The Fundamentals of Play (6 page)

“Keeping my eyes open for deals,” Harry explained. “Indonesia, Malaysia—very hot right then, George.”

He sounded disingenuous, and atypically so, but I let the comment pass, for of course that’s exactly what had happened. Harry couldn’t help doing deals; he walked out the door and a deal accosted him. He had stumbled up Nepal and through to China, found an undercapitalized electronics factory, and set them to making the new telephones. When the project was under way, he had called up his old Broder mentor for capital to finance the expansion. And then fate
had intervened—at least that’s how Harry told it—in the form of Chat Wethers, who had been sent over on due diligence for the firm. The deal had brought Harry back to the table; the coincidence had legitimized him to himself. There is nothing like running into someone to replace ambition, or chance, with fate as the apparent governing influence in one’s life.

“See, what I really wanted to do was to see some concerts,” Harry admitted, on our second XL margaritas. “That’s why I quit. That’s why I went to California: to see a show.” He named the peripatetic rock band he had hoped to follow around—by VW bus, no less.

“What show was it?” I asked, inanely. The conversation seemed to have taken a precarious turn.

“New Year’s Eve. San Francisco.”

“And how—how was the show?”

But Harry shook his head, staring down at his lap. It was horrifying: he suddenly appeared to be holding back tears. Or perhaps it was the alcohol that made his eyes bloodshot; he was a sweaty, unhealthy drunk. I could see him in twenty, thirty years, nodding off in the bar car of the Long Island Rail Road, mouth open, shot bottle of Wild Turkey on the grimy little table, breath spray in his coat pocket—except he was going to be too rich for that destiny.

“Canceled. They canceled it because one of the guys got sick.”

“God, I’m really sorry,” I said, as if someone had died.

He went on miserably, “I didn’t belong there anyway. Those groupie kids.… You know where I was staying? Just take a wild guess where I was staying.”

“I don’t know. I give up.”

“The Four Seasons. The
Four Seasons
, George. It was the only hotel I knew in San Francisco! We used to stay there on the firm.”

“But, Harry,” I said impatiently, “you know all those kids are from Greenwich.”

“But they
were
kids,” Harry said. He blew his nose into his napkin.
“Maybe twenty-five-year-old kids, George, but kids. I was no kid.”

He looked at me dumbly for a moment, as if hoping for a refutation of the statement. When none came he sighed and said, “Once I was out there, I couldn’t go back. I stayed in San Francisco a week, took some tours, watched videos in my hotel room. Then I booked a flight to Hong Kong.”

“Hong Kong?” I felt the seesaw of my respect for him teetering up a notch.

“Yeah. You ever been to Hong Kong?”

“No.”

He sniffed; sighed; seemed to find security in that. “Did you ever see them?” He named the band again.

“Yeah—twice,” I admitted. “Just twice, and one time the show wasn’t even that great.”

But it was no use apologizing: he looked wounded anyway.

The waitress came, and I excused myself and went to the men’s room. There I leaned against the sink and gave myself up to a kind of mirthless laughter. I kept picturing Harry in tie-dyes with crunchy hair. It was the saddest thing I had ever heard, or the stupidest or the funniest—Harry’s stealth mission to the West Coast, his elaborate acting out of the desire to acquire a teenager’s pop culture references. No doubt he’d been planning to buy some overpriced weed and figure out how to smoke it, too. I laughed, not quite drunk but pitying him. The man at the urinal must have thought I was on drugs. He kept turning around to stare.

We went to two more bars, or three or four, working our inevitable way back up to the Upper East Side. At the last bar, a place in the Sixties with sand on the floor and plastic beach toys on the wall, Harry fell in love with the bartender.

