The Game Player (14 page)

“Really?” Miriam's voice was thrilled.

“Miriam!” I said, admonishingly. “Don't put on being an ingenue.”

She batted her eyes at me at such a high speed that she seemed epileptic. “I am an ingenue, Howard.”

“What's that gonna do to Bill?” Betty said urgently.

“I don't know.” I snapped the words petulantly. “How am I supposed to know?”

Miriam finally said something in her normal voice. Very cool, but with a slight overtone of sympathy. “Howard, you're upset.” I met her eyes, a feat it had taken me two years to accomplish. They were full of her insatiable curiosity. “You're not jealous. You can't be. You're one of the few men around here who sees through her.”

I held my fingers as if there were a cigar in them and tried my poor Groucho Marx voice, “I wish I could.”

“He
is
jealous,” Betty said.

“No!” I said.

“I don't care if it's true, Howard,” Miriam said. “I refuse to accept it. It's beneath you.” Our teacher entered the room and we turned in our seats. “And, what's more,” I heard her mumble, “I'm disappointed in Brian.”

I was involved in half a dozen conversations about Brian and Mary that day and countless others throughout the week. Most liaisons were treated to that much attention, but Bill's dogged pursuit of Mary was legend and that aspect commanded most of the gossip. During the morning, it was whether he knew, and during the afternoon, it was stories of how he had found out.

The true story was much more mundane than some of the ones that were told. A friend of Bill's just told him and he searched out Mary for verification. What she said exactly, I don't know, but I've always imagined, perhaps because her long face and smooth skin had a doe's gentleness, that she was kind about it. I had expected a showdown between Brian and Bill, indeed, I not only hoped for one, I daydreamed about it. I was convinced Bill could beat him up and I got vivid images of Brian's body buckling under blows, his lean, angled face puffed from punches. But apart from not speaking to Brian for the rest of the term, Bill did nothing.

And during the next week, the tall, haughty form of Mary Tyler, and her thin arms that would gesture slowly and rhythmically with her speech, became Brian's prize, her neck stretched to look at him while they walked, her independent arms captured, one about his waist, the other limp until it could join its mate around Brian's back when they embraced for a kiss.

My refusal to see or to speak to Brian apart from the courtesies of hellos and the practical matters of theater work was probably meaningless for the week and a half I kept it up. He spent all his free time with her. I heard his car go past my house and towards hers every evening; and they came to school, and left it, together.

It was a miserable time for me. I had become convinced that every male, except for me, had enjoyed the dark forest of a woman's love. I stayed home for those ten nights searching for an explanation of my passivity. I couldn't be accused of failure since I hadn't tried and I decided my problem was that I was only interested in the untouchables: the elegant, beautifully shaped, proud girls who belonged to the strong, handsome boys. Bill, after overcoming his disappointment, settled for one of the prettiest girls in school that I would have committed murder to get in the first place.

I was a romantic fool, I decided. Worse, a snobbish fool. I had avoided, as had Joseph, becoming one of the square, good students; and also his alternative of evolving into a freak, covering my awkward adolescence with long, stringy hair and weird clothes. I had fed off of Brian's happy solution: be a sophisticated male, solve every problem they set, but remember it's crap. Smoke some grass, do all your homework, but never say you have; in short, do and be everything and no one can label you. But I wasn't equipped for Brian's strategy. I couldn't make the school teams because their coaches weren't as good as Brian was at using people's potentials. So I had been thrown into the intellectual, artistic, freak area—though I had successfully avoided being pinned down to one of those three categories. And the other critical area was women. If I settled for one of the non-beauties, I would be marked. And once committed, I knew there would be no hope for improvement. Girls, after all, have their pride. No beauty would follow a dog.

I needed Brian's help. So I called him and he quickly accepted my suggestion that on Saturday we should go to a local diner for breakfast. I had been up until 4 a.m. and so I begged him not to talk until we had been served our coffee. I lit one of his Camels and said all the things I've just run through, my excitement and confidence returning as he nodded in agreement to each of my points. I have always found, even when wrong, that generalizing about my life is an exhilarating act. When finished, our food had arrived, and I started to eat happily.

