The Best of Everything (16 page)

"You make me feel like such a child."

"Come on," he said. "What do you want me to do to you?"

"Kiss me."

"You said that."

She looked down at her hands, clasped on the table top, very white against the darkness of the cocktail lounge. It was dim light, meant to be seductive, and there was nostalgic, unrecognizable music playing somewhere near by. Mike looked so much younger in this vague dimness, he looked almost thirty. And what was so wrong about being thirty-eight? He was still in his thirties, and you couldn't say that someone in his thirties was so terribly old for a girl of twenty. . . .

"What else?"

"You know."

"Do you want me to touch you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

At times like this Caroline was so annoyed at him she was sure that she did not love him, and yet she was powerless to stand up and walk away. His voice and his words held her captive because they were the words of love spoken in the tone of love, and they had be-

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come important to her because they came from him. Perhaps she did love him. Certainly she could think about no one else, and whenever she found herself out on a date with one of the boys she had met since her broken engagement she found herself comparing him unfavorably with Mike. They all seemed so dull, they could not stir her as he did simply by touching her hand. Because now, at last, she was thinking of Mike in a physical way, and she wished that he would simply neck and pet with her, as Eddie had, without all this solemn talk of afiFairs and ruining lives.

"You have to hold my hand while I'm telling you," she said.

He reached out for her hand and grasped it very gently, and the tremor she felt from his touch reached all the way up her arm to her breast.

"You're ruining my vocabulary," she said, smiling. "I'm beginning to shock people without realizing it."

"Who? That flighty roommate of yours?"

"No, not Gregg. My mother and father. I went home to Port Blair last weekend and we were having a simple conversation at dinner— or not so simple, really, because everything my mother and I talk about lately has overtones—and I looked up and saw her face looking aghast. She's not quite sure what I'm doing here in New York. She keeps saying, I hope you're meeting nice boys. She says, I hope you're having lots of fun. All with a little rise in inflection at the end of the sentence because it's really a question, not a comment. And then I said something you'd told me, I can't even remember what it was. It was something that seemed so natural when you and I were speaking together. And my mother raised her eyebrows and drew in her breath and said, 'Caroline! Where do you get those ideas?'

"I suppose your mother wants you to get married as soon as possible," he said pleasantly. "Then she thinks you'll be safe at last."

"Yes, but only to someone whom she would consider 'a good catch.' My mother doesn't want me to marry just anyone for the sake of getting married."

"What about love?"

"Oh, that too. But my mother thinks a sensible girl will fall in love with the right person."

"It's so easy, isn't it?" he said. "To tell someone else what is the right thing for him to do. There's no emotion involved and you see right and wrong clearly."

Tiike Mary Agnes," Caroline said.

"Do you know how I see you?" he asked. "I see a little girl sitting on a rock in a glade near a forest. The Pied Piper comes along playing his music, and all the other little girls leave the secmrity of their homes and dance along after him, far, far away to another land. That's the land of marriage and respectability and who knows? Maybe disappointment for some. All of them, or nearly all, follow the Pied Piper; but you don't. Then along comes Pan, grizzled and hairy, with a leer on his human face and the sweet music of the pipes of Pan in his mouth. He goes off into the forest, and a few Httle girls like your friend Gregg follow him. They're the ones who have the courage to break with tradition, to live as freely as they like. You watch them disappear into the forest, but you don't follow Pan either. You want to think the way you like and hve freely, but on the other hand you want to be married and conventional and have a family. So you just sit there on your rock, and you say. What will become of me?"

"What will?" Caroline asked. "What loill become of me?"

"Do you think I'm a prophet?" he asked with a little smile.

"Sometimes I nearly do."

"I think you'll be very successful," he said thoughtfully. "I think you could love some man very much. I wish he could have been me."

"Maybe he will be you," Caroline said. "Would that frighten you?"

"Only for a minute. Then I'm afraid I'd be selfish enough to be delighted."

Spontaneously she leaned down in the darkness and kissed his hand.

