The Best of Everything (19 page)

He was wearing a clean white shirt and a pair of neatly creased dark-gray flannel pants. His hair was wet from the shower and she could see the marks his comb had left in it. "Thanks," he said. He flipped the tie around his neck and peered into the mirror, tying the knot.

April thought of retreating to her place on the couch but she was rooted to the spot, fascinated. She had never watched a boy get dressed before, and here she was with Dexter Key, the most fabulous boy she had ever met in her life, watching him in this situation that was somehow so intimate and yet not frightening. He looked at her.

"Nice?"

"Mmm-hmm."

He strode over to her and put his arms around her, and before she knew what was happening he was kissing her. This wasn't like the last kiss she had received, from that dirty Mr. Shalimar, and it wasn't like any kiss she remembered from the boys at home. It was magic, a pounding of the heart and a touch of something that was like silk and warmth; a kiss she couldn't remember a moment afterward because it was so emotional for her. She knew that she was kissing him in return, and that he was kissing her again, and then

the movements of his hands on her body brought her back to reality.

"No!" she said, pushing him away.

"What?" he said. His eyes were still half closed, he looked as if he were asleep,

"That's enough," she said tremulously. She retreated two steps and tried to smile.

He was looking at her then with an expression she tried to interpret. Was he annoyed? He would never want to see her again, he was insulted, he would think she was a little prude. He probably went out with sophisticated girls who went all the way and laughed afterward. But she couldn't . . . she couldn't. He would know she wasn't sophisticated, he would think she was just easy. She wanted to keep him, she had to, now that she had found him; she couldn't bear to have him think she was "that kind of girl" and throw her away afterward. Oh, my God, April thought, what is he thinking? Say something, Dexter, please speak to me.

He walked to the mirror and looked at his reflection, and wiped her lipstick carefully off his mouth with a paper tissue. Then he combed his hair again. He seemed more interested in his appearance than in her rejection of his embraces, and April didn't know whether to be offended or reheved. He doesn't like me any more, she thought in a panic.

"Are you mad at me?" she asked softly.

"Mad? Why?"

She shrugged, feeling herself blush.

"What, mad?" he said. "What?"

"I . . ."

"Come on, April," he said petulantly. "Grow up. Why should I be mad at you? I don't force anyone to do anything. I don't have to."

"I'm sure you don't," she said.

He was mollified and trying not to show it. She could feel her heart pounding with joy. "It's not that I don't like you," she said, wringing her hands together. "I do like you. A lot."

"WeU, I like you too," he said. He took his suit jacket out of the closet and put it on, carefully arranging a printed silk handkerchief in the pocket. He took a last glance into the mirror. "Are you ready?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes." She preceded him out of the apartment and waited while he locked the door behind them. It was a Httle as if he were writing

The End on a chapter, and yet she knew with a certainty that it was only the end of a chapter and not of the whole story. How handsome he was, and how nice he smelled! It was funny how when Dexter had first kissed her she had thought of Mr. Shalimar as "that dirty old man." Already everything that had happened to her before this day seemed far away and unimportant. How could she ever have thought Mr. Shalimar was glamorous? She was glad she had never let him do anything to her and that she had kept away from him whenever he was alone. Everything important was the present and the future, with Dexter Key, as if her life were really beginning on this day.

"Would you like to eat dinner outdoors?" he asked. "I know just the place."

He took her arm and they walked down the street, where he hailed a taxi. He wasn't annoyed, he liked her. He didn't mind that she was a bit of a prude, he liked her. In the end it would do her good. Maybe he would even fall in love with her. She was ninety-eight per cent in love with him already. It was a real New York success story, she was thinking, and now she knew what she had come to New York to find. Not business success, but love. Success in love was every bit as important as success in a career—even more so for a woman. If there was anything in the world more important than love, April thought, glancing secretly at Dexter, she really couldn't imagine what it could be.