“I take it we've made it up,” Brian said.

I laughed, seeing his smile. “Unless you object.”

“I never wanted to fight. I couldn't see how my affair with Mary had anything to do with you.”

“I'm sorry about it. I was envious.”

“Howard, I can't understand that. You've called her vapid, snobbish, self-involved—”

I was laughing. “I know, I know, you don't have to go on.” He did stop, and after a moment, when I recovered from my fit of laughing, I said, “But don't you act so naïve. You were the one who said to me that if I had the chance to sleep with her, I would.”

“Yeah, Howard, but I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't do so.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I'm trying to find out how many women you have been interested in—”

“Thousands.”

“Yeah, but of the thousands, how many have you decided are out of your league?”

“All of them.”

We both laughed and it was the sort of amusement that could paralyze us for many minutes. But Brian forced it back, saying, “Now, cut it out. Be serious.” I stopped giggling. “Okay,” Brian said. “Now tell me what you want to know.”

“Had you fucked anybody before her?”

“Mary? No.”

“Had she?”

“According to her, no. There was no blood, but that can—”

“Yeah, yeah, don't go into that.”

He laughed. “Be stout of heart, my friend, this is not an antiseptic subject. If she had screwed anybody else it couldn't have been more than once or twice. She was terrified for most of it.”

Though such a fact was obvious to me, the telling of it had an effect. Girls seemed so sure of themselves: it was natural to feel that in bed they would be cool, knowledgeable, and just generally more at home. I paused to consider this and then asked, “How did you get her to do it?”

“Oh, my God, what a question! I don't know, Howard. I started a conversation with her one day and I did my best to look handsome and be charming. I don't mean that I put anything on, but I was presenting—rather, I was working hard on my gestures and words.” He looked at me to see if that helped. “As to things like, how did I get her to see me, I just asked. I called her up and after saying hello I asked for a date. I took her out and treated her normally except that I was very attentive. I took her hand when we were in the street, and I put my arm around her in the theater. But I wasn't a fool. I tried nothing more than that the first time. And then we went out again and I kissed her hello and, in the car, in front of her house, we were talking and I was watching her face and I found myself leaning towards her and then we were kissing. Really kissing.”

Again, there was a pause while I considered all this and felt calmer. “I'm sorry to ask this, Brian, but how—”

“My parents went skiing, right?” He drawled the word, right, and a cloud of cigarette smoke emerged with it. “I invited her over. We drank some wine. We started to neck and, after a while, there's only one thing to do.” He looked at me and then suddenly said, “Oh, I didn't ask. I just took her hand and gently went towards the stairs. She followed. I mean you can't bamboozle somebody into doing it. She wanted to as long as I led the way. That's it. There's nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“When you decided to ask her out on a date, did you know your folks were going away shortly?”

“Yes, I did. I asked her then. For that reason. They don't go away that often, you know, and my plan was to get laid.” He slid out of the booth and, getting the attention of the counterman, asked for more coffee.

“You
did
calculate all this?”

He waited for the coffee and then picked it up from the counter to transfer the cup and saucer to the table. His voice tightened while he squeezed into the booth. “You can't calculate about people, Howard. I just knew that if I wanted to sleep with a lot of girls, it would be smart to start with the most glamorous one.”

“But you're acting like you're going to marry her.”

He smiled with his teeth showing, a smile that gives his mouth a trace of contempt. “I am?”

“Well, you're with her all the time.”

“I'm not sure I know what you're asking. I'm having fun with her. I like her. She's beautiful, she's very easy on the nerves. And also I wanted people to get the point. That we're fucking. Once everybody knows you've done it, there's an immediate attraction. You know, because people assume you do it well and that you can handle it.”

“So now you're going to seduce other girls?”

