The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  "We're really going."

  "Mm-hm."

  She moved closer to him and put her hands around his arm.

  As the station wagon moved through the city April looked out the window at all the sights that had meant so many different things to her during the past three years. How drab they looked in winter,

  and yet, they would always thrill her. Here was a part of the city she did not know, and here at last was the highway, flanked on one side by the cold blue water, deceptively sunny-looking in the bright day. She took one last look through the rear window at the skyscrapers vanishing behind them, and then she turned to look ahead and at Ronnie's capable gloved hands on the red wheel, and she did not think of or miss the city at all.

  Chapter 29

  For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends. Caroline Bender thought of all these things as she marked oflF the days on her desk calendar, waiting for the return to New York of Eddie Harris.

  Will it be the same? she thought. Will it even be nearly the same? Now that the fifteenth was drawing closer, she was alternately cautious and filled with all the elation of a bride. It was ridiculous, she told herself, and yet, she had never felt this way before in her life, as though she were really not herself but some young girl waiting innocently and adoringly for the fulfillment of her dream. Then, at the times when her fears overtook her, she would brace herself for disappointment, for the discovery that Eddie was, after all, human and might turn out to be nothing more than the prototype of all young husbands, bringing out baby pictures, chattering about his work, telling her how he had taken up golf. The image made her blood run cold. She remembered how, when they were in college,

  when she and Eddie had been in love, they had read Tender Is the Night together, and she took the book from her shelf in her apartment and read it again. There was a scene in it of reunion between a married man and a girl he had loved years before, a reunion that ended not in poignance but in something even more upsetting: dull lack of interest. They had both changed, and when they met again they had a brief, unloving affair and drifted apart, not really minding, not really aware of what they had missed. If that happens to me and Eddie, she thought. Oh, no. . . . And yet, perhaps it would be merciful. She would be delivered from him, from his spell, and she could go on to the future, whatever that was. If she were to find that Eddie aroused only indifference in her, then wouldn't it be better, not worse? It would be sensible, and she wouldn't even know it was happening. She would just pick up her life again and say. Well, that's diat. The thought made her want to cry.

  At the bottom of her bureau drawer, under her sweaters, she had her college photograph album, put away out of sight because it contained so many pictures of her and Eddie together with their old friends. And beside it, in a silver frame that was tarnished black by now, was an eight-by-ten photograph of Eddie. She took them out now, for the first time since she had moved to her apartment in New York, and she looked at them. She was almost afraid to look at Eddie's first; she looked at herself. How much younger she had looked! More tender, with tender, undefined features, the face of a very young girl. She thought she was prettier now, she had more style. She wondered whether Eddie would think she had changed much. And Eddie? His face leaped up at her, so familiar, so beloved, that involuntarily Caroline reached out her fingers to touch his lips and stroke his cheek. She loved him so. If she could only kiss him. No wonder she had hidden the pictures in the dresser; to look at that enlargement every day would have broken her heart.

  But now, for a little while, she could face it again. She put the photograph album on her coffee table and the silver-framed picture on the top of her dresser. Eddie. His presence seemed to fill the room. And as Caroline looked at the photograph she remembered for the first time in almost two years exactly how his voice had sounded, every tone and accent of it, as if she had spoken to him only that morning: slightly husky, soft, a voice almost in his throat,

  with that indefinable quaHty known as sexiness, and always full of humor.

  She remembered his voice making plans for both of them, and that hurt. She could repeat his words to herself, thinking how they might come true, but underneath they hurt her. To have believed so unquestioningly in something that had meant the world and tlien to find that it simply did not exist was a frightening thing.

