The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy

claimed he had let the door slam in her face, but I didn’t believe that part.) Then there were the disinterested, impersonal forms of arrogance, which, oddly enough, people seemed to take even more personally: the stupid tape Wethers always played, for instance, whenever he was in his room, the same stupid cliché of a reggae tape, on and on and on inexorably. As I later learned, it was one of two tapes Chat had brought to school. It was the tape that got to Mike; Mike who prided himself on a collection of CDs two hundred strong. “Wouldja knock it the
fuck
off!” he used to shout, and then he would bang on the walls, and, rather than confront Chat, turn up his own stereo even louder, to theapprobation of the entire hall, who would toast the asshole’s impending demise at the pigskin-callused hands of Mike and Craig-O.
    But though I dropped by the parties for a beer or two, I couldn’t summon the requisite animosity, in the form of a grievance of my own, to really belong. Nor could I join in corroborating the initial judgments as they were handed down. I am as happy as anyone to make friends over a common enemy; the trouble was that I’d sensed Chat and I should probably be friends. It wasn’t that I particularly liked him—not from what I saw, anyway. It was more a suspicion I had that he would not annoy me, as ridiculous as he was, nor I him, and that this vague mutual approval would prove more sustaining than any instant, dazzling alliance formed of open admiration and emulation.
    There was one quality Wethers possessed, however, which I did admire. I couldn’t have put a name to it at the time, but it had crept under my skin at Chatham—where I’d gone after finishing at the Rectory—and, as it turned out, was there to stay. It was a weakness, I suppose—a peculiar weakness for unexpected, contrarian surfacings of originality. Even the muted idiosyncratic strain in Chat was enough to get my attention: that same embarrassing tape played over and over, when the depth if not the breadth of one’s musical taste said—Well, everything in college. What the hell did it mean?
    I knew that Chat had gone to Hotchkiss. Boarding school was as good a jumping-off point as any, but neither of us, I think, wanted to be too crude about it, like some desperate types who had put on their Exeter sweatshirts and gone running around the Green.
    So I held out for a few days when everyone was madly meeting and greeting, and by the end of the week my neighbor needed a fourth to play cards. Actually, they needed a third
and
a fourth, but as the rest of the dormitory had gone to hear an orientation address, Chat was willing to settle for dealing out the two and playing a limp game of three-person hearts.
    I had not skipped the address for any reason other than I knew Iought to. If I had learned anything at Chatham, it was the simple dictate that to get anywhere in life one had to skip required events. To not skip would have been contrary to my personal code, so when three o’clock arrived I was lying fugitive on my bed, toying with a book and congratulating myself for being such an independent, rebellious soul. There was a knock at the door and Henry Lombardi came in. He was Henry then; Harry, with its echoes of princely sobriquets, came later.
    “Hey—George, right?”
    “Yeah, hey.”
    I sat up to be polite. It was funny, but he was the last person I would have expected to ditch the schedule.
    He did not introduce himself then; in fact, we were never introduced. He came to me as Chat Wethers’s emissary. “Chat wants to know if you want to play hearts.”
    “He sent you?” I said skeptically.
    “Yeah, he’s …” Harry said, and put a fat stubby index finger and thumb to his mouth and sucked in air in the least convincing pantomime of smoking a joint I had ever witnessed.
    “Are you saying he’s in your room smoking marijuana?” I said coldly—cleverly, I thought. For I was not so grown-up, after all, as to deny