The Best of Everything (41 page)

"Sounds like misery for all concerned," Sidney said.

"That's a nice dress but it's very inexpensive. Twelve ninety-five, I'd say. I think she's a secretary, she looks like one."

Barbara sipped at her Martini. The glass was frosted and the drink was very cold and hot at the same time. "Look how fast they

finished their drinks," she said. "Two while we were waiting for our first. I know just how she feels, I've done that myself on occasion."

"Well, why did she go out with him?"

"I bet she shares an apartment with two other girls and she wants to get away from them. She isn't wearing any stockings, they've probably borrowed them all."

Sidney squinted. "She has nice legs. That's probably one of the reasons he's out with her."

"What are the others?"

"You tell me."

"No," Barbara said, "you tell me. You're speaking for the men."

"He looks so bored right now I'd say he just wants to get her in the hay."

"Poor girl. But she'U be married to someone by next year, they always are."

"Not to him." No, sir.

Sidney laughed. "I feel sorry for him. You have no sympathy."

"I know," she said, laughing too, "I'm a beast. And I feel so superior just now because I'm having such a good time and I remember all the times I didn't."

"That's the price one pays for the eventual happy ending. Surely your mother must have told you that."

"She has. But I'm still waiting."

The couple across the room in the corner stood up. The man held the girl's chair for her as she gathered up her purse and gloves. Sidney nudged Barbara's knee under the table with his. "Your friends are going."

"Shh."

They were crossing the room now, passing directly in front of the table where Barbara and Sidney were sitting. Barbara looked up at them curiously. They were so close she caught a whiff of smoke from the young man's lighted cigarette. The hand he was holding it in bore a thin gold wedding band. Barbara turned, with a little shock of surprise, to look at the girl's fingers. She, too, wore a thin gold band, so narrow it had been invisible from across the room.

"They're married!"

She looked at Sidney and he looked at her and they smiled at

each other with surprise and amusement. "But they looked so miserable!" she said.

His smile faded a httle, but enough so that Barbara noticed it. "Yes," he said.

"I am dumb," she said softly. "I even forgot about how I used to look. People get so tied up in their own grudges and problems they forget about other people."

"It was fun," he said. He looked almost as contented as he had before, the moment of revelation had been only a flash. He is unhappy, she thought, I know he is. And although she hated to know that anything made him suffer, Barbara had to admit to herself with a perverse little stab of pleasure that she was rather glad. It meant he was more accessible, it meant . . . Oh, I am a fool, she thought. This kind of thinking is the oldest trap in the world.

At eight o'clock they left the bar and walked to a restaurant for dinner. It was sunset and the sky was streaked with deep colors. The streets were deserted and quiet because it was the dinner hour of a summer night and everyone who could go was either in the coun-tiy or in an air-conditioned room. Without the crowds and traflBc the streets looked unusually wide. The whole evening stretched out in front of them, like a vacation. No one knew where they were and no one cared, and they were together. I wish life could always be like this minute, Barbara thought. When Sidney held open the door of the restaurant for her a blast of artificially cold air hit them and there was the sound of music and voices. It was a brightly lighted restaurant with murals on the walls and fresh flowers on the tables and a menu a yard long written in undecipherable French handwriting. There were carts of elaborate pastries lined up along one wall, covered with tarts and cakes with swirls of whipped cream. Barbara had never felt less hungry in her life. She looked around the room. How bright it was, how gay, and how insensitive those people seemed gobbling their food and howling with laughter.

"Two, sir?" the headwaiter asked, flourishing a menu. Sidney looked down at Barbara. "We'll have a drink at the bar first," he said abruptly.

They sat at the bar on high slippery red leather chairs. Barbara looked into her Martini. "You'll think I'm crazy," she said, "but I don't want to stay here. Do you mind?"

He was already standing. "Let's go."

Out on the street again in the soft purple early darkness she felt better. "It was just that it was so . . ."

