The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  "Don't be sarcastic."

  "I will explain it to you just once more," he said, speaking very slowly, as if he were really too tired to make the effort. "There are times when a person wants to be alone, to think, or just not to think at all. Perhaps I'm worse than other people, perhaps I need to be alone more often. But if this is tlie case it's the way I am, and I want you to try to understand it. If you can't, then I don't think you and I should see each other any more."

  His words were like a knife stripping off her skin, sure and cold and terrifying. "No," Gregg said. "No! We have to see each other."

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, right on the tangle of unpacked clothing. "I'm so tired," he said.

  Gregg crossed the room to him in an instant and sat down beside him, putting her arms around his neck. "We have to see each other," she said. "We have to! I'll leave you alone, I promise,"

  He did not push her away or draw away at all, he simply sat there, allowing her to cling to him, his eyes shut. Finally he spoke, quietly, in a nearly expressionless voice. "Start now," he said.

  On the train all the way from Boston to New York David Wilder Savage slept, his head back against the back of his seat, his face grayish with strain and fatigue. Gregg tried to rest but couldn't. She was so tired that she felt as if any httle thing would make her crack wide open like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall, and nothing could put her together again, not even twelve hours of sleep with a sleeping pill. How long ago the beginning of their relationship seemed, as ii it had happened to two other people! Every day now things were more unbearable; it was a marriage after the honeymoon was over but with nothing to replace the lost romance. In the beginning newness had made her casual and wary so that she had kept her sense of humor and had managed to amuse him even when she was more concerned than he ever suspected. But now every little word, every look or movement, cut into the festering wound of panic that she kept inside her heart. Even her actions of the summer, her casual and loving goodbyes when she drove back to the country for summer stock, seemed to be the motions of a

  happy stranger. The worst of it was that there was neither a going back nor a reformation possible. She was what she was, and she had made of their relationship the tense and teetering thing it was. She knew it, and she was powerless to do anything about it, so everything she said was wrong and everything she did was wrong, and with every mistake her need of his forgiveness grew, until Gregg felt as if she were living in a nightmare. This was not she, nor was it David. It was a hoax, a horrible trick of fate. All she wanted was to love and be loved in return; it was cruel.

  Walking up the ramp in the cold of Grand Central Station Gregg felt more reassured. They were going home and things would be better. They talked casually, they smiled at each other, and after they had deposited their suitcases at his apartment he took her to a small restaurant for dinner. It was an inexpensive cellar place, frequented mostly by Ivy League college students and their dates, with red checked tablecloths and the kind of food that gives you heart-bum before you are even finished eating it. There was no Hquor, only wine and beer. It was a place where no one would recognize David Wilder Savage and ask him how the play had gone or, worse, know how it had gone and try to ofiFer sympathy, real or false. It was eleven o'clock at night and they were the only two people in the restaurant except for their gnomelike waiter, who popped in and out of the kitchen carrying their plates and chewing surreptitiously.

  *Tm glad to be back in New York," Gregg said.

  "So am I."

  "We ought to send out for a bottle. Do you think they have a little courier who runs across the street and brings back something alco-hoHc?"

  "That waiter is trying to eat his dinner and go home," David said. "We can have a drink at my place."

  "Let's hope he's not eating ours."

  David smiled. They were together again, they were two in a close httle group observing and commenting on the world; not important comments or even very witty ones at this moment, but vital because they were a bond. "If he is," Gregg went on, "I wish he would look a little less disgusted."

  "What time is it?"

  "Five minutes to twelve." Gregg put her napkin under her coffee cup where some coffee had spilled on to the saucer. "I wish people

  could always be sure of each other, do you know what I mean? Never have to guess what the other one is thinking or going to do."

  "I hope all that midnight philosophy didn't come from your uneasiness about your spaghetti," David said lightly. "You must be tired."

  "I don't mean other people," Gregg said. "I mean us."

  "That would be boring, wouldn't it?"

  "Not to me."

  "No . . ." he said thoughtfully. "Not to you."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I'm just repeating what you said."

  "The most important thing in the world is communication," Gregg said desperately. "That's why people can talk, so they can comfort one another and amuse one another and cry out for help."

  "And tell one another dull stories and sell one another the Brooklyn Bridge," David said, smiling. "You left out a lot more."

  "Well, we'll have to ignore those because I'm talking about something else."

  "AU right."

  "Why wont you ever say that you love me?"

  It was out now, the accusation, the all-consuming question. They looked at each other across the table for a moment in silence, Gregg tense and frightened and rebellious and relieved all at once, and he rather sad.

  "Because it's not the answer to the question you're asking," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "The college girl in the parked car asks, 'Do you love me?' and the boy with her says yes. But what she means is 'Will you respect me?' and what he means is 'I want to sleep with you.' The child asks his mother if she loves him and what he means is 'Will you protect me? Do you approve of me?' You ask me if I love you and what you really mean is will I devour you, envelope you, obliterate life for you and, worse, will I allow you to do that to me. That's why I never answer you, because I do love you, but not in the way you want, and I never will."

