The Best of Everything (48 page)

"Why don't you turn on the television," Barbara's mother said. "We can watch the people."

"Do you want to?"

"Sure. It's New Year's Eve, isn't it? We'll hsten to the radio and the television."

Barbara switched on the television set. "It'll be murder," she said.

"I don't know how those silly people can go out there and get trampled on and call it fun," her mother said. "I'll bet tliere are a lot of drunks in that crowd."

"I guess so."

"And purse-snatchers," her mother added cheerfully.

Barbara sighed. It didn't matter so much tliat she didn't have a date, it would only have been with someone she didn't care about anyway. New Year's Eve was such a long evening with someone dull, everyone felt he had to stay up late as a matter of principle. Soon it would be twelve o'clock and then it would be morning and she could forget all about this ordeal for another year. Where was Sidney now, what was he doing? Did he ever think of her? He probably thought she was at a party having a good time with some eligible man, if he thought of her at all. She had wondered so often lately whether he still thought of her, although she had tried to put him out of her mind.

"Cheer up," her mother said. "Lots of girls don't have dates tonight. I'll bet you're not the only one."

"I don't mind."

"Next year will be better. You'll see,"

Next year . . . Barbara thought. I wonder whether I'll still be thinking of Sidney. No one carries a torch for that long, not even an idiot like me. I wonder where I'll be next year and who I'll be wdth. It seems as though every New Year's Eve that you sit alone or go out with someone you hardly know or can't bear, you think of all the otlier New Year's Eves you've done the same thing, and it seems as if it's endless. Sidney said something like tliat once, he said when things are bad it seems as if they've always been that way.

Oh, Sidney, if I could only call you up and have you cheer me for five minutes. It would make all the difference in the world. Or would it? Would it really?

At one minute to midnight, the last seconds of nineteen fifty-three, when the gold ball had started traveling up the Times Tower and all over the city people were reaching for champagne glasses or for their companions and preparing for the hearty wishes and round of kissing, someone at a party in the East Thirties reached out and turned off all the lights. "Hey," someone else cried, "turn 'em back on! I can't find my datel"

Everyone laughed and the lights were switched on again. Caroline Bender was standing in front of a Christmas tree with Paul Landis. "One minute," he said, looking at his watch.

She smiled nervously and looked elsewhere. What time is it in Dallas, she wondered.

"Midnight!" someone cried. "Happy New Year!"

"Happy New Year," Paul said quietly. Everyone around them was in embrace, kissing each other to welcome in the new year, some of them taking advantage of the moment for all it was wortli. Paul looked a little embarrassed with all these people around, and he took hold of Caroline's shoulders very lightly and leaned down to put his hands on hers chastely and briefly. But the contact was too much for him and he put his arms around her and pressed her to him.

Her eyes were shut. Eddie, my darling, she thought, willing her thoughts across the entire country to wherever he might be, Happy New Year, darling. I still think of you. Remember me, just for this one minute. Remember me.

She broke away from Paul's arms and hands as gently as she could. "Happy New Year, Paul."

"Stop necking, all you kids," tlieir hostess cried gaily. "Especially you old married ones. Shame on you. We can eat now. Caviar! And more champagne coming up."

"Shall we?" Paul asked Caroline. He held out his arm and she took it and they walked together to the buffet table, skirting their way around one couple who were newly married and evidently didn't care at all whether there was caviar or not.

At half past four on New Year's morning, which was still New Year's Eve to some people, April Morrison was leaving El Morocco with a young man named Jeffrey, who was a friend of Chet's, who was a friend of Dexter's. She was more than slightly drunk and she tripped as she tried to get into the cab. Jeffrey, who had sobered somewhat in the chill air of early morning, took her arm quickly and they fell into the taxi together, laughing and clutching each other, and rode that way all the way across town to her apartment.

"May I come up?" he asked, but he was already halfway up the first flight of stairs and April did not even have to answer. They sang and laughed and hushed each other as they chmbed the stairs, and stopped on each landing to hug and kiss.

"We look like two bears," April said, "with our coats on. I can't get my arms around you."

"We'll soon remedy that."