She was older than we were, with long bare arms sticking out from her overalls. She ignored him at first, and who wouldn’t: big-spender
short guy and his I-banker-bozo pal, all dressed up in Daddy’s clothes. But I learned something that night. Harry went on, unruffled, persistent.
This your regular night? I don’t think I’ve seen you before. What time do you get off?
I envied him for being able to say the things he said with a straight face. And the crazy thing was that soon enough he was getting somewhere. The girl would make a drink, take her time about it, but edge back to our corner eventually, until she had taken a proprietary stance there. Time and again Harry got that from women—a second look—and there were a handful of reasons one could have proffered as to why: a sense of the money, or the power, or something more profound—the intelligence that lay beneath them. He had the kind of face, too, that demands a second look, not because it was good-looking but because it so nearly was. He had large blue eyes, penetrating when they looked directly at you, more often restless; but the mouth was more sloppily drawn. It was too big, with a slight excess of lip whose slack ought to have been taken up. With a certain type of girl he had been very popular in his year of college; a fact that had mystified and then enraged Chat. But it was easy for me to see why. Even though to us his name became a synonym for the hopelessly uncouth, Harry was one of those men whose modest growth tends to encourage the development of “personality” early on. There was a vitality about him, an alacrity to his movements even in their clumsiness, which bespoke an urgency in every moment.

There was one more thing going on with the woman behind the bar, something I had never quite understood before. At some early point in their flirtation, she must have sensed that she herself was not the focus of Harry’s ambition; the distracted quality surfaced even in the midst of his pursuit. And because he didn’t like her any more than she liked him—though, for a million reasons, he should have—she liked him much, much more. It was like his telling me, freshman year, when I thought I was condescending to be civil to him: “I’ve got no worries about you, George.” Lombardi threw the playing levels out of order.

“I’ve gotta work tomorrow,” I said to Harry, and then to the young woman standing to my right.

“So go home,” the woman replied.

This struck me as an excellent idea. I still had a drink to drink, though. It was fresh and seemed a shame to waste so I took it with me. It was one of those nights in early, early spring when people go prematurely coatless and late at night are overcome, tumbling out of bars, by a desire to walk a few blocks. I started up Third Avenue, and thirty-three blocks later tagged home. I looked forward to having a word or two with Toff—he was more relaxed late at night after a few drinks—but I found his bedroom door closed. There is something so dismal about a roommate having sex.

Then I thought I would watch some television, but that thought depressed me, too. I wasn’t exactly lonely, the way I had been in Paris, where loneliness had taken on the form of an enjoyable pastime. This was somewhat worse. I had the horrible conviction that somewhere in the city at that very moment a great party was going on without me. All of my friends were there and I had been invited, too—I knew the date and time—but I had either forgotten to write the address down or had lost it, carelessly, or thrown it away. And as I emptied out my suit pockets, I had a dreadful premonition that this was to be the case, a permanent post-collegiate syndrome of missing out, of driving around in pointless circles the way Harry and I had earlier, just to have something to do. When the reason for my rotten mood came to me, it was more humiliating than any homesickness. I was school-sick. I missed school, the lovely order and the sense of limitless yet defined forward movement. Kate had said it was so nice, but there were men at work who ran marathons and jumped out of planes just because they didn’t have any more homework.

In college Chat and I had had an endlessly evolving roster of character tests and dire predictions for people who failed them: like the man who won’t take a dare, or the man who fixes himself a drink and doesn’t drink it. I remember making a promise to myself that night not to admit a relaxing of standards now that I was in New York,
not to become one of those people who yell at one another on the subway—not to end up a Lombardi. I still had the vodka tonic; it was watery now, but I sat on the edge of my mattress and downed it. But the truth was the fridge was empty, and I drank it out of thirst more than anything else.

I
had a single my freshman year, which meant it was up to me to make friends. There were two rooms of guys on the hall—at least two that anyone noticed. The first, and by all accounts the dominant room, was Mike Murray and Craig-O’s; they cornered the hall the way a department store anchors a mall. Mike was a scrappy kid from southern New Hampshire who looked like he ought to play football but didn’t; Craig-O was a half-back from Detroit. Privately I was rather fond of Mike and Craig-O because they did all of the things I and my putative friends never would have—shooting hoops in the courtyard, collecting money for kegs; they even had a moose head hanging above their fireplace. At parties it would have a long straw in its mouth so it could reach its drink. Most people you met, if you told them you lived on Mike and Craig-O’s floor, that was location enough. At the beginning of school they had a keg every night, and except for the half hour of silence from seven to seven-thirty when Craig-O watched
Jeopardy!
, blared WDCR out the window from their massive, shitty speakers. The
whole freshman class must have passed through that room, with the exception of the other two guys on the hall.

