The Fundamentals of Play Read Free Page B

together?”
    Chat nodded. “You know he’d been at Broder, too?”
    “God,” I said, trying to get my head around it, “that’s some crazy coincidence.” I was only voicing the obvious, and yet this element of the encounter hardly seemed to have occurred to Chat.
    “You think?” he said with a shrug. Then, seized by a fit of impatience, he drummed the coat check on the counter. “Gilberto! You dozing in there? We need our jackettos, guy!”
    We shrugged into our overcoats. I’m sure I would have grilled him about Lombardi right then if there hadn’t been another, much more pressing question I wanted answered. “How long have you and Kate been going out?” I asked, as if the answer would shed light on their relationship, as on any old couple’s.
    Chat guffawed. “Three months? Fifteen years? Hell if I know! You think she deserves the ring?”
    I was saved from answering when Kate herself emerged from the ladies’ room, her long blond bob curving to her shoulders. Chat gother into her camel’s hair with a neat toss and watched her button it up. The expression on his face—it wasn’t affection, it wasn’t remotely affection. It was the way I’d seen him, a thousand times, look at himself in the mirror after shaving—with approval for a job done, if not perfectly, then well enough. He approved of her, that was all.
    I followed them through the revolving door. I felt as if my thoughts were spinning, too, trying to catch up with the evening’s revelations. Lombardi … and Kate and Chat … I wasn’t so much crushed by Kate’s announcement as I was conscious, again, of my own backwardness. Until then I hadn’t been aware that people could—well,
bore
themselves into marriage engagements, was the way it struck me. Why now? When she had known Chat her whole life?
    Outside it occurred to me that I had not asked Kate what she was doing.
    She pretended to be offended. “I
work
, George.”
    “Oh, right—you and Meems and Annie Roth,” Chat interrupted, chuckling, with a wink in my direction. “They’re in the art business, George. They’re all—”
    “You’re
extremely
funny tonight, Chat—”
    “—objets d’art.”
    “I’m in American paintings, George, at Sotheby’s.”
    “You work, Kate Goodenow,” Chatland Wethers sententiously pronounced, “because you live in an age when it is considered appropriate for rich American girls to work.”
    He would get drunk and come out with things like that. But somehow I felt that this made sense of the whole evening, much more so than their putative engagement.
    We walked to the corner, and Chat hailed a cab going uptown. Most men would hold a taxi door for a girl, but Chat knew better: he did the slide himself.
    “We’ll drop you off, George,” offered Kate. “Chat? We’ll drop George off.”
    “Sure, hop in.”
    “Oh, no,” I said quickly, “I want to. Walk.”
    “Shoot yourself, Lenhart.”
    Kate cranked the window down. “Sure we can’t take you somewhere?” she called. They were very polite, the two of them. They were always very polite. When I declined a second time, Kate warned, “You know, you won’t be able to hide your mysterious double life from us forever!” and I forced a laugh, too late to hide the solemnity that had stolen across my face. I remember resolving, as their cab sped off and I started on my solitary way uptown, to do better the next time. With Kate I was forever trying to live up to an ideal, but when you considered what that ideal was, it made no sense at all, my striving: it was an ideal of carelessness.
    The next week at work I reached into my suit pocket and drew out a balled-up cocktail napkin with the Town Club logo crumpled across the front. I tossed it into the wastebasket, only to retrieve it a moment later. I smoothed it out and stuck it in the top drawer of my desk. I think I kept it because it made me think of luck. They were the most conservative people I knew, and yet I had walked home that