Again a smile with his fox's mind showing. “I won't have to, Howard. Already the girls talk to me differently. Most of them are jealous of Mary's looks and would like to wean me away from her because the implication is that
their
looks or the added spice of their personality are greater than Mary's.”

I believed him and I nodded slowly to myself, absorbing it. He drank his coffee and I listened to the cup jiggle as he replaced it on the saucer. “I can't do that, Brian. The prettiest girl in school isn't going to sleep with me.”

“Howard, I fear you're right, but I dislike the fact that you assume it. Also, you're not me in more ways than one.” He checked my reaction. “I get the feeling you're a one-woman man. Right? I mean you want a companion, a good friend.”

“You don't?”

He began to speak and then stopped. He drank more coffee. “I don't know what I want except that I wanted
her.
She”—he held out his right hand as if to grasp the word—“she's a gem, you know? I wanted it. But not for life. She does what I want her to. It's boring. I think you'd feel the same way, which, in fact, is the reason she wouldn't sleep with you.”

“That I don't understand.”

“Well, most of the pretty girls know that they're a heavy commodity. They're not liked too much by other girls and the boys panic all the time with them. It breeds contempt, snobbishness, and narcissism.” He smiled at me. “What you used to say about her is true. I don't think it's really her fault. I think it's
our
fault. I mean, I really feel kind of sorry for her. If I laugh at something she says or say that something she thinks is intelligent, it's like”—his hands went out, holding the air between us—“it's like I've given her a million dollars. She lights up—it's pathetic.”

“Not all pretty girls are like that.”

“Who isn't?”

“Well,” I asked, “do you think Miriam is a pretty girl?”

He smiled. “Do you?”

I laughed. “You shithead. Yeah,” I said loudly, “I do.”

“So do I.”

“Well, she's very smart and honest. She's a good person.”

He lit a cigarette, one eye on me, and, after three quick puffs to start it, said, “You hang out with her a lot.”

I couldn't meet his eyes. “Well, she sits next to me in home room.”

“If it bothers you, I'll switch seats with you.” I looked up quickly to see him. His cigarette was barely hanging on to his lips because of his broad grin.

“Give me a break,” I said.

“‘She sits next to me in home room,'” he imitated, and laughed. “Come on, man. If you want her, say so.”

“Okay, so I'm saying. What good does that do me?”

“Well, Miriam likes you a lot. She
hates
me. But she's always talking to you. Why don't you do something about it?”

I was struck after Brian, by this simple question, made it clear that I had such an option, how much, how desperately much, I wanted to. “But she's one of the big ones like Mary.”

He opened his eyes wide. “Wow.” He continued to stare.

“What?”

“That's heavy when you do that,” he said. “You just chop yourself off. I said Mary wouldn't touch you because she knows you would see that there's nothing to her once you've slept with her.” He hit the table. “Don't you get it? Once she's no longer that light, untouchable statue, you'd just dump her. It's just because you're young that you don't know how much better you are than her.”

“Well, then why did she allow you to—?”

“Because I'm her, Howard!” The counterman and the few other customers stirred and glanced at us. But Brian ignored them. “I'm a male version of her. I have no substance.”

But my ephemeral friend seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for creating the illusion of great presence and effect. As our junior year drew to a close, he turned down enough offers to make a spectacular career, while still having one. He refused to stand for the Student Council president, even though the election would be easily his, he turned down the captaincy of the football and basketball squads, he refused to play top board for the chess team, he turned down the editorship of the school yearbook, dropped his membership in the French Club, and quit the Scrabble Club two weeks after creating it. But he stayed in the Chemistry Club, allowed himself to be elected class president, accepted my offer of the number two spot (managing editor) on
Hills People,
became president of the Bridge Club, and agreed to try out for the Fall Production next year. He was to get the lead in that production and do so well that Mrs. Rosenbloom enthusiastically gave him the lead in the Senior Production. His junior year was his third straight of all A's and his father arranged for him to take three accredited courses at Yale during his senior year of high school. He also took two other accredited courses offered in our high school.