The Best of Everything (63 page)

"And how long will it take ... to get—" she could hardly say it, but it had to be said—"the divorce?"

He looked at her with a glance that was almost dramatic. Then he shook his head. "Caroline ... I can't ... I cant get a divorce."

"Can't?" She stared at him, frightened. "What do you mean, you can't? Why can't you?"

He shook his head again, and on his face was that pale and tortured look that had hurt and mystified her at dinner. But now she knew what it meant. "I can't," he said. "I can't. It would hurt too many people. It would be . . . the end of my life as it is now, everything, my work, my family, my friends, my home. I love my child, Caroline. I can't . . ."

At first Caroline could not believe what he was saying, and then suddenly she knew it was true. Or at least true at that moment. She

could not believe it was true for ever. "What about me?" she asked softly. "What about hurting me?"

"I don't want to hurt you, darling. I couldn't hurt you."

"Don't you think this will hurt me? Eddie, you're my life. You always have been."

"I promise you," Eddie said, "111 find some way before I leave New York. I will."

"And you'll marry me?"

"I can't marry you, darling."

"There is no other way," Caroline said. There were no tears in her eyes, but her throat ached as if she were about to cry and she fought to keep her face placid. It was the first time she had ever tried to hide her feelings from Eddie, but she did not want to cry, she only wanted to understand and to reach him so tliat he would understand how she felt.

"Please don't think I'm going to marry you, darling. Please don't go on telling yourself that," he said pleadingly.

"Did you know this all along?"

"Yes," he said.

"You should have told me," Caroline said softly, and then her voice broke. She could not say anything else because she knew if she were to open her mouth to speak she would cry.

Eddie laced his fingers together and looked at them, not able to look into her face. "If anyone had told me three years ago that someday I would sit here and say to you that I love you more than any-tliing in this whole world and yet I'll never marry you, I wouldn't have believed him. But I've changed. Things used to be simple then; you fell in love, you married, you wanted something, you took it. But they're not simple any more. This is the way life is, not the way I thought it was then." He looked up at her finally, for the first time, and added quietly, "And not the way you think it is now."

"I was always the levelheaded girl whom everyone else told her troubles to," Caroline said. "But not now, not this one time. Not with you. And I know I'm right now, because I beHeve in you, I believe in us. Eddie, please don't make me stop believing in us."

"There are a lot of things you stop believing in after a while," Eddie said. "Don't you think I'd be happier with you than I am the way things are now? Don't you think I want a wife I can love, whom I'm happy with?"

"You must be happier with her than you'll admit," CaroUne said.

He shook his head. "I'm not."

"Then what is it you like? That safe, comfortable life? That heart-shaped swimming pool? That air-conditioned oflBce with nothing to do? Those parties at the country club where you play the piano and feel nostalgic about me? Is that what you like?"

"Don't say that."

"Is it true?"

"It's my life," Eddie said. "That's true."

She was so hurt she could scarcely speak to him, she sat there immersed in pain and bewilderment, as if she were in a high temperature, and she could not even look at Eddie's face because looking at him made everytliing worse. She looked at the wall because it was cream colored and innocuous and bare and she waited for the pain to leave her as one waits for the crisis in a fever. But it did not leave her, and she did not know what to do.

"I can't lose you," Eddie said. "I'll have to think of something."

"Think of me," Caroline whispered. "Please. Think of me."

The next morning at the oflSce she was still numb, but she was beginning to revive. Eddie would think of something, he had promised. Perhaps he would think of a way to have half custody of his daughter. She would even be wilhng to help bring up someone else's child, and she would love the child, if it would make Eddie happy and make him hers. It seemed so much responsibility, so many things she had not thought of, or had not let herself think of, but there must be a way, and if there was, Eddie would find it. In the hall she saw Mike Rice.

"Hey," he said affectionately, "I've been watching you lately. You look like you're in love." He peered at her.

"I am," Caroline said, trying to smile.

He was genuinely pleased. "I knew it. He's a nice, young, eligible guy, isn't he?"

". . .Yes," Caroline said.

"I knew that too," Mike said. "I'm glad, Caroline."

