The Best of Everything (15 page)

Through Mr. Shalimar's intervention Caroline had received a ten-dollar-a-week raise and the title of "Reader," and she had moved in

with Gregg. She had the apartment to herself most of the time because Gregg was out with David Wilder Savage, an arrangement which Caroline found quite convenient. Gregg usually returned about three o'clock in the morning because David had one rule: no girl was ever allowed to spend the entire night in his apartment.

"What's the matter?" Caroline asked Gregg. "Is he afraid for his maid?"

"He just likes to be alone at times," Gregg said. "He's a lone wolf."

Wolf is right, Caroline tliought, but said nothing. She wasn't quite easy in her mind about this affair. Not that she was a prude, despite her stringent upbringing and the virtuous lies she and her college friends had all told one another about their private lives. But she felt with a certainty that David Wilder Savage did not love Gregg, despite what Gregg wanted to believe. In the first place, he had never said he loved her. Then, too, there was his reputation. Why should a man like him, who had everything he wanted except a heart, turn mushy over a girl like Gregg? He never called for her or took her home, but made her meet him at his office or at a restaurant. At three o'clock in the morning he took her down to the street in front of his apartment and put her into a cab. Was this devotion? But he called Gregg every day and he saw her nearly every night, so that at least was devotion of a sort.

"Some people are made to be hurt," Caroline told Mike one night. "It doesn't even take much trying. Gregg is that type, and look who she's tied up with!"

"Don't you think she chose him for that purpose?" Mike asked.

"To get hurt? Not Gregg."

"Don't you think she would have avoided him?"

"Not David Wilder Savage. I could hardly have avoided him myself."

"You met him?"

"Twice. Gregg and I were having a drink in a restaurant before he came to meet her. He talks to you like you're the only person in the world."

"Would you like to sleep with him?" Mike asked calmly and curiously.

"Mike! I don't think about men I meet that way."

"Why not?"

"Well, girls don't."

"Of course they do," Mike said, finishing what was his eighth or ninth drink. "Women have exactly the same feehngs as men do, if they'd only admit it to themselves. A man sees a beautiful girl walking down the street, or he meets her somewhere, and he says to himself matter-of-factly, with no intention of doing anything about it, I'd like to sleep with that girl. That doesn't mean he'd even try to start a conversation. But he accepts his own feelings."

"Why do you drink so much?" Caroline asked.

"Are you changing tlie subject?"

"Maybe it isn't such a different subject. I can't believe that anyone would drink as much as you do simply because he likes the taste."

"You're right," he said cheerfully.

"I sit here and watch you night after night. You drink and talk with no sign whatever that you're getting high, and then all of a sudden you get up and walk out as if you're going to fall on your face."

"I like whisky," he said. "I prefer it to people."

"Why?"

"It's simple. No problems, no responsibilities, no reproaches. Take you and me, for instance. I woke up this morning and as usual I was thinking about you. And all of a sudden I knew I was in love with you."

He said it so matter-of-factly, with that same expressionless look on his face, that it took Caroline an instant to realize what he had just told her. She caught her breath. He was sitting there sipping his fresh drink, not expecting a reply, not asking her if she loved him in return, simply making a comment that could or could not be important to both of them. She was touched, and she realized how much she trusted him. He would take care of everything, everything would be all right.

"What did you do then?" she whispered.

"I got out of bed and found a towel, and then I went back to bed and thought about you some more."

"Oh, Mike, you're terrible, terrible! What a way to talk!" And yet, she was still touched, despite her embarrassment.

"I'd like to have an affair with you," he said. "But I think if you had an affair with me it would ruin your life." He had put down his drink now and was leaning across the table looking at her intently. He did not touch her. "Let's have a strange affair, a private love affair all our own. A vicarious, mental affair."

"What's that? I don't quite understand."

"We'll tell each other everything we're thinking. We'll be absolutely honest with each other. I'll tell you everything I want to do to you, and you tell me everything you want to do to me. We'll have a real affair of the heart, do you understand now?"

