The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  They finished dinner at eleven o'clock. Despite the fact that she had never before known anyone who could afford to take her to this restaurant, and she had always wanted to go, Barbara could hardly eat anything. The wine she had drunk during dinner and the after-dinner brandy made her feel rather odd, as if she knew she ought to be high and yet she wasn't. She had the feeling that everything she would say would be perfectly sensible and yet she had to be careful still because it might sound different to someone else.

  When the other couple were about to climb into a taxi the actress leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. "Barbara dear, I'm glad we met. You will send me a copy of your magazine, won't you?"

  "Of course." She stood there with Sidney as their taxi drove away. "Why do people always ask me to send them a copy of the magazine when they can buy it anywhere any time, for a quarter?" she asked him. "Not that I mind at all."

  "It's her way of keeping up with you. She liked you."

  "I liked her too."

  "I'm glad." He took her hand and she gave it only an instant's thought, it seemed so natural a gesture. "Those are two of my favor-

  ite people. I hardly see them, though, maybe six times a year. I hardly have time to see anybody I want to."

  "You're working nearly all the time, aren't you?"

  "Nearly. The stupid part is I don't really have to. You get in a rut, think you can stay at the office one more hour, do one more thing. Then you get tied up in something and you can't leave. Let's go someplace for a brandy."

  "All right."

  They walked down the street in the dark, hand in hand, and although Barbara had always disliked holding a boy's hand on the street because it looked so soupy and teen-agey, with Sidney it suddenly seemed as if it was the only thing to do. She didn't care who walked past and saw them. They strolled up Fifth Avenue looking into all the store windows. "I like that," he would say, or "I think that's awful, don't you?" and she would find herself agreeing with everything. They stopped in front of one garish display, shaking with laughter.

  "That's just what I need!"

  "I want a dozen!"

  It was trite, just as trite as holding hands in public, but with Sidney it was new. She remembered what he had said that night when he held her hand, that it was a braille the sighted had worked out to learn things they couldn't see. There were all sorts of signals, the first tentative relationship between a man and a woman was full of them. Even such a silly thing as midnight window-shopping was one of them. Barbara remembered all the dull first dates she had had with boys in which the entire evening was spent exchanging likes and dislikes: records, politics, books, places to dine. It had been so mechanical, so boring. And here, for no reason she could reasonably think of, every interest of Sidney's was fascinating to her. She wanted to find out everything he had ever liked and pour out to him everything that she had ever found important.

  They went to the Oak Bar at the Plaza for a drink and sat at a table in the comer. "You know," Barbara said, "more and more lately whenever I see people who have been married for a long time, whether happily or unhappily, I wonder, How did they meet? What makes tv/o people decide to stay together for the rest of their lives? It seems so long ago that I got married, and all for the wrong reasons, that I guess I'm looking for a formula in somebody else."

  "Somebody else's marriage is always a little of a mystery," Sidney said. "Isn't it? Especially if they're happy. You wonder how they did it. You wonder what they have that you never managed to have. I think about it too."

  She looked at him in the dim light. "Maybe this is none of my business, and tell me so if it isn't. You're unhappy, aren't you?"

  "I guess so, if I stop to think about it. That's why I don't think about it."

  Something inside her moved, painfully. "Then it is none of my business."

  He covered her hand, on the table, with his. "I'll tell you anything you want to know."

  "I never ask anybody personal things. I don't know why I asked you. I'm a little high, as usual, I guess. You've never really seen me at my best."

  "If we don't ask each other personal things how will we get to know each other? We don't have much time."

  "We don't ... do we?" It hit her then, the futility of it, the haste and the artificiality. They didn't have much time because each of them had his own life, Sidney at least had, although hers was far from full. And soon his wife and son would be coming back, although she was sure that hadn't been what he meant at all. Haste, haste, a quick romance, a few dinners, a few more drinks, a few evenings in bed. What could they oflfer each other that was lasting, that would not die of its own helplessness? Of course they had to hurry, because the ending would be upon them before they knew it, and the beginning was so full of doubts, and the only part that mattered was the high point in between. Whatever had moved inside her moved again, until it filled her chest, and Barbara turned her head away, looking at a mural on the wall.

  "I shouldn't have said that," Sidney said. "It was a stupid thing to say."

  She turned to look at him. "What?"

  "We have all the time we want. You know that, don't you?"

  "Yes."

  For the first time she felt relaxed, calmed, and a real warmth came over her. He was not like other men, she knew that now. And she wanted to see him. She no longer felt as if it were a battle of wits, she could really be herself. He had taken the tension out of

  their relationship constantly all evening by the little things he did and said, and now by this final promise. "Tell me," she said, leaning forward, 'Tiow you met your wife."

  "At a party in Greenwich Village when we were both twenty-four. It doesn't sound like me now, does it? She was a ballet dancer, or at least she was taking ballet lessons three hours a day, and I was working in an advertising agency. During the day I wore a gray flannel suit and at night and on the weekends I used to hang around the Village with a group of guys I'd met when I first came to New York."