In the apartment she went directly to tlie bridge table, which was now a bar. "Look!" she cried, holding up a Scotch bottle. "It's empty. What happened to it?"

Jeffrey thought for moment, seriously. "Somebody drank it," he said at last.

"I know who!"

"Who?"

"Me! This afternoon." It seemed very funny and she laughed and laughed. "No," she said, "it was yesterday. Yesterday afternoon. When I thought I wouldn't have a date for New Year's Eve. Before you called. I was so depressed."

"I'm glad I called," he said.

"So am I."

He took off his coat and dropped it on the floor and April did the same. He was a good-looking boy, she thought; not really her type because she liked dark men like Dexter, but good-looking anyway. This was only the third time she'd gone out with him and she had been as surprised as all get out when he'd called and asked for New Year's Eve. She wondered whether Chet had told him anything about the two of them, and at first she had worried about it, but Jeffrey hadn't been hard to handle. Chet had. It made her rather sick to her stomach to remember what she had done with Chet, and that was why she didn't see him any more. Now that she looked back at it she wondered what she had ever seen in Chet and how

she could have done it. But she wasn't going to think about it any more. It was over.

JeflFrey was looking around the room. April was glad she'd cleaned it up, her clothes were hung away in the closet and her bed was neatly put back into the wall. It looked a little like the Uving room of a three-room apartment, there was the kitchen, there were the two closed doors; why, he might even think she was rich. She hoped he did. Maybe he would think more highly of her than Dexter had, he wouldn't think she was a little hick. He thought she was simply a friend of Chet's and a former girl of Dexter Key's. Why, she could be anybody.

"Now we're not bears," JefiFrey said. He advanced toward her with open arms.

"There's still some gin," April said quickly.

"I don't want gin."

"I do."

She poured the gin into a glass with an unsteady hand and ran away from him into the kitchenette to pull a tray of ice cubes out of her icebox and rip up the lever. The cubes rattled into the sink, and April snatched three of them and dropped them into her glass. The gin spattered up onto her di'ess.

"Oh," he said, "you've messed your dress."

He was trying to wipe off the dampness with her kitchen towel and put his arms around her at the same time, and April was trying to put the glass of gin up to her mouth. She managed finally and took a large swallow, fighting to keep it down. She'd never had straight gin before, but it wasn't bad, it was rather like a Martini. Jeffrey kept trying to kiss her and she kept turning her head and trying to get at the gin, and finally they compromised and she would let him kiss her and then he would let her take a swallow from her glass until the gin was all gone.

"Ahh . . ." he murmured, "drop that damned glass." He took it from her hand and put it on the drainboard.

"Who are you?"

"Jeffrey."

"Do you love me?"

"I adore you."

"Really?"

"Yes." He was trying to unzip her dress.

"I don't love you," April said.

"You don't?"

"No. I hate you." She didn't say it with animosity, she simply said it.

"That's all right."

"Is it?"

"Yes," JeflFrey said. He kissed her. "It's all right."

"Don't bite."

"No."

"I hate you," April said again, pleasantly. .,;iAll right."

She was cold without her dress. "Ahhh ..." he sighed, and lifted her in his arms. It was like a scene from a love novel, April thought dizzily, the dashing hero lifting the heroine, carrying her to a satin-covered bed. Jeffrey turned his head, looking for the bed. There was none, nor was there a couch, but there was a door. He headed for it, carrying April in his arms, and when he was close enough to the door he reached out one hand and turned the knob and pulled it open. April closed her eyes, her arms wound tightly around his neck so that she would not fall. "Darling . . ." he murmured in her ear and pulled down the in-the-wall bed.

He knew what that door was all along, April thought, he wasn't fooled at all. The only way he could have known was that Chet must have told him. She was so humiliated that she wanted to get right up out of bed, but it was too late; and so she kept her eyes closed tightly and summoned up the feeling the gin had given her, the feeling that it didn't really matter because life was so much fun, so much fun.