Chapter 9

Summer is the worst time of year in New York. The hot breeze blows soot and sticky blackness in through opened windows, offices are running on half staff for staggered summer vacations, sidewalks grow soft and tempers short, and along the streets leading to the highways out of the city people tean on their tenement window sills and dully watch the long stream of cars nudging each other bumper to bumper at five o'clock, the hour of release.

Times Square at lunch hour looks like a carnival or a listless

Mardi Gras. Winter coats hide many secrets: flaws in figure, flaws in taste; but the heat of summer reveals everything. Just by watching the people at the crossings you can never tell when the lights have changed because the crowds keep moving on regardless, the boys in their short-sleeved sports shirts, the girls in their summer dresses, bare armed, bare legged, some bare backed, skin winter white, waiting for their two weeks in the sun. Non-air-conditioned oflBces are a torment in the summer, ten degrees hotter as you rise from the ground in the elevator, with electric fans to stir the choking air and blow the papers off the desks to the floor. In the cool modem Radio City buildings where offices like Fabian Publications are located, the girls wear sweaters all day in the office and are often absent with brief summer colds.

In the reconverted brownstones and old apartment houses where the tenants are not allowed air conditioning or cannot afford it, summer nights are a time to go to still another air-conditioned movie, to linger for hours in a cold restaurant, or to sit out on a balcony or a fire escape and rub irritated eyelids waiting for sleep, waiting for air, waiting for day which will bring more burning sun and no relief. In those hot sleepless nights of the summer of 1952, five girls, at least, stayed awake thinking of love and careers and worrying, each in her own and different way.

Mary Agnes Russo, in the Bronx, was thinking about her wedding, which was now less than a year away. She was wondering where they would rent an apartment and whether they could afford three rooms. It would be nice to have her own living room, and a bedroom and kitchen. A bedroom—a shiver went up her back in the hot dark room as she thought of the things she had been trying not to think about all these months. She was a Httle bit afraid, but she knew everything would be all right once she and Bill were alone together. Someone had told her an awful story: that after the excitement of the wedding and all the bride always got the curse on her wedding night. Wliat a horrible thing that would be, after waiting almost two years! But then, there would be all those other nights afterward, all through the years, and there would be children and a home with furniture in it, and mea^s to cook, and things to do as a couple, and it would all be worth the waiting. If you were going to be married for ever, all the rest of your life and all through eternity, you could wait two years—couldn't you? She clenched her hands to-

gether and moved about on her rumpled sheet, trying to find a cool spot where she had not been lying before. Lately she couldn't sleep, she was getting to be a wreck. In the morning she had dark circles under her eyes. A girl should be married; it was boring being single, and it was lonely. She hated saying good night at the door and running back for one last kiss and then having to pry his hands oflF where they shouldn't be. "I know," he would agree, and put his hands in his pockets. Then, walking up the stairs to her bedroom, tiptoeing so as not to wake her father whom she could hear snoring in his bedroom, she would want nothing more than to run back down the stairs and call out to Bill before he could get away. But she would grit her teeth and continue into her room, and by the time she got there she would realize that she was so tired there was nothing to do but go to bed. And then, in bed, she couldn't sleep. . . .

It's all right, Mary Agnes thought, we'll be married by this time next summer. And if it's hot and we can't sleep, we'll sit up by the window and talk, and drink a glass of milk, or maybe he'll have a cold beer. And we'll have a white French Provincial bedroom suite, with a double bed and a double dresser to match, or maybe a dresser for me and a chifforobe for him. It would seem strange to have a double bed. When she went to visit some of her girl friends from high school who were married now, and she saw a double bed in the bedroom, it would embarrass her a little. It was almost like saying, Now you know what we do. Never mind, Mary Agnes thought, when you're married you get used to those things. I'll bet after a while it gets to be just as ordinary as going to sleep at night. After all, that isn't the most important thing in marriage, it's the very least. The important thing is being a couple, being a wife, being married, being able to say. My husband. My husband says . . .

If I can't sleep tonight again, Mary Agnes thought, I don't know what I'll do.