"But why?" Caroline asked.

"Because I have my mind and my bottle, and you have your youth and your future. That's no trade, Caroline, the harm is all to you and the gain is all to me."

"I think about you most of the time," Caroline said softly. "I think about all the things I want to tell you, and I remember what you've said to me. I care very much about what happens to you."

"I warned you about that a long time ago," he said. "Do you remember?"

"Oh, yes." She laughed. "That night with that terrible blind date— what was his name? Alvin Wiggs."

He smiled. "Whatever happened to him?"

"He got married to a nice girl. They do, you know."

Slowly, slowly their hands moved across the table and met. He held her hand gently, caressing the tips of her fingers with his thumb. "Don't marry a fool," he said. "Don't get trapped by some 'nice boy' your family parades out for you. You have brains, a future. Marry only someone you adore, someone you can't stay away from. But most of all, marry only someone you respect. If you marry a man you don't have enough respect for it will kill you."

She thought of Eddie then and her heart turned over, but she did not remove her hand from Mike's. His hand was comforting and she wanted him to stay near her. "I knew someone like that once," she said. "He's married now. I don't know if I'll ever find someone who affects me that same way . . ."

"Wait for it," Mike said. "There's no hurry. You have a long, long time. I wish I could have married you myself."

"You?"

"Oh, twenty years ago, when I was your age. But you were just bom then. What a marriage we could have had! And now I'm a different person, and there's a whole life between you and me. We keep making decisions, every day, half without thinking, half against our will. If we don't fight back, if we allow ourselves to change, to be changed, then once it's done we have to do other things, and on

and on until the person we wanted to be is so far away in the past that we only remember him, longingly, as if he were a beloved stranger."

"How dreadful," Caroline said. "1 don't want that ever to happen to me."

He didn't say anything for a minute and then lifted her hand and kissed it very gentiy. "I'm afraid for you," he said. "You're too smart, too pretty, you want too much. You know, there's a wall in Italy covered with bits of feathers and blood because thousands and thousands of sparrows hurl themselves against it every year and are killed. Why do they do it? Who knows. You know who are the lucky ones? The Mary Agneses of this world. Mary Agnes has her whole life figured out: get married next June, save her money, plod along in her job, never look to life to give her anything more. She's the poor little product of training and ignorance and habit, and she's smarter than any of you."

"I had plans like that once," Caroline said.

"Well, maybe we all get one chance to be a Mary Agnes. You lose it, and that's it, you're on the way. But you see, if you were a real Mary Agnes, you'd find a second chance, even if it wasn't as good as the first."

"That's just what you told me not to do," Caroline said.

"I'm drunk," said Mike. He stood up. "Let's go, I'll take you home."

He took her to her house and stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs outside. "Think about our aflfair," he said.

"All right."

He looked at his wristwatch. "It's eleven o'clock. I'll be home in my hotel and in bed by eleven-thirty. I'll think about you then. Will you think about me?"

"Yes," she said.

"Think about me from eleven-thirty to twelve," he said. "And tomorrow when I see you, you can tell me what you thought and what you did."

"What should I do?" she asked curiously.

"Whatever you want to," he said very solemnly, and then he touched his lips in a little salute and walked quickly away into the darkness.

Upstairs in her Uving room Caroline put on her pajamas and drank a glass of milk. She kept her wristwatch on and looked at it every

now and then as she sat on the edge of her studio-couch bed. He must be home now, she thought, in that dismal hotel where Mary Agnes said he lived. Perhaps he was stopping for a last drink at the bar. She was not in the least sleepy and she thought she might wait up for Gregg, read a magazine, listen to the radio or take a bath. She was supposed to think about Mike, but what could she think? She was not accustomed to being told to think about someone at a specific time, and all of a sudden it seemed a difficult thing to do. It was easier to think about herself.