Chapter 22

Spring. Everything is softer, the air is soft with a reminder still of cold and promise of the warmth to come, the landscape is softened with new tiny pale-green leaves. Girls from offices on their lunch hours linger in the patch of spring sunshine that falls on the

sidewalk in front of their building, they don't want to go back in, they'd rather walk in the park. Perhaps some of them do. They limch on hot dogs from a white wagon and stroll down paths between bushes of frothy yellow forsythia and feel their hearts fill with an indescribable feeling: happiness, hope, poignance, impatience. In Rockefeller Center workmen are setting up tables where the skating rink used to be, under the great statue of Prometheus, and in the park there is the sound of children's roller skates where there used to be the silent slip of blades. There is something very evocative about children roller-skating in the springtime, it seems to tie all the generations together in the stream of life. Some things never change. The typists on their lunch hours remember when they used to skate on the sidewalks in front of their houses, or in the park, like these children, and it seems such a short time ago. They remember the scraped knees, how it felt to fall, and the freedom of speed when they got up to try again, and the exciting, tooth-rattling feeling of metal wheels rushing over rough concrete. They are old enough now to have children of their own, and perhaps in a year or two or three they will. And some spring not so far away their own children will be swooping down the paths of the park on a Sunday afternoon, skating through the tunnels and calling out to hear the sounds of their own voices echoing back to them.

Barbara Lemont's daughter Hillary was four years old that spring of 1954. She herself was twenty-two. One could never be quite sure if they were sisters or mother and daughter when she took Hillary walking in the park. They looked exactly alike, straight light-brown hair pulled back behind the ears, Hillary's in two pigtails, Barbara's in a barrette, small slight bodies, calm gentle faces. They both wore gray coats that spring, with white pearl buttons, and Hillary carried her first handbag, infinitesimal, made of imitation red patent leather, just large enough for her doll-size handkerchief and her toy lipstick.

Barbara was quite successful for a young career girl, with her two columns published every month with a by-line. She went to cocktail parties given by cosmetic companies to introduce a new shade of lipstick and nail polish, and by chemical companies to introduce a new fiber, and by perfumeries to show oflF a new kind of perfume and cologne. She ate fried codfish balls on toothpicks and tiny sausages and drank Martinis and watched tall, thin models take baths in colored bubbles or stroll about in weird abbreviated

costumes, for which they were paid ten dollars an hour and for which she was paid nothing. She met many male buyers and writers who were middle aged and married and exceedingly bored with these parties and often were not quite sure why they had been invited. Some of them asked her out for dinner, but she always refused. She met career women in their thirties and forties who always dressed like the fashion pages of the magazines they worked for and seemed much less bored than the men. And she met several girls her own age who wore dark-green nylon stockings and a great deal of eye make-up and carried little notebooks, who looked about furtively and excitedly and often accepted the dinner invitations of the older men whom Barbara had refused. It was a world where Barbara had finally achieved a toe hold, and where she was accepted and even recognized, but where she herself felt she only half belonged. Because at the end of the parties she went home, and home was not a garden apartment with a red telephone and three giggling girls and a casserole supper by candlelight, but a walk-up filled with the worn, respectable furniture of twenty-five years of living, with a child's tricycle in the middle of the living-room floor and a television set that blared out a housewife's futile dreams on "Queen for a Day."

She still thought of Sidney Carter, at night when she was tired and could no longer censor her thoughts, or sometimes when she was in the crowded elevator after lunch, filled with male executives and the scent of gin, all of them bound for other floors and other lives and all of them oblivious of her. She could imagine his routine, and imagining it brought her a certain comfort. He's eating lunch now, she would think, or, he's on the train now, reading all those newspapers. She was not so sure about the evening train, and that hurt. She wondered whether he was having cocktails with a woman, a sophisticated, older career woman who had had many affairs and would be fascinated by but never fall in love with a Sidney Carter.

That spring Barbara's husband Mac remarried. She was not quite prepared for the feeling the news gave her: shock, fright, pleasure because she really wanted him to be happy, but most of all the knowledge that a period of her life was over forever. He telephoned and asked if he could fetch Hillary and introduce her to his wife, and Barbara's first reaction was one of panic. She's all I have, she thought. But then she realized that Hillary had been living with her