The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  "I . . . don't want to," she stammered.

  "All right," he said. He helped her with her coat and they went out to the street, where he hailed a taxi. "Where do you live?"

  She told him, and shrank into her comer of the taxi in a state of growing depression as the streets slipped by. He was taking her home and she didn't want to go home. Like a child, she was afraid of the dark and loneliness, and, like a child, she reached out and tugged at his sleeve. He took her hand. She knew she would never see him again and she couldn't bear it. He was something strange and exciting that had come into her life, only for one evening—really just a few hours. And what was she to him? Someone he'd had fun with, whom he might remember if her name were ever mentioned to him again. "I don't want to go home," she said.

  "Where do you want to go, then?"

  "I don't care. I just can't stand to give you up."

  He didn't seem to think it was a frantic or silly thing to say; he simply leaned forward and gave the driver his address, and then moved back and put his arm around Gregg, comfortingly, with none of the appurtenances of passion. She felt suddenly as if what she had just said to him was somehow romantic and important.

  She had never seen an apartment like his before. She had always felt that you could tell more from one look at a person's apartment than you could from an hour of talk with him. There were the people who didn't care about their homes at all, and there were those who cared but had nothing to add to them. David's apartment must have contained over a thousand books. Books were in the tall bookshelves that lined an entire wall of the living room, and they spilled over to every chair in the room. On the round dining table were at least a dozen play scripts. On the floor beside the table was a large straw basket filled with magaziues. He took off her coat, and with the coat

  still in his hand walked to the phonograph and turned it on. She noticed his records then—long-playing records, four feet of them from end to end.

  At the far end of the room, between the bookshelves, was an old-fashioned fireplace with a carved black marble mantelpiece. It was a much used fireplace, with a fire screen and blackened fire tools, and logs waiting to be burned among the coals. He put her coat into his closet and knelt down to light the fire. In front of the fireplace was a long black sofa. She could imagine him sitting there in the dark staring into the flames, and it made him seem more satanic-looking than ever.

  "Would you like brandy?"

  "Yes, please."

  He brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses to the low coffee table in front of the sofa, and sat beside her. The music on the phonograph was a classical piece that she had never heard before, and he had it turned up loud, as if he really enjoyed hearing it, not as if it were background music to a seduction.

  "Have you really read all those books?" she asked, gesturing.

  "Yes."

  "And those magazines? And those scripts?"

  "Yes. I'm always looking for something."

  On one of the side tables beside an armchair there were no books at all. Instead there was a large silver-framed photograph of two men on a sailboat in summer, smiling and squinting into the sun, wearing white trousers and white sweatshirts and standing with their arms loosely flung around each other. She stood and wandered over to it. One of tlie men was David, many years younger, with a softer, vaguer face, and the odier was a rather handsome, sensitive-looking young man with the build of a large tennis player.

  "Who's that?"

  "Gordon McKay."

  "Oh . . ." she said. "The one whose play you just put on."

  "That's right." His voice seemed to have tightened, as if he were very conscious of the way it sounded in tlie room.

  She didn't know what to say. She couldn't say, "I'm sorry about your friend's death," or "I'm sorry about your friend's flop" either; somehow she felt that if she said anything like that it would destroy

  instantly the intimacy she and David were feeling together at this moment.

  "I'm sorry I never got to see the play," she said finally.

  "More brandy?" he asked, and filled her glass without waiting for a reply.

  She remembered something Tony had told her once about David Wilder Savage and Gordon McKay, some spiteful thing, the sort of thing unsuccessful people often say about successful ones, a kind of name-dropping gone one step further to become insult-dropping. What was it he'd said? Oh, yes—"No one knows for sure whether they were in love with each other. But now we'll see if he can ever put on another hit or if the light has gone out for him." That was the worst thing she had ever heard said about David WOder Savage; most of tlie kids at the class discussed instead his theatrical genius and his reputation as a wolf. Why did people have to say that two men were in love with each other when they merely loved each other? Couldn't people realize what a rare and miraculous thing closeness could be, without trying to dirty it? She felt suddenly that the world was full of cruel and silly people like Tony and her family and a long, long string of girls she had gone to school with and boys who had pawed her—all of them separate and lonely and spitefiJ and afraid to love each other.

  Like a sleepwalker she went to the sofa where David was sitting motionless. The room was dark and the redness of the flames shone on the fabric of the couch and made it look black and red both, and on the glass of brandy on the table, making it shine like a garnet. She touched his face.

  He did not pull her down to the couch but stood up in one swift gesture, put his arms around her and took her to the couch with him. She felt a touch of surprise at his first kiss, as she always did with anyone's, because the shape of the mouth never seemed to be related to the feeling of the kiss it gave. With his she felt astonishment that a cruel mouth could be capable of such warmth and gentleness.

  "You have the softest mouth in the history of the world," he murmured.

  "And you too."

  He was taking off her dress and slip and stockings without ever removing his lips from her mouth and face, as if his hands were an efficient, unobtrusive part of him and his love-making. She had an

  instant flash of her old caution at this, thinking, Oh, how practicedl He must have made love to hundreds of women. . . . And then his hands were no longer disembodied and she was glad for the experience they had, as if it had all been waiting for her. The one fear hit her then, of pregnancy and disgrace, and she hated her own passion-thickened, fearful little-girl's voice which had to ask that damned question that hurtled her out of the clouds.