  There were the phonograph records they had played together, which she had always been afraid to play again just for herself. They were old seventy-eights, and when Caroline put the first one on the phonograph she was struck at first by how diflFerent it sounded, distorted, far away. But then the melody hit her, and everything came back so rapidly and with such force that she rose to her feet and began to walk about the room, dancing a little to the music, thinking of Eddie and herself tliree years ago and almost holding out her hands to him. Her lips moved as she spoke to him, half in the words she had said to him when they had listened to those records and had made love—but really love, love, not any sham of passionate strangers but a thing of tenderness and closeness and great passion too, always with the words of love from each to the other—and half in the words that she would like to say to him now. It was a daydream in which Eddie was in the room, returned to her, and in tills dream they both understood that nothing, really, had changed.

  How quickly those shellac records were over, only a few tantalizing minutes and then you had to run to return the clicking arm. Caroline knelt by the phonograph and turned it off. Two more days. Two more days . . .

  The next day she went to Saks on her lunch hour and bought perfume and cologne and bath oil, the same fragrance she had worn when she had gone with Eddie, and which she had never worn since. Opening the stopper at her desk, she was nearly taken with dizziness at the familiarity of it, a throat-catching scent of flowers and memories and former happiness that she felt sure could never afiect anyone else the way it did her. Tomorrow. Tomorrow . . .

  That night she went to bed at nine o'clock so that she would look fine in the morning, but she could not sleep. Perhaps he won't come tomorrow, she was thinking; perhaps it will be the next day. Can I bear it, to wait another day? I've waited so long already. But she knew that she would wait the day if necessary, or another week, or

  any time, since nothing could be so long as these sleepless hours in the last, anticipatory night.

  Gregg came in at three, tiptoeing, and Caroline turned her face to the wall and pretended to be asleep. She would not, she could not, listen to Gregg tell her what new secret things she had discovered from sifting through David Wilder Savage's garbage. Not tonight. She liked Gregg, and she felt so sorry for her, but tonight of all nights, waiting, Caroline wanted to feel alone, untouched, pure, away from any talk of neurosis or heartbreak or aberration, so that she could wait for Eddie as Caroline, not the receptacle of someone else's sorrows, not a girl who had su£Fered and blundered in her turn, but Caroline whose heart was full of love and wonder and hope. The last thing Caroline remembered was the luminous hands of her clock at four, and then she slept.

  She was in her oflBce at nine and sat at her desk with her hands tightly holding the arms of her swivel chair, looking at the telephone as if she could will it to ring. She knew this was silly, he was probably asleep or not here yet, but she could not bear it. She tried to read a manuscript, but she found herself rereading the same paragraph four times and not getting any sense out of it, and so she put the manuscript asid
e. It wasn't fair to her authors, she might as well just sit and suffer. At a quarter to eleven her telephone rang. Caroline jumped, a startled, involuntary motion, and snatched up the receiver.

  "Hello?"

  "Caroline," Eddie said.

  That voice, that one word, were so close and familiar they made her begin to tremble. Her heart was pounding. "Eddie? Eddie? Hello!" she said brightly.

  He sounded relieved and his voice came pouring out of the telephone with more confidence, making her remember everything, bringing him closer. Her lips were almost touching the receiver as if it were Eddie himself. "How are you, Caroline?" Eddie said and, not even waiting for her to answer, "You sound wonderful."

  "How are you, Eddie?"

  He gave a little laugh. "I was up all night on the plane. I have red eyes and a black beard. Can you see me for lunch anyway?"

  "Of coursel What time? Where?"

  "Twelve o'clock? Or would one be better for you?"

  *T^o, twelve is fine."

  "Well, I'm at the Plaza." He paused. "I think it would be better . . . since it's been so long and I just want to talk to you without a lot of strangers listening in . . . could you meet me up here?"

  "Yes . . ."

  She pulled a pencil out of her pencil holder, spilling the entire supply in the process, and wrote down the number of Eddie's room. "It's a suite," he said, "and it's down at the end of the hall. Just keep walking to your left when you get out of the elevator."

  "Yes . . ."

  "I'll see you then," he said softly. "Twelve o'clock."

  "Yes . . ." And he had hung up.

