The Best of Everything (24 page)

"Have a good time," Gregg said. "Get drunk for me."

"I'm going to stay un-drunk, for me," Caroline said. But she had a feeling that if she were a little high she would do a lot better.

When she arrived in the office at nine-fifteen April was waiting for her, sitting behind Caroline's desk and bright-eyed with repressed giggles. "You have to walk around with me and get the fashion show," April said.

April was wearing a tight, sleek beige wool dress, and there was a matching cashmere coat hanging on Caroline's coat rack. They were part of the winter wardrobe she had charged at the department

stores before she had even paid for her summer one. The tawny colors of the dress and coat blended with April's gold hair and made her look startlingly beautiful. Caroline remembered the girl with the shiny baby-blue gabardine suit and long tangled curls who had come into this office a year before and she could hardly believe it was the same person. She remembered very well how that other April had looked, but it was as if she were remembering a girl they both had known who had gone away, never to be seen again, to be thought of once in a while with affectionate, pitying smiles.

"This is not to be missed," April said, taking Caroline's hand and leading her out into the bullpen.

There was Brenda at her desk, resplendent in gold lame, very tight, with a bow right under where she sat. She wore spike-heeled bronze kid pumps and a great many strings of fake beads. She was drinking her morning coffee out of a paper container, leaving a semicircle of lipstick on the rim, and there was a stack of letters at her elbow, although no one would do much filing today.

"Call girl after a hard night," Caroline whispered.

"Do you think she wore that on the subway this morning?" April whispered back, gulping in her laughter.

"Never mind," Caroline said, "her husband thinks she's gorgeous."

Mary Agnes waved at them. She was wearing a pale aqua dress of some soft, fuzzy material that looked like angora or rabbit's fur, and it had a little white angora collar around the high neck. She looked thin, flat chested and about sixteen years old.

"Gee," Mary Agnes said, "aren't you two going to get dressed up for the Christmas party?"

"We are dressed up," Caroline said.

Mary Agnes looked blank and then shrugged.

Some of the other girls in the pool were more conservatively dressed, in black velvet skirts and white beaded sweaters, or plain taffeta with swishing crinolines. The teletype operator was married and thought the whole Christmas party would be a waste of time without her husband, so she had compromised by wearing an ordinary tweed office dress with a spray of tinseled Christmas baubles pinned to the shoulder.

"Where's Miss Farrow today?" Caroline asked. "It seems warm in here without those cold chills ruiming down my back."

"Oh, she never comes in on the day of the office party," Mary

Agnes said. "She considers the whole thing a waste of time. She just takes the day ofiF on the grounds that she deserves it."

"Well, I'm glad she did," said April, "because I know I deserve it. You'd think she would have told me, though." Since Gregg had left, April had been filling in as Miss Farrow's secretary until a permanent replacement could be found. Actually, it was not such an unpleasant job during the Christmas season, because April spent most of her days in the department stores purchasing Miss Farrow's Christmas list. There were presents for Miss Farrow's whole family: her mother, her father, her sister, and two brothers and their children back home in Racine, Wisconsin. There were also several expensive presents for men. Since Miss Farrow made April bring these to the oflBce so she could deliver them to the recipients herself, April was sure they were not for any relatives. April and Caroline had decided that no one would buy both a smoking jacket and a silk bathrobe for the same man at the same time, and so there must be two.

"Mr. Bossart must have a rival," Caroline had said.

*Do you think one's for him?" April had hugged herself with glee.

"If they're lovers, then I should think she'd give him a Christmas present. Even if—knowing Miss Farrow—it was only to be sure to get something in return."

"Don't you think she's capable of love?"

"Maybe she loves him. Mr. Bossart is quite handsome, in an older-man sort of way."

"Maybe she loves the other one," April had breathed. "The rival."

