The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  "What are you doing?" he asked her.

  "Just sitting here. I'm going to try to write some copy in a few minutes. It seemed too soon after lunch to grapple with the problems of teen-age acne."

  He laughed. "I have four people waiting outside my office to see me but I wanted to talk to you first."

  They were both busy, they both had responsibilities, and yet for this instant everything else was shut out. "I'm glad you called," she said.

  "So am I. . . ."

  ''What time will I see you tomorrow?"

  "Five o'clock outside your office."

  She could see him there already, in her mind, and she was filled with happiness and excitement. "I have to go now," he said. "I only wanted to speak to you for a minute."

  "Go and work."

  "You too. . . ."

  She hung up the receiver and sat for a moment motionless, remembering their conversation, not so much his w^ords as the tone in which they had been spoken. Fondness had been in it, genuine fondness. A busy man in the middle of the working day had stopped to say a few meaningless things on the telephone because he wanted to; the day stopped for a moment and went on. It was that pause that made all the rest worthwhile. Barbara had the feeling that it had meant as much to him as it had to her. It wasn't hard now to turn around on her swivel chair and pound at her typewriter. "A new powder base for teen-age problem skin . . ." Poor teen-agers, they wanted to be admired too, inferiority complexes and pimples and all—didn't everybody?

  On Thursday afternoon there was a quick thunderstorm that vanished after fifteen minutes and left the streets wet and cooled with rain. Barbara came out of her office in a new red linen dress she had bought at the beginning of the summer and had never yet had the interest to wear. She had drenched herself in Wonderful perfume, half as a joke because it was one of Sidney's accounts and half because she really liked it. She had washed her hair the night before, the sky was dazzlingly blue, the afternoon was cool enough so that she would not wilt before they got into an air-conditioned bar, and her heart was pounding. When Sidney came up to her and took her arm to lead her to a taxi she had the feeling that all this had happened to the two of them not just once but many many times before.

  "What a beautiful dress."

  "It's new."

  In the taxi he sat again facing her, but not as far away as the last time. She was so glad to see him, she felt so at ease with him. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

  "I was wishing that everybody could meet for the first time on a second date, like this, and never have the mistrust and misunderstandings people often have in the begirming—the way we almost had when we first went out for cocktails, remember? And then I was thinking that if we had started off on our second date I would have missed all the fun we had together Tuesday."

  "You should have said yes when I asked you last Christmas. We could have had months together."

  "I know," Barbara said. "But I was different then."

  "Different? How?"

  She grinned at him. "Smarter, maybe."

  "Busier, maybe."

  "You always turn everything into a comphment."

  He took her to a bar far over on the East Side where they sat in a little enclosed garden with a striped awning overhead and clean gi-ay pebbles underfoot. It had white metal chairs and small round white metal tables. Everyone there looked very Madison Avenue, three men in earnest conversation, a girl with a poodle leashed to the leg of her chair, a young couple on a date looking stiff and self-conscious. The young man wore a red-and-blue-striped tie and a seersucker suit, his blond hair was cut very short and it made his neck look like raw veal. The girl looked as if she had just come from her office, because she was not very dressed up but there was something chic and businesslike about her. She was evidently trying hard to keep up a drowning conversation.

  "Look there," Barbara said. "That used to be me."

  "Do you know him?"

  "No. But I can tell you some things about him. He works on Madison Avenue or perhaps on Wall Street and he's been out with her before, but not frequently."

  "It looks to me like a bUnd date," Sidney said, "and not a very successful one."

  "No. He wouldn't take her to such an expensive place if it were a blind date. After all, he might not have liked her."

  "What a formula you have!" he said, amused. "Tell me more, but first have a Martini."

  He ordered drinks, and Barbara looked more closely at the couple in the corner, which was not too easy as they were far away. But the tables between were still empty because it was early. "She's doing all the talking, what little there is, but that isn't necessarily because she likes him. She looks as if she thinks it's her duty. And he evidently does too, because he isn't trying at all."

  "Sounds like misery for all concerned," Sidney said.

  "That's a nice dress but it's very inexpensive. Twelve ninety-five, I'd say. I think she's a secretary, she looks like one."

  Barbara sipped at her Martini. The glass was frosted and the drink was very cold and hot at the same time. "Look how fast they

  finished their drinks," she said. "Two while we were waiting for our first. I know just how she feels, I've done that myself on occasion."

  "Well, why did she go out with him?"

  "I bet she shares an apartment with two other girls and she wants to get away from them. She isn't wearing any stockings, they've probably borrowed them all."

  Sidney squinted. "She has nice legs. That's probably one of the reasons he's out with her."

  "What are the others?"

  "You tell me."

  "No," Barbara said, "you tell me. You're speaking for the men."

  "He looks so bored right now I'd say he just wants to get her in the hay."

  "Poor girl. But she'U be married to someone by next year, they always are."

  "Not to him." No, sir.

  Sidney laughed. "I feel sorry for him. You have no sympathy."

