After breakfast and until the late afternoon, our schedules varied greatly, and contact was generally infrequent. We shared no classes or interests and I can’t think of having run into him more than once on campus. But the evening we spent completely apart was rare. On Sunday nights (and, for our sophomore year, Tuesday nights) we played bridge. However, by our junior year the other bridge players were mysteriously ill or remarkably studious on Sunday and Tuesday nights. And the ones who continued to come would say that they couldn’t play longer than midnight, and go then, if they were losing, but stay if ahead. Their behavior can be explained by the fact that Brian and I won fifteen thousand, four hundred and thirty-three dollars in our first year of play. Half of my seventy-five hundred or so in winnings paid my rent and, in a flourish of admirable Jewish garment-worker thinking, I saved the rest, concealing its existence from my parents and using their money for luxuries. Brian paid all the necessary bills and blew the excess on objects whose desirability seemed most acute among the law students, who, without regard to the money habits of their ethnic heritage, seemed to consider life valueless unless it involved the acquisition of the latest Bloomingdale’s ensemble, Sony’s most recent improvement on color television, engineering’s best synthesis of stereo breakthroughs, the trimmest and most powerful of cars, and the ability to travel to the most vibrantly fashionable spot in the world. I’ve heard contempt-laden tones that any actor would love to master inspired by some poor fool being two weeks behind the fashion. And I have sat in a room with the best legal minds of this generation working on the niceties of whether silk shirts are worth the bread or even, in a stunning heresy, too nouveau.
These were concerns based on expectations of wealth. To be sure, each of them had cajoled their parents into purchasing one of the many desired objects, but Brian had them all.
And the ones he didn’t possess, he simply didn’t want. The lawyers could come to admire the life-style they would have in a few years, but Brian had nothing to gain in experience by being successful.
He had accomplished this by simultaneously being one of the best students and by the perfection of our partnership at bridge. We didn’t hope or expect that our second season of bridge playing would even equal our previous result. But in one third the playing time of our sophomore year, we won nine thousand dollars in our junior year. And the end, though anticipated, was still a shock. “Bastards!” I heard Brian say along with the rattling of the phone’s insides as he slammed the receiver down.
“They’re not coming?” I asked, pausing in my movement of chairs to set up for play. Brian said nothing, his head down, and walked past me towards the bridge table. His stride was too determined and I said, “Watch it!” just moments before he, in a freakish-looking action, walked right into it, the table quivering for a second before the cards and glasses flew off, and it flipped over. And then he started kicking it in the center, the cardboard surface, covered by thick, cheap black vinyl making loud hollow sounds of anguish as it began to tear. “Come on,” I yelled. “We may need it.” But he kept on and I, after a few more protests, just settled down to watch.
Finally, he accomplished breaking through the cardboard and vinyl, his foot getting stuck for a moment, forcing him to yank furiously and that knocked over one of the tall-backed chairs for the butcher block table. I jumped out of its way and watched Brian pick it up before he let himself flop onto the couch.
The phone rang and I went to answer it. “It’s Joan,” I called to him. “She wants to know if we’re playing.”
“Why does she care?” he said in a low voice.
I laughed. “Because if we’re not—of course, I’m guessing now—she wants to come over. Is that right?” I asked the phone. “Yeah,” I said to Brian, “that’s it.”
He rolled over to lie on his side. “She can come,” he mumbled.
I told her and agreed to her suggestion that she bring some pizza. I returned to the living room and looked at Brian’s face, but his eyes were closed. “Can I clean this up?” I asked.
“I’ll do it in a while,” he said, not moving.
“I’d like to do it now.” I paused, but he said nothing. It was depressing to handle the crippled table, its folding mechanism twisted, and the tear like the mouth of someone screaming. To put it in the foyer closet, to sweep up the broken glass, and gather the scattered cards—queens and kings looking at me with their offended faces—took some time. When the chore was finished, after seeing that Brian’s mood hadn’t changed, that only his position (now face down, his head slightly off the couch, his eyes staring at the floor) was different, I turned on his Trinitron television to watch “Sixty Minutes.” He became interested in their report on the San Diego Chargers football team having hired a psychiatrist to see if his therapy could improve their miserable record, even laughing heartily, so that when Joan called to say she had run into some other members of our crowd and could they come over as well, I agreed.
