Exurbanites at Play

the jinks are higher in the outlands of gotham

The adjuration to "work hard, play hard" has long been axiomatic for many Americans, but the exurbanite -- that creature native to the towns surrounding the suburbs surrounding New York -- seems to carry it, typically, to its ultimate extreme. He is so busy relaxing, so intently absorbed in occupying every moment of his leisure time, and he goes to such lengths in the diligent contriving of the casual, that the resultant appearance is quite convincing.

But even an exurbanite must sleep some time, and even those who are most assiduously playful must manage to store up sleep by getting to bed relatively early during the week. Unlike the camel, which drinks hugely against the time -- it may be days or even weeks -- when it will need the sustenance, the exurbanite snatches extra hours of sleep during the desert of the week so that he may splurge in the oasis of Friday-to-Monday. His weekday play will therefore consist of little more than an occasional dinner out, occasional guests in and perhaps some neighbors dropping by in the evening to watch television, or to play Scrabble, if the minds of all aren't too tired.

This routine is quite different from the life he led before he moved. In New York, depending on his branch of the communications industry and his relative level of importance in it, he averaged from one to five cocktail parties a week, during the season; he often dined out in the city's superior restaurants or in its holes-in-the-wall, and like as not he was a regular theatregoer. He was a regular patron of the cinema (continued on page 34)Exurbanites at Play(continued from page 21) houses that exhibit English, French or Italian movies. He knew by their first names the captains or maitre d's of at least a half-dozen smart, fashionable nightclubs. Even if he didn't get home till one or two, he could count on seven hours of sleep before his presence would be really demanded on the job. Weekends were reserved for perhaps one big party, and catching up on sleep.

When he moved to the exurb, he took with him many of his Manhattan habits, but with an important difference: where before he could spread his social activities over a whole week, now he had to concentrate them into one 60-hour period, along with a bushel-basketful of new social chores.

The week-long parlay is clearly out of the question. He simply no longer has the time for weeknight shindigs. Having moved to an exurb he has offered up two or three hours of his weekdays on the altar of country living; it doesn't take a man long to realize, if he is on a regime of rising at 6:30 or 7:00, that he must hit the sack by 11:30 or 12:00 if he expects to be his usual bright, winsome, companionable self the next day.

What he does with his weekends, how he goes about spending his time, will vary, depending on the exurb he has selected as home. A more accurate way, perhaps, of saying this would be: his selection from among the available exurbs will depend in large part on what kind of social life he prefers over a weekend. The playground is large and adaptable: there are sandpiles for drunks, for farmers, for libertines or Don Juans, for intellectuals, for sportsmen, for chronologically adult infants or adolescents, for the lazy or the active, for sailors or fishers or hunters or riders or swimmers. During the weekend recess from the rat-race there is no supervisor to blow the whistle and demand that the escapees do one thing instead of another. With remarkably true adaptability, the exurbanite finds his own level, his own part of the forest. Play-time, play manners, play opportunities, play facilities, play techniques, even intensity of play -- all vary from one exurb to another, but at the same time there are basic and striking similarities. Just as the residents of each exurb have had to forego (to their general subsequent dissatisfaction) some of the amenities of life in Manhattan when they undertook to escape its tensions, so the residents of each exurb share alike some leisure-time activities.

There is, for example, a heavy traffic in weekend guests from the city. There are three main categories of these transients. First are the people one might normally be content to spend an hour or two at a time with, in the city. In Exurbia, the only way to see them is to have them up for the weekend. Since the showing of the house and grounds and the small talk are pretty rapidly used up, the rest of the weekend must be devoted to actively entertaining the visitors -- against the possibility that they may be bored or become boring. Generally, social life with city friends diminishes with each year's exurban residence, so the first category gets smaller and smaller for the average exurbanite, leaving him finally with only lifelong, close friends (category three), and even some of these are lost by reason of geography and changed living habits.

The second category comprises genuine and pseudo-business acquaintances. A city man can play golf with a business acquaintance who needs leisure-time cultivation to make him bear fruit; an exurbanite must invite the man and his wife for the weekend. Active entertainment for these visitors, and plenty of people around, are musts.