"Bright and noisy and not for us," Sidney said. "The minute we walked in I knew this wasn't a night for L'Oiseau's."

"Can we walk for a while?"

He took her arm protectively and they walked down the street to nowhere in particular. "Are you hungry?" he asked.

"No. Are you?"

He shook his head.

They walked east, toward the river. Every now and then as they passed a restaurant or a bar people would come walking out in close groups, laughing and talking and looking slightly drunk and very well fed. Of course, Barbara thought, it's Thursday, the maid's night out. Other people's customs, other people's households, seemed very far away. She felt curiously detached. She was a little high from the Martinis but not in the least drunk, her lips were not numb and she could see everything clearly. The landscape changed, from oflBce buildings and stores and restaurants to dingy apartment houses and then finally to the large luxurious new buildings near the water, sitting side by side with tenements that were waiting to be torn down. There was a sidewalk and a railing and some benches, and beyond that the slowly moving black water and the lights of the shore on the other side. They leaned on the railing, side by side, and Sidney lighted a cigarette for himself and one for her.

"It's funny," Barbara said. "I live in New York and I've never been here before."

"I haven't been here in years."

She turned around with her back to the railing and her elbows leaning on it and looked up at the lights in the apartment buildings. Up there, on what seemed to be the twentieth floor, there was a terrace with people moving about on it. They were only black specks. She was happier with Sidney Carter than she had ever been in her life, and yet she felt nervous and dissatisfied, as if there were another person inside her skin that was trying to burst out. She wanted to run and run down the street along the river and never stop, or leap into the water and swim to the other side, or throw her arms around Sidney's neck and tell him never to let her go. But she did none of these things, she merely turned around again and tossed her cigarette into tiae water.

"Do you want to go to hear some jazz?" he asked.

"Do you?"

"No."

He lighted another cigarette for her and they were silent, looking out at the river, not touching. "I don't know what's wrong with me," she said. "I'm so nervous." He tossed his cigarette into the water and she watched it arc, the tiny red glowing tip. It seemed very important to watch it, to keep track of it, to concentrate on it instead of the vague and disturbing feelings that were making her teeth begin to chatter even though it was a warm night. He moved to her then and put his arms around her, not demandingly but protectively, and Barbara put her face against his lapel. She could feel his heart beating very hard against her cheek, but he did not move or speak for a long time and neither did she.

She stirred only to put her arms around his waist. Inside she wanted to cry and laugh at once, but outside she felt incapable of speaking a word. She was aware that she was shivering.

"We can't stand here all night," he said gently.

"No."

But neither of them moved. "I didn't think it would be like this," he said at last.

"Is it 'like this'?"

"Is it, for you?"

". . . Yes."

She looked up at him then and he lowered his head and kissed her. She had never kissed anyone the way she was kissing him, she realized, as if she wanted to draw all his breath into her body because without it she would choke. His arms were around her so tightly they hurt her ribs but she didn't mind, the discomfort was at the back of her mind, it was a pain that was a part of pleasure. He took a step to the side and they sank down on to a bench, arms still tightly wound around each other, mouths still together. She heard herself breatliing, or was it he? There seemed to be no difference between breath and breath. He was kissing her neck and her throat and her ear, and then he drew away a little and looked at her. Their faces were only a few inches apart and she saw his lips move before he began to speak, as if he could hardly speak at all.

"We'll be picked up for vagrants," he murmured.

"Oh . . ."

"Come with me."

"Yes."

