The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy Page A

myself the easy target. Besides, the guy had irritated me on sight, and besides that, it was the first week of freshman year: one had to draw the line somewhere.
    I still remember the look of reproach I was given. When I went on in a more conciliatory tone, startled into graciousness, Harry made an odd gesture, batting the air as if in pain, to stop me from being nice. It was to become a pattern with us. He would embarrass me with his clumsy attempts to drop into the vernacular; I would pointedly dissociate myself from these attempts; he would register my scorn; I would try, too late, to soften the blow; he would wave my efforts off. From Chat, Harry took it all, every baiting, insulting word; but even from the beginning he seemed to expect something more in the way of tolerance from me.
    We went next door. How incongruous it was to see the Portrait of an Ancestor firing up a two-foot bong. It was duly held out to me, but I shook my head. I didn’t like to get stoned with people like Chat, people who were meant to be drinkers and who got stoned simply because they thought they ought to. I like to think Chat respected my abstaining. He gave me a look that was both measured and measuring as we shook hands, and I saw that he had registered the point I was making, and it seemed to me that in that moment we understood each other. For the other great theme that had been borne in on me in my adolescence was that while it was always cool to partake, it was sometimes even cooler to abstain. It meant you were above all that. I had learned it at Chatham from Nick Beale, Kate Goodenow’s boyfriend, who some would say forgot his own lesson. I didn’t know it yet, but Chat had learned it from Nick, too. There was a whole generation of us who had learned everything we knew from Nicholas Beale. He was constantly being quoted by people who didn’t even know they were quoting him. But Chat and I had learned firsthand.
    We sat on the floor, Harry and I on one side and Chat on the other, with a wicker settee between us. On the opposite wall was a huge black-and-white photograph of one of the old J-boats that raced for the America’s Cup in the thirties. It reminded me of my father; I remember thinking that Pop would have known the boat’s name, her history, perhaps, as well. My father had grown up on Long Island Sound, sailing every kind of boat, and he had made a habit of taking me down to Newport when I was little, to watch the trials. Looking at the picture, I could hear the stories he would tell—of escapades at Indian Harbor, Larchmont, Manhasset—the great American yacht clubs which are strung along the Sound like pearls—
    “Enterprise,”
Chat said, not unkindly, catching my glance.
    “Right,” I said. I had learned to sail, as well—on the pond behind my father’s school.
    Chat dealt, explaining the rules to his roommate as he snapped the cards down.
    “You’ve never played before?” I asked Harry.
    “No, no—I think I did,” Harry said. “I’m pretty sure I played, but we called it something different.”
    “Spades?” I inquired. “That’s a different game, you know.”
    “No, no—I know. I think—”
    “He’s never played before,” Chat said. “Have you? And yesterday,” he went on, brightly, “we tried to get ‘high’ for the first time, didn’t we, Henry? It’s a whole new world up here in ‘college,’ isn’t it? You’ve got a checking account now, and you’re responsible for laundering your own clothes.” Beside me Harry was methodically arranging the cards in his hand, suit by suit, panting a little as he worked. Chat lit a cigarette from a pack in the breast pocket of his bathrobe. “Tomorrow I’m going to teach him how to use a fork.”
    Harry giggled. No sound brings back freshman year to me—not the songs they played in the basement of Psi U, not the maniacal musical interlude in
Jeopardy!
—more sharply than that low uneasy giggle which was Harry’s response to each of Chat’s