Third, as has been said, are the old friends, an important life line for the exurbanites to the Manhattan they have left behind them. Sometimes these old friends come early and often, sometimes they are reluctant dragons, sometimes they sit disconsolately indoors, scowling at the unaccustomed green that surrounds them outside, sometimes they show they are the stuff exurbanites are made of, and drag their hosts on tours of near-by houses for rent or sale, and sometimes they switch the old chestnut, and maintain that the exurbs are OK for a weekend, but they wouldn't live in the place if you et cetera. But almost invariably, when the guests are settled with their first drink in hand, the questions come, usually from the exurban hostess: What's new in town? Have you seen any plays? Do you see the Smythes any more? The thirst for urban gossip is unquenchable. Nor is it simply a matter of steering the conversation into channels that the guests will find negotiable. Urban gossip is an exurban need.

Again, no matter which his exurb, every exurbanite makes a ritual of his Sunday New York newspaper. Some cynics claim that the curling up with the paper that goes on in so many exurban households is merely a measure of the endemic nature of exurban hangovers, but this is not so, for even in the living room of the member of Alcoholics Anonymous (and there are Westport, Connecticut, residents who proudly contend that their chapter of A.A. is the largest in the world), the Sunday newspaper is a comfy ceremonial.

Then there is the question of children. In every exurb, parents find their hours of relaxation partially circumscribed by the activities of their young. Most exurban fathers cheerfully undertake a responsibility toward the children over the weekend which is borne solo by the mother during the week, and over a summer weekend this may entail scouting about for likely prospects to add to a Little League baseball team, or patiently coaching a few rallies of small-fry tennis, or instructing Junior in the function of a Genoa jib, or even going for a walk to get the kids out of the house and away from Mother when all other recourses have failed.

There is, moreover, for the do-it-yourselfer, a similarity of interests from exurb to exurb. Everywhere, beyond the 50-mile limit from Manhattan, hardware stores are the most important single retail outlets in town, only excepting the liquor stores.

In every exurb, booze is the common palliative for stress and strain.

• • •

One way to search out the patterns of exurban play is to follow a handful of exurbanites from the time they step off their Friday evening train from New York to the time when, on Monday morning, they appear on the station platform, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed or white-gilled and hung-over. For the sake of simplicity and unity of compass, the exurbanites whose course we will follow, as closely as the postal regulations permit, are, we shall imagine, all resident in the environs of Westport, in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Here, as the evening train from New York stops at the Westport station, come a couple of hundred exurbanites, either hurrying for the cars that have been parked in the lot all day or plaintively whistling a familiar signal to attract the wives who have driven to meet them. Our eye is caught by four from this crowd.

One of them is Ben Martell, whom the trade knows quite well as among the first successful radio writers to make the switch to TV. Ben is in his late 30s and looks older, especially tonight. We can judge the reason for it from his erratic gait: he comes from the bar car. He makes it safely to his MG, climbs in and heads purposefully home toward another Martini.

The man greeting his wife at the wheel of a Buick convertible is none other than Gideon J. Philips III, an advertising agency account executive. Note the charcoal-gray suit and the glossy, initial-embossed briefcase. Just beyond him, climbing into a Cadillac and giving his wife a perfunctory peck on the cheek, is Duke Cameron. He's in his late 20s and, although his hair is thinning, he looks fit and full of energy, despite his harrowing day and the unceasing flow of loud talk he exchanged with colleagues, with whom he was playing (continued on page 38)Exurbanites at Play(continued from page 34) bridge all the way out on the train, to the considerable annoyance of newspaper-readers, work hogs, and nappers. Duke's sharkskin suit is a little too sharp, his tie knot too small and tight. He knows all this; he knows, too, that until he's promoted to a better job, this is the correct uniform to wear in his business dealings with the small manufacturers on whom he must call. And what does he do for his living? Duke was captain of his college golf team; the transition was natural and swift to becoming an advertising salesman for a potent, nimble newsweekly. He will contrive to lose enough close matches to potential advertisers in the next few months to become assistant advertising manager, and can then dress according to his taste.

The fourth man we will watch in the next few hours is Armand Santini. He is clothed in ambiguous fashion: a turtle-neck sweater under his tweed jacket, and sneakers. While he is getting his Model-A Ford, to drive it round and pick up the couple who are his week-end guests, we can tell that he is a "genius," local patois for a commercial artist who is not a regular commuter.