They arrived within ten minutes: Joan, B.B. (this law student’s real name was never used), B.B.’s girl friend Karen, and Frank Winslow, a colleague of mine. Joan, knowing our place well, went into the kitchen without saying a word and brought out plates while B.B. asked me in his humorless, gruff manner what was on the tube; and Karen, who did not know us well, nodded a nervous hello at Brian, getting a frown in return, and therefore she looked relieved when I pleasantly asked how she was.
Frank Winslow, a big, lanky, shy fellow entered the room in his halting, pleading way, a little like the manner of a large, faithful, contrite dog. “What the hell are you doing mixed up with these people?” I asked him.
“Hi, Howard,” Frank said quickly, relieved to have gotten over that hurdle. “I was at the pizza place,” he explained to me.
“How’s the story going?” I asked him, referring to a short story he had been working on for three months. Frank warmed to this query immediately, seating himself next to me. “It feels good,” he began. “You know, I had a week of the most ordinary sentences—”
“Ordinary sentences?” I laughed and saw that Brian’s eyes, suddenly quick with intelligence, were on us. “Does that mean a reader with an average vocabulary could understand it?”
My remark was a dig at Frank’s pretentious narrative voice and my view of his reaction—I was curious because I rarely tested him on his weaknesses—was momentarily blocked by Joan’s passage with a load of plates between us. “What’s an average vocabulary?” Frank asked without any change of expression or of tone. “Using ‘concrete’ as an adverb?”
I stared at him, surprised, for a moment, that he could accompany so rapid a reply with such a total deadpan. “I suppose so,” I said. “For a Marxist.”
Now Frank laughed heartily at my parasitic use of his wit, another habit of his that bewildered me. It was an unpleasant and spasmodic laugh. He shook his head up and down in short jerking motions, saying, “Right, right. That’s beautiful.”
“Come on, people,” Joan said. “The food’s over here.”
Frank and I stood up simultaneously and, noticing that Brian looked ready to say something private to me, I waited for Frank to move. But he stood stiffly as if looking for a cue from me. “Go ahead,” I said, and then urged him with a hand on his back.
“I didn’t put in any money for the pizza,” he said.
I waited for more, but he just looked at me. “So? Neither have we.”
“Do you think there’s enough?”
“Joan,” I began in a loud voice.
“For God’s sake, Howard!” This was Brian, his voice arrestingly harsh and deep. “We can order more. Don’t worry about anything,” he said to Frank, though he moved only his eyes, like a spooky painting in a haunted house. “Just go eat.”
Frank put up an open palm in the air as if to show he was weaponless. “Great,” he said, and went to the table. Brian instantly motioned for me to draw close.
I sat down on the couch and he lifted his torso so that his mouth was next to my ear
. His whisper was like the rush a seashell causes. “Is Frank really like he appears?”
“What’s that?”
“Like a vehemently repressed egotist.”
We shifted around so that I could whisper my reply. “Yeah, but you’re not supposed to notice the repression. You’re supposed to think he’s humbly brilliant.”
“What are you two keeping secrets about?” asked Joan playfully as she approached, carefully holding two plates in front of her.
“It’s sad,” Brian said to me earnestly in a normal tone.
“What is?” Joan asked, as she handed Brian a plate. I stood up so that he could get it. Joan sat down and leaned forward, her lips pursed for a kiss. Brian kissed her quickly, but she murmured, and he twisted his head slightly as they craned their necks for a long kiss that brought a mocking exclamation from B.B. and a “How sweet” from Karen.
“Thanks for the food,” Brian said when they separated.
“You’re welcome. Go get some, Howard.”
