The Best of Everything (53 page)

"That's wonderful!" Caroline said.

"You should see him, he's so handsome, and he's the suavest man I ever met."

"He must be old," Caroline said.

"No. He's forty. That's not so old, do you think?"

"No," Caroline said, thinking of John Cassaro, "it can be the best age."

"She's such a nice girl," April said. "I'm so glad for her. She's going to quit her job and stay home to take care of her little girl."

"And live happily ever after . . ." Caroline sighed. "How come a man like that didn't get grabbed up before?"

"He just got divorced."

"Maybe those are the ones to look for," Caroline said. "But it's a long look."

"I don't know," April said wistfully. "I don't know anything any more."

"What's all the excitement?" Caroline's mother asked after Caroline was off the phone.

"A friend of April's and mine from the office just eloped. Barbara Lemont; I told you about her."

"Oh, yes, the one with the child. Who did she marry?"

"Sidney Carter. He's forty years old and wildly successful—he's the head of his own advertising agency. And April says he's very handsome."

Her mother clucked with what Caroline realized to her surprise was sympathy. "Well, poor girl, she'd have to marry an older man. Who else would support her child?"

"But we think she's lucky," Caroline said.

"She's very lucky. A young girl with such a big child. She's lucky to have gotten someone at all."

"I agree," Paul said.

You would, Caroline thought. You would.

Chapter 24

Summer is tourist time in New York, and they come by the hundreds, streaming into the hot city by Greyhound bus and train and plane and private car, in their white shoes and light summer clotli-ing, with their cameras and their suitcases and their saved-up spending money, and their dogged determination to ignore the heat that

rises from the blinding pavements and to do everything. By everything they mean Radio City Music Hall, and Times Square at night, and the UN and the Automat and a hansom cab ride and some Broadway shows. Some of them have never been to New York before, and they stay at hotels that native New Yorkers may never have set foot in, where trucks rumble outside their window and neon lights blink in, and after a week or ten days in a certain ten-block area they go home and say, Well, New York is a fine place to visit, but I certainly wouldn't live there. And others may bear with them letters to friends of friends or distant relatives, and they will stay with them in the Bronx or Flushing or Jericho, and make their daily pilgrimage to the heart of the city, and they say, Well, New York certainly is big, but I don't know why they say it's unfriendly. And others, who have a great deal of money to spend, stay at the Plaza or the Waldorf or the St. Regis, and go to the hit musicals with tickets that cost fifty dollars a pair, and dine at the Colony and the Brussels and Le Pavilion, and drink at the Harwyn and the Little Club and the Starlight Roof, and when they go home they say, Once a year is enough for me, I couldn't stand the pace!

In the summer of fifty-four, in the middle of August, a young man named Ronnie Wood came to New York City for a visit, his first. He had an Argoflex camera in a tan leather case slung over his shoulder and he wore a pale-gray Dacron suit, the kind tliat you can wash out yourself in your hotel room, and in his battered canvas flight bag he had the name and address of a girl named April Morrison, whose mother was a friend of his aunt's back home in Springs, Colorado. He was five feet nine inches tall and he had wavy brown hair that fell over his forehead when he moved his head, and inquisitive dark eyes, and he stammered a little when he was nervous and with people he did not know. He did not know April Morrison.

The first day he arrived in New York he checked into a hotel near Grand Central Station and walked to the UN building, where he took pictures of the flags flying and the glittering architecture, and could not get a ticket to get in to watch the General Assembly because the tickets for the day had already been allotted. Then he walked across town to Broadway and looked at all the shooting galleries and pizza stands and movie marquees, and he looked at the girls from the offices out on their lunch hour and he took some more pictures and he wondered whether any of those girls could be April

Morrison. He knew she worked somewhere in the Fifties, and after he had eaten a lunch of a hot dog and a paper cup of coconut milk from a Broadway stand he walked over to Fifth Avenue. It was ninety degrees in the sun that afternoon, but Ronnie Wood was only mildly uncomfortable. He was much too excited to be uncomfortable.