And now let's pause to consider the cars these men drive. Santini is a member of Westport's Model-A car owner's association, whose membership dues are spent in buying up other Model-As, which thereafter become boneyards for all members, who may strip the purchases for necessary replacement parts. As for the MG owner, Ben Martell, he belongs to the Sports Car Club of America which is headquartered here in Fairfield County. If his option is picked up for another cycle or two, he will sell his MG to buy a Jaguar; he knows where he can pick up a hell of a second-hand Jag. (Despite its expense, the Jaguar was for some time the best seller among foreign cars, thanks to its popularity in Exurbia. This sports car has been displaced, however, by the much cheaper, purely utilitarian Volkswagen, perhaps because Jags were becoming so common. In northern Westchester, for example, the Volkswagen sold as many as its five nearest competitors, last year. But the Volkswagen is usually a second car, while the Jaguar is a first and often an only car.) The Buick driven by Gid Philips is intended to reflect, and does, his comfortably realistic and mature acceptance of the simple need for dependable transportation. Cameron's new Cadillac is an important business expense, and so appears on his tax returns.

It is not only by their cars that ye shall know them. Let's attend to Armand for a moment. It's not because he is seeking status, but because he genuinely likes wine, that Armand Santini, the artist, has pulled up in his Model-A outside the liquor store which is conveniently situated just across the road from the railroad station.

While Armand is buying his two bottles of domestic Pinot Noir, we have time to reflect on the problems the exurbanite poses for such an expert taxonomist as Russell Lynes: is the exurbanite highbrow, or middlebrow, or upper-middlebrow? (He surely isn't lowbrow.) It would seem safe to state that he is not middlebrow. He does not belong (nor does his wife) to the Book-of-the-Month Club, or to the Literary Guild.

He is likely to have bought such highbrow trinkets as Eimer Amend chemical jars for his kitchen spice shelf 10 or 12 years ago; he may even hide them now, as being somehow infra dig, now that everybody knows about them. Armand cannot or will not remember the time when he did not grind his pepper fresh from a small mill. He is likely to have at least three special salad dressings for his, of course, tossed green salad. In everything but the most intellectual aspects of life, he is ahead of the highbrows or he will know the reason why. But in intellectual matters, he is only upper-middlebrow, and this is because of his belated anti-intellectualism, his reverse snobbism, the factor that today drives him to hide his butterfly chairs away or leave them out in the weather, because too many people have copied him by buying them in cheap copies. It is the same reverse snobbism that leads him to buy a domestic Pinot Noir, and when he gets home he will put the bottles in the refrigerator, too, because he knew that red wines are supposed to be served at room temperature so long ago that he feels he not only can but should break the rule. Armand, his wife, and their guests will be dining late, for nothing special is planned for the evening. Not so with the others.

The others are already busy pouring Martinis (in three out of four homes, the cocktail is Martini). Gid Philips and his wife have another couple in for dinner. Duke Cameron and his wife are going out for dinner. Ben Martell, the television writer, already fairly well sozzled, is taking his wife to a friend's house after dinner. All have something to do. All must have something to do. Each would feel he would sink to the level of a fifth-class power if the word got out that he wasn't invited out somewhere, or inviting someone in.

It is 7:45. Gid is filling Martini glasses. Taking advantage of a momentary silence, he clears his throat, catches the attention of his wife and their dinner guests, and tells them a dirty story, fairly new; only one of them has heard it before. The dirty story is common conversational coin in Westport. On this average Friday night it is likely that this particular story will be told some 290 times. Gid will, all by himself, tell (if we compute his average output) eight more such stories.

The evening goes forward. Between 8:30 and 9:15 there is a flurry of traffic through the winding country roads: this is Operation Baby-Sitter being successfully accomplished. Thereafter, the cars once again move purposefully through the darkness: parents, freed temporarily from their children, propose to enjoy adult society for a time. The weather on this early summer night is cool. Later on, when it gets hot, there will be beach parties, moonlight sails; still later, in the fall, the barn dance cycle will have begun, and the husbands will be breaking out their plaid shirts and the wives their peasant skirts; come winter, there may even be, in the event of snow, a ride in a sleigh. But now, in early summer, things are quieter. It is 10:30. Let us look in on our four specimens and see what they are up to.

