The Best of Everything (11 page)

Alvin was holding out his hand. "I want to meet a famous author. I'm Alvin Wiggs."

Mike allowed his hand to be used as a hitching post and looked quizzically at Caroline. She took a deep breath. "And this is Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald," she said.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald?" said Alvin. Slowly his face lighted up. "Oh, we studied you in college. You wrote about . . . the twenties and things. I'm very glad to meet you."

"I'm glad to meet you too," Mike said. He looked from Alvin to Caroline.

"Y'know," Alvin said, "I thought you were dead. Isn't that awful?"

"Disgraceful," Mike said solemnly. 'Tou should be ashamed to tell me such a thing. I'm hurt."

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Alvin said. "Here, let me buy you a drink. I'm so glad to meet you."

Mike gestured to the bartender for a round of drinks. Caroline could see that he was a well-known customer here. She wondered when he would start the round of Third Avenue saloons Mary Agnes had talked about; after midnight, probably.

"Are you two old friends?" Mike asked.

"We just met tonight," Caroline said. "On a blind date." She looked at him significantly.

"Wasn't that lucky?" Alvin said happily. He swallowed his drink, said thickly, " 'Scuse me," with a beatific smile, and liu"ched off in the direction of the men's room, bumping into a couple on the way.

"Oh, I can't stand it," Caroline said, "I can't stand it." Despite her embarrassment she was so relieved to see Mike, he seemed like such a sane and welcome face, that she began to laugh.

"What are these blind dates?" he asked curiously.

"An old American institution of mismating. Haven't you ever been on one?"

"No," he said with rehef. "I married when I was eighteen. Besides, no one I knew cared whether I had a social life or not. This barbaric custom of yours must be typically Port Blair."

"It isn't at all."

"How are you going to get away from him? Will you be all right?"

"It's all my fault," she said. "I made him take that first step on the lonesome road with Demon Rum. How was I supposed to know he was Doctor JekyU and Mr. Hyde? I really feel responsible for him now. I think I should get him safely on the train."

"He's supposed to take care of you. If he can't, then ditch him."

"That's kind of inconsiderate."

"Oh? And was it considerate of him to take you out and act the way he's doing?"

"I guess he can't help it. He has such an inferiority complex and I think I scared him."

He smiled at her, this time a smile that reached the rest of his face. It made him seem like someone she did not know. "You always make excuses for everyone, don't you?" he said.

She wasn't sure whether he meant it as a compliment or just the opposite. "That's not such a bad thing, is it?" she asked.

"It's bad for you."

"Why?"

"If you insist on liking the wrong person, don't teU yourself fairy

tales that he's this or he's that. That he's pathetic, that he needs your help, that you put him on his worst behavior . . . Just admit you like the wrong person, but don't give yourself the wrong reasons."

She looked up and saw Alvin's white face in the distance as he made his way toward them through the darkened room. She realized that she had already forgotten what he looked like. "I like that," she said. "But it certainly doesn't apply to me and Alvin. He's just someone who came into my life by accident and he's going right out again after tonight."

"I don't necessarily mean it for you and him," Mike said. "I mean it for you and anyone. It might be someone you'd get to care about. Someone a lot closer to home."

He was looking at her intently as he said it, and suddenly she felt, for an instant, a cold shiver pass through her. It wasn't the chill of foreboding, but rather of excitement, of the unknown, of that same unreality-coming-true feeHng she'd had when he had told her Mr. Shahmar was afraid of her.

"Who?" she said. "Who?"

"It's a good thing I'm not as drunk as Alvin," Mike said, "or I might tell you and make a fool of myself."

She sat there looking at him in surprise for a moment until Alvin came and jovially wedged himself in between them. But she had something to take to herself and think about, and it was enough. She felt astonished and warmed by her own feehngs. Really, what had he said? Nothing. And yet, it could be a great deal.