Next door to me lived Chat Wethers, with a roommate he detested. Before I knew Wethers’s name I had a nickname for him. I called him “Portrait of an Ancestor,” and hung him in somebody’s living room beside “Martha, his wife.” Shining above the boy’s pallid, peaked nose was a forehead so high you could have dived off it. His chin was a touch weak, which added to the eighteenth-century look, and he moved like an arthritic old man, creaking down the hall to the bathroom in a dressing gown and a preposterous pair of velvet slippers, black, with red devils on the vamp. That he couldn’t stand his roommate the entire hall knew. Before I’d identified either of them I heard Chat whining through the wall, “Lombardi, what—what kind of a weird freak are you?” and giving Lombardi hell. It was easy enough to figure out who was who.

Several times I was taken to task for the pair’s bad behavior, sheerly on account of the proximity of my room to theirs: “You
live
next to them: what the hell, Lenhart?” Those first few weeks of school, around Mike and Craig-O’s kegs of ever descending qualities of beer—and after, I’m sure, when I was no longer privy to such conversations—friendships were formed over what a total fucking asshole Chat Wethers was. He incurred hatred just walking out the door: a girl claimed she had met him at the freshman tea and that now he pretended not to recognize her. (She also claimed he had let the door slam in her face, but I didn’t believe that part.) Then there were the disinterested, impersonal forms of arrogance, which, oddly enough, people seemed to take even more personally: the stupid tape Wethers always played, for instance, whenever he was in his room, the same stupid cliché of a reggae tape, on and on and on inexorably. As I later learned, it was one of two tapes Chat had brought to school. It was the tape that got to Mike; Mike who prided himself on a collection of CDs two hundred strong. “Wouldja knock it the
fuck
off!” he used to shout, and then he would bang on the walls, and, rather than confront Chat, turn up his own stereo even louder, to the
approbation of the entire hall, who would toast the asshole’s impending demise at the pigskin-callused hands of Mike and Craig-O.

But though I dropped by the parties for a beer or two, I couldn’t summon the requisite animosity, in the form of a grievance of my own, to really belong. Nor could I join in corroborating the initial judgments as they were handed down. I am as happy as anyone to make friends over a common enemy; the trouble was that I’d sensed Chat and I should probably be friends. It wasn’t that I particularly liked him—not from what I saw, anyway. It was more a suspicion I had that he would not annoy me, as ridiculous as he was, nor I him, and that this vague mutual approval would prove more sustaining than any instant, dazzling alliance formed of open admiration and emulation.

There was one quality Wethers possessed, however, which I did admire. I couldn’t have put a name to it at the time, but it had crept under my skin at Chatham—where I’d gone after finishing at the Rectory—and, as it turned out, was there to stay. It was a weakness, I suppose—a peculiar weakness for unexpected, contrarian surfacings of originality. Even the muted idiosyncratic strain in Chat was enough to get my attention: that same embarrassing tape played over and over, when the depth if not the breadth of one’s musical taste said—Well, everything in college. What the hell did it mean?

I knew that Chat had gone to Hotchkiss. Boarding school was as good a jumping-off point as any, but neither of us, I think, wanted to be too crude about it, like some desperate types who had put on their Exeter sweatshirts and gone running around the Green.

So I held out for a few days when everyone was madly meeting and greeting, and by the end of the week my neighbor needed a fourth to play cards. Actually, they needed a third
and
a fourth, but as the rest of the dormitory had gone to hear an orientation address, Chat was willing to settle for dealing out the two and playing a limp game of three-person hearts.

I had not skipped the address for any reason other than I knew I
ought to. If I had learned anything at Chatham, it was the simple dictate that to get anywhere in life one had to skip required events. To not skip would have been contrary to my personal code, so when three o’clock arrived I was lying fugitive on my bed, toying with a book and congratulating myself for being such an independent, rebellious soul. There was a knock at the door and Henry Lombardi came in. He was Henry then; Harry, with its echoes of princely sobriquets, came later.