The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  "May I come up?" he asked, but he was already halfway up the first flight of stairs and April did not even have to answer. They sang and laughed and hushed each other as they chmbed the stairs, and stopped on each landing to hug and kiss.

  "We look like two bears," April said, "with our coats on. I can't get my arms around you."

  "We'll soon remedy that."

  In the apartment she went directly to tlie bridge table, which was now a bar. "Look!" she cried, holding up a Scotch bottle. "It's empty. What happened to it?"

  Jeffrey thought for moment, seriously. "Somebody drank it," he said at last.

  "I know who!"

  "Who?"

  "Me! This afternoon." It seemed very funny and she laughed and laughed. "No," she said, "it was yesterday. Yesterday afternoon. When I thought I wouldn't have a date for New Year's Eve. Before you called. I was so depressed."

  "I'm glad I called," he said.

  "So am I."

  He took off his coat and dropped it on the floor and April did the same. He was a good-looking boy, she thought; not really her type because she liked dark men like Dexter, but good-looking anyway. This was only the third time she'd gone out with him and she had been as surprised as all get out when he'd called and asked for New Year's Eve. She wondered whether Chet had told him anything about the two of them, and at first she had worried about it, but Jeffrey hadn't been hard to handle. Chet had. It made her rather sick to her stomach to remember what she had done with Chet, and that was why she didn't see him any more. Now that she looked back at it she wondered what she had ever seen in Chet and how

  she could have done it. But she wasn't going to think about it any more. It was over.

  JeflFrey was looking around the room. April was glad she'd cleaned it up, her clothes were hung away in the closet and her bed was neatly put back into the wall. It looked a little like the Uving room of a three-room apartment, there was the kitchen, there were the two closed doors; why, he might even think she was rich. She hoped he did. Maybe he would think more highly of her than Dexter had, he wouldn't think she was a little hick. He thought she was simply a friend of Chet's and a former girl of Dexter Key's. Why, she could be anybody.

  "Now we're not bears," JefiFrey said. He advanced toward her with open arms.

  "There's still some gin," April said quickly.

  "I don't want gin."

  "I do."

  She poured the gin into a glass with an unsteady hand and ran away from him into the kitchenette to pull a tray of ice cubes out of her icebox and rip up the lever. The cubes rattled into the sink, and April snatched three of them and dropped them into her glass. The gin spattered up onto her di'ess.

  "Oh," he said, "you've messed your dress."

  He was trying to wipe off the dampness with her kitchen towel and put his arms around her at the same time, and April was trying to put the glass of gin up to her mouth. She managed finally and took a large swallow, fighting to keep it down. She'd never had straight gin before, but it wasn't bad, it was rather like a Martini. Jeffrey kept trying to kiss her and she kept turning her head and trying to get at the gin, and finally they compromised and she would let him kiss her and then he would let her take a swallow from her glass until the gin was all gone.

  "Ahh . . ." he murmured, "drop that damned glass." He took it from her hand and put it on the drainboard.

  "Who are you?"

  "Jeffrey."

  "Do you love me?"

  "I adore you."

  "Really?"

  "Yes." He was trying to unzip her dress.

  "I don't love you," April said.

  "You don't?"

  "No. I hate you." She didn't say it with animosity, she simply said it.

  "That's all right."

  "Is it?"

  "Yes," JeflFrey said. He kissed her. "It's all right."

  "Don't bite."

  "No."

  "I hate you," April said again, pleasantly. .,;iAll right."

  She was cold without her dress. "Ahhh ..." he sighed, and lifted her in his arms. It was like a scene from a love novel, April thought dizzily, the dashing hero lifting the heroine, carrying her to a satin-covered bed. Jeffrey turned his head, looking for the bed. There was none, nor was there a couch, but there was a door. He headed for it, carrying April in his arms, and when he was close enough to the door he reached out one hand and turned the knob and pulled it open. April closed her eyes, her arms wound tightly around his neck so that she would not fall. "Darling . . ." he murmured in her ear and pulled down the in-the-wall bed.

  He knew what that door was all along, April thought, he wasn't fooled at all. The only way he could have known was that Chet must have told him. She was so humiliated that she wanted to get right up out of bed, but it was too late; and so she kept her eyes closed tightly and summoned up the feeling the gin had given her, the feeling that it didn't really matter because life was so much fun, so much fun.

  Chapter 22

  Spring. Everything is softer, the air is soft with a reminder still of cold and promise of the warmth to come, the landscape is softened with new tiny pale-green leaves. Girls from offices on their lunch hours linger in the patch of spring sunshine that falls on the

  sidewalk in front of their building, they don't want to go back in, they'd rather walk in the park. Perhaps some of them do. They limch on hot dogs from a white wagon and stroll down paths between bushes of frothy yellow forsythia and feel their hearts fill with an indescribable feeling: happiness, hope, poignance, impatience. In Rockefeller Center workmen are setting up tables where the skating rink used to be, under the great statue of Prometheus, and in the park there is the sound of children's roller skates where there used to be the silent slip of blades. There is something very evocative about children roller-skating in the springtime, it seems to tie all the generations together in the stream of life. Some things never change. The typists on their lunch hours remember when they used to skate on the sidewalks in front of their houses, or in the park, like these children, and it seems such a short time ago. They remember the scraped knees, how it felt to fall, and the freedom of speed when they got up to try again, and the exciting, tooth-rattling feeling of metal wheels rushing over rough concrete. They are old enough now to have children of their own, and perhaps in a year or two or three they will. And some spring not so far away their own children will be swooping down the paths of the park on a Sunday afternoon, skating through the tunnels and calling out to hear the sounds of their own voices echoing back to them.