"Caroline, I love you. I wish it were nineteen thirty-two."

"Then I wouldn't be here," she said, smiling.

"You see? We're lost."

"Why couldn't we love each other anyway? I know a wddow in Port Blair who married a man twenty years older than she is and they're very happy together."

"And when she's sixty and he's eighty she'll be holding him up getting into taxicabs and warming his glass of milk at night and telling him the same story over and over because he forgets it as soon as she tells it."

"Eightyl" Caroline said. "The way you live, you'll never live to be eighty."

*1 hope not," he said cheerfully, and swallowed his drink and what was left of hers.

"You know," she said, "I have changed. I can notice it in little reactions I have to things, a kind of acceptance of ideas that are different from mine, and of people who used to awe me. And all that in the six months we've been friends."

"Five of those six months we would have been married to each other," he said, "if we had been luckier. . . ."

It was the first time he had actually spoken of marriage, and Caroline was starded. He loved me long before I loved him, she thought in surprise. Longer than I ever suspected. She wondered what it might have been like to be married to Mike Rice. She could do things for him, make him drink less, give him a real home. . . . Look, she thought to herself, here I am again, being the little girl on the rock, dreaming of domesticating this renegade. And yet, he appeals to me so because he knows so much of life. I can just see him in my hving room at Port Blair; Sunday dinner with the in-laws.

"What are you laughing at?" Mike asked.

"Myself, I guess," she admitted. "For daydreaming."

The last weekend in June all the employees at Fabian from the vice-presidents down to the shipping clerks were driven out to the country in chartered busses for the summer oflBce party. It had been a tradition of old Clyde Fabian's to have the party at his golf club on the Hudson, and even though he was ill and incapacitated he insisted that the tradition be continued. The party was held on a Friday, starting at ten in the morning—the last workday of the week so they all could have their hang-overs on their own time the next day. There was softbaU, swimming, golf, a huge outdoor buffet lunch, liquor, dancing and a return trip to the city at six o'clock in the evening. Caroline went with Gregg, April and Mary Agnes.

"You know," Mary Agnes said, "At my girl friend's office they have the nicest thing. They invite all the husbands and wives and children to the office party, so they can all be together."

"What?" said Gregg. "And cramp everyone's style?"

The girls laughed, except for Mary Agnes. "I think it would be more fun," she protested. "Last year when I was wearing my bathing suit Mr. Shalimar kept making remarks about what nice legs I had,

until I thought I would die of embarrassment. This year I almost didn't bring a bathing suit."

"Just think," April said. "This is my first office party."

"All of ours," Caroline said.

"I'm dying to see a real Eastern country club," said April.

"Are the drinks free or do we have to pay?" Gregg asked.

"Free," said Mary Agnes. "And everybody gets so drunk it's terrible."

"I can't wait," said Gregg. "This party is my swan song. I'm going to take the three days' vacation I have coming to me and then quit."

"Quitl"

"David is getting me a job in summer stock. I'll be the ingenue in at least four plays. Not only is it real, genuine United States money, but I'll only be in Connecticut so I'll be able to see him."

"That's wonderful," Mary Agnes said.

"I never would have asked him for a favor," Gregg said. "But he suggested it. Isn't he a darling?"

"Imagine David Wilder Savage opening doors for you that way," April breathed. "You're so lucky. It's marvelous." There was not a trace of envy in her tone, but only awe and pleasure at Gregg's good fortune. If there was any girl who was completely without jealousy or rancor, Caroline thought, it was April.

As the bus drew up in the wide white gravel driveway of the club there were varied ecstatic exclamations from the occupants. Caroline and Gregg were sitting at the back of the bus and so were the last to leave. Directly ahead of them April and Mary Agnes hurried oflF to join the throng. Gregg looked at Caroline.

"I don't know why we ever came," Gregg said.

"I know. I hate a brawl. All these strangers, and Shalimar wiU doubtless want to act out one of the sex scenes from our latest manuscript."

"Do you think he canF' Gregg asked.

