Read Online The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy - Free Book Online

scowled: his roommate was a mouth-breather, as oblivious to the sound he made as a sleeping child. “Think I’ve heard your name.”
    “How do you know Kate?”
    “We go to Maine.”
    At this oddly chosen moment Harry interjected: “You went to Chatham?” Pronouncing it wrong, as if he hadn’t been listening at all, he rhymed the first syllable with “bath” instead of “bat.” Neither Chat nor I corrected him. “That’s on the Cape, right?”
    “Near it,” I said. It was a common mistake; the school was across Buzzards Bay and thirty miles west of the town of the same name, which marks the tip of the Cape Cod elbow.
    “Did you know John Lash?”
    I nodded. “Of course.”
    “John’s a great guy!” Harry gushed. “John’s from my hometown!”
    As he clearly wanted me to feed him the next line, I asked him where he was from.
    “Glen Cove,” he said.
    “Oh.” Except that he wasn’t. The sophomores had put signs onthe doors with our names and hometowns. Chat was from New York. Henry was from Millport. I didn’t know Long Island—the discrepancy would ordinarily have meant nothing to me, other than its
being
a discrepancy—but I wanted to sit the guy down and tell him to play life like cards. Surely he could make the discards less obvious.
    He went back to reassembling the cards.
    “We ought to go down to New Haven some time,” Chat said. He laughed deprecatingly. “Road trip!”
    “I’d love to see Kate,” I said.
    Chat nodded. “So you haven’t talked to Nicko recently?” he asked again.
    “No. Why? Have you?”
    “Well, I mean—I saw them in Maine this summer.”
    “Well, anytime you want to go … I haven’t seen Kate since she graduated. Or Nick.” They were two years older than I. And Nick, keeping himself legitimate, had gotten himself kicked out their fifth-form year.
    Harry had the cards in a neat stack ready to deal, waiting for his cue.
    “You know,” Chat volunteered, with a touch of sheepishness, “I should have graduated with them.”
    “Really.”
    He twisted the end of his cigarette in the ashtray. “I kind of did the five-year plan at Hotchkiss.”
    I opened my mouth to reply but found, to my embarrassment, that Chat’s admission had left me tongue-tied.
    “And then, you see, I traveled for a year,” he went on, in a rather mechanical tone of voice. “I went to Africa—went on a safari. You see, I’ve always had an interest in traveling, and my parents support that. It was a great year.”
    Still I was silent. I didn’t care, I didn’t give a damn if it had taken Wethers two extra years to get into college, and yet I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wouldn’t sound patronizing.
    “Hey!” Harry piped up, to my relief. “At least you got in here! I mean—eventually!”
    The response seemed to both delight and astonish Chat. He looked amazed that Harry had spoken—impressed, almost, that he would dare to. “What the hell, Lombardi! ‘I mean—eventually!’ What are you, my little consoler?” He clobbered him, but good-naturedly. “Can’t you breathe through your goddamn nostrils? Come on, try. You can do it! In-out! In-out!”
    After endless hands and long after our hall had come shouting back from orientation and left again for dinner, Chat’s roommate stood up and rather formally excused himself. He was leading by such a large margin that Chat and I were taking bets on who could lose worse. “I have to go to a meeting,” he added.
    It is always awkward in a room after someone tells an obvious lie for an unknown reason. None of us spoke until he had left, lugging a small duffel.
    “Guy has a job delivering pizzas,” my host informed me. “I saw him trying on the fucking outfit. It kills me about him—kills me!”
    Chat stood up from the floor, stretched languidly, and lay down on their long shabby couch. “That’s why I’m not letting up. I figure if I’m a big enough asshole to him, see, he’ll get fed up and tell me