  "I know," she said, laughing too, "I'm a beast. And I feel so superior just now because I'm having such a good time and I remember all the times I didn't."

  "That's the price one pays for the eventual happy ending. Surely your mother must have told you that."

  "She has. But I'm still waiting."

  The couple across the room in the corner stood up. The man held the girl's chair for her as she gathered up her purse and gloves. Sidney nudged Barbara's knee under the table with his. "Your friends are going."

  "Shh."

  They were crossing the room now, passing directly in front of the table where Barbara and Sidney were sitting. Barbara looked up at them curiously. They were so close she caught a whiff of smoke from the young man's lighted cigarette. The hand he was holding it in bore a thin gold wedding band. Barbara turned, with a little shock of surprise, to look at the girl's fingers. She, too, wore a thin gold band, so narrow it had been invisible from across the room.

  "They're married!"

  She looked at Sidney and he looked at her and they smiled at

  each other with surprise and amusement. "But they looked so miserable!" she said.

  His smile faded a httle, but enough so that Barbara noticed it. "Yes," he said.

  "I am dumb," she said softly. "I even forgot about how I used to look. People get so tied up in their own grudges and problems they forget about other people."

  "It was fun," he said. He looked almost as contented as he had before, the moment of revelation had been only a flash. He is unhappy, she thought, I know he is. And although she hated to know that anything made him suffer, Barbara had to admit to herself with a perverse little stab of pleasure that she was rather glad. It meant he was more accessible, it meant . . . Oh, I am a fool, she thought. This kind of thinking is the oldest trap in the world.

  At eight o'clock they left the bar and walked to a restaurant for dinner. It was sunset and the sky was streaked with deep colors. The streets were deserted and quiet because it was the dinner hour of a summer night and everyone wh
o could go was either in the coun-tiy or in an air-conditioned room. Without the crowds and traflBc the streets looked unusually wide. The whole evening stretched out in front of them, like a vacation. No one knew where they were and no one cared, and they were together. I wish life could always be like this minute, Barbara thought. When Sidney held open the door of the restaurant for her a blast of artificially cold air hit them and there was the sound of music and voices. It was a brightly lighted restaurant with murals on the walls and fresh flowers on the tables and a menu a yard long written in undecipherable French handwriting. There were carts of elaborate pastries lined up along one wall, covered with tarts and cakes with swirls of whipped cream. Barbara had never felt less hungry in her life. She looked around the room. How bright it was, how gay, and how insensitive those people seemed gobbling their food and howling with laughter.

  "Two, sir?" the headwaiter asked, flourishing a menu. Sidney looked down at Barbara. "We'll have a drink at the bar first," he said abruptly.

  They sat at the bar on high slippery red leather chairs. Barbara looked into her Martini. "You'll think I'm crazy," she said, "but I don't want to stay here. Do you mind?"

  He was already standing. "Let's go."

  Out on the street again in the soft purple early darkness she felt better. "It was just that it was so . . ."

  "Bright and noisy and not for us," Sidney said. "The minute we walked in I knew this wasn't a night for L'Oiseau's."

  "Can we walk for a while?"

  He took her arm protectively and they walked down the street to nowhere in particular. "Are you hungry?" he asked.

  "No. Are you?"

  He shook his head.

  They walked east, toward the river. Every now and then as they passed a restaurant or a bar people would come walking out in close groups, laughing and talking and looking slightly drunk and very well fed. Of course, Barbara thought, it's Thursday, the maid's night out. Other people's customs, other people's households, seemed very far away. She felt curiously detached. She was a little high from the Martinis but not in the least drunk, her lips were not numb and she could see everything clearly. The landscape changed, from oflBce buildings and stores and restaurants to dingy apartment houses and then finally to the large luxurious new buildings near the water, sitting side by side with tenements that were waiting to be torn down. There was a sidewalk and a railing and some benches, and beyond that the slowly moving black water and the lights of the shore on the other side. They leaned on the railing, side by side, and Sidney lighted a cigarette for himself and one for her.

  "It's funny," Barbara said. "I live in New York and I've never been here before."

  "I haven't been here in years."

  She turned around with her back to the railing and her elbows leaning on it and looked up at the lights in the apartment buildings. Up there, on what seemed to be the twentieth floor, there was a terrace with people moving about on it. They were only black specks. She was happier with Sidney Carter than she had ever been in her life, and yet she felt nervous and dissatisfied, as if there were another person inside her skin that was trying to burst out. She wanted to run and run down the street along the river and never stop, or leap into the water and swim to the other side, or throw her arms around Sidney's neck and tell him never to let her go. But she did none of these things, she merely turned around again and tossed her cigarette into tiae water.

  "Do you want to go to hear some jazz?" he asked.

  "Do you?"

  "No."

  He lighted another cigarette for her and they were silent, looking out at the river, not touching. "I don't know what's wrong with me," she said. "I'm so nervous." He tossed his cigarette into the water and she watched it arc, the tiny red glowing tip. It seemed very important to watch it, to keep track of it, to concentrate on it instead of the vague and disturbing feelings that were making her teeth begin to chatter even though it was a warm night. He moved to her then and put his arms around her, not demandingly but protectively, and Barbara put her face against his lapel. She could feel his heart beating very hard against her cheek, but he did not move or speak for a long time and neither did she.

