by Rona Jaffe
been going together because I feel it's a bond. Now you stop talking like that . . . please, darling."
"I mean it," he said. He came out of the dressing room straightening the points of his pocket handkerchief.
"You'd start going out with another girl?"
"As many of them as I can find." He sounded actually pleased with the sound of the idea. "Then none of them can say I wasted her time for a year."
"And what about me?" April asked in a small, frightened voice.
"I've invited you to dinner tonight. I'm still available.
"And . . . tomorrow?"
"You'd better make a date with somebody else."
Afterward, when she was alone in her apartment, April remembered every word. Everything Dexter had said to her returned, relentlessly; and her own answers, which seemed so logical and intelligent and loving, and which he had not seemed to understand at all. They had had dinner, or at least they had sat opposite each other while Dexter ate and she fought back the tears and pushed the food around on her plate. She couldn't even drink a cocktail and get drunk, nothing would pass her throat. She had kept her eyes fixed on his face, trying to understand him, to reach him, to find out why whatever they had had together had shattered so suddenly and terribly, beyond repair. Whatever she saw on that face bewildered her. It was closed off from her, under that mask of poise Dexter had perfected through years of the proper schools and the proper older acquaintances and countless introductions to strangers. He could not completely control his voice, so that the charm and smoothness did not quite extend to his tone. She could tell when he spoke that he was uncomfortable, although he insisted on keeping the conversation to inconsequential things. It was the longest and worst meal April had ever sat through in her life, and yet it was also the shortest, because Dexter had made it perfectly clear that he would not see her again.
"I think it's easier this way," he said. "A clean break. Then we won't drag it out and keep squabbling. I want to break it off here."
"Please . . ." April said, "wait until after Thanksgiving. Please. I can't bear to spend a big holiday alone. I'll go home for Christmas, but Thanksgiving . . ."
"That's two months!" he said indignantly.
"That's not so long."
"No," Dexter said. "Now."
She could not face the office the next day, she called in and said she was sick. That was not untrue; she was sick. When she looked at her face in the mirror she looked like someone who had been drowned and beaten and kept awake for four nights. Her skin was pale white with reddish blotches, her eyes were red rimmed from crying and her lips bore purple tooth marks where she had bitten them. Her throat felt raw. She could not lie on her bed because then the thoughts came pouring in, so she paced the floor, still dressed in the dress she had worn for cocktails and dinner the night before. At eleven o'clock she called Dexter at his office.
"Who is calling, please?" his secretary asked,
"Miss April Morrison."
"I'm sorry, Miss Morrison, Mr. Key isn't here." She really did sound sorry, perhaps she knew. April called him at his apartment and let the phone ring ten times. She called him again at his office at twelve, and at three, and at four and four-thirty. Every time the secretary sounded sorrier. In between these calls April called him at home. There was never any answer. Then she knew at last why his secretary had sounded so sorry. Any sympathetic woman would feel badly when she was talking to another woman who was obviously terribly upset and she knew she had to tell a he.
Chapter 19
In the late fall Caroline Bender reaHzed that she had been going out with Paul Landis for a year. She did not feel sentimental, the way she would about an anniversary. She was only surprised that she had been seeing him for so long without feeling any differently toward him, except perhaps more at ease, as one always is with an old friend. She had never gone out with a boy steadily for such a long period of time except for Eddie, and she and Eddie had been
in love. It's a mark of endurance, Caroline thought, rather pleased with herself—but whose endurance, I wonder?
She mentioned their anniversary to Paul the next night at dinner. He seemed much more moved than she had been. "This calls for a celebration!" he said, looking happy and excited, and promptly ordered a bottle of the best champagne.
Drinking her champagne and looking at Paul thoughtfully over the rim of her wide glass, Caroline couldn't help thinking, He'll never forget his wife's birthday or their anniversary. It was a comforting feeling. And yet, it hurt a little, because she felt she could never bring herself to love Paul enough to marry him, and so she would miss out on a lifetime of thoughtful little gestures. She was realizing already as she came to the end of her second year in New York that thoughtfulness like this was hard to find. There were men like Dexter Key, whom she hated for what he had done to April, all good looks and charm and loving himself so much that he didn't even bother to be subtle about it. There were the dozens of utterly mismatched blind dates she had been inflicted with in the past two years, a sentence at hard labor starting with the words (usually uttered by some nice older woman who hardly knew her or the boy) "I know a nice young man for you to meet." These amateur matchmakers seemed to think that the mere fact that Caroline wore a skirt and the man wore pants was enough to make them want to hurl themselves into each other's arms. And there was the majority, the so-so dates, the young men who didn't particularly care about her or she about them, but who continued to call her once in a while for dinner or drinks because they too were marking time. It was nice, in the face of all this, to be with someone like Paul, who really cared about her, and she had known girls who had married men like Paul for that very reason and because they wanted so badly to be married.
