1. HOSTILITIES
Daddy is how we have to begin. The only way he knew to have fun with us was by playing ear-training games, challenging us to identify various intervals and, later, chords. He would strike two notes on the piano—say, a G and a B-flat—and my sister and I would race to come up with “minor third.” Or he’d try to trick us with ninths, thinking we might confuse them with seconds. It was all quite easy until we got to diminished fifths and augmented fourths, which on a piano look the same. I later learned that this was a routine exercise in elementary music theory classes, universally considered boring. But Linda and I liked it because Daddy seemed to like us when we answered correctly. And to like himself for having taught us so well. Neither of which likings we saw much evidence of otherwise.
We also played word games at the dinner table; it was one way to get a conversation going. Or we played a form of Twenty Questions we called Who Am I? Good question.
A game called Slapjack was a great excuse for me to slap Linda, which I kept doing, more or less, for seven decades.
Our mother drove us crazy with something called Snakes, which involved very rapid arithmetic. When she got to the end of a long series of connected math problems, we were supposed to supply the answer pronto. Neither Linda nor I thought it was fun—especially me, with my complete incompetence when it comes to zeroes—but Mummy, whose friends called her “La Perfecta,” sure did: She knew the sums.
Years later, when I had my own kids, we played better games. A favorite was Camouflage, in which you hid twelve ordinary items in plain sight: things like a battery, a paper clip, a key, a wedding ring. Then the players, in teams of two, were allowed into the room. They could not touch anything; when they located an object, they pretended they hadn’t, and quietly checked it off their list. Whichever team completed the list first won. But the fun was really in the cleverness of the hiding. The wedding ring might be sitting right on the lid of that brass canister. A black knee-high stocking on the leg of a piano bench. Once I stuck a banana among the yellow pillows on the sofa: Adam couldn’t believe he couldn’t find the fucking banana. With enough ingenuity you could make almost anything completely disappear. A Tylenol wedged between the white dust jackets of two coffee-table books. A pair of glasses in the bottom of a crystal vase of flowers. For grown-ups I once devised a version with only dirty things: an enema tip between the black keys of the piano, a tampon in the venetian blind. I had a Tiffany crystal clock with a gold band at the circumference; I put my diaphragm around it. The next morning, Tod, who was helping me pick up all this stuff, found it and said, “Mom, where do you want me to put your knee guard?”
We also played the Hearing Game, in which we blindfolded all the kids and made noises they had to identify: nails on an emery board, the waterfalling of a deck of cards. And Rhythm: a kind of Name That Tune but with just the beat, not the melody. And Sardines, in which the person who’s “it” hides somewhere, and when you find him—say, perched on a shelf inside a closet—you have to climb in there with him, until gradually you are left with one person still looking, and everyone else incredibly stuffed in a closet full of people.
And Skin. For that game, you masked someone’s entire body beneath sheets and blankets so you couldn’t make out their form at all, leaving just one small patch of skin exposed. The players had to guess what part of the body it was. Sometimes it was something perfectly innocent, like a kneecap. Sometimes it wasn’t.
That was more of an adult game. We played it, along with many others, at Steve’s.
Steve and I played a game the first time we met. This was at Highland Farm, Oscar Hammerstein’s home in Bucks County, in the summer of 1944. Steve was one of the semi-orphans and sad strays with rotten parents whom Ockie and his wife Dorothy were always quasi-adopting, including the fey and fascinating Shawen Lynch and the mysterious, haughty Margot de Vaulchier, who was either a royal descendant of some unidentified mini-kingdom like Liechtenstein, or maybe an escapee from Staten Island—who knew?
1957: Stephen Sondheim. “At that moment I thought I would never be as infatuated with anyone again.”
I guess I had come with my parents; maybe Daddy and Ockie were working on Carousel, which opened on Broadway the next spring. Anyway, there we were: a thirteen-year-old girl, fat and ungainly, as my father kept telling me, and a fourteen-year-old boy genius with a crazy narcissist divorcée of a mother who’d put him in military school—which he loved.
With nothing in common except R (me) and H (him), what do you do? You play chess. Three games. He beat me fiendishly, took no time at all. Once we ran through that, we went to the piano, where he played either Rhapsody in Blue or An American in Paris. I didn’t know those Gershwin things, oddly enough. Growing up, I only went to Daddy’s musicals; at home, he never played Gershwin records. He didn’t play records much in general, but in specific he didn’t play Gershwin, the only composer he might have envied—well, maybe not the brain tumor part. Or maybe even that.
I was dazzled by Steve, completely stunned. I knew right away he was brilliant; he just reeked of talent. Which, not illogically, was always the biggest turn-on for me. I married two tall, blue-eyed men, but the ones I had the most fun with were dark. And, boy, was Steve dark. He wasn’t obnoxious, but impatient, a bit snappish. Pleasant, but not boy-girl pleasant. I was just a body there. I don’t think he thought I was as bright as he was, and he was right. He knew I wasn’t up to his standards. But nobody was. Later, we did become almost equals, except in the brain department. But at that moment I thought I would never be as infatuated with anyone again. Which turned out to be true.
When we were adults, we played much more elaborate games. Steve’s scavenger hunts were especially ambitious, and eventually famous—or, in the case of that movie, infamous; the plot was so complicated I eventually gave up. In real life, he’d form a bunch of his showbiz friends into teams and make them follow a series of insanely tricky clues that led all over the city. I remember I was once on a team with, among others, Phyllis Newman. We somehow made our way to a brownstone on East Seventy-third Street that happened to be the home of his lady shrink. Standing on the stoop, if you listened very carefully, you could hear music coming from the gap between the outer and inner doors. Somehow, he’d rigged a record or tape to keep repeating “One for My Baby,” specifically the opening musical phrase. We all knew the lyric, of course: “It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place except you and me.” But what to do with it? Eventually I figured, aha, it’s “quarter to three”—two forty-five. So the next address we had to find on the map would be at number 245. I can’t remember if we won that time, but I do know that everyone was starving because it took all evening to solve and Steve hadn’t warned us to eat ahead. One clue was hidden in the icing of a cake we found somewhere in the process, and poor Phyllis was so hungry she ate the clue.
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