In the room she shared with her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Barbara Lemont was awake staring at the ceiling. Every once in a while a car would go by, and its headlights would sweep across her ceiling. She wondered who was in the car and where it was going. A boy and a girl perhaps, on a date. She hadn't dated enough, she had never had a chance, and now dating was diflFerent. If only I

could meet someone interesting, she thought. I'm so tired of sitting in a cocktail lounge where the dim light makes me want to sleep, with my jaws hurting from trying not to yawn, listening to some fool telHng me dirty jokes because he thinks that's going to get me all excited. Some dumb boy dragging sex into the conversation, thinking all he has to do is talk about people going to bed together and I'll start to pant. What do these boys think anyway, that a girl who's been married is a sex machine? Those bedroom athletes probably have more of a sex life as bachelors than I ever had. Don't they know that when you're not getting along with your husband, making love is the last tiling in the world you want to do? And don't they realize that if they bore me to death at the dinner table I'm certainly not going to want to be bored afterward in their beds? Bored afterward, she thought, that's a Freudian slip.

Barbara smiled. At least I can laugh. And when you can still laugh at them you've got them all beat, no matter what happens. Don't we, Hillary baby? She got out of bed and tiptoed to her daughter's crib and bent low to look at the peaceful little face, listen to the regular breathing. I've got you to get settled too, now, she thought. God, what a responsibility! Soon you'll be old enough to talk and ask me questions about love, and about boys, and about why there aren't any daddies in this house. And I'll have to tell you that love is wonderful, and that good little girls get married and live happily ever after, and that Nana and I just weren't lucky. I wonder if you'll believe me, or if you'll be cagey enough to figure out that I don't even believe it myself.

Love, Barbara thought, is a four-letter word, but most of the boys I meet seem to have it confused with another four-letter word that people don't mention in polite company. If only, if only I could meet somebody interesting!

Caroline Bender, in a white nylon peignoir, was sitting on her balcony; or, rather, since there was no room on the tiny balcony for a chair, she was sitting on the window sOl, with her feet on the balcony floor and Gregg's cat asleep in her lap. She stroked the cat's ear with her finger, listening to the summer night noises below. The sound of cars, the weird skitter of a bus's brakes that sounded a litde like tree frogs, the screams and laughter of a group of teen-aged boys crossing the street. It was one o'clock in the morning and she

was not tired enough to sleep and too sleepy to do something constructive like read another manuscript. Manuscripts were piled on her dresser among the perfume bottles, reminding her of her old college room. There was always work to do, not because Fabian made their editors take work home but because she wanted to. She remembered the first weeks after she had been graduated from college, how in the fall evenings she would be watching television and feel a sense of guilt creeping up on her, and finally realize it was because she had been so trained to do homework after dinner that being absolutely free was a sensation she would have to become used to. Fifteen years of school, fifteen years of routine and in-taking and growing and being taught to seek, and finding. All of a sudden graduation, and the discovery that the limitless walls of books are really a cloister.

Things had been different between her and Mike after that afternoon when they had left the oflBce party—not a great difference, but both of them were aware of it. It was as if there was a slow, gradual drawing away of each from the other, very gently because each was afraid to hurt the other and each was afraid that the separation might hurt himself. They did not go out together as often, and they managed to surround themselves with people from the oflBce, people who they had once thought were absurd bores and whom they were now rather glad to see. She still felt an affection for Mike, but it was a changed love, without desire. When she took his hand out of fondness she was now always a little surprised because it aroused him as much as before. To her he was no longer a lover. It was not that he had failed her; actually he had given her something and she was grateful to him. She was glad it had been Mike and no one else. And yet Caroline could not help feeling, guiltily, that he had failed her, that they had failed each other. He had molded her mind and expected her body to follow. How could it? Everything had been a sham, their mental affair, their love and their eventual moment of passion. He had changed her, he had left her trembling, curious, half satisfied, with a mind that was demanding, perceptive, almost cynical. He would say that he had done her a favor, and she could agree. But he had closed out the field for her, and although he would say that was a favor too, Caroline wondered what would happen to her now.