2
The rent of land is established through the struggle between tenant and landlord. Throughout political economy we find that the hostile opposition of interests, struggle, and war are acknowledged as the basis of social organization.
—Karl Marx
I DIDN’T MIND having the cast except when I had to sleep. The only comfortable way to lie down was on my back and I had never slept in that position. Even that had its pleasures: I was not harassed about being awake late at night and I enjoyed sitting up until two or three in the morning, drinking tea and reading after the late movie on television. The broken arm also excused me from playing athletic games and that was a relief.
My only concern was how far back this would set me in terms of making friends in the neighborhood. And the unpleasantness of the football game made me wonder if I cared to fit in, though I don’t think my rejecting the suburb kids was a luxury I thought I could afford. After a few days, whatever pain the arm would occasionally give me disappeared and I was left with the constant itch the cast caused. I was shifting back and forth, somehow thinking this would relieve the irritation, while reading a particularly exciting passage in a mystery, when I heard our doorbell ring; and shortly after, the sound of Brian’s voice asking if he could see me.
I quickly put away the mystery (a literary snob even then) and looked around the room hurriedly to see if there were any other embarrassing items. Mom had cleaned it up, luckily, so I tried to look casual. Mom and he appeared at the door. “Hello,” he said.
“I’ll leave you two to your own devices,” my mother said. “Unless you’d like a snack or something.”
“Nothing for me, Mrs. Cohen.”
I nearly forgot to answer my mother because I was so astonished by Brian’s competent refusal of her offer. “I’m okay, Ma.”
“How’s the arm?” Brian asked.
I listened for my mother’s steps on the staircase before I answered. “It’s fine except that the cast makes my skin itch.”
He nodded and slowly walked around the room, looking carefully at the books. “It’s a nice room.”
I waited respectfully while Brian methodically checked the items in my room, picking up one of the books from my father’s Dickens set, and unselfconsciously reading a page. I was amazed by the concentration he brought to every act; and by his lack of worry about speaking to me. At last he settled on my bed and looked at me pleasantly. “You seem kind of happy to have a cast and be sitting reading.”
“How did you know I was reading?”
He laughed. “Don’t tell me you’ve been sitting in that chair doing nothing.”
“No. But how did you know what I was doing?”
“The TV is unplugged and tucked away under the bookshelves and there are a lot of books here. I figure that’s what you’d be doing.”
“I was.”
“Were you reading him?” He pointed toward the Dickens set.
I nodded yes, unable to speak the lie.
“Which one?”
“Great Expectations.”
He smiled and said without any pause, “I’m sorry I broke your arm, but at least you’re getting an education out of it.”
It wasn’t an apology in any real sense but his tone was appealing and I wasn’t offended. “Not your fault.”
“I didn’t intend it, but it was my fault.” Brian seemed almost annoyed at having to point out the distinction. “Danny said I did it because we were going to lose the game.” He laughed gladly at the thought.
“You were killing us. If anything, you did us a favor. I’m just sorry, because if I hadn’t dropped that pass we would have made a first down.”
“Bullshit. That was Danny’s fault. He doesn’t throw passes to be caught, he throws them to kill people.”
I had thought to show my maturity by admitting incompetence gracefully but my heart, by its quick jump to greet Brian’s words, belied my resignation. “It was a perfect pass, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah, if you’re throwing to a professional football player against a superb defensive secondary. Danny’s got a hundred-thousand-dollar arm and the brain of a two-year-old. He can throw that pass just as accurately at half the speed.”
I couldn’t quite absorb his idea and I must have looked it. He leaned forward, his face intent. “Don’t you get it?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter to Danny that no one except me can catch those passes. I think he’d be disappointed if you did. Look, Adam completes more passes than Danny—”
“Who’s Adam?”
“You know, the kid who quarterbacked my team. Anyway, because Danny throws such good-looking passes, everybody thinks it’s the receiver’s fault when they’re not caught.”
“But it is.”
Brian looked like he wanted to hit me for being so dense. “Does it make any difference how a pass is thrown if the receivers you throw it to can’t catch it? He might as well miss you by ten feet if they’re gonna come barreling in at ninety miles an hour. Danny doesn’t really want to win, he just wants to be thought of as a great person who’s being held back by mediocrity.”
This was too much for me: I didn’t understand how a human being could not want to win and yet appear to. I guess it would be fair to say that Brian had just provided my introduction to an intellectual recognition of the unconscious. “You mean, he’s intentionally losing?”
Brian smiled. Just a slow movement of the mouth, a private look of gentle contempt. “No, I don’t mean that.”
He meant to allow the subject to be dropped, but I knew that if I permitted him to, I should be admitting stupidity. “Please explain,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right and I want to understand.”
“You’re sure I’m right and yet you don’t understand what I’m saying? That’s silly.”
“No, it’s not,” I said in a hurt tone. “Your description of Danny’s play is accurate, so your explanation of it must be right. What difference does it make if I understand it? I don’t understand the A-bomb, but it exists.”