"Thank you," she murmured, and then she moved away from him quickly before he could say anything more. She felt then that all avenues of escape were closed to her.

She met Eddie at his hotel at twelve. There was a cowhide suitcase, open and half packed, lying on the luggage rack.

Eddie took her into his arms. "Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"You really do?"

"Oh, I really do."

"Everything will be all right then," Eddie said, stroking her hair. *We'll be together."

"When are you going to leave?"

"Tomorrow afternoon on the five-o'clock plane. I'm packing now because I have to go out to dinner tonight with those same people. You'll come to the airport with me, won't you?"

"Yes," Caroline said. "Of course, darhng. But what then? What about afterward?"

"That's all arranged. Could you be ready to leave New York in a month?"

"A month . . ." She could hardly catch her breath. "Yes."

"Youll have to quit your job. You don't mind, do you?"

"No," she said, "oh, no."

"I've found you a job in Dallas. It wasn't easy, but I was just lucky this turned up. There's a very wealthy, kind of eccentric man who's starting to write a book, and he needs an editorial assistant. You've had so much experience you'll be perfect for the job. I'll give you his name and address and you can write to him yourself right away."

"It's all right," Caroline murmured, her arms around Eddie's waist, her head resting against his chest. "It's all right. I have enough money to stay there for a while, until we're married. I don't need the job." She looked up at him. "Unless, of course, we'll need the money. I'll be glad to work if we do."

"Caroline . . . Caroline . . . you love me, don't you?"

"You know I do."

"You know I can't marry you, I told you that. You know that, don't you?"

She drew away from him. "What do you mean?" she asked, frightened and bewildered. "Why do you want me to go to Dallas?"

"So we can be together, darling. Forever. Don't you want that too?"

"Together howF' Caroline asked, beginning to tremble with hurt

and shame because she akeady knew what he meant and she could not quite bear to accept it all at once, it was too terrible.

"Together," Eddie said. "You'll take a little apartment, and you'll have this good job, and I'll come to visit you. You'll be near me, and we'll have lunch together at least twice a week—I can arrange that— and I'll get away to spend one or maybe even two evenings with you, and we'll speak on the phone every day, and sometimes we'll even be able to manage a whole weekend together. We can drive to the-"

"Lunch together!" she cried, interrupting him. She took a step away from him, as if she had suddenly found herself embracing, by mistake, someone who looked like Eddie Harris but really was only a stranger with an uncanny resemblance. "One or two evenings when you've escaped from your wife and your respectable married friends? A weekend? And I'm to go on like that for ever and ever, alone, waiting for you, hidden? What do you want me to be?"

He was very pale. "I want you to be with me."

"When? When you're free for the evening?"

"Caroline, I'll see you nearly all the time, I'll see you . . ."

She didn't want to say it, not because of fear of hurting him but because to say the word would suddenly make it true, and that was almost too much to bear. But she had to say it, to face him with it, and to make herself know, for once and for all, that it was what he meant. And also, she realized, because even now she was hoping desperately that Eddie would deny it. "You want me to be your mistress, don't you."

"Don't say that," he whispered. "It sounds so ugly."

"It is ugly," Caroline said. She backed away from him even farther, longing at the same moment to throw herself into Eddie's arms and beg him to reassure her that it was not true, that he loved her, that this whole discussion was a hideous joke. And she took another step away. "Is that what you meant?"

"It won't be ugly for us," Eddie said quietly. "We'll make it . . . difiFerent."

"So that's your solution. That's your plan to make us both happy. And twenty years from now I'll still be sitting in that little apartment in Dallas, waiting for you to come and have lunch with me, waiting for you to come to make love to me in the evening and then go back to your wife; and I'll be forty-three years old and I'll

never have had any children, or a real home, or someone to love me and care what happens to me—and all this because you didn't want to hurt anybody."

Eddie didn't answer. He bit his lip and looked at her and then he turned away. "You make me want to . . . cry," he said.

"Do I?"

He nodded.

