The Best of Everything (44 page)

"Dexter," April said slowly, "if you don't want a big church wedding we can just go down to City Hall someday. I wanted a church wedding but I'll give it up for you."

The gaze he gave her was blank.

"It means a lot to me," April went on, beginning to stumble a little in the face of tliat insensitive gaze, "but I want to do what you want. I know it's a lot of trouble for you to come all the way to Colorado . . . and really, it's kind of a silly custom anyway ... I feel sort of like a New Yorker. . . ."

"What are you talking about?"

"Our wedding," April said.

He lighted another cigarette with the butt of the first one. "You don't have to make plans so far in advance."

"But it's September already."

"I'm not getting married this fall," Dexter said.

"Why not?"

"Why not? Why not? What do you mean, why not? Don't you think women should let the men do the proposing?"

"Yes, I do . . ." April said, her voice faltering, wringing her hands together behind her back. "But you did propose, and now I'm just making a few plans."

"I proposed? Do you see a ring?"

"You said, "We can get married in the spring.* I remember that. That's what you said. And then later you said you were taking your vacation in the fall and Europe was a good place for a honeymoon."

"That adds up to a proposal?"

How could he be so cruel? He was worse tonight than he had ever been, she hardly knew him. "We . . . can . . . get . . . married . . . in . . . the . . . spring," she repeated, fighting back tlie tears.

"That was an awfully long time ago," he said coolly. "You know, if you find a package in the bus and nobody claims it for ninety days it's dead, it's not his any more. You take a lease on a building and it has a time limit. How long do you think that chance remark has any validity?"

There had been times before that she had thought she could never suffer any more, but now she knew she had been wrong. This was the crudest time, and what was worse, she could not understand it at all. The world was falling away, nothing made any sense. Dexter was suddenly a villain. Even his face had changed, it bore the marks of secrecy and fright. But even at this moment, terrified and hurt and angry at his strange behavior, April could not help noticing how handsome that face was and how she loved it, and she wanted to kiss him and tell him to smile at her and stop this dreadful scene.

Dexter stood up, walked to his kitchenette, and tossed the remains of his Gibson into tlie sink. "Do you want to go out for dinner," he said, "or do you want to argue all night?"

"We're not arguing. We're discussing our whole future, yours and mine. I'm . . . I'm not the kind of girl who can live with a man and just ... go on like that forever. I always thought we would get married."

"Living together? We're not living together," Dexter said indignantly,

"We're . . . sleeping together!"

He threw up his hands. "I suppose you're going to hold that against me too. Every little thing I say or do."

April stared at him. "It doesn't mean anything to you, does it?"

He smiled then, intimately, and she almost recognized him again. "Of course it does, honey," he said. She recognized his tone, but this time she understood it, for the first time. It was the sleepy-cat, purring tone, the happy tone, the pacifying tone, but there was nothing in it of love, and April wondered how she could have listened to it for over a year and never noticed that. All right, Dexter didn't love her. The enormity of it was such that she could not comprehend it, and so she put it at the back of her mind. Perhaps he could not really love. It was not for her to understand. He wanted to be with her, that was all that mattered. That was a form of love. If it was all Dexter could manage she would live with it and be grateful for even that.

"I won't talk about marriage any more now," April said falteringly, trying to pacify him. "We'll talk about it another time."

"There's nothing to talk about."

"When are you taking your vacation?"

"I thought I'd take it at the end of the month," Dexter said. "Now I think I'll take it next week."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

April almost said, You said you might go to Europe, but then she stopped herself. He might jump on her again. Instead she said, "I've always wanted to go to Bermuda. A girl in my oflBce went there on her—last June, I mean, and she said it was marvelous." She waited for him to give some sign that things were just as they had been before, that he was taking her with him.

"I don't know where I'm going to go," he said.

"I saved my vacation," April said. "I have two weeks. The same as you."

"I might take a month and go to Europe."

It was like having a tooth drilled, after a while it hurt so much you didn't really notice it any more, you rode along on the crest of the noise and the pain and forgot what time it was or where you were. "Not alone?" April said.

"If I can get some girl to go with me I won't go alone," Dexter said. He walked into the dressing room and began combing his hair in front of the mirror. April could see him through the open doorway. She remembered the jfirst time she had ever come up to this apartment, that summer so long ago, when he had peered into the mirror in that same posture after he had tried to kiss her. And how many times since then she had watched him combing his hair after he had kissed her, and made love to her, so that by now the simple act of combing his hair had for her a great and sentimental importance. She wondered whether she would ever again be able to watch a man combing his hair, stooping in front of a mirror, without this same mixture of happiness and misery.

"I met a girl at a party last week," Dexter said casually. "I might ask her."

"A . . . girl?"

"Yes."

"You'd take a strange girl?" April cried.

He was bent over the mirror, trying to press the wave into his hair with two stifF fingers. "Well, I'd take her out for a while first, of course, to see if we liked each other."

"How can you take another girl?" It was more a cry of pain than a question, aU sorts of thoughts were revolving in her head.

"Well, I can't take you," he said, as if it were perfectly reasonable. "You'd try to turn it into an elopement. You'd have a miserable time telling me how long we've been going out together, how much of your time I've wasted." Was it actually true that he sounded hurt and sorry for himself? "If I've wasted so much of your time already, I think it's only fair that I stop right now."

"Oh, Dexter!" April said. "You stop picking on me like that. I never said you wasted my time. I just mentioned how long we've

been going together because I feel it's a bond. Now you stop talking like that . . . please, darling."

"I mean it," he said. He came out of the dressing room straightening the points of his pocket handkerchief.

"You'd start going out with another girl?"

"As many of them as I can find." He sounded actually pleased with the sound of the idea. "Then none of them can say I wasted her time for a year."

