Narrated by George Lenhart, scion of a family who lost their fortune but not their good name, The Fundamentals of Play follows five friends from prep school as they enter adult life in New York City in the aimless, early nineties, before the internet explosion. They work entry-level jobs at investment banks, spend weekends in the Hamptons. At their center is the fickle, elusive Kate Goodenow. Everyone is in love with Kate and only George understands her heart was captured long ago, and for good.
Hailed as a Great Gatsby for the end of the twentieth century—The Fundamentals of Play introduces a brilliant new Lost Generation longing to live careless lives, while the situations around them are increasingly fraught with importance—and the world threatens to leave them behind.
Narrated by George Lenhart, scion of a family who lost their fortune but not their good name, The Fundamentals of Play follows five friends from prep school as they enter adult life in New York City in the aimless, early nineties, before the internet explosion. They work entry-level jobs at investment banks, spend weekends in the Hamptons. At their center is the fickle, elusive Kate Goodenow. Everyone is in love with Kate and only George understands her heart was captured long ago, and for good.
Hailed as a Great Gatsby for the end of the twentieth century—The Fundamentals of Play introduces a brilliant new Lost Generation longing to live careless lives, while the situations around them are increasingly fraught with importance—and the world threatens to leave them behind.
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Overview
Narrated by George Lenhart, scion of a family who lost their fortune but not their good name, The Fundamentals of Play follows five friends from prep school as they enter adult life in New York City in the aimless, early nineties, before the internet explosion. They work entry-level jobs at investment banks, spend weekends in the Hamptons. At their center is the fickle, elusive Kate Goodenow. Everyone is in love with Kate and only George understands her heart was captured long ago, and for good.
Hailed as a Great Gatsby for the end of the twentieth century—The Fundamentals of Play introduces a brilliant new Lost Generation longing to live careless lives, while the situations around them are increasingly fraught with importance—and the world threatens to leave them behind.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780385721127 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2001 |
| Edition description: | 1 ANCHOR |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.19(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.67(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
It was the year they changed the name on the building that ruins the view down Park Avenue. My firm was midtown-Fordyce, Farley-and I was that lowest form of post-undergraduate life: the first-year analyst. We worked hundred-hour weeks in fabric-upholstered cubicles of four feet by six. The guy in the one next to mine didn't so much as acknowledge me till one morning when he came in late and was compelled to share the latest outrage. "They changed the name!" I was indignantly informed. "They went and changed the name!"
I remember I told Robbins not to worry, that everyone would go on calling it the PanAm Building. I was wrong. Everyone started calling it the MetLife Building. This isn't really important-I certainly never heard anyone try to make a metaphor of it (the change in the city's most visible corporation from airplanes to insurance)-but it stuck in my mind, and it is from that point which I always date my arrival in the city.
I was like any other foolishly young face in pinstripes. I lived on the barren top of the Upper East Side in one of those high-rise dormitories called the Something Arms. My roommate was Geoff Toff-Will Toff's brother, whom I'd known at Dartmouth. Geoff was paralegaling as a means of getting into law school. We didn't live together so much as run into one another in the apartment every couple of weeks. When we did, Geoff was amiable, aggressively amiable, agreeing with my opinions before I had fully uttered them.
"I really think this whole mess about the Long Island-"
"Yeah, yeah, I know-me, too."
The television was Toff's. So was the sofabed, and a large fake-leather reclining chairfrom which he affected an ironic distance that I didn't quite believe. I had the stereo and a glass coffee table and hung three prints of the Seine on the wall.
In my bedroom (the smaller of the two; I lost the coin toss) as in the living room the floor was carpeted blue. I slept on a mattress on the floor which I planned to upgrade to a bed. The night I moved in we made spaghetti and jar sauce, and that was the last time either of us opened a kitchen cabinet.
The other day I was depressed to read in the Times that the idea of catching up on sleep is a myth. Nevertheless, I'm planning my Rip-Van-Winkle revenge. I took a poll of some friends of mine, and we all agreed the last time we were well-rested was in 1982. I remember one particular morning that first spring at Fordyce when I discovered myself lying on a stretch of the blue carpet, the ell-shaped inlet which joined my bedroom to the hall. I did not know how long I had been lying there. I believe that I was having a breakdown, from pulling two or three all-nighters in a row, but I don't know-maybe I was upset about something. Eventually I stood up and went to work. It seemed funny to me, in the cab downtown.