Now, standing in the office with April and Mary Agnes, Caroline remembered that conversation, and her thoughts moved quickly. There were so many things that one could do if one were truly bitchy, but Caroline knew she was not the kind of girl who could do any of them. An office ffirtation could probably be quite useful, but an office affair could not help but be dangerous. Despite all the rumors about Miss Farrow and Mr. Bossart, Caroline still felt that a girl got ahead in spite of an office affair, not because of one. After all, Mr. Bossart was married, he had children, and a reputation in his suburban community which he could not afford to ruin. Perhaps it was true, as everyone said, that no matter what she did or did not do in the office, no one could fire Miss Farrow because she was sleeping with Mr. Bossart. But Caroline could not help wondering whether perhaps, despite sex, Mr. Bossart might not be relieved if Miss Far-

row were to disappear gracefully out of his sight. He must have heard the rumors by now; even though he was a vice-president he was not that far away from it all.

She remembered other oflBce rumors she had heard. Mr. Bossart had a tape recorder in his office, hooked up under his desk, so he could take recordings of everything you said when you were with him. Old man Fabian had all the phones tapped so he would know who was disloyal to the company. One of the Norwegian cleaning women was really a company spy. Caroline was sure that none of these was true—and yet, how could you be absolutely smre? A great many employees believed other things that were the product of ignorance, fear and a wish to make a humdrum life more exciting. Certainly it was more interesting to make a routine boring phone call to the printing plant when you suspected that Mr. Fabian himself was listening in on the Hne.

At half past three the girls in the bullpen began going out to the washroom in groups, to recomb their hair, apply perfume and chatter excitedly. One of the men from Advertising, full of Christmas spirits, came downstairs to see Mr. Shalimar on business, stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of Brenda in her gold lame, and gave her an embrace and a hearty Idss, which sent the rest of the girls in the typing pool off into uncontrollable titters. At four-thirty the trek to the President Hoover Hotel began, with people gathering together to share the rush-hour taxicabs.

Mike came out of his office and met Caroline at the water cooler. "Want to share my cab?" he asked.

"That would be wonderful. We have to take April too, I promised her I'd go with her."

Caroline, April and Mike Rice had a taxi exclusively for the three of them, agilely flagged down by Mike. Caroline had always liked a man who could take over, find a taxi during the rush, maneuver her through a jam of people, manage to attract a waiter's attention in a crowded restaurant, act as though he had enough self-respect to demand his rights. Since she had known Mike she had been noticing this lack in many of the younger men who took her out; they were either too demanding, or petulant, or inaudible with self-consciousness. She had never noticed these little things so much before, and she was glad she did now because they made life easier, and sorry

too, because, of course, when you are more demanding life is never easier.

In front of the grand baUroom at the President Hoover Hotel there was a mirrored gallery with a bar in it and several little round tables. The Fabian employees checked their coats on the mezzanine and then went to the gallery for pre-dinner cocktails. At the right of the ballroom was a small salon where a five-piece band played for dancing. The ballroom itself was filled with larger round tables with white cloths and floral centerpieces, and red-jacketed waiters gHded about placing trays of dead-looking hard rolls and pitchers of ice water on the tables and trying to squeeze in an extra place setting here and there. Caroline walked into the gallery between Mike and April. She knew many of the people who were already there, and she felt confident and at home. It was a far cry from the shy girl who had come reluctantly to the summer office party wishing she had stayed in tlie city instead.

Mike maneuvered his way through the crowd surrounding the bar and came back with drinks for the three of them. Caroline could not help remembering the feelings she had had about him at the other party, which now seemed so long ago, and as his eyes met hers she realized he was thinking about it too. For an instant the spark arose between them again, and her heart began to pound. She was filled with a sweetness mixed with sadness.

Mike leaned down and kissed her very lightly on the hps. "Merry Christmas," he said softly.

She could barely whisper. "Merry Christmas."