  How businesslike they both had sounded, Caroline thought. Plans, time and place. And yet, that lowering of the voice, his wish to meet her somewhere private, signified emotion, even over an impersonal telephone. She went quickly to the ladies' room, where she washed her face, although she had washed it only two and a half hours before, and put on fresh make-up: mascara, everything, lightly so that it looked very natural. She put more of the perfume at her throat and on her hair, although the scent of the bath oil she had bathed in that morning still lingered, and then she looked for the dozenth time to see if the seams of her stockings were straight. She must have combed her hair fifteen times at that mirror before she was satisfied with the result, although she realized wryly that even in getting in and out of a taxi the December wind would destroy what she had so carefully done. Eleven-thirty. She couldn't go back to her office, she felt too nervous.

  She walked down the hall to the office that April used to have. It was funny, since April had left she still sometimes started toward that office, forgetting that it was empty, that April would not be there to speak to her and share her secret. Just because it made her feel better, Caroline opened the door to April's office and walked inside. There was the bookshelf of brightly colored paperback books, the desk completely emptied except for the office-issued blotter and pen-in-inkwell and calendar, and there was the coat rack on which she always used to see April's beige cashmere coat. If April were here they could talk, they could pass these fifteen minutes of waiting. Now Caroline just stood there, and then she turned and walked

  slowly back to her oflBce and put on her coat and gloves and walked still more slowly down the hall to the elevator.

  When she got out of the elevator on Eddie's floor at the Plaza it was only a quarter to twelve. Caroline hesitated, hearing the metal doors of the elevator click shut behind her. She could hover here or she could sit on the steps or she could take the chance and ring Eddie's doorbell. She bit her lip and walked slowly along the hall, reading the numbers, until she came to his, and then, timidly, she lifted her hand and rang his bell.

  There was silence and then she heard footsteps, only one or two, as you hear when someone is just at arm's reach of the doorknob, and then Eddie opened the door. They each stood there in silence, looking at the other. He had not changed, he had not changed at all. His hair was still cut fairly short, a medium sandy brown. His face was freshly shaven, smooth and so handsome she realized she had forgotten quite how beautiful he was. He looked at her intently, almost stared, and then he grinned and said, "Come in, Caroline, come in."

  He was wearing a dark-gray flannel suit with narrow lapels and a shirt with hairline blue and white stripes on it, and a plain dark tie. You noticed the suit almost as an afterthought—yes, it was gray-but what you saw first was the way he moved, the way an animal moves inside its coat. When he lifted his arm to help Caroline remove her coat she saw the arm and the hand with complete awareness, not the flannel sleeve, or the cufiF beneath, or the cuff link, if there even was one. She was aware of all this dimly, trying to think of something to say. "I'm a little early," she said.

  "I'm glad."

  "You haven't changed at all," Caroline said.

  "Neither have you."

  "You don't think I've changed?"

  "Not a bit. I was afraid you would. I was afraid you'd look like those terrible women you see on Fifth Avenue, who always look as if they've just stepped out of the hairdresser's."

  "They probably just have," she said, laughing. "They go three times a week."

  "And bring their dogs, and strap them to the leg of their chair." He was grinning at her, and then as his eyes met hers his smile faded

  and he reached out and touched her arm. "Sit down," he said. "Sit down. I'm so glad to see you."

  "I'm glad to see you," she said softly. "Eddie."

  There was a window with sunshine pouring in and a tiny, dimly exquisite view of the park below through the transparent curtains. In front of the window was a love seat and a bottle of champagne in a silver cooler. "I have champagne," Eddie said. "I thought it would be fun. Champagne for breakfast. Oh, but you've probably had breakfast, it's so late for you."

  She shook her head.

  "Remember that Sunday at school when we went to the Ritz for breakfast and had champagne?" he said happily. "I don't even remember what we had afterward."

  "Neither do I! I remember I was in the shower and you called me up and you said, 'Let's have breakfast at the Ritz,' just like that, on the spur of the moment, and I'd never been there except for dinner, and then only with my parents."

  "It was fun, wasn't it?"

  "Yes," Caroline said. "I guess everything we did in those days was fun."

