The Fundamentals of Play (5 page)

“Yup.”

“Gee.”

“Hell!” Chat exclaimed vehemently, setting the empty stein down with a crash. “Maybe it’s true!”

By nine the bar had emptied out except for some old guys in corners, partners in law firms you’d never heard of, plying secretaries with drinks. It was refreshing to know that sort of thing still went on, but whether it appealed to my generational cynicism or my own relative innocence I couldn’t have said.

When Harry had not shown up at half past nine, Chat begged out of the second act.

“You’re just going to go?” I hadn’t counted on this possibility.

“Part of me wants to see the freak, but, alas, I am wanted at home.”

This was a favorite joke. Home was Bobby Renfroe’s girlfriend’s couch in the Seventies. Chat had been crashing there for the three months he’d been back, smoking Pam’s cigarettes, hanging piles of dry cleaning from the lamps. Pam didn’t mind; she liked having people around. Kate would never have put up with something like that. I was beginning to surmise that they kept each other on very, very long leashes; that they could, and that this was a source of not a little pride to them.

“You ought to come with me. Say you waited and missed him.”

I shook my head. “He gave me the number for his mobile phone.”

Chat’s eyebrows went up in an expression of ultimate amusement, as if he’d been given a key to Harry’s character, and to all that was absurd in the world. “Why is it,” he said, “that all of the jerks who
nobody wants to get in touch with are buying phones? If I ever get one of those phones, take me out behind the barn and shoot me, George—all right?” He twisted a blue school scarf rather foppishly around his neck, perched a ridiculous fleece hat on his head, and strode toward the door, defying, with his imperious stare, the world to laugh.

T
hen there was nothing to do but wait. I had learned from experience that it was better to get this kind of meeting over with than to keep postponing it; to skip out with Chat would have been like eating dessert first.

I got a seat at the bar and took out a
Post
from my briefcase. Turning the pages of the latest scandal, I tried to remember the last time I had seen Harry Lombardi up at Dartmouth. Finally I placed it: it had been exam week at the end of our freshman year. I’d been walking back to the dorm after my last final, in that overly calm, hallucinatory state induced by sleep deprivation and hope. Nothing then made me so hopeful as doing well on a test; now that the tests were over, I was beginning to wonder if anything ever would. Someone had shouted to me from a taxi. It was Harry, packed and taking off for the summer, or so I thought. He hadn’t brought much stuff with him to school, compared to me, compared to Chat; two big suitcases would have done the job.

“How’ja do?” he called.

“God, I don’t know,” I said, as rigorous self-deprecation, particularly when it came to academics, was the expected mode of discourse. “That last question really—”

“Aw, come on!” Harry broke in. “You know you aced it!”

And I was startled into grinning out the truth. “Yeah, I guess I did!” I admitted, and I ran up to the cab to say a proper good-bye.

Harry waved this off, however, and leaning out the window, he said, “I’ve got no worries about you, George.”

His remark annoyed me, because I felt I should have been the one offering reassurances. But I had thanked him with what humility I could muster, and sitting in the bar waiting for him, I was glad that I had at least done that.

After Harry’s cab drove away I had continued toward the dorm full of promises to myself. I resolved to boldly eat with him in dining hall, for instance. But when term started the following fall, it was three weeks before I thought to formally inquire of the guy. I was relieved, at first, to be informed that he had withdrawn from school, but on second thought felt duped: quite conceivably his dropping out was not an admission of failure but a daring leapfrog. I honestly didn’t know which one it was. I could see that it irked Chat, too, so we didn’t talk about him—not that we ever had, much.

One thing Chat did always say was that Lombardi’s head was too big for his body. It was true, his head was massive, and he had a large toothy grin to go with it—a tortured disembodied grin, I thought—which he turned on and off to great effect; I imagined he had gotten a lot of mileage out of that grin, over the years, from people who didn’t see the torturedness in it.

At finding me alone in the bar, it was abruptly quenched. He shook my hand, gravely pronouncing: “George.”

He had learned to dress at the firm and the look suited him. It wasn’t the French cuffs, though, that made me want to call a timeout for reassessment. His hair had receded halfway to the crown. But I noticed that the blue eyes blazed, brighter now, against the bare forehead.

