The Best of Everything (58 page)

"It'll probably be an old widow, on relief, with three or four tomcats," Caroline said.

"No, it will be a girl, I know it will," April said. "It has to be another new girl, like I was. I wish I could leave her a note or something."

"A note? What kind of a note?" Caroline asked, surprised.

"I don't know exactly," April said. "Just something that says, I know just how you feel. I wish someone had done that for me. Oh, well, it was only a thought." She shrugged.

"I know what you mean," Caroline said slowly. "Nobody ever

thinks that other people have exactly the same problems and thoughts that she has. You always think you're all alone."

"Oh, I'm going to miss you!" April said. "I'm going to miss you so much!"

"I'll miss you too," Caroline said. "More than you'll miss me, because you'll have Ronnie."

"We'll write to each other all the time."

"Of course."

"Some people forget to write, like the girls I went to school with, but you and I won't forget. Will we?" April said.

"No," Caroline said, and April thought she sounded a little sad and looked a little faraway, as if she really knew better. "You and I won't stop writing to each other." She cheered up then, and smiled. "But I'll see you in only two months, at your wedding, and then in the spring when you and Ronnie go to Europe you'll have to stop first in New York."

"We'll have a reunion," April said happily. "Just think, Caroline-Europe/"

The telephone rang then, and April answered it.

"Honey," Ronnie said. "Are you ready yet?" How dear his voice was, how gentle.

"All but one suitcase," April said. "Are you ready?"

"Yes. I'll wait around for five minutes and then I'll check out and bring the car around. Can I park in front of your house?"

"Sure," April said, "I've seen people do it." The image of a long black limousine flashed tlirough her mind, but she pushed it hurriedly away. Soon she would see a bright-red station wagon at the curb in its place, and then the new image would stay in her mind forever after. "I'll see you soon, darling," she said.

She was stufiing all her last-minute things into the last suitcase, running to look into the bureau drawers to see if she had forgotten anything, pushing a quarter-filled perfume bottle and some old letters into her already overcrowded purse. "That's one thing about going by car," she said, "you don't have to be so organized." She ran to the mirror to put on more lipstick and fresh powder, and then she was ready. She looked about the room. "My gosh," she said. "This old dump. It's never been so neat." It looked depersonalized somehow, stripped of all its character, and yet so many things had happened here that April hated to turn her back on this room

witliout some sort of a goodbye. But she couldn't think of anything to do, so she just stood there at the doorway, surrounded by her luggage, and looked. First Barbara, she thought, and now me. We're all leaving this house.

The doorbell rang then and she turned to open the door for Ronnie. He walked into the room and bent down to kiss her on the side of tlie neck, a quick, instinctive gesture. "Hello," he said. "Hello, Caroline." He picked up a suitcase in each hand.

April picked up her overnight case and bent to lift the last suitcase. "No," Ronnie said, "don't do that. I'll come back for it."

"Up three flights of stairs? I should say not."

"Quiet," Ronnie said good-naturedly, and ran down the steps.

"He's so nice," Caroline said. "He loves you very much."

"I know."

They stood there smiling at each other, neither of them willing to say the preliminaries to goodbye just yet, and waited for Ronnie to return. He was back in a few moments and took the last suitcase and April's overnight case. "Here we go," April said, and shut the door to her apartment for the last time.

There was a chill in the air, but not an unpleasant one, rather the kind that makes you wonder why you never realized how much you enjoyed winter. The sun was shining, dazzingly bright, catching the little bits of mica in the sidewalk and making them glisten so that if you were a young child or a dreamer you would catch yourself stooping every once in a while to pick up what your eye had mistaken for a jewel. Then you would straighten up again, embarrassed, hoping no one had noticed, but sooner or later you would only be taken in by that incongruous glitter once more. April felt the band of her engagement ring inside the finger of her glove and pressed her fingers against it. A narrow platinum band with a little blue-white diamond-cut diamond set in it. "I want you to pick it out for me yourself," she had said to Ronnie, "and give it to me as a surprise." So he had, and it had been exactly the shape of diamond she wanted. She had wanted only what he wanted for her, but somehow their tastes in big things were so similar that he always seemed to know what she liked.

