The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  Miriam didn’t react except to say, “I’m not a virgin now, Howard.”

  I had been regarding her coolly and, though I felt a change in my face, it must have involved little movement, because I was frozen into a posture inappropriate to the stabbing shock I felt. My head was back on the couch, my legs crossed, my right hand holding my drink, while I rubbed off the moisture on the bottom with my left—a posture I had picked up from my father’s cocktail party mannerisms. It was meant to show wit and an unflappable sophistication. I looked at her and she looked earnestly at me and inside I felt as if I had looked away, so I looked again and she still insisted on that frank return of my silent inquiry. “Bullshit,” I said without considering. I saw spit go with the release of the word.

  “Howard, I didn’t know that when you drink your personality changes. Do you really think I would bullshit you about it?”

  I tried to uncross my legs and sit up at the same time. I did it but not without sloshing my drink. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re spilling,” she said, brushing my pants leg with her hand.

  I grabbed her hand. “Forget it! I want to apologize.” She looked up with a smile—a good smile of affection. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, letting her go. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said cheerfully. “Anyway, I shouldn’t have told you like that.”

  “Why not?” I asked, in a desperate attempt to recover. “We’re friends. How else are you supposed to tell me?”

  She plainly showed her disappointment. “Howard, please don’t be mean and silly about it. We’re more than friends.”

  But we’re not equals, I thought. Not anymore. “You’re right, we are. Still that—there’s no other way to tell me. It’s not like you’re being unfaithful.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Well, we’re not boy friend and girl friend, are we?”

  She stood up and bent over, her face flushed and very close to mine. “You shit. Before you say anything else you’ll regret, I just want to tell you that I hated it.” Her eyes were wide open, two blue marbles in white casing. “I hated it because I wanted it to be you.” I tried to talk, but couldn’t. “I was such a fool that I actually felt guilty about it.” She walked away through a few of the dancers to the stairway entrance.

  I caught up to her because she had stopped on the first step, leaning her head against the wall despairingly. “Please don’t do this,” I said in a repulsive whine. “Just because of two minutes of acting like a fool, don’t kill me. Please. I’m sorry.” She hadn’t moved until I blurted this; her eyes were red and it was a moment before I realized she was almost crying. “I was—” I quickly glanced around to make sure there was no one in earshot, which there wasn’t, but I saw Brian looking at us from across the room. “I was jealous. I love you.” This brought her eyes around to mine. Tears had begun in earnest. “Can I kiss you?” I asked.

  She laughed feebly and that, with the tears, made her look clownish. She suddenly grabbed me by the neck with her left hand and pulled me toward her, saying, “Don’t ask.”

  After a slightly salty kiss, she leaned against me and asked if she looked like she’d been crying, which made me burst into laughter. She hit me playfully and said we should go outside. We spent the hour or so that she had before her mother’s curfew necking on Brian’s front step, while I got to feel her small pretty breasts and strong, narrow waist, with the fall wind whipping the tall maples around us, the rush of the leaves sounding like a paper ocean.

  Before I opened the heavy door to the basement, I relished the diminishing ache of maintaining an erection for an hour, and felt a strength and lightness of spirit that was totally new. I was amused, while I walked down the stairs, at the thought that sex meant so much, when I realized it was probably love that had refreshed me.

  The dancing had stopped, though the music was still blasting, but the game playing seemed to have increased; four or five people had crowded around each of the four machines. Couples had turned out the lights at the other end of the basement and were sitting on the floor, some of them necking heatedly and shamelessly. The table of drinks and food that stood between these two factions was disorganized, every bottle broken into, every stack of meat halved and disheveled. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard Brian call to me, “My God, I thought you’d deserted us for the whole night.”

  On the periphery some people glanced at me. I hurried over to the pinball machine Brian had called from. “Be quiet. Everybody seems to be asleep over there.” I nodded towards the couples.

  “The sleep of reason,” Brian said. Mary was at his side and he put a hand on her left breast and slowly moved down its length, saying, “This causes it.” It was a tantalizing movement, so hypnotic that its barbarism was obscured.

  “Brian!” She jumped away and I came to with the bewilderment of someone dreaming. Had it happened?

  Brian ignored our reactions. “Were you two fucking?” he asked me.

  “Are you drunk?” I asked. His eyes were glazed, but only slightly. I looked at Mary and she seemed stunned.

  “Yes and no,” Brian said with a frown. “Answer my question. Were you and Miriam doing it up there?” His tone was not hostile. He seemed genuinely curious. “I have to know.” He nodded towards Mary. “We were talking about it. The bitch doesn’t think Jews can do it.”

  One of the two people by the pinball machine gasped and I felt the general uneasiness from the other players. I was neither scared nor upset, just puzzled. Was he freaking out or had he calculated this? Mary had said, “Howard, he’s crazy.” And she misinterpreted my silence for belief, because she then shrieked, “It’s not what I said, Brian! Tell him it’s not what I said!”

  Brian looked at her, unruffled, smiling, and spoke with his voice in a nasal drawl. “My dear, don’t you realize that that is a confession you’ve said something like it?” He turned to me with a look of, Isn’t she silly?