“Chat go home?” he said right away: get the worst over with.

“A little while ago.”

“He probably had to meet Kate.”

“Hmm.”

“You told him I said hi?”

“Would you like a beer, Harry?”

Watching him try to refocus was painful. It seemed to take a huge mental effort for him to recalibrate the evening in his head, salvage a few points after heavy losses. “Jeez, it’s been a while, huh?” The grin was turned on again. “A beer? That’s a great idea. Let’s have a beer. Lemme get it, though. I want to get it. You don’t mind if I get it, do you? Although …” He surveyed Killian’s divey interior. It seemed to embarrass him, and he passed a fidgety hand over his skull. “You know what? Let’s go somewhere else. What do you say we go somewhere else? Somewhere a little …” He mouthed the last word: “nicer.”

“Nicer than Killian’s?” I deadpanned.

“Somewhere, you know,” Harry persisted uncomfortably, glancing over his shoulder, “downtown.”

“Oh,
down
town! But you just got uptown.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he mumbled. “Come on, let’s get outta here. This place is—it’s just, I don’t know. It’s okay after work, but you don’t want to hang around here—you know what I mean?”

I went, just to see what he would pick; or, more likely, because I had nothing better to do.

Down we went to Soho, Harry making calls to answering machines on his mobile phone. “Promised some people I would call.”

“Sure.”

“Here, you wanna try it?”

“No, thanks.”

“No, seriously, call anyone you want. Long distance—anything.”

“I can’t think of anyone.”

“Call Chat, why don’t you? See if he wants to meet us. He might change his mind if he knows we’re going downtown.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I thought of someone.”

“You did? Here. Dial away.”

I punched in Kate’s number. She answered after a couple of rings.

“Hello, it’s George.”

“Oh, George!” She always sounded faintly appalled when she picked up the phone, and the tone of her voice made me shiver a little, imagining what the rejoinder would be to the man whose name she didn’t recognize. “Where are you calling from?”

“I’m calling from a mobile phone in the back of a car.”

“You are? You must be very important, to have one of those!”

“It’s not mine.”

“It’s not? Well, whoever you got it from must be very important.”

“He is. Very.”

“Well, have fun. Where are you going? Do you want to come over?”

“We can’t—we’re going downtown.”

“Are you? Gosh, that’s a big effort. We were thinking of going out, too. But I don’t know if we’ll leave the apartment. Dick and Loribelle and some people just came over with a bottle of Mount Gay.”

“That was nice of them.”

“But I don’t think we have any limes. I wonder if the deli would send over just limes.”

In the background a man’s voice said, “The deli’ll send over anything!”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

“Good, I hope so. Well, have fun, George! Come over if you change your mind. There are some people here who’d really like to meet you.”

“Who was that?” Harry asked.

“A girl.”

“Does she want to join us?”

“No.”

F
or half an hour we trawled the warehouse streets south of Houston looking for the place Harry wanted to go. “I’d go somewhere else, but I really think you’re going to like this place, George, I really do.” And five minutes later: “It’s not that we have to go there, but I think we should go there if we can.” Eventually the driver dropped us off, cursing, in front of a line of people standing, literally, behind a red velvet rope. “I knew we’d find it!” Harry exulted. He walked directly to the front of line, spoke to the bouncer, and turned around and beckoned to me. I was lagging back, like the bad friend that I was, certain he would be rebuffed. “Come on!” Harry called. “Come on, George! We’re in!”

As we walked through the chrome doors I felt a curious rush of excitement. I could only conclude that this latent side of myself—the side that got a real thrill out of being plucked from the crowd to enter a nightclub—had been aroused by New York.

“Pretty cool how I got us in, huh?”

It was two floors inside, with dining upstairs and dancing down,
and a steel staircase spiraling between. We sat down and ordered a pair of extra-large cocktails—the drinks came in sizes—and sipped them and, from the vantage point of a corner table, looked around. The crowd had not quite gone bridge-and-tunnel; amid guys like us and an optimistic group of South Americans, a handful of hipsters were enjoying their last supper. Harry and I must have looked ridiculous—two guys in suits sitting across a chrome table the size of a record album. Almost in spite of myself, however, as I sipped my drink, the scene and the Latin beat put me in an immoderately good mood.