All the way home on the train, sitting next to Alvin and pretending to look out the wdndow, she found herself thinking about Mike. She let the thought of him enter her mind and stay there, uncau-tiously. He was nearly twice her age, he was used and bitter. As with any dissipated person there were many things in his past life that she was sure would arouse her sympathy—a disappointment, a heartbreak, a failure—events and misfortunes that might not deserve that sympathy but which would be sure to receive it from a girl like herself to whom they would all be new and shocking and therefore poignant. That was what he was trying to warn her against, she was sure. And because he cared enough to warn her against him she found herself totally disarmed. He must care about her in some way that was more than friendship, she was thinking, or he would never have said anything. The possibility of a romance between herself

and Mike was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her, and yet it was beginning to seem the most natural thing in the world. She could not help but compare Mike and his sophisticated understanding of her secret thoughts with the succession of dreary boys she had been out with since she had been graduated from college. With each of those boys it seemed as if there was a barrier, hurled up because she was a woman and he was a man and each wanted something from the other. It was a kind of juvenile competition. With Mike, it was as if because he was a man and she was a woman each had something to give to the other. She wasn't afraid of him. To her, something dangerous meant being hurt. She didn't believe tliere could be any other kind of danger in becoming involved with him. The hazards of a changing outlook, of a mind that could become as old as his, seemed very far away.

Chapter 5

Gregg Adams, in the shower, looked a great deal better than she sang; nevertheless she was happy (for her, which is to say tonight she had a general absence of depression) and so she sang and splashed, hurriedly so that she could wash all the soap off before the day's supply of hot water disappeared. A tune was going through her head, some old thing from her mother's flapper days. Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries. "Life is just a boll of weevils," she sang to that tune. "Da dee da da da . . . Life is just a boll of weevils, da dee da dum." She had managed to get twelve lines in a morning soap opera for next week, with promise of more in the future. As usual she was playing a teen-ager, baby-voiced and excruciatingly sweet. That slight Western accent she hadn't been able to get rid of didn't hurt either. She had noticed that all the nauseatingly sweet little children who did commercials—"Gee, Mom, this tastes like more!"— seemed to have a Western accent. Perhaps some executive power thought it made them sound more childlike.

She was going to a party tonight with Tony, who was in her acting class and was one of her semi-platonic friends. They lent each other

money and took each other to parties where free food and Hquor could be had for a minimum of charm. He was younger than she and had long hair that fell into his eyes when he shook his head, and he mumbled when he spoke. If you asked him a question he would wriggle and scratch himself and look at the floor as if he were feeling out the line, and finally he would grunt some extraordinarily emotional result like: "Yeah, let's go to the movies." She knew it was an act, that when he was very excited or overwrought he lapsed into the most beautifully modulated Shakespearean diction she had ever heard. All the boys in her acting class were like that, the ones who took her out and the ones who were married and even poorer and the fairies. She was bored with them all.

In her messy, overcrowded closet she found a red dress she had liked and had forgotten she owned. It was a meeting-people dress for parties; a blond girl in a red dress always seemed to be able to manage without introductions. It wasn't as if she hoped to meet anyone non-boring at tliis party, actually she was only going there because there would be food and good Scotch and it would be a way not to be alone. When she was alone in her apartment she could feel the stifling sensation she had learned to fear creep up on her; one minute things were all right and then all of a sudden a ten-pound weight would establish itself on her chest and she would hardly be able to breathe, let alone swallow. Jazz music on the phonograph and cheap vermouth helped a little, telephone conversations with her friends by the hour helped even more, but all of these were merely sedatives to dull the panic and lift tlie weight, they could not remove it. Around the circle of light by her bed there were shadows waiting to envelop her as soon as she put down the telephone receiver and broke away from the reassuring voice at the other end.