  “Mary,” I said. “I don’t believe it. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t care anyway.”

  One of Mary’s good friends had reached her side. Mary’s shoulders were tensed so that she looked as if she were chilled and trying to hide from an icy wind.

  “Anyway,” Brian said, in the relaxed tone of a person suffering from boredom, “you were right, Howard. She’s an insufferable snob.”

  I had expected something like that, for Brian is nothing if not logical, so I said quickly and lightly, “Well, I’ll wait till this blows over. And I advise you to do the same, Mary. Eventually he’ll say what it’s all about.” I walked away to the pool table but I wheeled about when I heard the scream.

  Not a hysterical, almost funny, horror movie scream, but a scream of anguish and dread that yanked the thirty or so people in the room from their lives and into Mary’s. There were cries of, “What?” and Mary’s friend, holding her to prevent her from keeling over, yelled at Brian that he was a bastard. Suddenly Stoppard looked very drunk, his feet spread out oddly as if to balance himself, his face quizzical, his mouth stupidly open. And I heard someone note it with the surprise it merited; none of them had seen him out of control.

  The explanation that he was drunk settled everyone’s nerves and Mary, shaking with sobs, was taken out by her friend and escort to be driven home. Brian’s drink was taken from him and a very pretty girl named Sandy asked him if he wanted to lie down or needed coffee.

  “‘That’s a fair thought,’” he quoted. “‘To lie between a maid’s legs.’”

  “Boy, acting turns him into a real nut,” someone said. And there were a few more jokes made, everyone slowly returning to their games and lovemaking. I sat down in a chair next to the pool table and watched Brian loll in Sandy’s arms while she helped him over to the couch on which Miriam and I had quarreled. Once there, she left to get him coffee from the huge caterer’s urn on the table. He waved to me with a foolish grin on his face and I nodded before turning to watch the pool game. In a few minutes it ended and I pla
yed the winner. I looked over at the couch from time to time and saw Brian and Sandy sitting close together, Brian talking quietly, often with his eyes closed. Sandy would laugh mildly and then listen seriously to what appeared to be a long story.

  I lost track of them during a particularly intense stretch of the game and when it ended I found that they had disappeared. The music had been allowed to end without a new record being selected and our numbers seemed to have diminished, only two of the pinball machines now in use, more of the lights turned off, some of the gym mats having been moved off the wall to the floor, and some of the neckers now asleep in each other’s arms under blankets.

  I felt my childhood had ended that evening.

  I was too entranced by that feeling to sleep or to leave. When the pool players quit and the remaining lights were doused, I stayed in the chair by the pool table, listening to occasional whispers from the lovers, or their furtive maneuverings of clothing and hands. It was so dark (only a silvery gleam from the moon appeared through the one cellar window) that I could wonder if the rustlings were from intercourse. I hoped so.

  After a while, I got hungry, and I felt my way to the buffet and helped myself. I was sipping coffee when I heard the cellar door open and saw a figure make its way down the steps. It paused at the foot of the stairs and whispered, “Howard.”

  “Here,” I whispered back, and, when the head turned, waved.

  It came towards me in sure, silent strides, only a slight flashing of white about its neck. It bent over to see what I was eating. “Good idea,” the voice whispered. I watched him get food and carefully walk back with it.

  “You gave a great performance tonight,” I said.

  “Which one?” Brian asked.

  “The first. I didn’t believe your second one.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice distorted from chewing food. “How?”

  “Drunks don’t reason so quickly how best to hurt people.”

  He made a noise and hurried his chewing to swallow. “You know it’s better to let her think I’m a neurotic shit.”

  “Hmm.” I sipped my coffee. “This is super.”

  “Yeah, the coffee’s good. I hope it means you’re staying up.”

  “Oh, of course.” We sat silently and I watched the leaves, silhouetted by the moon, make a pattern on the floor. “Did you manage,” I finally asked, “to bed Sandy?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was clipped. “Did you win the pool game?”

  “Yes.” I heard myself hiss the word into the night.

  7

  The competition was stiff, but I realized from the outset that my chief adversary was myself.

  —Jackson Stanley, GAMESMAN BRIDGE

  MY PARENTS HAD behaved, throughout the year or so that preceded my acceptance by Yale, while I was applying for entrance into good universities, as if they were indifferent to my success. But when Yale came through, they went all out on money, supplying me with a used VW bug, making no complaint about the cost of tuition, dorms, and my extravagant wardrobe. Brian and I roomed together with another fellow for our freshman year. Our quarters were an example of social change: we three squeezed into two rooms that, in the old days, were for one wealthy student and his manservant. Although we managed to talk the third fellow into taking the small servile room, I still felt we were too cramped. The freshman year, in general, was the worst. I had flattered myself that I had read an enormous amount of English literature and it was hard, when our instructor kept coming up with novel after novel, poem after poem, play after play, that I had never heard of, not to suspect Yale of chaining several writers to desks somewhere in the reaches of the library to write them.