“You like it, huh?” Harry said diffidently, understanding that if pressed, I would shut down into disapproval. “See? You see what Chat’s missing? He doesn’t even know what he’s missing! I mean, this is great!”

He drank in the funniest way, pushing his head down and out through his shoulders, picking up the glass in one trembling hand with the other spread on the table for balance, and funneling liquid off the top. His eyes would get wide as he slurped, like a child’s.

“Where you living?” Harry asked.

“Uptown.”

“You live alone?”

“No, I’ve got a roommate.”

He paused to consult the menu of hors d’oeuvres. They were all sucker appetizers, Tex-Mex plates you’d never see west of the Connecticut River, various skewered items with incongruous sauces. Harry ordered half a dozen of them.

“Do you have a lot of parties, George?”

“We haven’t had one. We ought to.”

When the food came he gobbled up a shrimp quesadilla, wiped his hands on his napkin, and tossed the napkin back in front of him. “If you had one—if you had a party—when do you think you’d have it?”

“I don’t know, Harry.”

“If you have it—”

“I’ll invite you, I promise.”

His lips turned up wanly. “No, hey, I wasn’t going to ask that. I know you’d invite me, George. I know you’re my friend. I was going to say—I was going to ask, actually, what does your, uh, roommate do for a living?”

“He’s a paralegal,” I said shortly. You had to keep it brief with Harry; the more information you gave him, the more his mind would want to do something with it, project something on to it. Give him an inch and he’d
pave
a mile.

“Paralegal?” he repeated. “Okay, okay … I don’t know what they’re paying you to start at Fordyce these days, but I know it’s not a hell of a lot, and I wanted to say, if you want me to pay for some of the booze—you know, I could bring some really top-shelf stuff”—he caught my expression and kept going—“top-shelf stuff really gets a party going, I find.”

“Why don’t you just give me a hundred dollars cash right now and I’ll put it toward the Mount Gay?” I suggested.

“Yeah. That’s what I mean, like Mount Gay rum, Stolichnaya vodka …”

“Thanks, Harry,” I said. That was all you could say.

I finally got him to talk about work. There was a gracefulness in his self-deprecation that you never saw elsewhere. He answered my rudimentary questions about the market in a tone that was almost gentle. When we spoke, presently, shouting above the flutes and drums, of his own career, Harry reminded me of an aging athlete recounting the big game, having to go through the whole spiel again not because he particularly wants to but because he knows it’s expected of him. His modesty was both false and true, and the conflict of it made him shy.

I myself was probably at the height of my susceptibility to the romance of Wall Street that evening. Impoverished beginner that I was, I loved to hear the stories of the players, the winners and losers, and the allowances made for the eccentricities of the former. So I would have been happy to shine the spotlight of a disciple’s attention on Harry for a good couple of hours. But I could hardly hide my disappointment
when he cut short his personal history and started in telling me about the company he wanted to start.

I have to laugh now when I remember the exchange.

“Computers?” I said with distaste. “But I thought you were through with the techie stuff.” To me, computers smacked of mediocrity—guys who wore short-sleeved shirts to work, the engineers of the nineties.

“Now it’s not computers per se, George, you’ve gotta understand. It’s a computer
network
—”

But he could see the way my eyes glazed over at even the briefest of details, and he smiled benevolently and said, “Well, nothing’s happening quite yet.”

I will say that despite my own lack of enthusiasm, I had no doubt Harry would do as he said when the time was right, when he got the capital, or just got bored. He had done it before, two years earlier: when he was at the top of his game he had quit the desk at Broder—just like that—to go off backpacking in the Far East. That was how he’d ended up in China.

I didn’t have to ask Harry why he left Broder, or why then. Naturally, the first thing he did when he had some money—the first thing anyone who never had much does—was go and try to give himself a few of the privileges he’d missed out on, growing up. It wasn’t that he had been poor—“But in my hometown kids didn’t, like, spend their summers abroad, you know what I mean?” But I did ask him why Asia, why not Europe.