Armand is sitting quietly at home with his weekend guests and his wife. He is on his fifth highball. In view of the earlier Martinis and the wine, he has taken on quite a package, and has reached the point where, a few minutes ago in the bathroom, he was talking to himself in the mirror and making faces at his own answers. Now he is wondering what he ever saw in these people, to make him invite them out for the weekend. His wife stifles a yawn.

Ben Martell and Duke Cameron are at the same party. They exchanged nods when they first came in (they don't know each other particularly well, each is just a train face to the other) and promptly went their separate ways. Duke, ever the salesman, was able to get a poker game started off in the library. He had been miffed, earlier that week, to find that his regular weekly poker game was canceled -- one regular had to fly to the coast, another was in bed with a psychogenic cold, and a third was sitting up with a sick script -- and had even thought for a few minutes that Friday night might come and find him with nothing to do. A fourth regular in the poker game had, however, invited him to dinner; together with their wives they had come on to this party. Nothing big or pretentious -- no more than two dozen people sitting around, talking, watching television, drinking. Five kindred spirits were soon collared and a poker game set up.

On this Friday evening, because the game was hastily organized, stakes are 50¢ and a dollar, and the dealers have been demanding wild games. Duke's wife, growing bored with spit-in-the-ocean, has picked up her money and (continued on page 46)Exurbanites at Play(continued from page 38) left. Duke is ahead. He plays a good, hard game, and his talk bristles with tough slang.

Ben, being a television writer, is as far away from the television set as he can get without actually being outside the house. He was sozzled when he got off the bar car more than three hours ago and nothing he has done in the meantime has repaired the situation, but you have to know him well to perceive how far along he is. His wife can always tell, of course; there is something about his eyes; they begin to look like very slow pinwheels. She said something to him about it earlier and there was a brief, acrimonious exchange, but things seem all right now.

At this moment, Ben's eye has a speculative glint that has nothing to do with pinwheels: he has just seen a young woman for the first time whom he can't remember having seen before; their glances met and did something improper, before she turned away. She is Mrs. Duke Cameron, a fact about which Ben couldn't care less. We may give this pair another 30 minutes to gravitate closer to each other, eye each other again, exchange a few words, and engage in gambit and counter-gambit; no more will be required for them to have gone away somewhere or other, to do something or other. Their liaison at the moment could not be more casual, even more ephemeral; for this reason it is for each of them something that can be legitimately included under the general heading of recreation. It may, of course, develop into something more serious and tenacious: one party or the other (or both) may with time even come to believe that what is involved is a grand passion, perhaps the only true grand passion of a lifetime, in which case it will no longer be recreational but will tug at the seams of two marriages and two families and may well end up in some psychoanalyst's notebook. But for the moment it is in the nature of a routine, a bit. Such encounters have a deadly sameness throughout Exurbia.

Over in Greens Farms, Gid Philips, the account executive, is sitting in his living room with his wife and dinner guests (the husband of this couple is an account executive from another agency). Gid is trying to remember what it was that he wanted to say. Something his friend just said reminded him -- of what? He is racking his memory. Shop talk? Real estate talk? What was it? He cannot remember. He sighs, and goes to refill his glass yet again.

It is after midnight now, and all these people have worked a long, full day. Moreover, they must be up early on the morrow whether they want to or not; their children will see to that. For those who are away from home, what of the baby-sitter? Will they not now go home?

In Armand Santini's home, the New Yorkers who are his weekend guests were the first to cave in. They mounted the stairs to their bedroom a few minutes ago, amid a certain amount of restrained chatter about birdsong in the early morning. (They will whisper to each other about the three-quarter bed, the 25-watt bulb in the light on their night table, and the distance to the bathroom.) The account executives are bidding each other goodnight, too, for they must both be up before dawn; they are going fishing, out in the Sound. But Duke is cannily engaged in drawing to a flush, and he is good for at least four more hours. His wife, whose sleepy expression is delicately sated, is ready to drive home any time now, and let her husband fend for himself. Out in the darkness, Ben Martell, whose expression would bespeak quiet triumph under other circumstances, has passed out. It happened just a moment ago and his wife isn't aware of it yet; she is still talking to him, if talking is not too mild a word. She is driving the MG toward home and, she hopes, driving bloody and implacable barbs of fury toward her husband. The lights will be out in their house by 1:30, and a good thing.