They were running then, hand in hand, across the street and through the empty canyons between the dark buildings, like children, their footsteps echoing in the summer night. The sky was a very dark blue-black, streaked with white clouds and stabbed with stars, a display of nighttime pyrotechnics. A doorman standing on the sidewalk in front of a huge whitish building looked at them cm-iously as they ran past. There was a taxi cruising along First Avenue. Sidney waved at it and it stopped and they cHmbed in and sat very close together, each holding both the other's hands tightly as the taxi rocketed across town to his hotel. Barbara was afraid to think, she held his hands against her pounding heart and closed her eyes. When they walked through the brightly hghted lobby of his hotel she kept her head down and her eyes closed, shutting out re-ahty, letting him lead her, and briefly aware that this carpeted lobby that was suddenly the scene of the most important and shortest and most dreamlike walk she had ever taken was the same ordinary place where she had waited many times for girls to meet her for lunch or boys to meet her for cocktails.

He opened the door of his room with a key and turned on the hght. It was not a hotel room, it was an entire suite. There was a small balcony outside the hving-room window and long white curtains covered it, billowing slightly. There was a huge fireplace which looked as if it had never been used, and two sofas, and a coffee table littered with papers and mail. The combination of the cold impersonality of this hotel suite and Sidney's work tossed on the table filled Barbara with a kind of poignance. There was a bar set against one wall with some bottles and decanters on it. Sidney was moving about quickly, turning on a lamp, switching off the hall hght. The room was softly lighted, bluish with shadows. Barbara put her purse on a sofa and walked to the window, looking out, feeling the breeze against her face. There were millions of hghts out there, and the dark, hght-dotted area of the park. From behind her she heard the click of ice cubes being dropped into a glass. She turned and shook her head.

Sidney put the bottle back on the bar, unopened, and stood there

for a moment, his hand still around the neck of it, looking at her. "Will you do something for me?" he asked very quietly.

Barbara nodded.

"Stand there and hold out your arms."

She did. He looked at her for an instant more and then walked to her very quickly and took her into his arms. "God," he murmured into her hair, "that's the most beautiful sight in the world."

"It's the way I feel about you," Barbara said.

There were twin beds separated by a night table. Sidney and Barbara were shedding their clothes all the way to the bedroom, leaving a trail, with that same breathless hurry that had made them run down the street to the cab. They stopped at the doorway to the bedroom, arms around each other, looking at those two ridiculous narrow beds and each of them beginning to smile at the same time. "Decisions," Sidney said, "notliing but decisions."

"Oh, I love you."

They fell on one of the beds and this time it was Barbara who reached out and turned off the light. There was enough light streaming in through the open doorway to the living room so that she could dimly see Sidney's profile as he leaned over her breast. Why had she never realized before what a beautiful face he had? It was a pleasure just to look at it. Oh, I love him, she thought, I love him, I do. Just knowing that she loved him was enough, even if she was not allowed to. She could feel. That was worth everything; feeling, caring, no matter what happened to make it end in emptiness, because having the capacity to love was so beautiful. She knew that she had never truly loved any man before in her life.

She had never felt this physical pleasure before, to such a degree, and she realized it was love that made the difference. She had not been to bed with any man since her husband, and it had been two years, a long time, so that at first Sidney hurt her, but only for a second. Then she welcomed him. She had not known such skill existed, and yet she was not surprised because she had known that Sidney Carter would do everything well, she had never doubted it. The only thing that surprised her was her own reaction; she was suddenly a creature without shame, all made of sensations and motion without any consciousness of what was happening outside of herself and him. She heard herself screaming in her throat as at a great distance, and felt him very gently putting the corner of the pillow be-

tween her teeth. What a monster I am! she thought, and then she did not care in the least.

They were bathed in perspiration and she did not care about that either, although she had ordinarily found that an unpleasant part of love-making. Afterward he continued to hold her in his arms for a while until the breeze that came in through the window felt cold, and then he sat up and pulled up the sheet. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

"Nothing. Except that I'm happy."

"So am I."

But under the clean sheet with its crisp fresh-laundry smell, reality returned, and sense, and Barbara thought of two things. "I'll probably get pregnant," she murmured.

"No you won't. I was careful."

She reached out for his hand and grasped it and he returned the pressure. They were silent for a while. "Something else," Barbara said. "Something worse."