He piled her suitcases into the back of his station wagon, beside his one. She had her new going-away coat in its paper box and handed it to him, and he put it carefully on top of the pile.

*Well," Caroline said.

Ronnie held out his hand and Caroline took it. They shook hands warmly. "You're April's favorite friend," Ronnie said. "I'm going to miss you too, even though we've just met. You'll have to come to visit us sometime."

"Thank you," Caroline said. "Maybe I'll be able to." She turned to April.

"Oh, Caroline," April said. For the first time she realized it was true, she was going away, she was leaving New York and her friends here, and after she returned from Europe perhaps she might never come back again. You never knew. She might have a baby the first year, she would have other friends, you got tied up when you lived in a place. . . . She kissed Caroline on the cheek. "Goodbye, Caroline."

"Goodbye, April. Have a safe trip. And happy . . . happy everything."

"You too," April said softly. "I mean it. I hope you'll get what you want too."

"Thank you," Caroline whispered.

"Goodbye."

"Goodbye."

April went around to the other side of the station wagon then, where Ronnie was holding open the door for her, and she climbed in. The sun was so dazzling on the side window that she could hardly see Caroline standing there on the curb, except as a dark silhouette. April held up her hand and waved, and the silhouette waved back. She reached behind her then and snapped down the lock on the door. Ronnie settled behind the wheel and started the engine, letting the car warm up for a moment. He looked at April, and he did not say anything but simply smiled at her. She smiled back, and her throat nearly choked with love and happiness. "Hey," she said softly.

"What?"

"We're really going."

"Mm-hm."

She moved closer to him and put her hands around his arm.

As the station wagon moved through the city April looked out the window at all the sights that had meant so many different things to her during the past three years. How drab they looked in winter,

and yet, they would always thrill her. Here was a part of the city she did not know, and here at last was the highway, flanked on one side by the cold blue water, deceptively sunny-looking in the bright day. She took one last look through the rear window at the skyscrapers vanishing behind them, and then she turned to look ahead and at Ronnie's capable gloved hands on the red wheel, and she did not think of or miss the city at all.

Chapter 29

For people who have something in the present it is easier to forget the past, although you never wholly do so. When winter comes, spring is a vague memory, something looked back at with nostalgia, but winter is the here and now and requires all your energies. If spring were to vanish and there were nothing, an abyss, if that were even possible to imagine, then you would live with memories of spring for ever and ever or else become a part of the abyss itself. The same can sometimes be said for love, but not always. There are some loves that live on for years, inexplicably, although the lovers are parted and there is no hope that they may ever reunite except as polite and distant friends. Caroline Bender thought of all these things as she marked oflF the days on her desk calendar, waiting for the return to New York of Eddie Harris.

Will it be the same? she thought. Will it even be nearly the same? Now that the fifteenth was drawing closer, she was alternately cautious and filled with all the elation of a bride. It was ridiculous, she told herself, and yet, she had never felt this way before in her life, as though she were really not herself but some young girl waiting innocently and adoringly for the fulfillment of her dream. Then, at the times when her fears overtook her, she would brace herself for disappointment, for the discovery that Eddie was, after all, human and might turn out to be nothing more than the prototype of all young husbands, bringing out baby pictures, chattering about his work, telling her how he had taken up golf. The image made her blood run cold. She remembered how, when they were in college,

when she and Eddie had been in love, they had read Tender Is the Night together, and she took the book from her shelf in her apartment and read it again. There was a scene in it of reunion between a married man and a girl he had loved years before, a reunion that ended not in poignance but in something even more upsetting: dull lack of interest. They had both changed, and when they met again they had a brief, unloving affair and drifted apart, not really minding, not really aware of what they had missed. If that happens to me and Eddie, she thought. Oh, no. . . . And yet, perhaps it would be merciful. She would be delivered from him, from his spell, and she could go on to the future, whatever that was. If she were to find that Eddie aroused only indifference in her, then wouldn't it be better, not worse? It would be sensible, and she wouldn't even know it was happening. She would just pick up her life again and say. Well, that's diat. The thought made her want to cry.