He saw two boys in shirt sleeves, so he took ofiF his suit jacket and tossed it over one shoulder, holding it with two fingers, as he had seen Gary Cooper do in the movies. He had started to carry his jacket that way years ago when he had had a brief ambition to be an actor, and now it was an automatic mannerism. He walked to Rockefeller Center, looking at the people and into store windows, and when he came to the statue of Atlas in front of a huge office building he set his camera and squinted up at it. There was New York, exactly as it had always seemed to him it ought to be. Enormously tall, impersonal buildings, with the personal touch of a work of art. That girl, April, worked right around here someplace.

He decided to call her and he looked around for a drugstore. There was none in sight. He walked for fifteen blocks without finding a drugstore, and by then he had given up. He went back to his hotel and took a shower and lay on his bed in his underwear. It was ten minutes to five. On an impulse he decided to call her at her office anyway and see if she would have dinner with him. He hoped she wasn't a dog. It would be a heck of a thing, Ronnie Wood was thinking, to have dinner with a dog the first night that he was in the exciting city he had always wanted to see.

"As a matter of fact," April Morrison said, "I am free tonight. But just for cocktails. I could meet you in front of my office at half past five."

He liked her voice, it had a breathless, sexy quality. It was a whis-pery voice. "All right," he said, trying not to stammer. "I'll have on a light gray suit."

"So will I," April said. She laughed. "See you soon."

He didn't have the faintest idea where to take a girl for cocktails before dinner in New York but he supposed she would know. She had sounded sophisticated. I'm free . . . just for cocktails. Well, all the better. His first night in New York he wanted to be with a girl who was as sophisticated and New Yorkish as anything in the world.

He was already imagining what she would be like. Somehow, Ronnie had the feeling, this girl would not be a dog at all.

He saw her, standing in front of the statue of Atlas, her hair blowing in the slight evening breeze that had come up. It was going to rain. Her hair was very golden in the lowering late day, with touches of red in it, short and blowing and bright. She did have a gray suit on, made of something silky and thin, so that he could see the curving outlines of her body. And she had a beautiful face. When she saw him approaching her she smiled at him.

"April?" he said.

"Hello, Ronnie Wood."

"I'm glad to meet you," he said, beginning to stammer again. "I'm glad you could make it tonight."

She put the tips of her fingers on his arm, lightly. "We'd better go somewhere quick before it rains. Do you have a favorite place?"

"Me? No ... no. I thought ... I'd leave it to you."

"We'll run and duck into the Barberry Room."

They ran, and arrived breathless and smiling at each other. The first drops of rain were just starting to fall as Ronnie pushed open the glass door. They found a table in the back. "Wow," he said, "it's dark in here."

"You'll get used to it."

"What would you like to . . . drink?"

"A vodka Martini. With an olive."

"A vodka Martini. With an olive," Ronnie repeated carefully to the waiter. "Make it two."

"Well," April said. "Have you been in New York long?"

"Just since this morning."

"And what have you seen?"

"I walked about twenty miles," he said. "Or it's beginning to . . . feel that way."

"My goodness," she said. "You're certainly ambitious."

"Yes," he admitted.

"I used to do that, when I first came to New York," April said. "I would walk for miles. I even got lost. Have you been lost yet?"

"I don't think I'd know," he said. They both laughed.

April lifted her cocktail glass. "Cheers," she said brightly.

"Cheers."

"And here's to a good vacation for you."

"It's starting out that way already," Ronnie said.

"Tell me something about yourself," she said. "What do you do?"

"I'm going to go into business with my father back home. Real estate. I just got out of the Army."

"In Korea?"

"No. I was lucky. I was in Germany."

"Really? I've never been to Europe."

"One leave I had, I flew to Rome," he said. "It was beautiful. A beautiful city. I never did get to Paris, though."

"Maybe you'll go back sometime."

"I'd like that. It would be a great place for a honeymoon."

Was it his imagination, or were her eyes filming over? She looked for an instant as if she were going to cry. Then she smiled at him. "Can I have another drink?" she asked brightly.