"April, too. Merry Christmas, April." He kissed April. Waiters were moving through the crowd with trays of highballs, and everyone was drinking as if he were about to be set adrift on a raft. Mike finished his drink in a minute and went to the bar for more. Caroline looked around. There was Mr. Bossart, with thick silver-flecked brown hair that reminded her of a nutria coat her mother used to wear, and a square face that must have had a chorus-boy prettiness when he was in his twenties but now had become handsome in his fifties with the illusion of strength that age sometimes gives. He was wearing gray flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with tiny lapels and two vents in the back that made him look rather like a gander. He wore a red wool tie with little white sports cars printed on it. Caroline tried to keep track of him as he worked his way through the mob

greeting everyone he knew, but he soon vanished. She saw some of the secretaries hovering together in bunches, looking like wallflowers in their party dresses, and talking to one another as animatedly as if they had just met instead of having been working at adjoining desks all day. And there were some of the unlikeliest sights—Mr. Shalimar with Barbara Lemont, Kingsley the confessed office fairy, from Unveiled, with Brenda, and the sweet-looking gray-haired lady who was Mr. Bossart's secretary hooking her hand around a glassful of straight whisky and gulping it down as if she were Tugboat Annie herself.

Mike returned with three glasses of Scotch and soda and a new joke someone had told him while he was waiting in line. Caroline was beginning to feel a pleasant glow. It was very light whisky, obviously the least expensive the hotel had to offer, and it went down painlessly. April was beginning to look as if she could not see too well, as she always did after her second drink. "Caroline," she murmured, "come to the ladies' room with me."

"Why do girls always have to go to the ladies' room in pairs?" Mike asked, amused.

"To talk about boys, of course," Caroline said. "We'll be right back, please save our places."

It was too early for the ladies' room to be crowded. April sat on a bench in the dressing-room section and peered fuzzily into the mirror. There was a box of public cosmetics on the shelf in front of her—cheap cologne, smeary-looking lipsticks and a box of face powder with a community puff. April picked up one of the bottles of cologne and sniffed at it as if she really did not smell it at all and put it back. "Tell me," she said in a soft, small voice, "do you think a girl looks different if she's having an affair? Can people tell?"

"I hope not," Caroline said.

"I just wondered."

"What a strange idea. What brought that up all of a sudden?"

"Oh, Caroline," April said. "I've been wanting to tell you ever since it happened, but how can you just tell somebody?"

"You and Dexter?" said Caroline.

April blushed. "We've been sleeping together for two whole weeks."

Caroline tried not to smile. "The way you say that sounds like 'two whole years.'"

"Are you shocked?"

"Of course not."

1 remember how you and I used to talk about it," April said.

"Remember?"

"I certainly do."

"And remember how we were trying to figure out whether you did it under the sheets or on top of them?"

"Yes."

April looked at her nails and shrugged, smiling to herself. "Well ... the first time . . . right in the middle of it, I suddenly thought to myself, Now I know. And I remembered how you and I were wondering, and I thought, I must tell Caroline."

"That's what you thought about?"

"I guess people think funny things the first time," April said. "It seems so . . . incongruous, doesn't it? All of a sudden the world seems to be made of all different layers of feelings, happy, scared, romantic and very very ordinary, and you feel them all at once. I've been feeling like that for the past two weeks."

"Don't worry," Caroline said, "I've been feeling that way all my

life."

"You're my best friend," April said. "I'd never tell anyone else."

"I'm glad you did tell me."

"It's not just an affair," April said dreamily. "We're going to get married. I know we are. You know, you can sense those things."

"Do you want to marry him?"

"Of course!" April's eyes widened with shock. Then she smiled and bit her lip. "I guess I sound awfully innocent, but I could never sleep with Dexter if he weren't the only man in the world for me. I'm dying to marry him."

"I hope you do, and soon," Caroline said warmly.

"Caroline, he's so good to me," April said, sighing. "He's so sweet; he really loves me, I'm sure. He's going to come to Springs for Christmas to meet my family."

"That's wonderful!"

"It's not exactly definite that he can come with me. He's going to try to get out of some family parties of his own. His mother always has a big deal with Christmas dinner and the whole family from his ninety-year-old grandfather down to the great-grandchildren who

have to eat Pablum. But he's going to try—and if he likes my family and they like him, well . . ."