"I didn't do anytliing," Caroline murmured. "I only told you what you already know." And then she found herself crying, uncontrollably, standing there in the middle of the room with her hands over her face, too miserable and stunned to move or sit down or run out of the room. Eddie was at her side in three steps, and held her in his arms, and when she could finally look at him she saw that his eyes were closed and that his face was wet with tears. "Please . . ." she whispered, and then she could not say anything more.

"Don't . . ." he murmured. "Don't, darling ... I love you, I do . . ."

"What is it you love so much that loving me doesn't make any difference?" she asked. "I just want to know that."

He did not answer, and then she knew.

She went into Eddie's bathroom after a while and washed her face, but she was too tired to put on any make-up and she really didn't care. She walked slowly back into the hving room and sat on the love seat where they had sat the first time they had met again in this room, and she folded her hands tightly on her knees and tried to breathe slowly and quietly without sobbing and she could not think ahead to what she would be doing even an hour from now.

Eddie sat down next to her without touching her and looked at her sadly. "Will you think it over?" he asked. "Don't say yes or no now, just think it over. You can tell me tomorrow morning when we meet. Please just think it over, for me."

She couldn't answer.

"Caroline? Will you?"

"All right," she said at last. "I'll think it over." But she knew even then it wouldn't work, that she couldn't live the way he had planned. And yet, to live without him after they had been together again was like a second death. She looked at Eddie. Even now, in spite of what he had done to her, she loved him. This person who had asked her to spend her life as his mistress wasn't Eddie, it was some cruel mad

stranger, she told herself. It had to be. But she knew it was Eddie, and this was the way Eddie liked to say the world was. "You look so dramatic," she said, sighing. "You have such a dramatic look on your face."

"I do?"

She smiled at him weakly, because she still loved him, and because her heart opened up to him every time she looked at him or heard his voice, no matter what he had revealed about himself. 'Tes."

He smiled too, then. "I don't mean to."

"I know you don't." Her voice was very gentle and full of love.

"I'm thinking about how it will be to go back there tomorrow night and know that no matter how long I wait you'll never come to me. I can't bear that."

"But you will bear it," Caroline said gently. "I'll be the one who won't be able to bear it, I'll be the one who'll slowly die inside."

"If you won't come to me," Eddie said, taking her hand at last, "then I'll come here next summer for a visit. I can do that. I'll stay for a week, and we'll be together then at least."

"Twice a year?" she said. "Am I to live for that?"

"Perhaps you will come to Dallas."

She shook her head. She touched his fingers with the fingers of her other hand, stroking them, running her fingers along the back of his hand and the inside of his wrist, because at this moment he was hers, to touch, to love, to hold, to familiarize herself with for all time. "Do you want to know the difference between you and me?" Caroline said. "I'll tell you. You'll go away tomorrow and you'U go back to Helen and your friends and your job and your good, contented life, and I'll stay here. And in five years you and Helen will take a trip, maybe to some romantic place like Rio de Janeiro. And one night in Rio you'll be in your big expensive hotel and it will be the dinner hour, and while your wife is getting dressed you'll go downstairs to the bar. You'll buy a drink and you'll take it outside on the terrace with you, because there's always a terrace. And you'll be looking out at the beautiful tropical night and listening to music from inside the bar, and you'll sip at your drink, and then you'll think of me, and you'll feel pleasantly sad. That's all. Pleasantly sad."

Chapter 30

Gregg Adams, sitting in the shadows at the top of the stairs outside David Wilder Savage's apartment, looked like a child of twelve or fourteen who is still afraid of the dark. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms were clasped about her knees, and her blond hair hung down around her face as a schoolgirl's does. She shimmered a little in the midnight shadows, pale white face, pale white-gold hair that caught the reflections of the tiny overhead bulb like a firecracker giving off sparks, and a pale tan raincoat. She was cold in her raincoat and now she couldn't remember why she'd put it on instead of her winter coat. She hadn't even known she was wearing it until she found herself skirting a patch of ice on the curb in front of David's house and discovered she was shivering in the night wind. She remembered now also that she had forgotten to eat dinner, but she didn't really care about that because she felt too ill to be hungry. He was in there, in his apartment, with the girl.