More and more lately, during these dreary months, she had found herself thinking of two things. One of them was Eddie. If I had married Eddie, she kept thinking, I would be happy today. I wouldn't be putting up with any of this. But then the other thought came in: I wouldn't have this wonderful job either. Caroline knew in her heart that if she had the choice today she would still throw away her job in a minute for life as Eddie's wife. Or she could continue to work for a few years. Eddie would be proud of her, he would like
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her to work if it was what she wanted. Paul would too, she supposed, but he was always so wrapped up in his own work and his legal cases that he seemed to feel her work was a little game, especially since he had glanced through two or three of the Derby books and had stated flatly that they were for idiots.
"We have to go somewhere special tonight," Paul was saying, "since it's our anniversary. It's too late to get theater tickets. Why didn't you tell me before?"
I didn't think it was that important, she wanted to say, but instead she smiled and shrugged. "I'd just as soon go to the movies, Paul, really."
"Nonsense. We'll go to the Blue Angel."
She sat in the dark club watching the show, her hand in Paul's. She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the oflBce on time, to a date on time, a scrap of cheese and some caimed orange juice in the icebox, perhaps a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except on weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and suflBcient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory.
The apartment that had once seemed so exciting now seemed too small to Caroline. The walls seemed to be closing in. She longed for a separate living room and bedroom so that she and Gregg could each have some privacy. But she wasn't ready yet to live all alone, becaus
e she couldn't afford alone the kind of apartment she liked, and because there were lonely times when she was glad for a roommate to confide in. And also, with Paul it was safer. He would never be the kind of man who would try to sleep with her unless she herself first made it clear that she did that sort of thing, but after a year he was getting to the point where sex with Caroline was something very emotional to him, and she tried to avoid that as well as she could. It was easier lately to lie and say, Gregg has company tonight and I think they'd like to be alone, or, Gregg went to sleep early
tonight, and thus keep tlieir physical contact confined to a brief kissing session in the hall. Paul lived with his parents, and so he had no bachelor lair to lure her to. It was strange, Caroline thought, rather amused, he was so conventional about planning every step of their evening to conform to gracious living that he still, at twenty-six, had the conventional attitude that one necks at the end of the evening. No cocktail hour embraces for him, no ride to the beach on a summer day and a feverish sprawl behind a lonely dune. You kissed the girl in her apartment after you had wined and dined her. It was rather like a bargain. And by its very regularity and predictability his love-making had lost all its attraction for her and almost seemed an obligation.
She liked him, she really liked him, and she wanted to be good to him. But what could she give to him? Her company, of course, was the first answer, but her twice-a-week company was both a satisfaction and a frustration to him. She knew he would rather see her this way than lose her, that he took out many other girls and had not fallen in love with any of them. She and Paul had all the outward ease with each other of old friends but very little of the communication. True, when she told him of Miss Farrow's latest harassment she never had to stop to tell him who Miss Farrow was, and he was always sympathetic. He knew Caroline's likes and dislikes to the point where he could order for her in restaurants, and he often said, "Oh, you don't want the duck, do you? You had that last week." But these elements in their relationship were more important to Paul than to her. A waiter who knew her well could tell her she'd had the duck last week. But no one but a man she could love could look into her heart and know what she was thinking and show it by his answer to something she had said.
So what then could she give him? Love? Sex? Perhaps some other men would think she was a bitch, she thought, for keeping their relationship on such a semi-pristine plane for so long. And perhaps others would think she was just the kind of innocent virgin girl they had been looking for. Whatever Paul thought about it was a mystery to her. He kept his feelings well hidden. Or, perhaps, Caroline was guiltily beginning to realize, his feelings had been there all along, in his eyes, but she had deliberately kept herself from seeing them.
When the show was over Paul paid the check and they walked for
afeveral blocks in the autumn night air that was just beginning to turn chilly.
"Are you cold?" he asked, peering at her in the dark. "You look cold."
"No, I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
For some reason, tonight his solicitude annoyed her. Was it because he really was clucking over her too much or because she disliked herself for not feeling more grateful? If she had loved him, how happy she would have been that he cared if she was chilly or notl This way her only thought was: I can take care of myself. It was the first time she had felt that way, independent, withdrawn. In her mind's eye there floated the image of a manuscript she had left half read on her desk at five o'clock when she left to meet Paul. It had been an engrossing novel and right now she wished with all her heart that she could know what was going to happen next in it. She should have taken it witli her, then she could have curled up in bed and read the rest of it before she went to sleep.
"I can give you my coat," Paul said, "if you're cold; or we can take a taxi."
"Let's take a taxi," she said. A taxi would be much quicker than walking, and soon she would be home. She was suddenly so depressed she could hardly talk.
She paused at tlie doorway with her key in the lock. "May I come in for a minute?" Paul asked.