But then, everything seemed funny. The money-or the idea of money, for I had none yet-and the hundred-hour work weeks gave the year a wired, comic tinge. It was all such a ruse. One pretended to be an adult and did adult-like things: one had the Journal delivered; one had a morning coffee order. The coffee order-order-was everything. If you imposed enough order on your life you would wake up your boss, you would wake up old, the imposition would no longer be necessary because the habits would be fully acquired. And in our generation we wanted to be old. Not all of us, of course, but among those of us who went to Wall Street, it was a prevalent posture. I personally looked forward to the day when I could creak around in threadbare seersucker and indulge in my baffling idiosyncrasies; when I would be chastised by my wife for sneaking out to the local diner for an old-school, high-cholesterol breakfast. My parents were a little older than most parents with kids my age-closer to World War Two than Vietnam-and I was one of a number of my peers who believed that their generation had gotten it right. And perhaps the habits had stuck all the more in our family because they were all we had been able to hold onto. I hadn't come to Wall Street for nothing.
I thought of calling Kate-of course I thought of calling her-but the time was never right. Monday was too early in the week and Wednesday was too late. The daytime seemed too casual for the initial call, the evenings much too formal. The weekends were impossible. Chat Wethers would know where to find her, but I didn't want to go through him. And in the back of my mind, I cherished the idea of running into her. I had envisioned various settings, each triter than the next-crossing Grand Central, hailing a cab up Park on a rainy night. Then one evening she materialized, right where you would expect her to, at the Town Club, on Sixty-Second Street.
The partner in a deal I worked on took us there the night the company went public. It was the partner and I, a director and two associates, shooting endless after dinner pool in an inner sanctum three or four flights up. My direct boss was the associate Daniels. He was the kind of man who buys the Harvard Business School sweatshirt, the Harvard Business School key chain, and any number of Harvard Business School bumper stickers. He got drunk and said more and more loudly, "You're having a good time now, eh, Lenhart? First time at the Town Club, eh, Lenhart?" Eventually he picked a fight with me over a shot I didn't call, and looking for an excuse to escape the work scene, I volunteered to put him into a cab.
I intended to head home myself, but after hesitating a moment outside, I let myself back into the foyer of the Club. It was well-lit; standing just inside the door you could see up a wide marble staircase which rose for several steps, split in two, curved around a gold bust and rejoined in time to deposit the climber onto a brief mezzanine. Like all stairways, it gave the best view coming down, but the ascending prospect was more enticing because it was in looking up that one anticipated-and correctly-the rewards which lay beyond the mezzanine: ballrooms, there were, and bars.
Contrary to what Daniels had said, it was not my first time at the Club. My grandfather had been a member, and I had childhood memories of drinking Tom Collinses "without the Tom" in the men's bar upstairs. And looking back now on that evening, I'm sure I returned to seek some evidence of our residual belonging: his name on a roster; a face staring out from the photograph of a men's dinner half a century ago; or perhaps his old Chesterfield hanging still in the coat check, the claim forgotten after a particularly raucous night.
But of course there was no coat. My mother wore it now. And as I stood there, looking up the stairs toward a muted, urbane din, the source of which the mezzanine concealed, my disconcerting childhood seemed to creep up and surround me: we didn't, for instance, own our own house. My father ran a tiny pre-adolescent boarding school in western Massachusetts called the Rectory, for sixth through eighth grade boys, of the kind which the last thirty years had nearly wiped out, and so the school provided a house. My grandfather's apartment had been sold years ago, to settle some of his debts. There is a whole host of recuperative fantasies which someone like me swears by, growing up, and even, reflexively, now: I was going to buy back 1100 Madison.... ! Buy back Nantucket... ! And I suppose the Town Club figured in there somewhere as well. In the meantime the running joke between my sister and me was that we had the only kind of money that was respectable these days-the kind that was all gone.
I am not sure how long I had lingered there, just inside the door (with no particular ambition to go forward or back but, rather, simply to be allowed to stay), when upstairs, I heard a loud party come down from dinner and take over the main bar. Then over the sound of men's voices, I heard a girl laugh. "I'll see if I know anyone," I thought. When I got to the top of the stairs, I turned to see if I could tell who it was laughing. There were a couple of others who were passing with me, and they paused, as well, and turned to look. It was impossible not to follow that laugh to its source.
A group of men her father's age with big old fashioned glasses in their hands were standing in a circle around my old friend Kate Goodenow. I remember, in the moment before she saw me, I had a dread that Kate wouldn't recognize me, and it seemed to me it took her face an instant too long to change. Then she cried my name.
"George!"
All fears washed away, I stepped forward to embrace her.
"Why, it's the most fun possible," Kate murmured gravely into my ear.
With us both there, the men seemed to remember themselves, or their collective age, and rather than be introduced they turned in a single motion toward the bar.
