the room. “Girls understand these things! Kate,” she said, bringing the little bottle. “You and I have a lot in common.”

The repugnance on Kate’s face when she raised it was so bald that Cara took a step back. But even after Mr. Goodenow had cursed her name and taken his daughter into his arms, Cara wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the fight. She had discovered the winner’s graciousness; she had taken that from Kate, and she was determined to act graciously toward the Goodenows.

“Leave it alone, Cara,” I said.

But she tottered after them out to the landing. “Can’t we talk this over? Don’t you wanna have a drink or something?”

In response, Mr. Goodenow turned from the top stair and viciously batted the shot bottle of whiskey from her hand.

“Hey!” said Cara, relinquishing her politesse at last. “I collect those!”

“Do you. Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to drink dime-store hooch with a two-bit whore!”

“Watch what you say, you hear me?” Lunging for him, Cara tottered on her high heels.

“George!”

Mr. Goodenow was not too hungover to recoil from contact with the flailing figure. Shielding Kate, he pressed himself to the railing. I
caught a glimpse of Cara’s stomach-flesh as she tripped off the top step and the tunic billowed out like a sail. “Fucking Christ!” With the added weight, the fall made a loudish noise, part whack and part thud.

“Cara?”

The landing now seemed quite far down indeed. Cara’s neck was skewed at a ridiculous angle—a wildly obtuse angle that a geometry teacher would make up for the test, an obnoxious angle that you would never see in real life. And there wasn’t one of us looking down at her who didn’t think the silence that followed her scream might have been for effect.

S
o few days into the new year, and yet when I got home I had no idea what day it was. Only by counting intermissions of darkness and light could I figure that I had been at the hospital one full night, at the precinct house one full day, back at Lenox Hill another full night, and that it had been three nights and three days since I’d left for New Year’s Eve with Chat.

Chat Wethers. The very name seemed part of a social experiment, a comic utopia in which I had dwelled a very long time ago. I could not remember, or had never known, what had become of him. Perhaps he was stranded still in Jersey City, hunting around the party for cigarettes, trying to beg a ride back to the city with a couple of girls.

I sat in Toff’s armchair in the weak winter light and wondered idly if I had, at last, been fired. My excuse wasn’t so great after all: “My roommate’s girlfriend—” “The one-night stand of a guy I know—” The answering machine was blinking like mad, and that would have Toff worried. It made him nervous when I didn’t play the messages
and write them down in a timely fashion, the way he did. Then I remembered that Toff would not be worried about the answering machine at all. It was difficult; there had been two camps at the hospital—the extended McLean family, who referred to Toff as their daughter’s fiancé, and Harry and Mr. Lombardi and Rhonda and I. So I hadn’t had much opportunity to talk to Geoff.

I was stumped. I couldn’t see myself going in to work, but there was no real reason to stay home, either. I went to lie down on my bed. Then I thought of what to do. It was all I could do to force myself into the shower, make myself shave, find a pair of pants and a clean shirt, lace up my shoes. I had to see Kate. There was something I had to tell her before it was too late. The conviction came to me that she was waiting for me, at that very moment, that she had been waiting for me all along. It was so simple, so obvious, that we hadn’t seen it. But wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be? You never saw what mattered until something happened that was bigger than yourself—like a death, a tragedy—and then you saw it clearly. What was always left for Kate and me was the way we had been before. If she didn’t see this now, she would never see it. I had to make her understand. I prayed—to my Episcopalian Christmas-and-Easter God, I prayed it wasn’t too late.

The funny thing, if there was anything funny about the eradication of Cara McLean from the universe, was that I still had Harry’s car. I had been using it to chauffeur Harry back and forth to the hospital, to take Rhonda to the grocery store and so forth, and so that morning I had simply driven home. It was parked outside, illegally, but like any good chauffeur I had gotten brazen about that.

So I drove over to Kate’s. I had the idea that I would get her to come out riding in it, and then afterward I would tell her what I had to tell her.

The same roadblock of an aunt was standing guard and I had to plead with her, via a very suspicious doorman, to let me up. She showed me into Kate’s white living room.

“You know Kate has not been very … 
well
.”

I explained that I was an old friend and asked to be allowed to see her.

“Yale friend?” the aunt inquired coldly.

“No. We went to boarding school together.”