  Barbara Lemont's daughter Hillary was four years old that spring of 1954. She herself was twenty-two. One could never be quite sure if they were sisters or mother and daughter when she took Hillary walking in the park. They looked exactly alike, straight light-brown hair pulled back behind the ears, Hillary's in two pigtails, Barbara's in a barrette, small slight bodies, calm gentle faces. They both wore gray coats that spring, with white pearl buttons, and Hillary carried her first handbag, infinitesimal, made of imitation red patent leather, just large enough for her doll-size handkerchief and her toy lipstick.

  Barbara was quite successful for a young career girl, with her two columns published every month with a by-line. She went to cocktail parties given by cosmetic companies to introduce a new shade of lipstick and nail polish, and by chemical companies to introduce a new fiber, and by perfumeries to show oflF a new kind of perfume and cologne. She ate fried codfish balls on toothpicks and tiny sausages and drank Martinis and watched tall, thin models take baths in colored bubbles or stroll about in weird abbreviated

  costumes, for which they were paid ten dollars an hour and for which she was paid nothing. She met many male buyers and writers who were middle aged and married and exceedingly bored with these parties and often were not quite sure why they had been invited. Some of them asked her out for dinner, but she always refused. She met career women in their thirties and forties who always dressed like the fashion pages of the magazines they worked for and seemed much
less bored than the men. And she met several girls her own age who wore dark-green nylon stockings and a great deal of eye make-up and carried little notebooks, who looked about furtively and excitedly and often accepted the dinner invitations of the older men whom Barbara had refused. It was a world where Barbara had finally achieved a toe hold, and where she was accepted and even recognized, but where she herself felt she only half belonged. Because at the end of the parties she went home, and home was not a garden apartment with a red telephone and three giggling girls and a casserole supper by candlelight, but a walk-up filled with the worn, respectable furniture of twenty-five years of living, with a child's tricycle in the middle of the living-room floor and a television set that blared out a housewife's futile dreams on "Queen for a Day."

  She still thought of Sidney Carter, at night when she was tired and could no longer censor her thoughts, or sometimes when she was in the crowded elevator after lunch, filled with male executives and the scent of gin, all of them bound for other floors and other lives and all of them oblivious of her. She could imagine his routine, and imagining it brought her a certain comfort. He's eating lunch now, she would think, or, he's on the train now, reading all those newspapers. She was not so sure about the evening train, and that hurt. She wondered whether he was having cocktails with a woman, a sophisticated, older career woman who had had many affairs and would be fascinated by but never fall in love with a Sidney Carter.

  That spring Barbara's husband Mac remarried. She was not quite prepared for the feeling the news gave her: shock, fright, pleasure because she really wanted him to be happy, but most of all the knowledge that a period of her life was over forever. He telephoned and asked if he could fetch Hillary and introduce her to his wife, and Barbara's first reaction was one of panic. She's all I have, she thought. But then she realized that Hillary had been living with her

  for almost all of her four years, and that Hillary loved her, and so she said, "Yes, Mac. Come over." He evidently thought it would be bad taste to introduce his wife to Barbara as well, and Barbara did not suggest it. She did not think she could face meeting the wife of a man she had once loved, it would remind her too much of Sidney. So on a Sunday morning Mac arrived at the apartment and took Hillary by the hand and led her out to the street where his wife was waiting in their car by the curb, and Barbara had the strangest feeling: that she was a stone in the middle of a wildly rushing river, stationary and buffeted, always the same, while life went by and changed all around her.

  On the first really warm spring day, when automobile sounds came in through the wide-open windows, two things happened, Barbara remembered it afterward as a very strange day, because in the course of four hours she changed from believing in nothing to believing that everything in life was good. She ate lunch at her desk because she had a great deal of work to do, and then she suddenly decided she could not bear another moment of air conditioning on a fine spring day and so she opened her window and leaned out over the sill looking at the people and taxis down below, like colored specks, and the office buildings blocks away, misty in the afternoon warmth. She breathed deeply and her heart began to pound. And then all of a sudden she was crying, not with tears but a kind of dry, straining contortion, throat aching, mouth open without sound, eyes tightly shut. She was shaking all over, because it was spring, because it was warm, because she was alone, and because it seemed at this moment as if she could never bear another instant of her life. It wasn't anyone special she was crying for, she had gotten over that, it was simply that she was shaken with a need to give, to love, to expand with the warmth of every living thing in the changing season, and no one seemed to care. When the telephone rang she hardly heard it, and finally she turned as if in a trance and picked the receiver up.

