Free The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy Page A

once the wrongheadedness, the self-indulgence, of painting the world in gaudy colors of morality and crisis. Chat’s dour expression and the gray overcoat seemed more to the point, and much more reliable, than any overwrought conscience-wringing of my own. “Grow up,” his presence seemed to be saying. “Grow up and enjoy life.”

    It is tempting, looking back, to make ritualized routines of favored outings—to say “We always used to” of an event that occurred perhaps twice. And I would like nothing better than to say that in Manhattan I was immediately caught up in a whirl of mutual engagements with Kate and Chat. But my work prevented that—happily for me, as Kate’s schedule and the cost of keeping up would have otherwise. I got the impression that they went to a lot of benefits together and that Chat spent most of his time at the Town Club, as he frequently called me from there to try to drag me out, convinced that the excuse of my job was a big farce covering up that secret double life of mine.
    But I had no such gratification.
    It was a dismal spring of five-dollar umbrellas, the rain seeping down the collar of my coat and Daniels on my case with a dreary kind of vengeance. One week, the week before we left for a road show out west, I saw the sun rise from the thirty-fifth floor of Fordyce three mornings in a row. Or I would have seen it, if I’d had a window, and it hadn’t been raining. In the antiseptic hours before the dawn of those all-nighters, I fell back into a sad habit I’d had in college, of picturing the world asleep in their beds. I wasn’t choosey; anyone would do. I would think of Toff and Cara, passed out after their perfunctory amours, the bottom sheet shrunk from its corners revealing naked Dial-a-Mattress underneath; or of a girl I’d known briefly in Paris, who had a brass bed; of Daniels, the bastard, dreaming of Y-curves with Mary Ellen Flynn, the secretary on 19 who commuted from Croton. Sometimes I would think of Nick Beale, strung up in a pipe berth in some stripped-down maxi off Bermuda, off Barbados, or anywhere the wind blew; or even—and here I would chuckle, laugh in the face of my dull fate—of Harry Lombardi here in New York, slack-jawed on his back, clutching some fantasy girl. I envied them all their slumbers, but it was Kate’s image that haunted those sterile vigils most, and hers that I ground away toward through the nights, as if I were striving to meet it and not the FedEx deadline. Itold myself that I, too, would one day possess eight dreamless hours after midnight, clean-sheeted, and that my darkness, as hers no doubt was, would be still as a reflecting pool.
    I was curious to see her apartment, and so one night when I was sitting around waiting for the graphics guys to come through, I sneaked out and met her and Chat for a game of cards.
    She lived on Sixty-sixth Street, off of Lexington; her father had bought her the place, “simply because it’s a good investment, George. You should think about buying, you really should. It’s pointless to keep paying rent; you’re just throwing money away, you know.” Indeed, Goodenow’s investment probably doubled in value during the years she kept it. I wondered, later, what Kate did with the place when she got married, as it was a perfect Old New York apartment, with molded ceilings and tiled bath, hissing steam heat, and the impression I always have in this type of Upper East Side place, of Antique White emanating from the walls, the fixtures, and the air itself.
    They had just come from dinner with the circle of cousins and childhood acquaintances from New York who predated me as their friends, and it made me glad when Kate made a point of saying I ought to come out more. “Work is not an end in itself, George,” she reprimanded me, as Chat shuffled and dealt the first hand with Kate sitting on his lap. “It’s a means to an end.”
    “Tell that to my boss, Daniels,” I said, picking out two lousy cards to