The Best of Everything (13 page)

"This damned thing," he said, amused and annoyed. "I haven't used one of these things since I was sixteen years old."

"You're speaking of the sixteenth of an inch between me and the Home for Unwed Mothers."

"Well, next time you contribute."

"Well, what did you expect? Do you think I go to every cocktail party prepared for something like this?"

"Are we having our first fight?"

From the shadows behind them the telephone rang, softly. She looked at her watch. "My goshl They call at two o'clock in the morning?"

He stood up. "Drink your brandy," he said affectionately, ruflfling her hair, and went to answer the phone.

Left by herself, she smiled into the fire, feeling the hot bitterness of the brandy in her throat and the faint scratchiness of the couch fabric against her bare legs. She could hear David laughing at something the person on the telephone was saying, and his occasional exclamations of amusement. She finished her brandy and stood up languidly, groggy with the aftermath of love and the kind darkness of the heated room, and went to the phonograph. She Hfted the needle and turned the record over, tuning it down very softly so it would not disturb David on the telephone. There was an overflowing ash tray on the window sill and she picked it up and took it to the kitchen to empty it. She could still hear his voice on the telephone, masculine and laughing and independent, and she remembered the way it had sounded speaking to her in the words of lovemaking. The sound of his voice then had been for her and her alone. She could not remember ever having felt so content.

She wondered whether the window in his kitchen was uncurtained because he did not own a curtain or because it was at the laundry. He probably didn't own one; a bachelor as busy as he wouldn't even know about those things. Wouldn't it surprise him if she made curtains for him! She could pick out some fabric tomorrow. . . .

Back in the living room she watched the fire slowly dying and the brandy level going down in the bottle as David talked on and on to whomever it was on the other end of the telephone. She could tell it was a business call from the conversation, and she was not sin*-prised because people in the theater had a way of staying up until all hours. Her wristwatch said twenty-five past two. It gave her a land of glow to know that she was here with him, in intimacy, waiting for him in the shadows.

"All right, boy," he said. "Goodbye. Thanks for calling. Everything's going to be all right." He replaced the receiver and returned to stand beside where Gregg was sitting on the couch. She looked up at him.

"I think I love you," she said.

He smiled at her tenderly and bent down to kiss her forehead.

"I do love you," she said.

He took her into his arms again.

Chapter 6

Barbara Lemont, leaving the Fabian oflSces at five o'clock, paused for a minute in the dark outside the revolving door and let the shrill crowd of girls pour past her into the night, going to their buses and subways and trains. It was an evening late in February, and surprisingly the air was soft with false spring. The store windows around Rockefeller Plaza were very bright, and Barbara walked slowly past them, dallying, looking in, imagining that some rich man was going to give her any of their contents she might choose as a gift. Here it was February, and this afternoon she had been typing copy for the June issue of Americas Woman, the bridal issue. All the brides in the photographs looked so young, so airy, you found yourself wondering what their hves had been like and whom they were in love with and going to marry, forgetting that they were only models. The blond one on the cover with daisies in her hair and a look in her eyes like a child on Christmas morning had just been separated from her husband and had upset the shooting schedule the week before the picture was taken because she was in bed recovering from the results of an abortion. Perhaps that look she wore on her face for the bridal cover was a facsimile of the one she had worn on her own wedding day, and even tliough things had turned sour for her she remembered when they were different. Like me, Barbara thought.

She had awakened very slowly this morning, with a sense of something she didn't want to remember, and had burrowed underneath the covers like an animal in its cozy lair, until her crib-trapped daughter's screams forced her out of bed. Then she had remembered, and in the remembering had realized that it was not such a dreadful thing after all. Today would have been her wedding anniversary.

Three years—a record, really, for someone as young as she was. Most of the girls she knew at work hadn't ever been married, much less married three years. The married girls were the ones she didn't see often any more, friends of her high-school days. She and those

old friends called each other on the phone now and then since her divorce, and sometimes the wives would say, "When you have a date why don't you bring him over one evening," and she would thank them and never do it. You couldn't take a boy to spend an evening with a young married couple, she had discovered; it would frighten him away. He would feel the trap closing in, even though it was an imaginary one, and he would think she wanted to demonstrate to him the contentment of marriage. She fitted into the married-couple conversation so well, she was so used to it, that sometimes in the midst of a discussion of recipes or household problems (I know, men are terrible about holes in socks) she would look up and catch her date looking at her with an expression that could range anywhere from boredom to panic.

She stopped at a bakery on Sixth Avenue to buy some honey buns for her mother. On tlie spur of the moment she bought some animal-shaped cookies for the baby. She would try to teach Hillary how to say rabbit when she ate the cooky, it would probably leave a more lasting impression on her than a picture of a rabbit in a book. She had been thinking for a while now of changing the baby's name, perhaps to a nickname that the baby could eventually use as her Christian name when she went to school. Barbara had named her Hillary after her husband's mother, who was dead, and at the time it had seemed a gesture of love. She had never seen his mother, and now she almost never saw him, and the name Hillary had turned into an encumbrance that she wasn't particularly fond of, reminding her of people and a time that had lost their meaning. She was only glad that the baby hadn't been a boy because she would have named him after his father, and that would have turned into a nuisance.