  Gregg stared at him for a moment, shocked. Everything he had just said traveled downward through her mind like a paper piano

  roll and stopped at the line next to the end. 'Tou do love me " she whispered. 'Tou do."

  "Did you listen to the rest?"

  "You said you loved me."

  He sighed and shook his head. "God help me, I must love you," he said.

  She stood up and ran to him and kissed him, right in the restaurant, her arms wound around his neck, tears in her eyes. "That's the cm-tain line," she said, "and the orchestra starts to play and the audience rise to their feet as if they were pulled by strings, and it's a rouser!"

  "And then they leave," he said, "and they go to Nedick's." He stood up, unwound her arms from his neck, and put her coat tenderly about her shoulders.

  "Oh, why are you so cynical?" Gregg asked, hugging his arm, her head on his shoulder. Her head just reached his shoulder, her blond hair hung down over his lapel. As they walked out of the restaurant that way they passed an old-fashioned pier glass hung against the wall next to the checkroom. Gregg stopped walking. "Look at us."

  "You look like a mermaid clutching a drowning sailor," David Wilder Savage said.

  When they entered his apartment he put a record on the phonograph immediately, as he always did, and lighted the fire in the fireplace. Gregg tossed her coat over a chair and slipped out of her shoes. In her stockinged feet she padded over to the couch and sat down, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms clutched around her knees, her eyes moving as she watched his every move. "I have a present for you," she said dreamily. "I'll give it to you later."

  "ReaUy?" He looked amused.

  "Not what you think. A real present. A thing."

  "Well, you'd better give it to me soon because I'm dead tired and I'm going to put you in a cab and go to bed."

  Her mood w
as shattered, she felt herself beginning to tremble. "It's my present and I'll give it to you when I feel like it," she said, hurt.

  "I'm sorry, darling. I'd love to have it. Where is it?"

  "When you get a present from somebody you don't just throw him out afterward," she said.

  "Then give it to me tomorrow when neither of us is so tired," he said.

  "Don't you want it?"

  "Not if it's going to make you upset."

  "If I want to give you a present you have to take it," she said, "whether you want to or not."

  "Then give me the goddamned thing!"

  "Don't you love me?" Her voice was the voice of a small girl, she heard it in the still room as if it belonged to someone else, and that made it even more frightening to have to wait for the answer, because the answer would belong to her and not to someone else.

  "What the hell has a goddamned present to do with whether I love you or not?"

  "It has everything to do with it."

  "Gregg," he said, "I am not going to humor you tonight."

  "What has loving me got to do with humoring me?"

  He closed his eyes. "I'm so tired," he said.

  "Do you love me?"

  ". . . Yes."

  "Then why can't I stay all night?"

  "Stay all night. Stay all night."

  "Why didn't you ever let me stay all night before?"

  "I think there's a clean toothbrush in the medicine chest," he said. "Top shelf."

  "I know," Gregg said.

  "There's a white nightgown in the bottom drawer of the dresser," he went on. "But I suppose you know that too,"

  "No, there isn't. I never saw . . ." She stopped when she saw the way he was looking at her. "Well . . ."

  "You can wear my pajama top if you like to wear something in bed in the wintertime," he said.

  "I don't. Oh, there are so many little things we don't know about each other. It hurts me just to think about all the little things we've missed." She put her arms around him. "Why didn't you ever let me stay all night before?"

  "You stayed for three days this summer."

  "That wasn't like staying all night, it was like coming for a visit."

  "Oh, there's a difference, is there?"

  "Why are you so sadistic?"

  Tou stayed other nights too, as I remember. You stayed during the summer whenever you drove down from your job."

  "I should hope so," Gregg said angrily, "after driving all that way."

  "Oh, my God," he said. "What is the difference? Stay all night, don't stay all night, just don't analyze it."

  "I have to," she said. 'Tou're very strange."

  "Yes," he said. "I am."

  She stared at him for a moment, partly in anger and partly in fright. She remembered what Tony had said so long ago about David Wilder Savage and Gordon McKay—"No one knows for sure whether or not they were in love with each other." And he seemed so afraid to love her. Strange . . . strange . . . Perhaps he was strange, but not in that way. If it were true she wouldn't be afraid to face it, because she was sophisticated enough, and goodness knows she had met enough men who turned out to be different than she had thought. But she knew it wasn't true about David Wilder Savage, not that. She would have heard rumors from other people besides Tony, because everyone seemed to know every shameful thing about a celebrity, and David Wilder Savage was a celebrity in their group of people who lived for the theater,

  "Well, don't gloat about it," she said coldly.

  1 am strange," he went on, "to put up with what you do to me. You cling, you choke me, you demand, you don't try to understand. You never think am I unhappy, it's only are you unhappy. You follow me, you go through my bureau drawers, you're jealous of my friends. You lie in wait for me in bars—oh, don't think I didn't know that too. Just because I always ask you to come and sit with me doesn't mean I don't know why you're there."

  "I have a right to be there."

  "Yes."

  "Then why are you angry?" Gregg cried. "I thought you loved me."

  "I'm not angry," he said quietly. "I'm sorry for you."

  "W/it/.P"

  "Because you need someone who will love you for these things and be warmed by them, not someone who finds them harder and harder to forgive."

