The Fundamentals of Play Read Free Page A

she had invented the word, at least in this context. She and Chat lived by certain imperatives, such as “You have to rally,” and “You never bail out on a scene,” and the principle, when throwing parties, of never running out of tonic.
    “To what?” said Chat, drinking off the top of his glass.
    “Well—to our generation,” I said. “Because we have nothing better to do.”
    Chat, good sport—best sport—laughed a little too hard.
    We stayed for two more. Waiting at the coat check, I cursed the middle of the week. There were not five minutes to turn into an hour to turn into a night out. “Get used to it, buddy,” Chat advised. “I’m telling you. I did. All anybody did in China was drink and work.”
    “I’ll bet,” I said.
    “Guys getting plastered—American guys—same goddamn two bars every night. Pure liver torture.” He eyed me then, seemingly on the brink of a confidence. Perhaps these many months apart were what made him hesitate, or the fact that our friendship in college had been born not of late-night intimations, but of certain fundamentalagreements about how things ought to be done. We had never seen the need to bog each other down with exposing the more sordid corners of our souls. “Tell you, Lenhart, it’s different over there,” Chat said finally.
    “What’s different?”
    “The drinking.”
    “Really.”
    “Same thing as here, same as school, but it’s different.”
    “Come on,” I said, “a hangover’s a hangover.”
    But he replied coldly, “No—I’m not talking about that.”
    “What, then?” I really couldn’t guess what he was getting at.
    “It’s like—it’s—well, you work so hard, you know, and you’re all alone over there.” Chat took off his glasses and rubbed them absently on his shirtfront. “You end up hanging around with people you wouldn’t hang around with here.”
    “Oh.”
    “Kind of … 
random
sometimes.”
    “Sure.”
    “I’ll tell you who I ran into.”
    “Over there? Who?”
    He hooked his glasses back on and ran a hand through the colorless strands of his hair. I remembered his saying in college, “See, some men thin and some men recede, but my dad did both and so will I—I’m doubly fucked,” and laughing then, too, because of his many vanities, physical beauty was not one, or if it was, he saw it as so far beneath himself he would no sooner indulge it than sleep off a hangover.
    “Hell with it, I didn’t just run into him,” Chat said, looking me in the eye as if making a decision to come clean about a crime. “I’m not going to lie, why should I? Truth is, I spent time with him. I drank with him nearly every night.” There was another fraction of a pause before he pronounced the name, a fraction of a pause during which Chat and I were alone in the foyer, waiting for Kate in a kind of disgruntled sympathy that was the usual state of things between us. Then he said: “Lombardi.”
    “Harry Lombardi? My God.”
    It was the last person on earth I would have expected Chat to name, and I didn’t know quite how to react. But Chat seemed to take my remark for general derision, and he gave a harsh, approving laugh. “He
surfaced
, George! Reinvented himself as a go-getter, a fucking entrepreneur! High-tech venture capital: who would have thought? Ambitious, evidently.”
    “But—of course,” I said. “We always knew that.”
    “We did?
I
didn’t. I had no idea.”
    I had to think he was joking, but the long blank face was void of humor. The unbelievable, and sometimes delightful, thing about Chat’s myopia was how astoundingly vast it was in scope. Rumors of Lombardi’s success had reached me even in Paris.
    “Guy had quit his job—was knocking around China for
kicks
, Lenhart—finds this electronics factory … 
takes it over
. By the time Broder sends me over he was king of the goddamn hill! All these factory manager guys were like, No, Mis’ Lombardi, Yes, Mis’ Lombardi—”
    “You mean you worked