  She didn't know why she had answered it, because she knew she was going to hang up in an instant. It was ciuriosity that made her answer, that was all. "Hello."

  "Barbara . . ."

  "Oh . . ."

  "Barbara . . . it's Sidney."

  "Oh," she said again. She sat down, holding the receiver in her two hands.

  "I didn't think you'd be in," Sidney said. "I thought I'd take the chance."

  "How are you?" she said, amazed at how well her voice was holding up, not betraying her feelings at all.

  "Wonderful. How are you?"

  "Fine."

  "I was wondering," he said, "have you had lunch yet?"

  "Lunch?" she repeated stupidly.

  "I know it's the last minute. I just had a business lunch date broken and it's the only day I have free this week to do whatever I want. So I thought I'd call you."

  "I'm surprised," Barbara said.

  "Could you have lunch with me?"

  She was trembling. "Yes," she said, her voice very steady, "I'll meet you downstairs if that's convenient for you."

  She waited for him in front of her office building, as she had those two evenings so long ago and she wondered whether he would think she had changed. She had no idea why he had called all of a sudden but she would not let herself analyze it. All she knew was that one moment she had been leaning out a window feeling like the most insignificant speck on earth and now she felt as if something extraordinary was about to happen to her. She tried to think of the worst thing that could possibly happen, so that she would not be disappointed. He doesn't want me to write the column any more. That was pretty bad. It was also unbelievable.

  He stepped out of a taxi and he looked so completely unchanged that it frightened her. She was back in that moment to last summer, and nothing had changed at all. She knew she still loved him, that she had never stopped loving him, and that frightened her the most.

  He walked over to her and smiled, holding out his hand as one does to a business acquaintance. Not knowing what else to do, Barbara shook hands. "Hi," Sidney said. "You look exactly the same."

  "Do I?" She was smiling, terrified, so intent on what she would say to him to hide her feelings that she almost did not have any feelings at all.

  "Do you want to eat outside?"

  "Yes."

  They began to walk toward the place that had been the skating rink in winter and now was an outdoor cafe with small tables and umbrellas. "You look happy," Sidney said, glancing at her as they walked, "or I should say, exceedingly content. Your life must be agreeing with you."

  "I like my job," Barbara said. "It's very exciting."

  "You look like a girl who's in love. I hope you're not just in love with your job?"

  "I don't think I'm that type, really," Barbara said lightly. She shrugged. "Maybe I'm just in love with spring. That happens."

  "I haven't seen you for such a long time," Sidney said.

  They walked down the steps to the outdoor cafe and foimd a table next to the fountain that spurted from the statue of Prometheus. "This is nice," Barbara said.

  "What would you like to drink?"

  "A Martini, please."

  "I haven't seen you for such a long time," he repeated. "I thought you'd be engaged by now. I used to look in the papers sometimes.'*

  "Did you?"

  He nodded.

  "Well, I'm not."

  "You're in love, though."

  She smiled, as if it didn't matter in the least. "No, not today."

  The waiter arrived with their Martinis, and Barbara and Sidney smiled at each other and sipped at their drinks and smiled at each other again, like idiots. Barbara felt as if she were going to faint.

  "I missed you," he said finally.

  "Not very much."

  "Very much."

  "I missed you too," she whispered.

  "Barbara . . ."

  "Why did you call me?" she asked.

  His voice was so casual it was almost as if he had said, *Tm going to Florida for my vacation." He said, "I'll be divorced in two more weeks."

  "Divorced . . ."

  "Those things happen."

  "I guess they do."

  His voice was still casual but very g
entle. "My wife's going to re-

  marry after the divorce. Someone we've known for years. Those things happen too. I wanted to tell you that so you wouldn't feel uncomfortable; you have a way of feeling uncomfortable about the oddest things."

  "My husband remarried last month," Barbara said. "Spring must be marrying time."

  "Yes."

  "That's funny," Barbara said. Hold on, she told herself, hold on to yourself, don't fly apart. This isn't the time, you don't even know if it will ever be the time again. She kept looking at him, carefully, to see if she was saying the wrong thing, to know when to stop. How could you expect someone else to go on feeling the same way you had for all those months? It was too much for any rational person to hope for. "Do you have any special plans?" she asked casually.

  "For what?"

  "For the spring. For summer. For people."

  *^es. In a way."

  "Oh?"

  The waiter came over then, brandishing two menus, and Sidney waved him away. Barbara leaned forward, her hands clasped tightly in her lap so he would not see how they were trembling. "Such a long time," Sidney said.

  "It was a hundred years ago and it was yesterday," she said.

  "For me too."

  She tried to keep her voice detached, as if she were discussing a love aflFair that had happened between two other people. "Sometimes I used to think it was a shame I felt the way about you that I did, because it's so much worse to lose something special than never to have it at all. And then I thought . . . it's better just to have had it."

  "You sound as if it's over."

  "No," she said, "no, it isn't. For me at least. I don't think it is."

  "I used to hope you would start to dislike me," Sidney said. "I thought I was doing you a favor. Then I was afraid you did dislike me."

  "I'd never dislike you."