"Sure . . . waiter! Two more . . . uh, vodka Martinis. Please."

"I like them much better than regular Martinis," April said. "You can't taste that gin taste. I used to like gin, but then one morning I woke up with a dreadful hang-over and I never could bear the taste of gin again."

"You shouldn't drink so much that you get a hang-over," he said. "You should be more careful."

"My goodness, you sound like my father."

"I'm sorry. . ."

"It's all right," April said. She smiled at him. "Most girls like to have a man who worries about their health." She sipped at her Martini and looked at him over the rim of her glass. "I do. I don't care a bit about my health when I'm left to my own devices."

"Well, you should," he said. Wlien he had seen her standing there in front of the statue of Atlas she had looked to him like everything a New York girl should be: sophisticated, leggy, beautiful and very poised. And now she had flashes when she seemed to him just like a reckless httle girl. Somehow he liked her better this way. "I won't let you drink too much tonight," he said. "I wish . . . you'd have dinner with me."

"Maybe I can."

"You tell me where you want to go. I'm the stranger."

"That will be fun."

"Do you want me to . . . tell you some more about myself?"

"Yes," she said very interestedly, "do."

"Well ... I wanted to be an actor for a while. In fact, I was going to go to dramatic school on the G.I. Bill, but I finally talked myself out of it. I guess you have to have a certain temperament for acting, a lot of confidence in yourself as the commodity you're trying to sell, and I figured I would do better selling real estate."

"Isn't that funny! I wanted to be an actress for a while. That's why I came to New York."

"Really?"

"But after I'd been here for a while I gave it up. That's why I'm in publishing. At least it's in the arts."

"It sounds fascinating."

"Oh . . . it's fun."

"I think that's the important thing," Ronnie said, "to do what you like."

"Do you like selling real estate?"

"I don't know yet. If I don't, or if I'm no good at it, I'll find something else."

"You have a lot of courage," April said. "Most boys just get into a rut and stay with it for the rest of their Hves."

"Well, I don't want to be a drifter. I certainly don't want to be that. But I'm still young enough so that I can try for a while to find what I'll do best."

"How young?"

"Twenty-four," he said.

"That is young."

"Why? How old are you?"

"Twenty-three," April said.

He laughed. "You sound like an old lady."

"Sometimes I feel like one," she said lightly.

"Please have dinner with me."

"I'll have to break my date."

"Could you? I mean . . , would you?"

"Yes," she said.

Ronnie reached into his pocket. "Here's a dime for the phone."

"It's all right. The waiter will bring a phone to the table."

My God, he thought, I thought tliey only did that in the movies. But the waiter came and plugged a telephone in next to their table and April picked up the receiver and started to dial. Then she put her hand over the phone and cut the call off.

**Tell me something," she said abruptly.

"What?"

"Are you lonesome?"

"Lonesome? Why?"

"I just thought you might be," she said. **Your first night in New York and all."

"I guess I am," Ronnie said slowly. "I hadn't really thought about it. But if you don't have dinner with me I will be lonely, I know that."

"That's all I wanted to know," April said. She lifted the receiver again and started to dial, and while she was waiting for the number to ring she turned and smiled at him.

Chapter 25

On a night in mid-October, when the first frost came to the outlying suburbs and people began to remember how nice it was to stay indoors by their hearth or television set, cozy and warm, Gregg Adams was in David Wilder Savage's bedroom going through his bureau drawers. She worked at it furtively and quickly because he was in the shower, and as long as she could hear the sound of the water she knew she was safe. She had no inkling of what had prompted her to do such an outrageous thing, except that he was occupied and she was here, and suddenly a compulsion had overtaken her to find out. What she was going to find out, she had no idea. But he had been a mystery to her for so long, with his self-contained and apparently self-sufficient life, that she felt if she could only find some secret thing of his, some letters, some photograph, anything, then she could understand him better. She had toyed with the idea that he was an ordinary person, that there really was no mystery about him except in her own mind, but then she had rejected it. There must be an answer hidden somewhere; life was not that simple.