With the early morning, the entire exurb stirs, shakes itself, and is almost immediately transformed into a hive of activity. Saturday throughout Exurbia is children's day. It is the day when the fathers are put to the test of remembering why they said they wanted to move from the city, and it must be stated that in the majority of families, the father rises to this occasion splendidly. Whether the purity of his motives is sullied by feelings of guilt toward his children is not the point, at least not here; what matters is that from breakfast until the cocktail hour he is almost entirely at the disposal of his young.

But throughout Exurbia, whatever the Saturday morning activity may be, at noon, stirred by an inner signal, fathers everywhere stiffen, like a dog on the point. Inside them, a small voice is asking: "What is better than one Martini before lunch?" And another small voice makes prompt answer: "Two Martinis," wherewith the cars depart from the shores, the tennis courts, the boat-yards and the schooling rings, so that Daddy may repair his tissues.

In the afternoon, the hectic round will be resumed, except for the lucky few who can contrive a nap. Duke Cameron is not one of them. Undismayed by lack of sleep and his two sets of tennis, he heads for his country club. He has a date to play golf with an old friend. It has nothing to do with business: he can play for blood and intends to: $50 Nassau. Ben and Armand are shepherding their young to Compo Beach, where the artist's guests will be thoroughly dismayed by the sharp rocks over which they will have to scamper in order to reach the water, which is in any event going out. Low tide will be around 4:00 this afternoon. Gid and his son won't be back from fishing till around 5:00, at which point they will join the rest of their family around a friend's pool.

Mention was made earlier, in connection with Friday night, that few Westporters care to spend their Friday evenings alone. There is even greater fear of being left out on Saturday night. True, there are a handful of hardy souls -- freaks, biological sports -- who even around Westport would prefer to stay at home and read a book; and it is likely that there are others, part of the majority, who entertain a sneaking envy for these individualists. But Saturday night's enticements beckon too urgently. All four of our specimens are going out for the evening. The writer, Ben, and his wife are going to a big party in Weston. Ben spent the morning wondering how obvious to everybody his absence last night had been; he remembered that he had been absent -- and why -- as soon as he became aware of the fact that his wife was not talking to him except in the presence of the children. Came the afternoon sun on the beach, and for the first time he began idly to speculate as to whether the space salesman's wife would be at the same party again tonight. He rather hoped she would not. But after his third pre-dinner Martini, he began to hope that she would be there, and to fear that she would not. As it happens, she will not. She and Duke are driving with two other couples to have dinner at Stonehenge, a charming country restaurant on Route 7 near Ridgefield, a place that advertises: "We charge more. We care more. We give more."

The Camerons and their friends will not eat until 10:00, and when they get back near home they will take dead aim on the party in Weston but will miss it, ending up instead dancing in a darkened room at the Camerons' house. The Armand Santinis and guests are going to a somewhat smaller party. The Philipses are going to a party in Wilton, at the home of an advertiser, big deal. If you ask, But isn't this approximately what they all did just last night? the answer is, Well, yes, and it is also approximately what they all did last weekend, and approximately what they will all do next weekend.

What are our four specimens up to, on this Saturday night? It is getting on toward 11:00 -- we should look in on (continued on page 52)Exurbanites at Play(continued from page 46) them. At Stonehenge, Duke and his party are dawdling over coffee. He is talking to the lady on his left (his wife is across from him) but his eyes, as he talks or listens, keep dropping down to a point about six inches below the lady's chin, and his mind is less on what they are talking about than on what may eventuate, should she be the one to sit on his lap on their way home. (They have all six come in one car, although nobody was concerned about saving gas.) In Wilton, Gid is talking to the advertiser about real estate. The Santinis and their house guests are at a party of about 20 people. The party is being given by a middle-aged couple named Mann -- Ralph and Eleanor Mann.

Here's our buxom hostess, already flushed and nervous, talking too fast and too much. And what the hell! -- there's Bill Dahl, who took a job right out from under Armand's nose just last week. What is this, a gag, having both of them at the same party?

Bill and Armand greet each other effusively and part company. There, in the corner, with some other magazine people, is Fred Barber. There's his wife, Rita, looking wistfully pretty and overdressed. She's talking with Jane, which is not odd despite the fact that they spent the whole afternoon sharing supervision of a children's birthday party. There's Ted Daniels, the TV producer, and the only man who hasn't heard the current description of himself as a pinstripe Walt Whitman. Everybody knows everybody else and they're all on at least their second drinks, except Jack Fuller, the playwright, who's on his third.

But the atmosphere of the party is not relaxed, and everyone senses it. They will, therefore, respond happily to Armand Santini's suggestion that everybody play parlor games.

In Fairfield County parlor games have a periodic popularity like economic depressions. For years there will be none of it, but somewhere there is an exurbanite who has run across a line in Dylan Thomas that he never heard of having been used in The Game, and the moment will come when this man will insist on some charades just so he can satisfy himself that his line ("Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house") is as prickly a proposition as he hoped it would be. His insistence, at one Saturday night party, will set off a wave of charades.

Perhaps it is the exurbanite's flamboyant exhibitionism, perhaps it is his spirited sense of competition bursting above the surface again. Not enough that he played two sets of tennis and a bloody game of croquet and then drove his Hillman Minx as competitively as possible from home to party, while his wife nervously braked the floorboards the whole way. Not enough: he must compete some more. Perhaps this is the reason, but most certainly something else is involved too, in other parlor games popular around Westport, and that is aggressive hostility, urbanely masked. These other games (there are at least two that have had a limited run of popularity in the last year or so) are switches on old children's games, and the wonder is that they have not caused more outright violence than they have. Here is how one is played:

One of the group is selected to be It. It is told to leave the room, and that while It is out of the room the others will make up a story of some sort. Then it will be It's task to return and try to discover what the story is about by asking everyone in turn whatever questions occur to It. The other people are restricted, in their answers, to a Yes, a No, and a Maybe. Once It is out of the room, the others will make up no story whatsoever. They will use up a little time to fill their drinks, tell a joke or two at It's expense, and inform any squares who don't know how the game is played (if indeed there is any square present aside from It) of the real rules. The real rules are that when It returns, any question asked that ends with a consonant is answered with a No; any question asked that ends with a vowel is answered with a Yes; a question ending with a "y" permits the answer Maybe. The point of the game is that It will make up his own story, and in the process disclose to the amateur psychoanalysts present, by his free-association, his unconscious fantasies.

Lest the reader think that stories do not in fact come out, herewith, very briefly, are appended two actual stories as invented by unfortunate Its for the delectation of their friends:

1. A girl midget, whose mother is also a midget, marries a boy midget. Goaded on by her mother, the girl midget on her wedding night has sexual intercourse with an elephant, and dies.

2. A sister shoots and kills her brother when she discovers him in her barn, using her milking-machine for the purpose of masturbation.

Once there was a girl from whose unconscious appeared a story about a circus-train which was wrecked and spewed forth freaks who raped all the women living in houses beside the railroad track. When she was told it was her story, that she alone had supplied the details, she burst into tears and fled alone into the night.

Stories like these could never be contrived by a group of people sitting around a room. They can only develop in the course of this malevolent game.

The game as played at the Manns' party illustrates the technique. Fortunately for Ralph Mann and his wife, either of whom would have been good victims, the It chosen was the city guest of the Santinis. When he was called back, this hapless man invented the following story, in the following way.

It: Is this story about people?

Answer: Yes.

It: Is it about animals?

Answer: No.

It: Then every character is a person?

Answer: No.

It: No? Well ... supernatural characters?

Answer: No.

It: Is there a monster in the story?

Answer: Maybe.

It: Well, let's see--does a woman give birth to a monstrosity?

Answer: Maybe.

It: Well, does she?

Answer: Yes.

It: Maybe? and Yes? Oh, it's two?

Answer: Yes.

It: Siamese twins! Is there a crime?

Answer: Yes.

And so it went. The story unfolded was of a woman who destroyed the Siamese twins she had born out of wedlock by ripping them to pieces with her bare hands. When It was told this was his own story, he reacted in the usual way, with hot denials. It was patiently explained to him, as it has been to every It to date, that the completely mechanical and arbitrary method of answering gave him free choice at every turn, and that, for example, he might have started out by asking questions about time, locale, historical period, motivation, anything. Additionally, it was explained that the question as to whether the story was about people, to which an affirmative answer was given, might have satisfied anyone willing to think about people as distinct from non-people, but that It insisted on having other creatures in his story, even after learning there were no animals.

It took an exurbanite to decide that this game was flawed by the endless post-mortems, and to think up a way to improve it. He felt, too, that it was formless: the person who was It could go on asking questions indefinitely, could spin several stories, and never end until finally, in belated mercy, or out of sadistic impatience for the particular delights of the moment of truth, some player of the game would cut It off and tell him who was responsible for the horrors. But the moment of truth, it seemed to the inventive exurbanite, came too soon. It occurred to him, one night, that at a certain point It should be told that the entire story as contrived by the group had now been successfully wormed out of them, that It was completely the winner. "And now," this exurbanite (continued on page 56)Exurbanites at Play(continued from page 52) asked the man who had been It, "what do you think of five people who could make up such a story?" (It was the story of the midgets.) The man was not sure what to say. Like most exurbanites, he was intelligent and superficially conversant with psychiatry. He shook his head. "If it were only one person," he answered, "who had dreamed it up, I could make a comment. But after all there were five of you who had a hand in it." "But what," he was pressed, "what would you think of a person who made up such a story, supposing just for the moment that only one did make it up? In a word, what would you say about such a person?" The man who had been It no longer paused. "If I knew that only one person had made it up," he said, "in one word I would say he was sick, sick, sick."

Then they told him who made it up.

Another gay parlor game of this type requires, for its success, that its players be high, in order to secure their complete cooperation. The man or woman who is to be It is told, for the purposes of this game, that while out of the room the others will decide that they are going to play the roles of a specific category of personages -- kings of medieval Europe, say, or Hollywood stars. The one who is It has the task, by asking the most personal sort of questions (the asking of personal questions is encouraged), of trying to figure out what category of personages is being portrayed. Once It leaves the room, again the real facts of the game come out. Instead of assuming the roles of personages his friends will assume the roles of the actual person sitting at their right hand, and they must tell the truth as best they know it. In a community where extramarital sex relations are not unheard of, such a game, if pursued according to the rules, can wreak a tidy bit of havoc within a half-hour. At the Mann party, the playwright was sober enough when he was It to figure out, after a few minutes, the realities of the game, but did not reveal his knowledge. Once that had happened, he was absolute master. There were a number of things he had long wanted to know about relationships between some of his near and dear: he found out, and so did the rest of those present.

Such splendid releases for hostility would seem to be tailormade for communities where most of the residents are superficially so gay, so pleasant, so charming. The factor inhibiting the greater popularity of these games (and others like them) is of course that a circle of friends very soon runs out of squares. And so their custom declines, for months or perhaps even years, until there are enough new faces in the exurb to justify their revival.

Tonight, the parlor games at the Manns' concluded with a long session of The Game. Wives got fretful with husbands who were too cloddish or too self-conscious to act out their phrases in quick order, husbands got irked with wives for being too goddam bossy, and after an hour interest ran low. Presently the play was abandoned and the talk once again became general. Somebody wandered over to the television set to see if there was a baseball game being broadcast; somebody else told a real estate story; somebody else started to talk shop; and a gag writer began to flirt with a columnist's wife. And so this party became like parties anywhere in the area and was subsequently referred to as a good one.

As with the party over in Weston, where Ben Martell is once again drunk, this party is basically the same. Before the three-dozen guests have left they will have put a severe dent in their host's liquor supply: he estimated that a half-case of Scotch, a half-case of gin, a half-case of rye, and a half-case of bourbon would see him through the evening; tomorrow he will be able to count a halfdozen unopened bottles.

Gid Philips, the account executive, and his wife, relatively sober, will be home by 1:00 A.M. this time around. After driving the sitter home, they will be in bed by 2:00. Lights will be out at the Santinis' by 2:30. Ben's wife will experience some difficulty in prying her husband out of his chair, but will get him home by around 3:00. Duke and his friends will keep on dancing in a darkened room, or lounging on convenient couches in the dimness and drinking, until about the same time. They will be reluctant to break it up: the only thing they dislike more than getting up is going to bed, but they'll be asleep by 3:30.

Sunday, a day of relaxation everywhere, finds the exurbanites relaxing at full speed all over again. It is striking to note how all -- weekend guest, casual visitor, householder and wife -- as Sunday noon approaches, gradually find that their conversation has brought them to their feet and closer and closer to the bar. At noon, in houses all over the Westport area, you can hear someone say: "Well, I don't know about you bastards, but I think I'll have a Martini, for a change," and again, life, which had up till then been almost unicellular, begins to become more complex.

One might surmise that, after the usual Sunday brunch or midday dinner and an afternoon out-of-doors, even an exurbanite would have reached the point where blessedness could consist only in sitting down quietly somewhere and doing nothing. But no: what is working in the exurbanite's mind, pushed down all day Saturday somewhere almost beyond consciousness, is the realization that, tomorrow, he must again become part of the rat-race. So as the afternoon sun slides down he once again sets himself the objective of doing something, anything, to push away tomorrow. If he is not himself visited, he now starts to visit.

It would be exaggeration to refer to the gatherings that take place from 5:00 Sunday afternoon until around midnight as parties. They are seldom organized, as is a party. It is rather as though every house is considered open, and exurbanites wend their way from one to another house (always within the limits of a given clique) as, in New York, they might have pub-crawled up Third Avenue. Where on Friday or Saturday it was obligatory to have arranged a date before-hand, on Sunday the exurbanite can relapse into his old New York custom of calling a friend without notice. "You doing anything? Come on over," or "You stuck at home with the kids? Rita and I are over at the Santinis', we'll be over. You need any gin?"

In this amiable fashion, a couple will leave their house for that of a friend, pick up another couple and drop in on a second friend, leave the second couple behind and go on to a third friend. Here they will eat a sandwich, there an olive or a peanut; the faces they will see during an evening will in all probability include those of their whole circle of intimate acquaintances, and the circumstances will be, for perhaps the first time in the entire weekend, truly relaxed. They are physically tired, so their conversation is more truly casual, pleasanter, more amiable.

And what of our foursome, come Sunday evening? After perhaps three hours of this sort of meandering, the Philipses are home again, having along the way picked up three other advertising men and their wives. It is now 10:00 at night. The admen are talking shop on the Philipses' terrace. Each is persuaded that his agency, for one reason or another, is the best in town. Each explains why he feels that this is so. The others listen, argue, listen. They drink a little more. By 11:00 P.M. they are coming out under truer colors: each wonders out loud what he can do to get out of his agency and into another, where the grass seems greener. One adman is really serious about this, he insists he really means it, is there any way he could -- without losing face -- manage to -- but the others interrupt him. They are really serious, too. They really mean it, too. Each refills his glass. By midnight they have reached the solution. (The same solution is being reached, at this moment, in a remarkable number of admen's homes, all over the exurb.) Why don't (concluded on page 77)Exurbanites at Play(continued from page 56) the four of them get together and set up their own agency? The hell with working for somebody else, clubbing your brains out just to line some bastard's pocket who can't even write a decent line of copy any more, the doddering old meathead.

"Look," says one, "I'm sure I could swing my account to a new firm, fresh blood, fresh outlook."

In the back of each mind is the thought: "It's a way out of the rat-race. My own business -- and wouldn't it look great, my name up there on the letterhead?"

It is impossible to estimate accurately the number of dream-agencies that have been fantasized in this way, but it is a fact that at least two actual agencies have grown from just such meetings. But not this time. This time, the admen take leave of each other around 12:30 or so, the wives protract the departure in characteristic wifely fashion, and the Philipses start to empty ashtrays and collect glassware. They are sufficiently loaded and exhausted to insure a night's sleep.

The Santinis, having seen their weekend guests off on a refreshingly early evening train, could get to bed around 11:00, but they sit up two hours, sipping coolers and verbally assassinating their departed friends, who left a ring in the tub, dropped butts on the lawn, and didn't help with the Friday night dishes.

The Camerons get home from their house-crawling around 11:00 and are in bed by 12:00. The Martells were home by 10:00 and hoped to get to bed early. Ben's wife is talking to him again and they're happily tired together. But Ben found a message to call the comedian he works for in New York, did so, was told that his sketch for next week's show stinks but stinks, and that he'd better have something passing fair ready by noon next day or else, and so he is already involved again in the rat-race. He is downstairs in the playroom, walking up and down, drinking some beer out of a can, and thinking, thinking.

Armand Santini is the only one of our four specimens who will not be on the platform at the railroad station in time to catch the 8:12 on Monday morning. He will be in his studio by 9:00. None of them thinks he has spent an exceptional weekend. If you ask Armand, Gid, Duke, or Ben what he does over a weekend, he will answer, "Why, what everybody else does, wherever they happen to live. It's no different in the country than anywhere else."