When I got to the table I stared at the two huge boxes of pizza and the bloated soda bottles. I had felt a tug somewhere in the region of my sex while they kissed and I thought, with a weariness appropriate to a familiar complaint, that I had to reconcile my contempt for the character of most women with my lust for their presence. One of the nice things about my friendship with Brian was that it provided a constant blessing of females and, no matter how bad my reluctance to make myself vulnerable to rejection got, I could see them arrange themselves with men, I could hear their range of voices, from love to chatter, and I could smell the flowering of their odors, lingering in our couches and sometimes especially dank in Brian’s bathroom.
The previous year I had gone to bed with a number of women in a month, the cause of this dramatic upsurge simply being that I was willing to fuck beneath my normal standards of beauty and intelligence. Other people, especially girls, perceived me as that classic Jew—Mama’s boy, not having hit his thirty-year-old stride of compulsive fucking; emotionally open and serious, too bewildered and nice not to have fears of performance and doubts about the emotional value of promiscuity. Brian had told me that unless I tried to fuck every girl in sight I would always believe this caricature and think my not having a lover was due to some physical or life-style lack. “Studs screw everything in sight, kid,” Brian said. “People act as if they’re robbing a museum when they fuck a girl. As if it isn’t a pleasure for her. Do it and you’ll know whether you like it. I bet you won’t.” How could one like it? This choice between neither of you feeling any love, or her feeling it and you not? He was right, I preferred to wait and fall in love, even if that meant spending a fortune on pornography to aid masturbation, yes, even if that meant waiting only to be rejected in the end.
So I ran through that speech while another part of my mind decided between anchovies or mushrooms. “What a ghastly thing to do to a human being,” I said to them. “It’s like a civil war. Why not both mushrooms and anchovies?”
They laughed and Joan said, “Pick off a few from one and put it on the other.”
“A fantastic idea!” More laughter. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”
“It’s really good,” Frank said, meaning the pizza.
“Fritz’s special,” Joan said, laughing. “I love it. Pizza made by a German.”
There followed a typical conversation: the wonderment of there being so many great pizza places in New Haven. Frank always flourished on this topic; he had amassed several ersatz sociological explanations which he would recite word for word. I stopped him by asking if anyone knew whether there was a good movie on television and, when we discovered there wasn’t, Karen, with surprising boldness, suggested we have a dancing party. “I haven’t danced in four months,” she explained.
“God, you’re deprived,” I said in the voice I used for droll comments. I have to explain to the reader that, though this may seem to be misguided or exaggerated politeness, my friends have always laughed enthusiastically at what I say, and that’s left me with the impression that, in large gatherings, I’m supposed to follow witticism with yet more witticism.
“Howard hates dancing,” Brian said, his voice without energy.
“Really?” Joan asked with a disappointed look.
I smiled and pointed to Brian. “He hates parties. I like ’em but I don’t dance. I find those repressed sexual rituals disgusting. But I like to watch,” I finished in a naughty child’s voice. Karen had kept her eyes on me while I spoke, first confused, and then laughing suddenly at the end. Her laughter was a confession that I had guessed why she liked to dance and she kicked me playfully with her foot so I was awarded a thrill of adulation, no matter how pathetically small a token it was. She was bored by her dapper, moody lawyer, I thought. I knew it well, the shock of recognition that Wasp girls from the West are treated to in the city: acquisitive, solid boys are orgasmless fucks.
“Come on,” B.B. said to Brian. “You guys have the perfect place for it.” I laughed at him because of my thought about Karen, but B.B. misunderstood. “You do,” he insisted. “No one’s got a stereo like yours.”
“Ain’t we just the cat’s meow,” I said, giggling.
Brian, his eyes lidded, nodded solemnly at me. “Yeah, we should never feel depressed, we can always sell everything when the bozos graduate.” Frank, whose moral indignation about people like B.B. was corrupted by the political self-righteousness only the children of Communist Party members can muster, and fearful, because his desire for pretty women, good clothes, and efficient technology was restrained only by poverty, really laughed at our remarks, doubling over so that his plate fell to the floor. There was a flurry of comments on his excess and Joan hurried over to pick up the food. “Get on the phone,” Brian said meanwhile to B.B. “Invite anyone you want. Just buy the food and drinks and you can party here until the A-bomb drops.”