  There were many reasons for our freshman year’s unpleasantness: among them being the end of school deferments, which meant we had to sweat out our lottery numbers. The fall of 1970 also followed hard on the deaths at Kent State and Jackson State College; the Bobby Seale-Ericka Huggins trial was taking place just outside our ivy walls and in and out of them came pleas for support, national figures from both the left and right to accuse or justify, and, even though our being youngsters excluded us from most of these debates, we knew there was a movement on to shut the school down in protest of everything from the draft to the trial, from capitalism to simple cruelty.

  But Brian and I led a charmed life (or, if you prefer, since you’ll get no argument here, a cursed one) because our lottery numbers, short of a World War, excluded us from being drafted; and we were in that gray area, as the White House might call it, between the highly courageous, political students of the late sixties, and the cautious, introspective, superstitious collegians of the seventies.

  Our sophomore year, the political heat was off our campus, though there were the early amusements of coeducation, our age group getting the vote, and the freedom to move off campus. Brian and I took advantage of the last ferociously and I began searching the papers for advertisements of the mostly gray, two-story houses that were rented to college students. They were dingy, but large houses and I was content to get one. But Brian was not.

  He drove me in his Volvo to the place he had found. It was one of the tallest buildings in New Haven, twenty stories, built three years before with young professionals in mind. The rent for this two bedroom, huge living room, kitchen complete with dishwasher, central air conditioning monster was six hundred a month, an incredible price for the area. I looked out the window that stretched across one side of the living room thinking how much I wanted it when Brian said, “We can go downstairs and sign the lease.”

  “We can, but I may not,” I said, laughing. I turned to look at Brian. “I can’t pay three hundred a month. My folks don’t live this well.”

  “Sure they do,” Brian said in his humorless, factual way.

  “Yeah, but only after twenty years of living in walk-ups.”

  Brian, rolling up one of his sleeves, asked, “How much can you pay?”

  “A hundred and fifty.” I met his placid glance. “I thought they were being generous.”

  “I’m not attacking your parents, Howard. It’s no problem. I’ll pay the other one hundred and fifty.”

  “You’ll pay four hundred and fifty a month! What for?”

  “The privilege of your company.” He had finished rolling up his other sleeve and he looked intently about him as if searching for work that he was only now ready for. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute.” I sighed with frustration, looking for a nonexistent chair. “If we get into an argument about”—I couldn’t think what—“dishes, vacuuming, anything, you can toss me outta here.”

  “Through the window, or down an emptied elevator shaft?” He waited for a reaction, but I just shrugged. “It won’t do any good for me to promise—”

  “No. I want to feel I can make a demand about something to do with this place without feeling I don’t have a right to it.”

  “Howard, the bedrooms are separated by the foyer, living room, and kitchen. You have your own bathroom. What could we conflict about? We don’t have to leave because of a girl.” He finished gesturing to each of the rooms and looked at me expectantly. I shook my head. “You could sell your car for—”

  “Forget it. We’d fight over the Volvo.”

  Brian made a sucking noise with his teeth. “I have plenty of money in a bank here. I can simply give you—”

  “No!”

  “Wait a minute. It’ll be yours, legally and morally.”

  “Not morally, my friend.” I moved towards the foyer. “There are guys you can find with the money.”

  He stopped me by holding onto my arm. “Can you play bridge?” he asked.

  I was too used to him to be surprised by this non sequitur. “You know I don’t. And I can’t afford those stakes.”

  “I told you about that?” he said with a smile.

  “Ten cents a point, right?”

  He let me go. “It’s not much.”

  “That’s about fifteen bucks a rubber! How long does
it take to play a rubber? An hour?”

  “More or less. All you have to do is win ten times a month and you’ve got the extra hundred and fifty.”

  I felt mischievous at his suggestion and stood for a moment relishing the image of being a gambler. “Brian, I’m not like you. I lose quite often, especially under pressure.”

  “But since you’ll be my partner, Howard, you won’t lose.”

  “You said you lost three hundred dollars because of that bozo Charles, remember? You need a good partner to win in bridge.”

  “Three hundred bucks of money that we should have won. He missed three slams. But we still won two hundred bucks.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I see,” he said, with his closed-mouth smile. “You’d prefer to live in an endless, slovenly routine of hasty departures because girls are coming over, dragging laundry ten blocks, sweating in the summer, damp in winter. You don’t mind spending two days painting the new place—”

  “You’re going to run through all of it?”

  “Live, damn it, Howard! Live! It’ll blow people’s minds that we have this place. You don’t even have to wash dishes, for Christ’s sake!” He stared at me. “All right, I’ve got the clincher.” He moved closer and lowered his voice. “There’s a cigarette machine in the basement.”

  I signed the lease.

  I did so under the guise that I should pay my way by becoming Brian’s partner and playing in the virtually endless bridge game that the wealthy members of the Knaves, Yale’s bridge club, had started years ago. It included many people not a part of it, or, indeed, even of Yale. At least half of the group were musicians, a fact that seemed to be true for the elegant reason that when, as teen-agers, the musicians went to the many summer music camps around the country, the only group sport played enthusiastically was cards. Chess was big, also, I found out, but that seemed to attract the more introspective types, while poker and bridge were perfect releases for the tensions of concerts and competitions.