  "I remember everything," Eddie said. His face was calm, but his eyes were sad, as if they were looking far back into the past. He leaned forward and pulled the cork out of the bottle of champagne, and it popped. "It doesn't always have to pop, did you know that?" he said. "That's a fallacy."

  "Really?"

  He poured champagne for them both, into wide crystal glasses, and handed one to her. He lifted his glass and looked into her eyes. *I guess I should say. To reunion."

  "That sounds like college alumni. Class of Fifty-Two," Caroline said softly.

  "Does it?" He looked into his glass quickly and drank.

  "You're not sunburned," Caroline said. "Somehow I expected to see you with a tan."

  "Not in the winter. Remember that time we had a picnic on the beach?" he said.

  "Revere."

  "Yes. And it was much too early so everyone was really shivering but no one would admit it."

  "And we ran up and down the beach to get warm." Caroline laughed. "But what a gorgeous day it was, everything so blue and white and sunny."

  "Just cold."

  "But somebody went swimming. It was you!"

  "So it was," he said. "I remember now. God, how sorry I was when I got out there in that ocean, but I didn't dare admit it." He looked at her. "Oh, Caroline . . ."

  Their eyes met, and Caroline felt as if she were going to cry. "You never would admit it when you made a mistake, ever," she said in a very small voice.

  "That was a long time ago," Eddie said softly. "I was just a child then. It's only three years, but it's been much longer than that, really. Much longer than that."

  "That's what you said in your letter," C
aroline said. "What did you mean by it?"

  They were sitting side by side on the love seat and it was so narrow that if she moved only a few inches she could touch him. She wanted so badly to touch him, even to reach out with her finger and brush his wrist to know that he was really here with her at last, to feel anything of him that was permanent and his, that she could not help herself; she put forth her hand on the velvet cushion and touched the back of his hand. He turned his hand over instantly and closed his fingers around hers. "What . . . did you mean by it?" she repeated breathlessly, her voice catching in her throat.

  "That I missed you," he said stiffly. With his free hand he lifted the bottle of champagne. "Let's have another glass, it'll go flat if we don't."

  "We . . . ought to have champagne twirlers," Caroline said.

  "Those sticks with little fins on the end of them? Have you seen those? There's a woman in Dallas who has one she carries around in her purse, it's solid gold with a little diamond set on the tip of each fin, and when she stirs the champagne all the bubbles catch the light." He grinned at her. "It's like every bad joke about a Texas millionaire."

  "You still sound a little bit like a New Yorker just visiting there," Caroline said. "Is that how you feel?"

  "In a way. Of course, I've made a lot of friends, and some of them are really wonderful people. You know, other . . . young couples."

  His voice faded out on the last two words, as if he realized too late how the words would cut her. He covered her hand with his other hand. "It is tme, you know," he said, softly, looking into her eyes. "It's my life, it's the life I have. You've been having fun, haven't you? Is there anyone you're . . . serious about?"

  "No," Caroline said.

  "I still have the letters you wrote me when I was in Europe," he said. "Isn't that funny? I couldn't throw them out, that was all."

  "I don't think it's funny," Caroline said.

  "No . . ." he said. "It isn't funny. I read them sometimes, when I'm alone in my office with nothing to do. It's quite often that I have nothing to do. And when I read them I ... I could kick myself for being so cruel to you, for being such a stupid fool. They were such sweet letters, so good. Everything about you as you really are is in those pages, so giving, always giving. And ... I'd read each one when it came, and then I'd go to a party, or a dinner with some diplomats or ambassadors, or counts or something, and I'd think I was having such fun. The young man on his first trip to Paris." He said it with such self-hating scorn that Caroline was filled with pity for him. "I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. I even rode through Les Halles at four o'clock in the morning on a vegetable wagon. Remember that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald? The carrot wagon. Well, this one had carrots on it too, and Helen and I were tossing them around just like in the book, and singing songs, and we had a bottle of red wine—oh, God." He let go of Caroline's hand and put his hands over his face.