  "Do you have something?"

  "Don't you?"

  "I didn't know . . ."

  "All right . . ." For the moment that he was gone from her she closed her eyes, shaken with dizziaess, and then he returned and took her into his arms. She felt the coolness of his skin and the warmth of the firelight as if it were all in a dream filled with pleasure that was like pain and the old, old words of demand and obscenity that seemed like words of love ia his mouth. He spoke them to her and she spoke them back to him, both of them urgentiy, both of them with their eyes open searching each other's faces, trembling, until the last moment when passion separated them.

  He did not draw away when he was finished, or let her go, but kept his arms around her, looking again into her face. The music on the phonograph had long since played out and the room was silent except for the clicking of the needle against the last groove, forgotten and alone. She held him in her arms as if he were the child this time and she a woman, and stroked his hair, wishing they could stay that way forever. Finally he drew away.

  "This damned thing," he said, amused and annoyed. "I haven't used one of these things since I was sixteen years old."

  "You're speaking of the sixteenth of an inch between me and the Home for Unwed Mothers."

  "Well, next time you contribute."

  "Well, what did you expect? Do you think I go to every cocktail party prepared for something like this?"

  "Are we having our first fight?"

  From the shadows behind them the te
lephone rang, softly. She looked at her watch. "My goshl They call at two o'clock in the morning?"

  He stood up. "Drink your brandy," he said affectionately, ruflfling her hair, and went to answer the phone.

  Left by herself, she smiled into the fire, feeling the hot bitterness of the brandy in her throat and the faint scratchiness of the couch fabric against her bare legs. She could hear David laughing at something the person on the telephone was saying, and his occasional exclamations of amusement. She finished her brandy and stood up languidly, groggy with the aftermath of love and the kind darkness of the heated room, and went to the phonograph. She Hfted the needle and turned the record over, tuning it down very softly so it would not disturb David on the telephone. There was an overflowing ash tray on the window sill and she picked it up and took it to the kitchen to empty it. She could still hear his voice on the telephone, masculine and laughing and independent, and she remembered the way it had sounded speaking to her in the words of lovemaking. The sound of his voice then had been for her and her alone. She could not remember ever having felt so content.

  She wondered whether the window in his kitchen was uncurtained because he did not own a curtain or because it was at the laundry. He probably didn't own one; a bachelor as busy as he wouldn't even know about those things. Wouldn't it surprise him if she made curtains for him! She could pick out some fabric tomorrow. . . .

  Back in the living room she watched the fire slowly dying and the brandy level going down in the bottle as David talked on and on to whomever it was on the other end of the telephone. She could tell it was a business call from the conversation, and she was not sin*-prised because people in the theater had a way of staying up until all hours. Her wristwatch said twenty-five past two. It gave her a land of glow to know that she was here with him, in intimacy, waiting for him in the shadows.

  "All right, boy," he said. "Goodbye. Thanks for calling. Everything's going to be all right." He replaced the receiver and returned to stand beside where Gregg was sitting on the couch. She looked up at him.

  "I think I love you," she said.

  He smiled at her tenderly and bent down to kiss her forehead.

  "I do love you," she said.

  He took her into his arms again.

  Chapter 6

  Barbara Lemont, leaving the Fabian oflSces at five o'clock, paused for a minute in the dark outside the revolving door and let the shrill crowd of girls pour past her into the night, going to their buses and subways and trains. It was an evening late in February, and surprisingly the air was soft with false spring. The store windows around Rockefeller Plaza were very bright, and Barbara walked slowly past them, dallying, looking in, imagining that some rich man was going to give her any of their contents she might choose as a gift. Here it was February, and this afternoon she had been typing copy for the June issue of Americas Woman, the bridal issue. All the brides in the photographs looked so young, so airy, you found yourself wondering what their hves had been like and whom they were in love with and going to marry, forgetting that they were only models. The blond one on the cover with daisies in her hair and a look in her eyes like a child on Christmas morning had just been separated from her husband and had upset the shooting schedule the week before the picture was taken because she was in bed recovering from the results of an abortion. Perhaps that look she wore on her face for the bridal cover was a facsimile of the one she had worn on her own wedding day, and even tliough things had turned sour for her she remembered when they were different. Like me, Barbara thought.

  She had awakened very slowly this morning, with a sense of something she didn't want to remember, and had burrowed underneath the covers like an animal in its cozy lair, until her crib-trapped daughter's screams forced her out of bed. Then she had remembered, and in the remembering had realized that it was not such a dreadful thing after all. Today would have been her wedding anniversary.