"And what about me?" April asked in a small, frightened voice.

"I've invited you to dinner tonight. I'm still available.

"And . . . tomorrow?"

"You'd better make a date with somebody else."

Afterward, when she was alone in her apartment, April remembered every word. Everything Dexter had said to her returned, relentlessly; and her own answers, which seemed so logical and intelligent and loving, and which he had not seemed to understand at all. They had had dinner, or at least they had sat opposite each other while Dexter ate and she fought back the tears and pushed the food around on her plate. She couldn't even drink a cocktail and get drunk, nothing would pass her throat. She had kept her eyes fixed on his face, trying to understand him, to reach him, to find out why whatever they had had together had shattered so suddenly and terribly, beyond repair. Whatever she saw on that face bewildered her. It was closed off from her, under that mask of poise Dexter had perfected through years of the proper schools and the proper older acquaintances and countless introductions to strangers. He could not completely control his voice, so that the charm and smoothness did not quite extend to his tone. She could tell when he spoke that he was uncomfortable, although he insisted on keeping the conversation to inconsequential things. It was the longest and worst meal April had ever sat through in her life, and yet it was also the shortest, because Dexter had made it perfectly clear that he would not see her again.

"I think it's easier this way," he said. "A clean break. Then we won't drag it out and keep squabbling. I want to break it off here."

"Please . . ." April said, "wait until after Thanksgiving. Please. I can't bear to spend a big holiday alone. I'll go home for Christmas, but Thanksgiving . . ."

"That's two months!" he said indignantly.

"That's not so long."

"No," Dexter said. "Now."

She could not face the office the next day, she called in and said she was sick. That was not untrue; she was sick. When she looked at her face in the mirror she looked like someone who had been drowned and beaten and kept awake for four nights. Her skin was pale white with reddish blotches, her eyes were red rimmed from crying and her lips bore purple tooth marks where she had bitten them. Her throat felt raw. She could not lie on her bed because then the thoughts came pouring in, so she paced the floor, still dressed in the dress she had worn for cocktails and dinner the night before. At eleven o'clock she called Dexter at his office.

"Who is calling, please?" his secretary asked,

"Miss April Morrison."

"I'm sorry, Miss Morrison, Mr. Key isn't here." She really did sound sorry, perhaps she knew. April called him at his apartment and let the phone ring ten times. She called him again at his office at twelve, and at three, and at four and four-thirty. Every time the secretary sounded sorrier. In between these calls April called him at home. There was never any answer. Then she knew at last why his secretary had sounded so sorry. Any sympathetic woman would feel badly when she was talking to another woman who was obviously terribly upset and she knew she had to tell a he.

Chapter 19

In the late fall Caroline Bender reaHzed that she had been going out with Paul Landis for a year. She did not feel sentimental, the way she would about an anniversary. She was only surprised that she had been seeing him for so long without feeling any differently toward him, except perhaps more at ease, as one always is with an old friend. She had never gone out with a boy steadily for such a long period of time except for Eddie, and she and Eddie had been

in love. It's a mark of endurance, Caroline thought, rather pleased with herself—but whose endurance, I wonder?

She mentioned their anniversary to Paul the next night at dinner. He seemed much more moved than she had been. "This calls for a celebration!" he said, looking happy and excited, and promptly ordered a bottle of the best champagne.

Drinking her champagne and looking at Paul thoughtfully over the rim of her wide glass, Caroline couldn't help thinking, He'll never forget his wife's birthday or their anniversary. It was a comforting feeling. And yet, it hurt a little, because she felt she could never bring herself to love Paul enough to marry him, and so she would miss out on a lifetime of thoughtful little gestures. She was realizing already as she came to the end of her second year in New York that thoughtfulness like this was hard to find. There were men like Dexter Key, whom she hated for what he had done to April, all good looks and charm and loving himself so much that he didn't even bother to be subtle about it. There were the dozens of utterly mismatched blind dates she had been inflicted with in the past two years, a sentence at hard labor starting with the words (usually uttered by some nice older woman who hardly knew her or the boy) "I know a nice young man for you to meet." These amateur matchmakers seemed to think that the mere fact that Caroline wore a skirt and the man wore pants was enough to make them want to hurl themselves into each other's arms. And there was the majority, the so-so dates, the young men who didn't particularly care about her or she about them, but who continued to call her once in a while for dinner or drinks because they too were marking time. It was nice, in the face of all this, to be with someone like Paul, who really cared about her, and she had known girls who had married men like Paul for that very reason and because they wanted so badly to be married.

More and more lately, during these dreary months, she had found herself thinking of two things. One of them was Eddie. If I had married Eddie, she kept thinking, I would be happy today. I wouldn't be putting up with any of this. But then the other thought came in: I wouldn't have this wonderful job either. Caroline knew in her heart that if she had the choice today she would still throw away her job in a minute for life as Eddie's wife. Or she could continue to work for a few years. Eddie would be proud of her, he would like

288

"^

her to work if it was what she wanted. Paul would too, she supposed, but he was always so wrapped up in his own work and his legal cases that he seemed to feel her work was a little game, especially since he had glanced through two or three of the Derby books and had stated flatly that they were for idiots.

"We have to go somewhere special tonight," Paul was saying, "since it's our anniversary. It's too late to get theater tickets. Why didn't you tell me before?"

I didn't think it was that important, she wanted to say, but instead she smiled and shrugged. "I'd just as soon go to the movies, Paul, really."

"Nonsense. We'll go to the Blue Angel."

She sat in the dark club watching the show, her hand in Paul's. She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the oflBce on time, to a date on time, a scrap of cheese and some caimed orange juice in the icebox, perhaps a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except on weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and suflBcient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory.