“You’re doing splendidly,” Edgar whispered to me, without turning his head. “Steady on.”

Just before the match started, Gerald showed up with his wife and twin two-year-old sons, all in matching plaid windbreakers, mufflers and caps. They began waving vigorously to the crowd even before anyone saw them, holding their babies aloft and manipulating their tiny hands to make them wave too.

“Hello, chaps,” said Gerald as he and his family sat beside us. “Carter, this is my wife, Maureen.”

“The Duchess of Longshire,” Maureen added quickly, extending her mittened hand as if she expected me to kiss it. Maureen was very pretty in a perfected way, with a sheaf of expensively blonde hair, expertly displayed. She was still in her twenties but wore the masklike makeup of an older woman, as if she’d chosen the face she wanted from a catalogue and had it permanently installed, with a whitened sheen that looks ghostly in person but flawless in high-definition video. She was smiling brightly, as if she wanted to sell me something and then kill me.

“So nice to meet you. Although of course I’ve seen the photo. So awfully sorry.”

As the match got underway, I activated my high school technique for comprehending quantum physics: I stared really hard and opened my eyes as wide as I could, as if sheer focus could do the trick. But just as with physics, this didn’t work. The game was like football only with less headgear and padding and a kind of rugged soccer ball. I kept an eye out for wooden paddles until I remembered that was cricket. Every so often something would happen and the team members would run around in random patterns, the ball would get kicked and half the crowd would leap to their feet and cheer. Edgar cheered for both teams, since he couldn’t show favoritism, but he was truly into the game itself, so I kept telling myself, It’s fine, some very nice people enjoy eating ground glass.

“You’re hating every second of this, aren’t you?” Edgar whispered to me, smiling.

“No, no, it’s great, I was just thinking about how Ralph Lauren once had a line of cheaper sportswear called Rugby, but he shut it down.”

As the game kept going, I tried to anticipate when Edgar would stand and cheer, but I was always a beat behind, while Gerald and Maureen were holding their babies over their heads and shaking them as if change might fall out.

“Here’s what you need to do,” Edgar confided. “Imagine that every man on each team is secretly in love with a man on the opposing team, and after the next goal, envision all of them ripping off their jerseys and making out passionately on the field.”

Finally! Without helmets or shoulder pads I could see that the players were major hot stuff, and more brawny and rambunctious than America’s billionaire quarterbacks, who often seem doughy and just a few Big Macs away from beer-bellied middle age.