But then Sam Wasserman complained to Karl about Fred. Sam said that Fred was ruining the game with his cheapskate style of play. It was true that Fred, since the three-hundred-dollar loss, had become a conservative gamesman, folding nine out of ten hands on the opening cards. Karl, bullied by Sam’s remarks and fearful of losing Sam, made another attempt at discouraging Fred from coming. He tried a direct lie, telling Fred that he had decided to give up playing and had canceled the game. Fred asked why. Karl said the arranging, the setting up of the table, the cleaning up afterward, all of it was too much hassle. Fred offered to take over. Since, in fact, Karl had not canceled the game, he could hardly say yes and permit Fred to call the others, who were under the impression that nothing had changed. That would work only if he included the other five players in his deception. Karl was embarrassed by his own actions, humiliated both by the fact that he was telling lies and that he didn’t have the guts to simply tell Fred he wasn’t wanted. He was forced to call Fred back and say the game was on.
Karl had spent several nights unable to fall asleep, wondering why he bothered being friends with Fred. He told himself not to let Fred seduce him into long telephone calls, not to be frightened to tell Fred he was ruining the poker game, in brief, not to care about sparing Fred’s feelings. But every morning, no matter how many vows he had made, Fred would call and Karl would answer, tight and tense in the early part of the conversation, until he heard himself saying something insulting or demeaning to Fred, something he would instantly regret and feel he’d have to make up for by chatting longer.
Finally he bought the phone machine to defend himself. He’d call Fred back in the afternoon, after finishing his own work, and surely then he’d be able to avoid hurting Fred and therefore … But then, the very first time Fred called, he had picked up anyway! Meanwhile, Sam Wasserman was bitching more and more about Fred, his hostility surfacing at the game with increasing frequency, and just three days ago Sam had phoned and said that he was feeling fluish and might not come. “But you don’t need me anyway,” Sam had added pointedly, “you’ve got fuzzy Freddy.” The point was clear. After all, nobody cancels events three days off on the chance that he might be coming down with the flu. So Karl had conceived of the plan that he would buy the phone machine, call Fred and tell him an old friend who used to play in the game (this was an excuse he had used successfully in the past) was in town and he didn’t have room for Fred, and then turn the machine on all the rest of the week, so as not to have to listen to Fred’s plaintive questions and … But then he had picked up! The very first time!
And now here was the moment, here was the time to laboriously tell Fred that this old friend was coming to town, stammering throughout because he knew it sounded utterly fake, totally dishonest.
“Hello, Karl!” Fred said, laughing nervously. “Are you there?”
“Sorry. Listen, I don’t think there’ll—”
“What? You’re not having the game?”
“No, but my old friend is—”
“Oh? Which old friend is this?” Fred said with open disbelief.
Karl opened his mouth to continue the lie, but there was no engine to power the words. They were stuck in his throat, a sailboat resting on still waters, with no wind to blow them to their destination. “Nobody,” Karl said angrily.
“What?” Fred said, startled. Instantly his voice was small, scared by the possibilities of confrontation.
Karl noticed. It made him angrier. Why does Fred needle and probe and insist, if he’s unwilling to hear the truth? If he’s so vulnerable, Karl thought, why does he act so tough?
“The others don’t like you,” Karl said, wanting to wound Fred, but discovering, right in the middle of the thrust, that he didn’t relish the actual moment of stabbing Fred. “They say if I keep inviting you, they won’t come. I don’t want to lose the whole game because of you.”
There was silence from Fred. A total oblivion that almost convinced Karl Fred had been cut off and his excursion into truth had been wasted. Then he heard Fred clear his throat.
“Look. I’ve tried to—” Karl began to stammer, but Fred interrupted.
“I understand. No problem. I gotta go.”
Fred hung up.
He stared at the phone. He had known, really, known all along. But still he had tried to tell himself it was coming from within him, his own poor sense of himself, his perpetual nervousness that he wouldn’t be liked. The black receiver resting in its cradle, still and silent, possessing no identity but its own, reflected a small distorted image of his face peering anxiously into the black impenetrable world. “Let me in,” it seemed to say, “or I’ll die.”
David Bergman’s dinner party was about to begin. He had finished setting the table with his brother’s hand-me-down china. It was black Wedgwood, chosen to match the black Formica kitchen, and therefore left behind, since his brother’s taste had moved on, evolving backward from high-tech to Victorian wall sconces and floral patterns.
However, David had to admit that the dense-colored but delicate plates, boldly blotting the white Formica dining table, did indeed, as his brother would say, “make a statement.” And David wanted to impress, to seem as adult as possible tonight. It had taken two months to find a night that Chico and Rounder (nobody called him Groucho, possibly because he was such an outsider: a restraint which ultimately added to the sense that he would forever continue to be one) were both free to come. The other guests, who had suddenly become problematic, were Tony Winters and his wife, Betty. A few days ago Betty had told Patty that Tony and she might not be able to come because Tony’s father was coming in from Los Angeles on his way to London and wanted to see them for dinner. Patty had, with shameless charm, begged Betty not to cancel, complaining that she would be drowned in a flood of Newstime gossip. Betty called back, after checking with Tony. His father wasn’t arriving until ten o’clock, and he planned to meet them at eleven, so they could attend, as long as it was understood they would have to leave early.
David resented this arrangement. He had met Tony and Betty on only one other occasion besides the dinner nearly a year before at Fred’s — the night he had first met Patty. A few months later they had gone to a startlingly fancy brunch at Tony’s and Betty’s. That event, with its nakedly business-oriented guest list, the professionally tended bar, the rented coat racks, the fancy dishware, and the elaborate menu, convinced David it was appropriate for someone his age to invite his bosses to dinner. David, secretly, was irritated that Patty would never dream of entertaining on that scale (David didn’t consider the possibility that Tony might have made the arrangements), thus forcing him to settle for an uncatered, relatively intimate dinner. At Tony’s party he had counted at least thirty people in show business, all of whom, David assumed, were important contacts for Tony, relationships Tony needed to succeed. David wouldn’t have minded having Rounder and Chico over, along with the other Marx Brothers and the important editors he knew from Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and so on, to make the point to the Marx Brothers that David was the sort of person whom they needed to woo, if they wanted to hang on to him.