  "From where?"

  "Lebanon, Pennsylvania. They were from all over the place. There was one who wrote for little magazines, and one who painted terrible pictures and never washed the paint oflF his arms, and one who played the guitar. There's always somebody who plays the guitar. It was two years before tlie war broke out in Europe and we were all very nervous and full of ideals and we used to talk each other to death. I guess all over the Village there were other groups of kids who thought they were going to be the Thomas Wolfes and Picassos of tomorrow, just like us. Anyway, I met this lovely, graceful girl and took her home from the party. She was living alone in a drend-ful little cold-water flat, but it was summer and we both thought the place was beautiful. I never left. We were each of us lonely without admitting it, and we thought we were being very Bohemian. When we decided to get married we went to Cartier's in blue jeans on a Saturday afternoon to pick out the ring. I remember wondering what would happen if anyone from my office saw us."

  "It doesn't sound like you at all," Barbara said. "I can hardly picture it."

  "Well after a while all the guys I knew got married, one by one, and became respectable. We were becoming pretty respectable ourselves. After my wife had our baby she gave up ballet for good and we decided to move to the country. That was probably the worst idea we ever had. As a matter of fact, it was my idea, I had to talk her into it. Some of my friends, the newly respectable, were moving to Westchester. So we went too, and after a year I was all ready to move back but she liked it. We stayed, and finally we bought the house where we are now. The trouble is, it was such a long trip from the city and I had to work so late some nights that we really only

  saw each other on weekends. I had one set of friends in the city and she had another in the tall-grass Upper Bohemia. It took us ten years to discover that we hardly knew each other any more."

  "Why didn't you move back to the city then," Barbara asked, "before it was too late?"

  "If I had been sure it was the country that was to blame I would have insisted on
it. But I was never quite sure. That's what I keep asking myself. I wish I really knew, I'd feel better then."

  "They say people outgrow each other," Barbara said. "That was a bitchy thing to say, wasn't it! If anyone had said that to my husband while I was married to him and I knew about it . . ."

  "It wasn't bitchy. I know how you meant it. Look, Barbara, you can say something in malice and it means one thing, and you can say it because you're a sympathetic thinking human being and it means quite another."

  "You keep giving me credit," she murmured.

  "Why? Do you picture yourself the homewrecker? Do you think this is a very dramatic situation?" His smile took the edge oflF his words. He could smile at me that way, she thought, and call me anything he wanted and I think I'd take it.

  "I can't say I'm not sorry you're married," she admitted.

  "There are a lot of other things wrong with me," he said, smiling. "Just pretend the main obstacle to our romance is that I'm too old— which is to be considered, by the way—and you'll feel better."

  "I know . . . it's silly. I go out with lots of boys I know I could never marry, but that's because I don't want them or they don't want me. But when I know that even if you and I for some utterly cra2y reason decided to fall in love I couldn't have you, then it scares me."

  "Trust me. You won't fall in love with me."

  "That's a dangerous thing to say to a girl," Barbara said lightly.

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. It just makes the wheels start to whir. The only thing more dangerous is to say, 7 won't ever fall in love with you.'"

  He didn't answer for a while. "Then I won't say it," he said finally. "But not for that reason."

  "There's one thing I know," Barbara said. "Married men don't divorce their wives for other women. They divorce their wives because they don't want to be with the wives any more. I'm not talking about old fools or lechers or neurotics, I mean the kind of mar-

  ried man a girl like me might fall for. A man like you. I'm right, aren't I?"

  "Yes."

  "Well. Now that we've got that settled, let's change the subject."

  He looked at her carefully. "You are extraordinary."

  "No, you are."

  "I?"

  "Because you're so honest," Barbara said.

  There was nothing more to be said for a moment and they sat together, shoulders touching, finishing their brandy. He was no longer holding her hand, and the pressure of his shoulder against hers was very light, a mere transmission of body heat, but Barbara was extremely aware of him. She should feel sad, she should feel fated for disappointment and perhaps worse, but she felt only contentment. She liked him so much, she was so fond of him, that merely sitting next to him without words made her feel as though she could face anything: the garter snappers, the boys who "only wanted to neck" with her, the search for someone compatible whom she could love. She knew that, after their long separation, she again was dangerously close to being in love with Sidney Carter, but this time it was not a childish crush and she felt she could handle it. To fall desperately in love with him, to spoil this warmth she felt and turn it into the cold chills of an emotional problem, would be idiocy. She had been forewarned. But she knew that, despite their best intentions, people reached a point beyond which they could not return but could only hope for a safe landing.

  He paid the check and they walked slowly out of the bar and through the hotel lobby. Sidney stopped at the newsstand and bought a copy of each of the morning newspapers for himself and one of each for her. "I'll never have time to read them all," Barbara said. "Do you, before you go to sleep?"