It was funny, she was thinking, how something that had seemed sentimental and important, and even more—almost sacred—could turn into nothing at all. If it had ever occurred to her in the beginning that all her love for this one man and everything they had together that was meaningful was going to disappear and be forgotten the thought would have broken her heart. Today she was grateful for the flexibility that had allowed her to forget. Mac had been her first date in high school—her first real date, that is, aside from her classmates who invited her to parties. She was sixteen and he was twenty. She was a little thrilled at his old age, but when they had spent one evening togetlier she felt as if she had known

him forever. It was love, like in the juke-box songs and the magazine stories and the pajama-party gab fests, with birds twittering and pink clouds and no sense at all. She wasn't a very pretty girl, her features were ordinary, but she was appealing-looking, and when she was in love she felt as if there must be something special about her looks to have won her such a prize as Mac. He was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, and the difference in their ages made her give him credit for more intelligence than he really had. He had just returned from the Army in Germany, and next to her classmates he seemed an experienced world traveler. On their third date he proposed, and although they kept it a secret from their parents they considered themselves engaged from that night on.

Being engaged, especially secretly engaged, was a strange, exciting state with little touch on reality. Barbara went about her daily routine, study, gym class, homework, sodas with the girls, feeling as if she were in a dream. She was Engaged to Be Married, she was In Love. She was floating thirty feet above the ground and she never stopped to find out what she really felt about things. As soon as she graduated from high school she and Mac announced their engagement, and in February they were married and left New York for Ohio State University, where he was finishing college on the GI Bill. She kept house for him there, or kept their room, rather, because it was a dingy little one-room apartment with a convertible sofa and a rickety bridge table that almost always had books and papers and the remains of the previous meal on it. They had only one closet, and the clothes popped out like a jack-in-the-box every time someone opened the door. She was taking courses at a near-by women's college and trying to keep up with her schoolwork and keep a home together all at the same time. When she began to be nauseated in the mornings, and often in the afternoons as well, she thought it was because she was still such an inexperienced cook. Mac himself had heartburn most of the time those first three months. Then she discovered that her problem wasn't indigestion at all but something she should have suspected right away.

At first she couldn't beheve it. It was not that there was anything organically wrong with her, but she simply couldn't beheve that she, Barbara Lemont, was capable of doing something as complicated and adult as conceiving a baby. She was going to produce another human being, someone who would eventually go to college

and fall in love and get married just as she had done. It was unbelievable. She who had never even owned a dog was going to be responsible for a human being for at least the next fifteen years. Her disbeHef turned to beHef and then to fright.

She began to look fat and ungainly. She was a plain girl, but her charm was in her neatness and warmth and in a kind of piquancy. How could anyone who looked like a fat spider look piquant? She was ashamed to go to classes, feeling somehow that a girl of eighteen ought to look like those other sweatered and skirted freshmen and not like a bloated, heavy-footed matron.

The required reading for her courses, which she did faithfully, seemed both an escape and a reminder. She would be lost in the world of a novel by Thomas Mann and then look up at the sound of a group of college boys and girls laughing and tramping past her window. The apartment was on the first floor, across the street from the campus of Mac's college. The voices outside her window were discussing the class they had just attended, in heated argument that bore just the faintest undercurrent of flirtation and courtship. "Let's have a cup of coffee," she would hear one of the boys say. "Do you have time?" And a girl's voice would answer, "That would be wonderful." Her mood broken, Barbara would look around the room and notice the dust under the sofa bed, the dishes still to be washed, Mac's clothes tossed on the floor to be sent to the laundry or put away. She would get up, heavily and feeling sickish again, and put away her book. As soon as she finished cleaning the apartment she would have to mess it up again preparing dinner—it was funny how a one-room apartment looked so dirty if you displaced one or two little things in it. It would be dark outside her window then, and waiting for Mac to come home, she would realize that she missed him terribly, because he was all she had.

Neither of them quite knew what was happening to them and to their marriage, or how to prevent it. Mac believed in live and let Hve, and although it must have occmred to him many times to try to find out why Barbara was melancholy, he never asked. On weekends he took her to beer parties at the rooms of his college friends, and sometimes during the week he would take her to the campus beer house where the students raced up and down the aisles greeting their friends and crowded six at a time into narrow booths meant for four. The smell of the spilled beer and the half-put-out cigarettes

made her feel ill. The girls who were out on dates with Mac's friends all looked so slim and carefree they made her feel twice as self-conscious as before. If she could have had one good thing: a ride in the country on a fresh day, a cleaning woman to clean up their tiny room once and for all, a new dress that was becoming, a close girl friend to confide in, everything would have been all right. Neither her mother nor Mac's father had enough money to send anything more than rent, and even that was not easy for them. Barbara had been putting off writing her mother about the baby.

After a while when Barbara said she didn't feel like going to the beer house Mac started going there alone. It was seldom enough that he had a chance to get out, what with studying and then the part-time job he had found as a busboy in tlie college cafeteria during the summer school. The job was to save money for the hospital bills and the expenses that would come afterward. They needed a larger apartment. As for Barbara, she didn't feel any more as if she were carrying a baby, she felt as if it were a tremendous growth, a tumor, and she wanted nothing so much as to go to the hospital at the end of the nine months and have it leave her body. Even love-making was no longer fun, or even an escape. You had to care about your own body to want to give it to someone you loved, and when you felt that you were an ugly stranger how could the giving of such a body be anvthing but embarrassing?

Then Barbara went to the hospital to have the baby, and overnight everything changed. One night she was in pain, screaming and wishing she were home with her mother again, and in the morning she felt for the first time that she was an adult. The first thing she saw when she awoke was her own flat stomach, her sense of identity restored. She was Barbara, of course, how could she have forgotten? The next thing she saw was her baby's round fuzzy head and its tiny body, so delicate to the touch, a sack of soft white clothing with littie limbs wrapped inside.

She hadn't had the faintest idea how much she would love her baby until she touched her with her own hands. This was worth it, this was worth everything. How could she have been so childish, so ignorant, not to have realized how much love she had stored up in her own heart? Love came pouring out like an aura in the room, bringing tears to her eyes. She loved the baby, she loved Mac; how much she loved him! She had been ignoring him all these months,