Brian opened his eyes wide in astonishment and then laughed. His laugh was a series of staccato grunts, theatrical and self-loving, but flattering because they seemed to be a kind of appreciative gesture. “Boy,” he said, letting out a few more, “that makes touch football pretty important.”
“If you can explain the A-bomb instead, then go ahead.”
He laughed again, and I knew we were friends. It was the kind of joke only friends enjoy. “Well,” Brian said, “what I meant was that Danny is considered the best passer among us because he throws that way. So people think of him as a winner even though his team loses.” He looked at me. “Got that?”
“Yeah! I got that.”
“Okay, just checking. So—he could try to win the games if he passed so that his receivers could catch the ball. But he’d have to throw less perfectly. And if he then missed—I mean throwing ordinary passes—then he would still lose the game and he would also lose everybody’s respect.” Brian stopped and looked inquisitive.
“Understood.”
“Okay. He’s scared to try and win because losing is so safe. See? He wins the good opinion of others by losing the game because of his teammates’ faults, and he never has to risk his own skill.”
“Wow,” I said. I felt the exhilaration of true knowledge: I understood suddenly how an alien being functioned. “Wow, that’s amazing.”
Brian smiled his private smile. “Isn’t it?” He was pleased by my excitement. “I’ve always known that about Danny but nobody else has spotted it.”
I thought for a moment and then said, “So Danny is intentionally losing, as I said.”
“No!” Brian slammed his hand down on my bed and I heard the jangle of the creaking springs. “No, no, that’s wrong. He does this without realizing it. He thinks he’s doing his best. He says to himself—himself! he says it to me all the time—‘If I had decent receivers I’d beat you.’ See? Deep down he’s scared to put himself on the line. That’s why
I say he doesn’t really want to win. All he really wants is for people to think he can.”
I absorbed this, my first perception of subconscious desires in other people, in silence. Awed silence. Brian paused for a comment and that encouraged me to ask, “But isn’t that just as good as winning?”
“Huh? You mean, people thinking you’re a winner?” I nodded. Brian looked at me searchingly and again told himself something that caused his smile to show. “No, it’s only half of winning. Winning is doing something right.” Again he stopped to watch for my reaction.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Brian leaned back as if the subject were closed, but I couldn’t halt my questions. “But Danny does think he’s doing it right.”
“Don’t you see that because he’s losing he knows, somewhere, that he’s not doing it right? That’s why he’s always insisting that he’s doing it right. Because he’s trying to convince himself.”
I could follow Brian’s reasoning and, even though both his facts and logic were inescapable, I found their conclusion astounding. I didn’t doubt it—I didn’t feel competent enough to do so—but I reserved absolute agreement. “Doesn’t Danny ever win?” I asked.
Brian looked at me with a quick glance of disapproval and then relaxed. “Starting to think I’m crazy?” He smiled. “Of course, Danny wins sometimes. We’ve played eight football games this year. He has won one time.” Brian now smiled at me with glee. “The first time we played,” he added.
I waited to hear the reason, but Brian just looked at me with that obnoxious smile. “He was lucky?” I offered.
“No,” he said. “He was on my team.”
I remembered his look of self-satisfaction about that last remark for the rest of the day. I envied how happily he could think of his accomplishments, but I begrudged him my complete admiration by deciding it was foolish of Brian to think winning football games was important. Still, I knew that he had left a deep and favorable impression, because when my mother, while serving lentil soup to begin dinner, said, “Did Brian apologize?” I was outraged.
“Apologize! For breaking my arm?”
“He came over today?” my father asked with a look of interest that surprised me.
“Well, yes,” my mother said to me. “Is that so unreasonable?”
“But it was an accident. Why should he apologize?”
“You can apologize for an accident, you know.”
“That’s interesting,” my father unexpectedly commented. “Because Brian’s father, Mr. Stoppard, called me this afternoon. About three-thirty.” My father, to this day, always states the time of events no matter how irrelevant. I caught my breath at this news: conferences between fathers seemed ominous.
“Why?” my mother asked.
“He had the crazy idea that we might sue him because of Howard’s arm.”
“Oh, so goyish.”
“Yes,” my father agreed. He slurped his soup. “So he offered to pay the medical bills.”
My mother had stopped eating. She put her spoon down and regarded Dad with amazement. “What kind of a neighborhood have we moved into?”
“Oh, Sara, don’t talk that way.” My father glanced at me while saying this and, of course, I knew I was the reason she should censure herself.
“Herman,” she answered. “I don’t think there’s any point in pretending about our feelings in front of our son.”
“You know, he did apologize, Ma.” I said this suddenly, a little frightened of how it would be taken.
“What, darling?” she asked.
“He did apologize.”
“You see,” my father said. “You’ve made him feel self-conscious about his friend. Howard, what Mr. Stoppard did has nothing to do with his son or your friendship with him. It’s just that I was insulted by his suggestion that we accept money.”
There was an unpleasant silence, during which I was aware that mother was annoyed by Dad’s correction of her talk in front of me and also that they expected me to respond to my father’s admonition. “Why was it insulting?” I eventually asked, in the small voice I thought I was growing out of.