  She stirred only to put her arms around his waist. Inside she wanted to cry and laugh at once, but outside she felt incapable of speaking a word. She was aware that she was shivering.

  "We can't stand here all night," he said gently.

  "No."

  But neither of them moved. "I didn't think it would be like this," he said at last.

  "Is it 'like this'?"

  "Is it, for you?"

  ". . . Yes."

  She looked up at him then and he lowered his head and kissed her. She had never kissed anyone the way she was kissing him, she realized, as if she wanted to draw all his breath into her body because without it she would choke. His arms were around her so tightly they hurt her ribs but she didn't mind, the discomfort was at the back of her mind, it was a pain that was a part of pleasure. He took a step to the side and they sank down on to a bench, arms still tightly wound around each other, mouths still together. She heard herself breatliing, or was it he? There seemed to be no difference between breath and breath. He was kissing her neck and her throat and her ear, and then he drew away a little and looked at her. Their faces were only a few inches apart and she saw his lips move before he began to speak, as if he could hardly speak at all.

  "We'll be picked up for vagrants," he murmured.

  "Oh . . ."

  "Come with me."

  "Yes."

  They were running then, hand in hand, across the street and through the empty canyons between the dark buildings, like children, their footsteps echoing in the summer night. The sky was a very dark blue-black, streaked with white clouds and stabbed with stars, a display of nighttime pyrotechnics. A doorman standing on the sidewalk in front of a huge whitish building looked at them cm-iously as they ran past. There was a taxi cruising along First Avenue. Sidney waved at it and it stopped and they cHmbed in and sat very close together, each holding both the other's hands tightly as the taxi rocketed across town to his hotel. Barbara was afraid to think, she held his hands against her pounding heart and closed her eyes. When they walked through the brightly hghted lobby of his hotel she kept her head down and her eyes closed, shutting out re-ahty, letting him lead her, and briefly aware that this carpeted lobby that was suddenly the scene of the most important and shortest and most dreamlike walk she had ever taken was the same ordinary place where she had waited many times for girls to meet her for lunch or boys to meet her for cocktails.

  He opened the door of his room with a key and turned on the hght. It was not a hotel room, it was an entire suite. There was a small balcony outside the hving-room window and long white curtains covered it, billowing slightly. There was a huge fireplace which looked as if it had never been used, and two sofas, and a coffee table littered with papers and mail. The combination of the cold impersonality of this hotel suite and Sidney's work tossed on the table filled Barbara with a kind of poignance. There was a bar set against one wall with some bottles and decanters on it. Sidney was moving about quickly, turning on a lamp, switching off the hall hght. The room was softly lighted, bluish with shadows. Barbara put her purse on a sofa and walked to the window, looking out, feeling the breeze against her face. There were millions of hghts out there, and the dark, hght-dotted area of the park. From behind her she heard the click of ice cubes being dropped into a glass. She turned and shook her head.

  Sidney put the bottle back on the bar, unopened, and stood there

  for a moment, his hand still around the neck of it, looking at her. "Will you do something for me?" he asked very quietly.

  Barbara nodded.

  "Stand there and hold out your arms."

  She did. He looked at her for an instant more and then walked to her very quickly and took her into his arms. "God," he murmured into her hair, "that's the most beautiful sight in the world."

  "It's the way I feel about you," Barb
ara said.

  There were twin beds separated by a night table. Sidney and Barbara were shedding their clothes all the way to the bedroom, leaving a trail, with that same breathless hurry that had made them run down the street to the cab. They stopped at the doorway to the bedroom, arms around each other, looking at those two ridiculous narrow beds and each of them beginning to smile at the same time. "Decisions," Sidney said, "notliing but decisions."

  "Oh, I love you."

  They fell on one of the beds and this time it was Barbara who reached out and turned off the light. There was enough light streaming in through the open doorway to the living room so that she could dimly see Sidney's profile as he leaned over her breast. Why had she never realized before what a beautiful face he had? It was a pleasure just to look at it. Oh, I love him, she thought, I love him, I do. Just knowing that she loved him was enough, even if she was not allowed to. She could feel. That was worth everything; feeling, caring, no matter what happened to make it end in emptiness, because having the capacity to love was so beautiful. She knew that she had never truly loved any man before in her life.

  She had never felt this physical pleasure before, to such a degree, and she realized it was love that made the difference. She had not been to bed with any man since her husband, and it had been two years, a long time, so that at first Sidney hurt her, but only for a second. Then she welcomed him. She had not known such skill existed, and yet she was not surprised because she had known that Sidney Carter would do everything well, she had never doubted it. The only thing that surprised her was her own reaction; she was suddenly a creature without shame, all made of sensations and motion without any consciousness of what was happening outside of herself and him. She heard herself screaming in her throat as at a great distance, and felt him very gently putting the corner of the pillow be-