"I wish they'd just give us the money instead of spending it on a party," Caroline said.

"Me too."

They walked slowly over to a long table which was set under a group of leafy trees and foliage, and which was obviously the bar because it was clustered four deep with Fabian employees, like ants on a wedge of cheese.

At the edge of the crowd Caroline saw Mike standing with a glass in his hand, talking with two editors from other magazines whom she had never met. He looked so adult and businesslike that for a moment she had the odd thought that she did not know him at aU. Three men, probably talking business or telling the kind of jokes they did not like women to listen to. She felt very young and self-conscious, and she took hold of Gregg's arm.

"Maybe your friend has pull," Gregg said, nodding toward Mike. "The only place I'll get a drink in this mob is down the front of my dress."

"I don't really want one."

"Of course you do," Gregg said. "How are you going to play touch football with the mailroom boys if vou don't fortify yourself first?"

Caroline laughed, but her hands were cold. It was a hot summer day with a touch of breeze that brought the smell of freshly cut grass, perfume, cigarette smoke and hickory smoke from the outdoor barbecue pit which had just been lighted. The breeze made her shiver and she didn't know why. She looked toward the periphery of the crowd of merrymakers and saw Mike looking at her, his face botli solemn and a trifle amused, as if he had wandered into the wrong

o party. His gaze seemed to join him with her; she felt as if it were a

bridge that she could climb across until she was safely by his side. She moved around the crowd, hardly feeling a heel dug into her instep and a fat arm grazing her breast, and moved breathlessly into his circle under the tree.

He introduced her and Gregg to the others. One of the men gave Gregg the drink he was holding in his hand and she beamed with delight. "Are you having fun?" Mike asked Caroline. He took her arm and turned her deftly away from the group. "I'm so glad to see you."

"I don't know why I come to these things," he said. 'It's harmless, I suppose ... a little fresh air . . ." He breathed deeply. "You like the country, don't you?" Caroline said. "I love it. I grew up on a farm." "My heavens! One would never know." "Why? Is there a way to look if you come from a farm?" She shrugged, "That's just me being provincial again, I guess." "You should have seen the farm," he said. "It was for boys from four to fourteen who didn't have a home or were too ornery for their

relatives to keep them. The old bastard who ran it used to beat us each with a strap on Saturday night so we'd have something to cry about in church on Sunday."

"My Godl"

"One time when I was ten years old I jumped out of the hayloft hoping I would break my neck and die, but unfortunately all I did was sprain my ankle. It didn't even incapacitate me enough to get me out of the extra chores I had to do for being so careless."

"Why didn't you write to your family?" Caroline cried.

"Kids are funny," he said. "My father was dead and my mother had four younger kids at home to take care of. I was the oldest so I was the one who got sent away to that nice healthful farm in the country. I guess I felt that she didn't give a damn about me or else she would have let me stay home."

"I think that's terrible," Caroline said.

They were walking away by themselves now and had left the others far beliind. Mike sat down cross-legged on the grass and pushed a little space in the earth for his whisky glass. Caroline sat down beside him and tucked her skirt around her legs.

"I guess it's ironic," he said, "that now I'm the editor of a religious magazine. The main thing I remember about my Sundays in church is that every morning before I would go there I would have elaborate fantasies about running down the aisle in the middle of the service and pulling off my clothes to show the whole congregation the welts that bastard had put there the night before. In my fantasies the minister was always saving me, he was being very fatherly and saying, This boy need never go back to the farm again. But, of course, I never had the courage to do anything of the sort."

"I think that's just terrible," Caroline said. "How did you ever get out?"

"When I was fourteen I was graduated," he said cheerfully. "I went to work as water boy on a newspaper and that was it. Would you believe it—some of the graduates actually stayed on the farm, working as dishwashers or field hands, bullying the younger kids. It's amazing how kids can be brutalized into a mold in which they give it right back to the weaker ones and never tliink of escaping from the whole filthy mess,"

"I wish you hadn't told me," Caroline said softly. "I can just see