  The pain that settled in her chest was worse than any she had felt when she was alone; this was not a mere ten pounds but fifty.

  When she answered, she spoke through the pain, and only made the effort because not to speak would have hurt her more. "You have to forgive me for loving you?"

  "The love you have to give isn't the kind of love I need," he said. He smiled and touched her cheek with his fingertips. "Were two slightly neurotic people whose neuroses don't happen to complement each other. Come on, let's go to sleep. Things will look a lot better in the morning."

  "Sleep? Do you think I could ever sleep now?"

  "I'll give you some warm milk and a sleeping pill. How's that? And I'll take one too. We'll be unconscious together."

  "We're never together," she said. She put her hands over her face, shoulders tensed, waiting for him to come over to comfort her. He didn't. She heard him walk out of the room and looked up in a panic, but a moment later he returned, carrying a small medicine bottle which he set on the coffee table. "What kind of love do you need?" Gregg asked.

  He was still smiling. "A gentle love, like in the song."

  "No, seriously."

  "I am serious."

  What in the world was a gentle love? Gregg had a mental image of a little mouse of a girl, a girl with wispy hair and no face, who would be content to spend her life on the periphery of David Wilder Savage's life, admiring him, waiting for him to notice her, the kind of girl that girls like Gregg were always sorry for. And yet she would be the luckiest girl in the world, because David Wilder Savage would cherish her, and he would care what happened to her no matter where he was. "I'll heat the milk," he said. He walked into the kitchen. The curtainless kitchen. Should she give him the curtains now? That would show him she was a gentle girl, the kind who sat at home night after night and hemmed those goddamned things. Gregg jumped to her feet and ran to her suitcase, spilling her clothes and shoes on to the floor in her hurry to get the curtains out from underneath.

  She walked into the kitchen with the curtains held behind her back. He had put two heavy porcelain mugs on the drainboard and a pot of milk was heating on top of the stove. "Surprise," Gregg said.

  She was holding the curtains out in front of her and he was look-

  ing at them with a pleased and sHghtly perplexed expression. "Let's put them up now," Gregg said.

  "Curtains?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, they're lovely, darling."

  "I made them."

  "Did you!"

  And suddenly she realized that he would have been just as pleased if she had given him a new record or a bottle of wine. The curtains had absolutely no extra symbolism to him, none at all, and they could not change her or what she meant to him any more than the fact that a monkey is taught to eat from a spoon can turn him into a baby. She folded the curtains carefully and put them on the kitchen table. "Well hang them up tomorrow," she said, keeping her voice steady and giving him a stiff smile.

  "It was sweet of you, darling, to go to all that trouble."

  "You don't know the half of how homey I am," she said lightly. She fled into the living room.

  The light of the fire was hot on her face, she felt it burning her eyelids. The little bottle of sleeping pills was ruddy in the firelight, its edge red. She could take them all, eat them up like aspirin, and curl up on this couch for good before he had even finished warming the milk. He would think she was asleep and he would not want to disturb her. He would put her mug of milk down quietly on the coffee table and bend to pick up the bottle of sleeping pills. Then he would notice for the first time that it was empty. He would be concerned, upset, he would shake her and call the hospital. All the way to the hospital in
the ambulance he would sit beside her as she had seen bereaved relatives sitting beside the sheet-covered hump in many an ambulance that shrieked past her in the street. He would be wondering what would happen if he lost her. He would know why she wanted to Idll herself. She would never have to tell him how unhappy she was again.

  There was a click as he set the mugs on the coffee table. "We can sleep all day," he said.

  It had been just a wild fantasy, the suicide. She knew she would never do it. People who really meant to kill themselves shot themselves through the head or jumped in front of trains, they did not take pills when they knew there was someone near at hand to make

  sure it was not too late. This pill bit was a woman's trick, a device of the lovelorn. It didn't take courage. Courage was to live. Gregg had the oddest feeling, as if someone had given her her life back again. It wasn't worth much, but it was her own life. If she wasn't going to die, at least she was going to live as she pleased, whatever that meant. She wondered whether she had ever done anything because she really wanted to, or only because she had to, like the suicide drawn irresistibly down the platform toward the train.

  Chapter 16

  In the early spring of that year, 1953, when the first hardy horseback riders appeared in Central Park and the first earnest, shivering, undershirted runners began trotting around the reservoir in the foggy mornings, Mary Agnes Russo began preparing for her wedding. Her conversation, which had formerly centered around office gossip, now centered on herself. If Caroline asked, "How are you today?" she would say, "I picked out the menu for my wedding dinner. We're going to have fruit cup, soup, chicken, peas, potatoes lyonnaise, salad, little rolls, ice cream and wedding cake. And a bottle of liquor on each table." Major items, like the fact that she had gone for a fitting on her wedding dress, needed no introduction. The only thing she kept a secret from the other girls in the oflBce was her wedding invitations, because her friends were going to receive them, and Mary Agnes wanted them to be a surprise. Caroline couldn't help wondering what could be so different about a printed wedding invitation, but knowing Mary Agnes she was prepared for anything.