Those seemed to be the last words Brian ever wished to speak. His face settled into an inactive, unsmiling frown, and along with his dependent posture—his head leaning in against Joan’s shoulder and breast—he reminded me of the five- and six-year-old children of the religious and political communes I had seen pictures of. They grudgingly held on to their mothers, their faces sullen and bored, restraining even the tears of petulant love.
I felt myself sink with him into silence, partially attentive to the television, and listening, with disgust, to the collection of achievers B.B. was summoning to our apartment. After he had made twelve calls, I motioned Frank to my side and told him, “Listen, do us both a favor. Get on that phone and get somebody here who would know what I meant if I asked him to join the Society of the Thirteen.”
While Frank made it clear that he enjoyed this distinction, I noticed that Karen had heard me. She looked at me, her eyes busy calculating, with the open stare only an audience allows itself.
“Hi,” I said to remind her I wasn’t a television program.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” she said immediately. “But what is the Society of the Thirteen?”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed to have my silly arrogance examined. “It’s just a story by Balzac.”
She nodded and got up from her seat to join me on the couch across the way from Brian and Joan. She settled herself so close to me that our bodies touched along the length of the right side of my body. Her confidence about the movement made it seem natural. “I’m afraid,” she said, her face turned to me and only an inch or two away, “that I have never done enough reading. What is the society?”
“It was just a stupid comment,” I pleaded. “I knew that Frank would think it was funny. I can’t resist giving people what they want.”
She smiled slowly. “That’s a nice quality,” she said with unmistakable deliberateness. I stared to check on her meaning and she held my examination, her eyes mischievous. “So,” she said, with a quick glance at my lips, “tell me what it is.”
“I can’t resist, I guess. Balzac tried, in real life, to
convince other writers, poets, critics, you know, all the important literary people—and publishing people—to join a Society of Thirteen, that would review each other’s books favorably. And pan their enemies.”
“A kind of literary Mafia, is that it?”
“Well, there always is a literary Mafia. He was trying to organize one in which the major requirement was talent. He did get Hugo and a couple of others to agree but he wanted them to do more than just that. He wanted them to help protect the government, rouse France’s pride, help out young artists with money—there was no limit on what he wanted them to do. And he wrote a novel extrapolating this fantasy. The group appears in a novel called Louis Lambert, and in a few others.”
“I’ll read it,” she said seriously.
“Don’t. I don’t think it’s a good novel.” She laughed but I was occupied by B.B.’s reappearance. I thought our positions on the couch were too cosy to please him, but he seemed oblivious, walking in quickly, and bouncing onto the couch. “It’s all set,” he said, and put a hand on her denim-covered thigh. She turned slightly, twisting her neck so that she faced him. But she left me her breasts: round, large, steady in their bra, tightly covered by her wine-red sweater. Knowing I could look unobserved, I did, barely hearing B.B.’s childishly happy recounting of whom he had invited. I was entranced by her breasts and looked away only to watch the amazing red mottling that would flush the fair skin exposed by the slight V of her sweater. When I heard Joan explode with laughter, I looked up hastily towards her and Brian. Brian saw me, glanced quickly at B.B. (who was explaining which people he had assigned the food and drink to), put out his hand and, with a leer, squeezed an invisible breast.
This set off Joan again and got me to sit up more so that my natural field of vision was away from Karen. I stayed in this position, as did Brian across from me, while the arrivals began and the others set out refreshments, cleared the living room for dancing, and selected a stack of records to play. Brian managed not to say a word while greeting each of the twenty or so people who came to our apartment that night. He would nod with a smile, or wave excitedly to someone across the room, and I’m sure they all had the impression he had said hello. Joan would bounce up and down to arrange a detail, but she would always return immediately to Brian to take him into her arms, a hand stealthily reaching down the back of his pants, and then she would shift to the front so that after an hour, his shirt was completely pulled out of his pants. He submitted to these caresses with the languid patience of a cat: he closed his eyes every few seconds as if to absorb the pleasure, and then opened them wide, curious about the activity of the others.
The Game Player Page 15