Free The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy

that the two of us found ourselves with girlfriends. Each of us made an independent decision to downplay, in my case, or to hide, in Harry’s, the existence of said girlfriends from Chat. Harry’s girlfriend was called Marie. She was a Mike-and-Craig-O regular—a smart, determined girl from Rochester, half a head taller than Harry, who eventually did big things for student government. Chat found out about her soon enough. He had to be polite to me about Ann, no matter that he thought my married state was putting a damper on the fun, and I’m sure this constraint, doubled with the fact that he himself remained girlfriend-less, increased his venom toward Harry.
    The tone changed in their room. Before Chat had been outrageous,certainly—there was no escaping it—but there had been a kind of creativity in his attacks, and a certain underlying hope. Now Chat lit into Lombardi in a way that was just boring. He made fun of the way the guy dressed, right to his face. He used to take periodic inventories of Harry’s wardrobe, of his black concert T-shirts and his two ugly ties and his quasi-oxford shirts in odd patterns.
    Harry got so much flak from Chat about Marie that finally he dumped her rather than deal with it, and went around looking hunted. She really liked Harry, though, and one night that fall she came over, blind drunk and blubbering, to see why they couldn’t give it another shot. Marie didn’t usually drink. That was one of the many things Chat had found to ridicule about her. She didn’t drink, she didn’t put out. As it happened, Harry wasn’t home; Chat and I and Will Toff were sitting around trying to get a plan together. Toff finally gave up on us, and I went to my room without much hope to call Ann, who would have gone out to get drunk long ago, disgusted with our lethargy. I couldn’t get hold of her, so I went back next door. Chat had fixed another drink for Marie and she was drinking it and talking about Lombardi. “It’s really over now!” she cried. “And I don’t even care!”
    “Yes, dear,” Chat was saying, and stroking her hair. “Now drink your drink.”
    To me he murmured, marching me smartly back out the door, “Very sorry, George—party of two, you understand?”
    In the morning I started at Chat’s light rap on my door. We prided ourselves on getting up and going to breakfast, and belittled the others who slept the day away and tried to make up for it at night. This morning, however, I stalled. I folded up the newspaper on my desk and took my time about finding my keys. We were supposed to take the road trip to New Haven that weekend or the next. I imagined Kate’s approval when she found out that the two of us had become friends. It struck me how melodramatic it would be to start a fight, to make an accusation. I think it’s safe to say that was the very last thing I wanted to do.
    “While we’re young, Lenhart,” remarked Chat. I opened the door. He was wearing a gray overcoat over the dressing gown, a wry look on his face.
    “I wasn’t sure you’d make it this morning,” I said stiffly.
    Chat feigned insult. “Christ!” he said. “Give me some credit, will you?”

C HAPTER 6
    I t was fitting he should say “While we’re young” in that sarcastic tone—Chat, who had never felt the exigencies of youth. He had felt no obligation to “make the most of it”; he did not go around saying, as so many did, that those years—or these in New York, for that matter—were the best of our lives; or berating himself, as I did, for failing to live up to their promise. I guess that was the other thing I liked about him right from the beginning: Wethers took the edge off my moods. As we walked to breakfast through that fine, cold morning, the foliage—the color—was gone, and the trees were bare. The sense that I had backed down from a moral crisis quickly dissipated. Chat and I were up early, as we always were, while the rest of the college slumbered on, and I saw at