They both looked appalled at the prospect of explaining so adult and complicated a thing as that. But my father took a deep breath and tried. “It’s just not friendly. You see, Mr. Stoppard is assuming that we would do an unpleasant thing. If he had called to express his regret that you had broken your arm and asked if he might pay for it, that would be different. But he called up to say that if we were thinking of suing him, it would be better to settle it personally.”
“It’s not the greatest thing in the world,” my mother said, “that he offered money at all.”
“If he had put it the right way, it would have been a nice offer.” Dad returned his attention to me. “Do you understand why it disturbed me?”
It was hard for me to speak. I felt overwhelmed and suffocated by this issue. I said yes very quietly.
“Honey,” Mom said, leaning over and kissing me on the forehead. “Don’t look as if you’re being scolded. We’re not upset with you or Brian.”
“I know,” I said in a brusque tone, as if nothing like that had ever occurred to me. In this fashion, over the years, I have wasted a lot of my mother’s love.
The next day, much to my satisfaction, Brian came by. My mother must have decided to do her best to reassure me that she approved of our friendship, because she wouldn’t allow Brian’s polite refusals from dissuading her that we ought to be fed. I disliked the idea because it would mean sitting in the kitchen in her company and I knew that would make Brian and me uncomfortable. But Mom was clever enough to sense this and she said, “Don’t worry that you’ll be stuck with me. I’ll bring it up on a tray.”
“I wasn’t worried about that, Mom.”
“Sure, sure. I have to go shopping, anyway.”
As soon as she was gone, Brian said, “I really like your mother. She’s very, very nice.”
“Oh, good. Sometimes, you know, she’s a nudge.”
“A nudge?”
“You know, she insists on interfering in what I’m doing.” It was brought home to me, during the next few months, in little ways such as this, that I was no longer in New York, where all people understand Yiddish expressions.
“She’s unusual,” Brian said.
That was the last thing I should think of to say about my mother, but it was nevertheless flattering. “She was a dancer until I came along.”
“Really? A ballet dancer?”
I laughed at the idea, though I shouldn’t have. “No, you know, modern dance. Martha Graham.”
“She gave it up to have a family?”
“I think money was also part of it. She had to work.”
Brian cocked his head to one side and blinked his eyes. “Your father wasn’t earning enough?”
I hadn’t been clever enough to realize that talking of my mother’s former career would lead to this: I had to decide prematurely how much I could trust Brian. “My father was a lawyer.”
Brian waited to hear more, but I was silent because of my indecision. Finally, he said, “Was a lawyer? He isn’t one anymore?”
“No.”
“He was disbarred?”
“Oh, God, no. No, nothing like that.”
Brian laughed. “Well, what then?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. But you really can’t tell anybody else.”
He regarded me with his eyes at their blackest; his lips in a slight smile. “If it’s that big a secret, maybe you shouldn’t tell me.” Of course I knew I was being teased, but it was effective, because there was no good response.
“Okay,” I said, crushed.
“Come on, I’m kidding. I won’t tell anybody.”
“You really can’t.” He nodded. “My father was a member of the Communist Party, so during the McCarthy period he couldn’t get any work.”
“Why? How did his clients find out he was a Communist?”
“Well, he hand
led contracts for the movie studios and he also did that for entertainers. And checked the tax stuff, too.”
“In Hollywood?”
“Yeah.” I was impressing him, which was my reason for ignoring my parents’ advice to keep this part of their past secret. “He was really important and the FBI made it their business to let everybody know he was a member.”
“You mean, he wasn’t brought to trial or anything?”
“He didn’t break any law.”
“So, how did they tell people?”
“Two agents would show up and say, ‘Did you know Mr. Cohen is a member of the Communist Party?’ And then they would start asking them if they were members or if Dad had tried to get them to go to meetings.”
“I get it,” Brian said. “So if they didn’t fire your father, then the FBI could call them Communists too.”
“Right,” I said, and put my finger on my lips, because I heard my mother on the stairs. She came in, unsteadily holding a large tray in front of her. Brian, immediately on seeing her, got up and took it. “Thank you,” she said in a surprised tone.
“On the desk?” he asked.
“Yes.” She gave me a look I feared meant she suspected the correctness of Brian’s behavior. Mom distrusts anything too good or too bad.
“We’ll be okay, Mom. You go ahead.”
“You two aren’t planning to blow anything up, are you?”
“Not with his arm,” Brian said. “But after it heals—”
Mom laughed. “Well, in that case it’s all right.” After a few intrusions about the food, she left us.
“Was your mother also a Communist?” Brian asked.
“Oh, of course.”
“Of course! You mean, out of loyalty?”
“No, everybody—I mean, all their friends were Communists.” I watched him absorb this information while eating. He didn’t seem to have any reaction other than surprise. “Your parents aren’t political?” I asked.
“My father is a Republican.”
“You’re kidding me! Really?”
“No, I’m serious. He thinks Kennedy is a Communist sympathizer.”
The Game Player Page 2