She was all grown-up in a navy suit with a sprout of scarf blossoming out from the neck. The cut of the suit was too severe to be becoming, but then Kate had never been stylish, really-I judged I could say that having seen Paris. Like a lot of thin girls, the clothes tended to wear her.
"I've been looking all over town for you," I said.
"And where all over town did you expect to find me?" she replied steadily, with those eyes that were neither bored nor bright. She was as tranquil as she ever was, and I suppose I had known she would be. That was why it wouldn't have done any good to seek her out. One wasn't allowed to want things of Kate. I had meant to "catch up," for instance, and in a hurry, but against my intent was Kate's demeanor-denying that there was any catching up to be done.
"I've been in Paris, you know," I said, anyway-to establish myself somehow.
"Really? I've been right here every minute."
"Then it suits you to be home," I said.
For though Kate was not beautiful, it was a fresh face, to which you found yourself applying old adjectives-she had been called "game" for instance. "Attractive" wouldn't work, either. Attractive tells a slightly different story. The preternaturally pale boy who turned, presently, from the bar would not have gone around with "attractive" women. In the first place, he wouldn't have found them attractive. He had to squint at me through the wire-rims
"Lenhart! Christ almighty!"
-and then I was wringing hands with my college roommate, Chat Wethers.
"It's about time you turned up! I thought we'd lost you to the semi-demi-hemi-monde. Didn't I say, Kate, George'll shack up with some Frenchie, start wearing berets, heh-heh?"
Chat's bank had sent him to China for three months, but he was back in New York now. "Business school applications-they're hell, George! What am I supposed to write about a major setback I've encountered? You tell me. The time the Diesel died on the way to Vermont? But maybe I won't go next year. I don't know. See if my recommendations pan out. Otherwise do a third year-"
"I'll bet George wouldn't do a thing like that for a living," interrupted Kate, without raising her voice. "Would you, George?"
"I'm afraid so," I confessed.
Chat drained his glass. "They got you, too, Lenhart?"
I nodded. "Corporate finance. Fordyce, Farley."
"What about the ex-pat plan?"
"I just couldn't-I don't know," I started, struggling toward an articulation I myself had not quite formed.
But Chat nodded as if he understood. "I know exactly what you mean," he asserted. "You think Paris was tough. "
"No, not exactly-"
"Try China, George-Chengdu, China. Two western bars in the whole town."
"Yeah?" I couldn't picture it till Chat added, "One newsstand." Then an image came to mind of a tall, oblique scowl-on-legs trying to get hold of a Journal in a remote Eastern city, then settling grudgingly when by some miracle somebody produced a day-old Trib. He had always been bent on travel, yet travel without any wish for, or-my mistake-pretense of assimilation. I guess he was the old sort of American abroad.
I had stories to tell and was about to expand on my own travels, when Kate announced, looking pleased with herself: "If someone gave me the chance to go anywhere in the world, do you know where I'd choose?"
"Where?" said Chat and I.
"I'd choose Maine. I'd choose Cold Harbor, Maine. I'd choose it over France, Italy, Spain-" She ticked continental Europe off on her fingers. "Is that horrible of me? Is that the most horrible thing you've ever heard?" Her gray eyes looked happily from one to the other of us for confirmation.
"I'll drink to that," Chat said curtly.
"You?" Kate said, affecting scorn. "You were hardly up at all last summer. George, he was hardly up at all-can you believe that?"
"I work, Katie, remember?" Chat said, and gave me a burdened look that seemed to say: "Women!"
And yet from the inflection he put on the word I got the sense that the job remained a novelty. "Guess what, George?" he'd announced our senior spring, with the air of someone who has done something rather devilishly clever: "I got a job."
"Now who's having what?" Chat inquired kindly, rattling the ice in his glass. "George? What are you drinking now, straight Absinthe, heh-heh?"
Kate's patriotic provincialism-and Chat's cinematic picture of Paris, with men in berets drinking liquers-went down like a cool tonic after my sojourn across the pond.
We had settled on something, when Kate got a silly look on her face, like when she was going to tell a joke. "No, Chattie," she said. I have a better idea."
"Yes?"
"George will have a vodka and lemonade."
"Sorry?"
"A Popov and lemonade," Kate went on, making her voice silly and dreamy. "Dining hall lemonade. Dining hall lemonade mixed in an athletic department water bottle. "
"Oh, yes," I said warmly, catching on. She was referring to a habit of ten years earlier. Kate and I had gone to boarding school together; I had met Chat in college based on our mutual acquaintance. Or, to put it more precisely, our friendship there had been predicated on my knowing her.
"Will you have one, too?" I asked quickly, flattered by her turning this into a landmark, and in front of Chat.