She didn't care. Let him come in, let him go home, what did it matter? Depression was like a companion, she could almost talk to it. Paul hadn't gotten past the front door in over a month so now that too was becoming a pattern. In the past few montlis her whole life had become a pattern, predictable, the same.
"Come on in," she said.
She turned on the lights, and Paul helped her oflF with her coat and hung it in the closet. "Would you like a drink?" she asked.
"Yes," Paul said, quite pleased. "Scotch and soda, if you have it. And make it light, I've had enough tonight already."
I must have too, Caroline thought; I feel so tired. She rummaged about in the kitchen. "I'm sorry, we're out of soda. Will water do?"
"Fine." Paul settled himself on one of the studio couches and
lighted a cigarette. He reached over to the bedside radio and turned it on, moving the dial until he found a program of continuous classical music. She could tell he was digging in for a good long stay, and the knowledge made her feel even more depressed. She didn't want to make pleasant conversation and then allow herself to be kissed for fifteen minutes. She wanted to send him away and turn out the lights and get into bed with her head under the pillow and cry.
She didn't know why she did it, but she made him a very strong drink. The glass was halfway filled with Scotch and three ice cubes before she put the water in. It looked good so she made the same for herself and carried both into the room and sat beside Paul on the studio couch. "Cheers."
"Cheers," he repeated. And then, "Ouch!"
"Too strong?"
"It's all right," he said. "But I'll have to teach you how to make a drink."
"You always know how to do the right thing," she mused. "Don't you?"
"I can make a better drink than you can," he said happily. He was in a very good mood tonight, the exact opposite of her own. He reached out and ruffled her hair. "Come sit nearer to me, I feel lonesome."
Instead Caroline moved farther away. "I feel lonesome too," she said. She tried to keep herself from sounding melodramatic, but the very utterance of the words made her lonelier than ever.
"Then come sit over here."
She was sitting on the very edge of the studio couch, her hands clasped together on her knees. She shook her head. "Talk to me."
"All right."
She couldn't help smiling at that. "At least you didn't say 'What about?' Most people say 'What about?' when you ask them to talk to you."
"You have to give me credit for being more original than that," Paul said.
"Do you ever get depressed?"
"Sometimes."
"And what do you do about it?"
He shrugged and took a sip at his caramel-colored drink. "I just
go to sleep if I can. I only get depressed when I'm overtired from working too hard."
"You know," Caroline said, "sometimes when Gregg comes in late I'm still awake and we sit up and drink milk and talk and talk and talk. I get a mental image of the clock and it's made out of butter and the hands just fall around it like knives. One minute it's two o'clock in the morning and the next time I look it's four-thirty."
"She must be an interesting person."
"Oh, she has a wonderful sense of humor, but it's not that. We're both very serious at three o'clock in the morning. We talk mostly about ourselves and—believe it or not—life."
"And what do you two discover about life in the middle of the night?"
"Nothing," Caroline said. "That's the trouble."
"Do you mind if I tell you something about yourself?" Paul asked.
"Not at all."
"You take everything much too seriously."
"I do?"
He had finished most of his drink and his diction was not quite as clear and precise as it usually was. "What the hell have you got to be so serious about? Where is it all going to lead you? It's one
thing to enjoy your job, every girl should have something to do until she's married, but you live with it every minute of the day. You take work home, you worry about oflBce politics, you let Miss Farrow get you down. If you ask me, I think you'd like to have her job eventually."
"I would," Caroline admitted.
"For what? So that you can be just like her? A crabby bitch? The shadow of mine enemy."
Caroline smiled. "Do you think I show signs of all that?"
"You're much too ambitious, and the worst of it is, you're fighting with windmills. If you had talent as an opera singer or perhaps a painter or an astrophysicist or something like that, then I'd say it was unavoidable. An artist or a genius can't help doing what he does. But you're knocking yourself out for that third-rate little publishing company."
"It's hardly little," Caroline said, hurt.
"Do you honestly think you're doing a job that some other girl couldn't step in and do just as well five minutes after you've left?"
"As long as we're being nasty tonight," Caroline said, "you're
hardly Clarence Darrow. But that doesn't prevent you from living with your job twenty-four hours a day and talking about it whenever you're not in the office or bent over some work at home. There are boys in law school right this minute preparing to take the bar exams, perhaps to take away your potential clients a year or two from now."
"That's different," Paul said.
"Why is it difiFerent?"
"This is my career. It's an integral part of my life. What am I going to do if I don't do this? Starve or become a playboy, depending on my economic situation. Neither prospect appeals to me at all."
"It's exactly the same with me," Caroline said indignantly. "What am I going to do? Sit home in Port Blair and polish my nails and wait for a husband? This isn't the nineteen-hundreds. A girl has to do something."
"You could get married if you wanted to," Paul said.
She sipped at her drink with intense concentration, trying not to say the wrong thing. It was easy enough for him to say that; she seemed popular, there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing except that there was no one she loved.