  "Every night."

  "I'm glad I'm not an executive!"

  He laughed. "It's a train habit. You have to do something when you commute, and I don't play cards. Now that I'm not commuting for the summer I can't seem to get out of the habit so I read the papers in my room."

  "You're ... in the city?"

  "I'm staying at a hotel. It's only four nights a week, and I hate going up to that old bam alone."

  Why did it frighten her a little to learn that he was staying by himself so near by? Was it because she expected him to lure her upstairs and seduce her? Or because she wanted him to? I'm a veteran of attempted seductions, Barbara told herself, and I haven't been trapped yet. It's up to the girl. "It's pretty late," she said. "I'd better go home now."

  "That's where I'm taking you."

  When the taxi arrived in front of her apartment, Sidney got out with her and walked up the steps. She opened the heavy front door with her key and kept on walking and he continued beside her. "It's a walk-up," she warned.

  He looked amused. "Am I invited?"

  "Of course, you're always invited."

  She felt a little ashamed of the stairwells and halls of her apartment house, because they looked so dingy compared to what she was sure he was used to, because they still smelled of cooking from the evening meal. He wasn't a boy of twenty-four any more, escorting a Bohemian ballet dancer home to her romantic cold-water flat. He was forty years old and he ate at Le Pavilion, and cabbage smelled like cabbage. As for her, she wasn't living here because she thought it was a lark, she lived here because it was the only thing her family could afford. An ugly image went through her mind: the poor young magazine assistant and the rich older executive. But when she unlocked the door to her apartment there was a lamp lighted softly on the end table next to the sofa and tlie only thing you could smell was the faint odor of baby talcum from the room she shared with Hillary. All the windows in tlie living room were wide open and there was the beginning of a cool night breeze. She switched on the overhead light.

  "Do you want a drink?"

  "I don't think so. I'm keeping you up." He was looking around. "Is that where your mother scuttles when she hears your key in the lock?"

  "Yes."

  He gestured toward the sofa. "And that's the scene of the many battles."

  She couldn't help smiling. "Yes."

  He walked over to the end table and looked at two pictures which were on it. "Who is this?"

  "My father."

  "And this is your littie girl. She's pretty."

  "She's prettier now."

  He picked up his newspapers and put them under one arm. "I'm going now. I just wanted to spy a little." He walked to the door, and Barbara followed him. At the door he stopped and looked down at her. 'Thank you for a wonderful evening."

  "Thank you"

  "Could you have dinner with me on Thursday?"

  "Yes," she said softly.

  They stood there looking at each other, he holding his armful of newspapers, she witli one hand almost reaching the knob of the door to open it. Neither of them moved. Barbara felt as if she were paralyzed.

  "Look," Sidney said, "this is silly." With a swift gestmre he deposited the newspapers on a chair and put his arms around her. With one hand reaching out in back of her he switched oflF the overhead light. She could have stepped back and he would have released her but she could no more bring herself to do it than she could have hurled herself down the stairwell. When he kissed her she had an instant of detached resistance, a second when she said to herself, This is more silly . . . But then she had the oddest sensation, as if for the first time she was aware of every vein and artery in her body because warmth and blood were coursing through them, and the feeling she had fought off when every boy kissed her overpowered her and was finally welcome. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back, recognizing her own desire as if it were a stranger because it had been such a long time, and as an old friend because it made her so happy.

  He was the one who drew away first. He looked down at her affectionately and grinned, with that glint in his eye she had seen the first night she had met him. "Hell," he said, "don't worry. I don't want to neck with you. I just want to sleep with you."

  He picked up his newspapers, opened the door, and was gone, blowing her a kiss. "Call you tomorrow."

  She stood ther
e in her doorway, looking after him, touching her

  lips with the fingers of one hand, wondering for the first time how they had felt to someone else.

  That night she fell asleep immediately and slept dreamlessly, and when her alarm went off in the morning she was not tired because she was so anxious to get to the office where Sidney might call her. The day that stretched ahead seemed pleasant, everything that was going to happen to her was going to be good. For the first time in over two years she had something to look forward to. Knowing that Sidney would call her, and that she would see him the next evening, made even the smallest most boring bits of office routine take on new dimension. She loved her job, she loved walking to work in the early morning before the sun made the streets begin to sizzle, today she loved her reflection in the plate-glass window in front of the delicatessen near her apartment house. How jaunty that girl looked, the girl Sidney Carter liked and found interesting.

  He called her at three o'clock. Barbara had closed the blinds of her office against the glaring afternoon sun, and it was dim and cool in her little cubicle, shut away from the rest of the offices and their noises, with something of the drowsy and luxurious feeling of being in bed in the middle of the afternoon. When she heard his voice on the telephone it completed the feeling and she wondered why she had never before realized that tliree o'clock in the afternoon would be the best time of the entire day or night for making love.