  Three years—a record, really, for someone as young as she was. Most of the girls she knew at work hadn't ever been married, much less married three years. The married girls were the ones she didn't see often any more, friends of her high-school days. She and those

  old friends called each other on the phone now and then since her divorce, and sometimes the wives would say, "When you have a date why don't you bring him over one evening," and she would thank them and never do it. You couldn't take a boy to spend an evening with a young married couple, she had discovered; it would frighten him away. He would feel the trap closing in, even though it was an imaginary one, and he would think she wanted to demonstrate to him the contentment of marriage. She fitted into the married-couple conversation so well, she was so used to it, that sometimes in the midst of a discussion of recipes or household problems (I know, men are terrible about holes in socks) she would look up and catch her date looking at her with an expression that could range anywhere from boredom to panic.

  She stopped at a bakery on Sixth Avenue to buy some honey buns for her mother. On tlie spur of the moment she bought some animal-shaped cookies for the baby. She would try to teach Hillary how to say rabbit when she ate the cooky, it would probably leave a more lasting impression on her than a picture of a rabbit in a book. She had been thinking for a while now of changing the baby's name, perhaps to a nickname that the baby could eventually use as her Christian name when she went to school. Barbara had named her Hillary after her husband's mother, who was dead, and at the time it had seemed a gesture of love. She had never seen his mother, and now she almost never saw him, and the name Hillary had turned into an encumbrance that she wasn't particularly fond of, reminding her of people and a time that had lost their meaning. She was only glad that the baby hadn't been a boy because she would have named him after his father, and that would have turned into a nuisance.

  It was funny, she was thinking, how something that had seemed sentimental and important, and even more—almost sacred—could turn into nothing at all. If it had ever occurred to her in the beginning that all her love for this one man and everything they had together that was meaningful was going to disappear and be forgotten the thought would have broken her heart. Today she was grateful for the flexibility that had allowed her to forget. Mac had been her first date in high school—her first real date, that is, aside from her classmates who invited her to parties. She was sixteen and he was twenty. She was a little thrilled at his old age, but when they had spent one evening togetlier she felt as if she had known

  him forever. It was love, like in the juke-box songs and the magazine stories and the pajama-party gab fests, with birds twittering and pink clouds and no sense at all. She wasn't a very pretty girl, her features were ordinary, but she was appealing-looking, and when she was in love she felt as if there must be something special about her looks to have won her such a prize as Mac. He was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, and the difference in their ages made her give him credit for more intelligence than he really had. He had just returned from the Army in Germany, and next to her classmates he seemed an experienced world traveler. On their third date he proposed, and although they kept it a secret from their parents they considered themselves engaged from that night on.

  Being engaged, especially secretly engaged, was a strange, exciting state with little touch on reality. Barbara went about her daily routine, study, gym class, homework, sodas with the girls, feeling as if she were in a dream. She was Engaged to Be Married, she was In Love. She was floating thirty feet above the ground and she never stopped to find out what she really felt about things. As soon as she graduated from high school she and Mac announced their engagement, and in February they were married and left New York for Ohio State University, where he was finishing college on the GI Bill. She kept house for him there, or kept their room, rather, because it was a dingy little one-room apartment with a convertible sofa and a rickety bridge table that almost always had books and papers and the remains of the previous meal on it. They had only one closet, and the clothes popped out like a jack-in-the-box
every time someone opened the door. She was taking courses at a near-by women's college and trying to keep up with her schoolwork and keep a home together all at the same time. When she began to be nauseated in the mornings, and often in the afternoons as well, she thought it was because she was still such an inexperienced cook. Mac himself had heartburn most of the time those first three months. Then she discovered that her problem wasn't indigestion at all but something she should have suspected right away.

  At first she couldn't beheve it. It was not that there was anything organically wrong with her, but she simply couldn't beheve that she, Barbara Lemont, was capable of doing something as complicated and adult as conceiving a baby. She was going to produce another human being, someone who would eventually go to college

  and fall in love and get married just as she had done. It was unbelievable. She who had never even owned a dog was going to be responsible for a human being for at least the next fifteen years. Her disbeHef turned to beHef and then to fright.

  She began to look fat and ungainly. She was a plain girl, but her charm was in her neatness and warmth and in a kind of piquancy. How could anyone who looked like a fat spider look piquant? She was ashamed to go to classes, feeling somehow that a girl of eighteen ought to look like those other sweatered and skirted freshmen and not like a bloated, heavy-footed matron.

  The required reading for her courses, which she did faithfully, seemed both an escape and a reminder. She would be lost in the world of a novel by Thomas Mann and then look up at the sound of a group of college boys and girls laughing and tramping past her window. The apartment was on the first floor, across the street from the campus of Mac's college. The voices outside her window were discussing the class they had just attended, in heated argument that bore just the faintest undercurrent of flirtation and courtship. "Let's have a cup of coffee," she would hear one of the boys say. "Do you have time?" And a girl's voice would answer, "That would be wonderful." Her mood broken, Barbara would look around the room and notice the dust under the sofa bed, the dishes still to be washed, Mac's clothes tossed on the floor to be sent to the laundry or put away. She would get up, heavily and feeling sickish again, and put away her book. As soon as she finished cleaning the apartment she would have to mess it up again preparing dinner—it was funny how a one-room apartment looked so dirty if you displaced one or two little things in it. It would be dark outside her window then, and waiting for Mac to come home, she would realize that she missed him terribly, because he was all she had.