Sometimes her cat would slip up to her and rub his furry head against her ankle, and, looking down at him, she would feel an immense, overwhelming affection for him. My little cat. Pencil-line ribs to move witli breathing as he slept, signs of life to remind her that there were other worlds inside of other people's skulls, even inside a cat's little skull. It made her feel less alone, less stifled, less afraid of something she could not really name. You could die in New York behind the locked door of your apartment and no one would ever know until some neighbor complained of the smell. Yes, your friends would say then, I remember I hadn't heard from her for some time,

but I thought she was just sulking. Or I thought she had a new job and was busy. Busy? Ha, Gregg thought, busy being unemployed.

Tony was an hour late, which was like him. When he finally arrived she was so lonely she was even glad to see him. "Hey," he said, "I remember that dress." He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

She remembered then with embarrassment that she had worn the dress on the evening of the first and only night she had gone to bed with him. No doubt he thought of the dress with sentiment. No wonder she had forced it to the far end of her untidy closet. It was a night and a dress she wanted to forget. There were some lovers you could have once, and only once, and then you never wanted to have them again. Not that they weren't skillful and considerate, because they usually were. But they had held each other out of loneliness and fear and curiosity and lust and hope that this time they would find something beautiful. And in the morning they would find sheets that looked like a geographical terrain, and perhaps an overturned ash tray on the rug beside the bed, and no trace whatever of the face of love.

"Come on," she said, taking his hand. "They'll eat everything before we even get there."

The party was at the apartment of a middle-aged actress whom Tony knew. The room was dark and already filled with smoke and people, as if they were leftover observers from a fire. Gregg coughed and moved with the clockwise motion of the crowd to the window end of the room, hoping she would find the bar there. With an icy glass in her hand she felt better. Tony put a lighted cigarette into her other hand; now she had the props and the play could begin. A play called Isn't This Fun?

"See those three men over there," he whispered. "See the tall young one? You know who he is?" Tony must have been excited, he had said three complete sentences one right after the other.

"Who?"

"David Wilder Savage."

David Wilder Savage had been one of the first people she had heard of when she had come to New York. It was an eccentric name, and he suited it. Most people thought it was a pseudonym, taken so that he would be remembered. For whatever reason, it had worked. Nobody ever referred to him as Savage, they went through the whole

routine. He had been one of the boy wonders of Broadway, producing his first play at twenty-five, a hit which had run for nearly two years. Every play he produced after that was a success, until the one he had done at the beginning of this season, which had closed in four weeks. The magic name David Wilder Savage had been the only thing to hold it on Broadway that long.

The play itself had little theatrical excitement. Thoughtful, fragile and of limited appeal, it had been written by a man who was one of the few people David Wilder Savage had ever been close to. Like many men who cut a heartless swath through the worlds of business and of bedrooms, David Wilder Savage had one friend whom he cared for deeply and whom he protected. They had been roommates in college, the author and the producer, and in the fourteen years since their graduation the author had been working on this one play while holding various jobs to make a living. That fact alone would have warned away nearly any would-be producer. It would have warned away David Wilder Savage before anyone else, because if anyone had an instinct for success and failure it was he. But this closest friend had been killed in an automobile crash in the spring, and in the fall David Wilder Savage, against the advice of anyone who dared to give it to him, put the play on Broadway. It was not because he was confused by his bereavement. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was one of the rare gestures of sentimentality—and even more, of love—from a man who was known for his ruthlessness. It was ironic that his one act from the heart should turn out to be a debacle, but not unusual, since David Wilder Savage himself would be the first to say that if a con man ever tried to save a child from drowning in a moment of pure goodness he would be sure to be eaten by a shark.

"Do you know him?" Gregg whispered back.

"I read for him once. He probably doesn't remember me."

"Do I dare go over and talk to him?"

"Why not? It's a party," Tony said without much enthusiasm.

"Come with me."

He kissed her lightly on the temple, his cheek bulging out with an hors d'oeuvre he had just gobbled. "What for? Pretty girls have much better luck alone."

She was relieved that he didn't want to accompany her, but when she had worked her way through the crowd to where David Wilder