"Of course," she laughed.
"One quart you mean," I supplied.
"Yes! And if I drink too much-!"
"If we should get sick you mean-"
"Why, we'll go and vomit our guts out behind the science building!"
"I don't want to hear about you and George behind the science building!" Chat bawled. "Wouldn't surprise me if you did want vodka and lemonade!
"I'm telling you, George," he went on, petulant, gesturing with his empty glass, "I don't know what anyone drinks anymore. In China, it's one thing, get a little tropicallee-but I swear, the next corporate tool I hear order a 'Kamikaze,' I'll -"
"I want a Sex-on-the- Beach!" cried Kate. "I want an 'Orgasm'!"
"Don't say that word, Katie. I hate that word. You know I hate that word."
"Get me an Orgasm!"
"They should never have let women into the Town Club," said Chat gloomily.
"Oh, have they?" I said. I meant this to be ironic somehow-as if I would know the inner workings of the admissions policy-but the irony was lost on Kate.
"Well, not really," she said seriously. "Only till we're thirty. "
"Then what?"
"Then we have to marry in or we're out."
"Put out or shut out," they both said, and they both gave half a laugh.
Chat took himself off to the bar.
Alone with Kate, I was suddenly self-conscious, as if I had forgotten my lines in a play. Their particular brand of droll urbanity was not entirely new to me, but it was the first time I'd seen them in situ, as it were, and their casual indifference to the setting made me feel like a very young boy with shiny shoes and his hair slicked down, who has been allowed to make an appearance at the adults' party before going to bed.
I thought again that Kate and I might talk, for real, but she said, rather annoyed, "Did you hear Jess Brindle was engaged, George?"
"No, I hadn't," I said.
"Yes, but she broke it off."
"Oh, good," I said, glad of this, for some reason, though this was the first I had heard of the girl.
"Yes, bit of a ... random choice..."
Then Kate proceeded to give several more names I had never heard and to account for their whereabouts. Marnie Pall was in town, and her cousin Dick had married Loribelle Betz, up in Maine, and Granny had gotten drunk at the wedding-which was a rather elaborate affair-and Granny had said, "That girl is climbing as fast as she can, isn't she?" and it was very embarrassing....
I heard it said once, by whom I can't recall, that true beauty always has one flaw. As Kate went on, blithely chattering, I fell into the habit I had of looking for that flaw-the thin lip or the feature out of place-which might have meant her entry into that elite society. And yet, those frank good looks of hers had always seemed to suggest that there was something distasteful about beauty, something a little tacky about a quality that by its very nature draws attention to itself, like coming overdressed to a party, or throwing a black-tie wedding in the country. But Kate-Kate was what you wanted, somehow, in this infinitely ironic age. She was the kind of girl about whom other girls used to say, "All right, so she's thin but-" trying vainly to suss out the appeal. And even now, when her name comes up, and with it the sulky protest it invariably evokes-"She's not that great"-I do not feel compelled to argue in her defense. That was the whole point: she didn't have to be.
"You're not still with that one girl, are you?" she wanted to know.
"Hmm. What else do you want to know?"
Kate thought, frowning. "What you ate for breakfast."
"Poached eggs on toast," I lied, finally getting up to speed.
She liked it. "Where did you eat a poached egg? Where did you get a poached egg?"
"In my kitchen."
"You poached the egg yourself, George? How did you learn to poach eggs?"
"My mother taught me."
"She did? I wish my mother-"
"Come over some time; I'll make you one."
"Breakfast date?" she said curiously. "Do you think Chat would approve? You know he and I are supposed to be engaged," she added then, as if it were an afterthought, and she grinned.
"I lied," I admitted suddenly. "I didn't eat breakfast."
"You didn't?"
"No, I just had coffee. That's all I ever have."
"That truly disappoints me."
"I meant to say-best wishes."
"Oh, it's not ... official," she said. For some reason this made both of us laugh. There was no promise in Kate's laughter; in fact it was just the opposite note that seemed to resound, an expression of utmost faith in today, of total absorption in the moment as it passed. "You know, George, the main thing is to have fun," she asserted suddenly.
"I don't know," I said after a moment. I put my hands in my pockets and took them out again. "It's just New York, I guess. I'm still getting used to it."
"I understand completely," Kate said. "Isn't it dirty and awful?"
"Yes," I said.
"But it's fun," Kate continued. She had a way of making platitudes like that sound fresh. "It's so, so, so, so fun. You just go out and everyone's around and-and you don't have any homework. It's just so nice not having any homework."
"Oh, Kate."
"And you know, George," she murmured confidentially, "what else would we be doing? We have nothing better to do, do we? Or
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