Did she love him? No, not the way she had loved Eddie, or the way she had loved anyone in her life. He fascinated her, and she thought she might be happy if she could fall in love witli him, despite his warning. She did not know any other men who understood what she was thinking. Mike seemed to be able to look deep into her heart and see not only what was puzzling her but give her the answers as well. In her mind she could hear his voice again as he said, "I knew I was in love with you." She said the words over and over to herself and found them both exciting and comforting. If she could love Mike, it would be the only exciting thing in her present life, she knew, and knowing it she was half in love with him already.

With any otlier man she would not have dared to think of falling in love, much less try to fall in love with him, but she felt utterly lulled and cared for. Mike was older, he was perceptive, he would never desert her as Eddie had done. He would never marry her either, but she was so young, only twenty, and she had a long time yet before she had to think seriously of marriage to anyone. It was a relief to put it off, to think of emotions and new feelings without woriying about any permanent attachment.

She never really thought of Mike in a physical sense, she could not even imagine him kissing her on the mouth. What she thought of was the challenge of him as a person, as a companion, as her dearest friend and as a lover on a plane she was only beginning to know existed. She could not tell Gregg or even April about any of this. They would never understand. And Caroline was not so sure that she herself really understood.

It was midnight. She didn't want to wait up for Gregg now, she wanted to go to sleep as quickly as possible so that she could keep all her thoughts to herself. The idea of having to talk about trivialities with anyone at this moment, even a close friend like Gregg, seemed

a heavy imposition. Caroline turned ofiF the Hght and curled up in her lumpy bed; and found herself dreaming of Mike, not quite sure if she were awake or really asleep.

From then on it became easier to fall into their game, or their affair, as he continued to call it. Soon the idea of calling his image to mind at a specified time did not seem bizarre at all. On any night when he forgot to tell her to think about him Caroline felt somehow deserted. She would tell herself that he had merely forgotten, and then she would wonder why. She felt as though he had left her waiting for an appointment. As for Mike, she knew that he had a more pronounced physical reaction to these thoughts of her than she did to her thoughts of him. When he told her what he did about it she was appalled.

"Why?" he asked.

"But that's so . . . that's for children. Little boys. Adolescents . . ."

"Caroline, when will you learn that nothing two people do when they love each other is wrong?"

"That's just it; it isn't two people, it's you by yourself. It's dreadful. It's so isolated."

'It isn't isolated because it brings me closer to you."

"How can it, when it embarrasses me even to think of your doing it?"

"If we're having a love affair," he said, "you mustn't be embarrassed by anything. You'll have to accept your feelings and mine too."

"Sometimes I think it would be better if we really had an affair," she said.

"Rely on me," he said ruefully. "It wouldn't. This way nothing can touch you, nothing can hurt you. That's all I'm concerned about— not hurting you."

For the moment Caroline could not protest, she could only be grateful.

He never took her to his room, nor would he come to her apartment. They sat in bars: Third Avenue saloons with sawdust floors, the Fabian bar in the darkest corner, sometimes some of the cocktail lounges in Radio City. They often ran into people who worked at Fabian whom Mike knew, and after a while Caroline realized that the oflBce gossip probably assumed that she and Mike were having

an aflFair with each other. It was ironic, she thought, because they so obviously were not, and yet there was an intimacy growing between them that could never be called merely a friendship.

"You know," she told him one night, "if it's possible to say that one mind is sleeping with another mind, then that's what we're doing."

"Anything is possible," Mike said. "Tell me what you want me to do to you."

"You know I hate to talk that way."

"Tell me. How else will I know?"

"It embarrasses me."

"Do you want me to kiss you?"

"Yes," she said.

"Then say so."

"I want you to kiss me. And you never do, you know! Just good night, like an old uncle."

He leaned across the table in the blue-lighted dark and kissed her lightly on the comer of her lips. "There."

"There you go again." She couldn't help smiling.

"If I started to kiss you—really kiss you—I couldn't stop there."