At the bottom of her bureau drawer, under her sweaters, she had her college photograph album, put away out of sight because it contained so many pictures of her and Eddie together with their old friends. And beside it, in a silver frame that was tarnished black by now, was an eight-by-ten photograph of Eddie. She took them out now, for the first time since she had moved to her apartment in New York, and she looked at them. She was almost afraid to look at Eddie's first; she looked at herself. How much younger she had looked! More tender, with tender, undefined features, the face of a very young girl. She thought she was prettier now, she had more style. She wondered whether Eddie would think she had changed much. And Eddie? His face leaped up at her, so familiar, so beloved, that involuntarily Caroline reached out her fingers to touch his lips and stroke his cheek. She loved him so. If she could only kiss him. No wonder she had hidden the pictures in the dresser; to look at that enlargement every day would have broken her heart.

But now, for a little while, she could face it again. She put the photograph album on her coffee table and the silver-framed picture on the top of her dresser. Eddie. His presence seemed to fill the room. And as Caroline looked at the photograph she remembered for the first time in almost two years exactly how his voice had sounded, every tone and accent of it, as if she had spoken to him only that morning: slightly husky, soft, a voice almost in his throat,

with that indefinable quaHty known as sexiness, and always full of humor.

She remembered his voice making plans for both of them, and that hurt. She could repeat his words to herself, thinking how they might come true, but underneath they hurt her. To have believed so unquestioningly in something that had meant the world and tlien to find that it simply did not exist was a frightening thing.

There were the phonograph records they had played together, which she had always been afraid to play again just for herself. They were old seventy-eights, and when Caroline put the first one on the phonograph she was struck at first by how diflFerent it sounded, distorted, far away. But then the melody hit her, and everything came back so rapidly and with such force that she rose to her feet and began to walk about the room, dancing a little to the music, thinking of Eddie and herself tliree years ago and almost holding out her hands to him. Her lips moved as she spoke to him, half in the words she had said to him when they had listened to those records and had made love—but really love, love, not any sham of passionate strangers but a thing of tenderness and closeness and great passion too, always with the words of love from each to the other—and half in the words that she would like to say to him now. It was a daydream in which Eddie was in the room, returned to her, and in tills dream they both understood that nothing, really, had changed.

How quickly those shellac records were over, only a few tantalizing minutes and then you had to run to return the clicking arm. Caroline knelt by the phonograph and turned it off. Two more days. Two more days . . .

The next day she went to Saks on her lunch hour and bought perfume and cologne and bath oil, the same fragrance she had worn when she had gone with Eddie, and which she had never worn since. Opening the stopper at her desk, she was nearly taken with dizziness at the familiarity of it, a throat-catching scent of flowers and memories and former happiness that she felt sure could never afiect anyone else the way it did her. Tomorrow. Tomorrow . . .

That night she went to bed at nine o'clock so that she would look fine in the morning, but she could not sleep. Perhaps he won't come tomorrow, she was thinking; perhaps it will be the next day. Can I bear it, to wait another day? I've waited so long already. But she knew that she would wait the day if necessary, or another week, or

any time, since nothing could be so long as these sleepless hours in the last, anticipatory night.

Gregg came in at three, tiptoeing, and Caroline turned her face to the wall and pretended to be asleep. She would not, she could not, listen to Gregg tell her what new secret things she had discovered from sifting through David Wilder Savage's garbage. Not tonight. She liked Gregg, and she felt so sorry for her, but tonight of all nights, waiting, Caroline wanted to feel alone, untouched, pure, away from any talk of neurosis or heartbreak or aberration, so that she could wait for Eddie as Caroline, not the receptacle of someone else's sorrows, not a girl who had su£Fered and blundered in her turn, but Caroline whose heart was full of love and wonder and hope. The last thing Caroline remembered was the luminous hands of her clock at four, and then she slept.