The Best of Everything (45 page)

The apartment that had once seemed so exciting now seemed too small to Caroline. The walls seemed to be closing in. She longed for a separate living room and bedroom so that she and Gregg could each have some privacy. But she wasn't ready yet to live all alone, because she couldn't afford alone the kind of apartment she liked, and because there were lonely times when she was glad for a roommate to confide in. And also, with Paul it was safer. He would never be the kind of man who would try to sleep with her unless she herself first made it clear that she did that sort of thing, but after a year he was getting to the point where sex with Caroline was something very emotional to him, and she tried to avoid that as well as she could. It was easier lately to lie and say, Gregg has company tonight and I think they'd like to be alone, or, Gregg went to sleep early

tonight, and thus keep tlieir physical contact confined to a brief kissing session in the hall. Paul lived with his parents, and so he had no bachelor lair to lure her to. It was strange, Caroline thought, rather amused, he was so conventional about planning every step of their evening to conform to gracious living that he still, at twenty-six, had the conventional attitude that one necks at the end of the evening. No cocktail hour embraces for him, no ride to the beach on a summer day and a feverish sprawl behind a lonely dune. You kissed the girl in her apartment after you had wined and dined her. It was rather like a bargain. And by its very regularity and predictability his love-making had lost all its attraction for her and almost seemed an obligation.

She liked him, she really liked him, and she wanted to be good to him. But what could she give to him? Her company, of course, was the first answer, but her twice-a-week company was both a satisfaction and a frustration to him. She knew he would rather see her this way than lose her, that he took out many other girls and had not fallen in love with any of them. She and Paul had all the outward ease with each other of old friends but very little of the communication. True, when she told him of Miss Farrow's latest harassment she never had to stop to tell him who Miss Farrow was, and he was always sympathetic. He knew Caroline's likes and dislikes to the point where he could order for her in restaurants, and he often said, "Oh, you don't want the duck, do you? You had that last week." But these elements in their relationship were more important to Paul than to her. A waiter who knew her well could tell her she'd had the duck last week. But no one but a man she could love could look into her heart and know what she was thinking and show it by his answer to something she had said.

So what then could she give him? Love? Sex? Perhaps some other men would think she was a bitch, she thought, for keeping their relationship on such a semi-pristine plane for so long. And perhaps others would think she was just the kind of innocent virgin girl they had been looking for. Whatever Paul thought about it was a mystery to her. He kept his feelings well hidden. Or, perhaps, Caroline was guiltily beginning to realize, his feelings had been there all along, in his eyes, but she had deliberately kept herself from seeing them.

When the show was over Paul paid the check and they walked for

afeveral blocks in the autumn night air that was just beginning to turn chilly.

"Are you cold?" he asked, peering at her in the dark. "You look cold."

"No, I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

For some reason, tonight his solicitude annoyed her. Was it because he really was clucking over her too much or because she disliked herself for not feeling more grateful? If she had loved him, how happy she would have been that he cared if she was chilly or notl This way her only thought was: I can take care of myself. It was the first time she had felt that way, independent, withdrawn. In her mind's eye there floated the image of a manuscript she had left half read on her desk at five o'clock when she left to meet Paul. It had been an engrossing novel and right now she wished with all her heart that she could know what was going to happen next in it. She should have taken it witli her, then she could have curled up in bed and read the rest of it before she went to sleep.

"I can give you my coat," Paul said, "if you're cold; or we can take a taxi."

"Let's take a taxi," she said. A taxi would be much quicker than walking, and soon she would be home. She was suddenly so depressed she could hardly talk.

She paused at tlie doorway with her key in the lock. "May I come in for a minute?" Paul asked.

She didn't care. Let him come in, let him go home, what did it matter? Depression was like a companion, she could almost talk to it. Paul hadn't gotten past the front door in over a month so now that too was becoming a pattern. In the past few montlis her whole life had become a pattern, predictable, the same.

"Come on in," she said.

She turned on the lights, and Paul helped her oflF with her coat and hung it in the closet. "Would you like a drink?" she asked.

"Yes," Paul said, quite pleased. "Scotch and soda, if you have it. And make it light, I've had enough tonight already."

I must have too, Caroline thought; I feel so tired. She rummaged about in the kitchen. "I'm sorry, we're out of soda. Will water do?"

"Fine." Paul settled himself on one of the studio couches and

lighted a cigarette. He reached over to the bedside radio and turned it on, moving the dial until he found a program of continuous classical music. She could tell he was digging in for a good long stay, and the knowledge made her feel even more depressed. She didn't want to make pleasant conversation and then allow herself to be kissed for fifteen minutes. She wanted to send him away and turn out the lights and get into bed with her head under the pillow and cry.

She didn't know why she did it, but she made him a very strong drink. The glass was halfway filled with Scotch and three ice cubes before she put the water in. It looked good so she made the same for herself and carried both into the room and sat beside Paul on the studio couch. "Cheers."

"Cheers," he repeated. And then, "Ouch!"

"Too strong?"

"It's all right," he said. "But I'll have to teach you how to make a drink."

"You always know how to do the right thing," she mused. "Don't you?"

"I can make a better drink than you can," he said happily. He was in a very good mood tonight, the exact opposite of her own. He reached out and ruffled her hair. "Come sit nearer to me, I feel lonesome."

Instead Caroline moved farther away. "I feel lonesome too," she said. She tried to keep herself from sounding melodramatic, but the very utterance of the words made her lonelier than ever.

"Then come sit over here."

She was sitting on the very edge of the studio couch, her hands clasped together on her knees. She shook her head. "Talk to me."

"All right."

She couldn't help smiling at that. "At least you didn't say 'What about?' Most people say 'What about?' when you ask them to talk to you."

"You have to give me credit for being more original than that," Paul said.

"Do you ever get depressed?"

"Sometimes."

"And what do you do about it?"

He shrugged and took a sip at his caramel-colored drink. "I just

go to sleep if I can. I only get depressed when I'm overtired from working too hard."

"You know," Caroline said, "sometimes when Gregg comes in late I'm still awake and we sit up and drink milk and talk and talk and talk. I get a mental image of the clock and it's made out of butter and the hands just fall around it like knives. One minute it's two o'clock in the morning and the next time I look it's four-thirty."

"She must be an interesting person."

"Oh, she has a wonderful sense of humor, but it's not that. We're both very serious at three o'clock in the morning. We talk mostly about ourselves and—believe it or not—life."

"And what do you two discover about life in the middle of the night?"

"Nothing," Caroline said. "That's the trouble."

"Do you mind if I tell you something about yourself?" Paul asked.

"Not at all."

"You take everything much too seriously."

"I do?"

He had finished most of his drink and his diction was not quite as clear and precise as it usually was. "What the hell have you got to be so serious about? Where is it all going to lead you? It's one thing to enjoy your job, every girl should have something to do until she's married, but you live with it every minute of the day. You take work home, you worry about oflBce politics, you let Miss Farrow get you down. If you ask me, I think you'd like to have her job eventually."

"I would," Caroline admitted.

"For what? So that you can be just like her? A crabby bitch? The shadow of mine enemy."

Caroline smiled. "Do you think I show signs of all that?"

"You're much too ambitious, and the worst of it is, you're fighting with windmills. If you had talent as an opera singer or perhaps a painter or an astrophysicist or something like that, then I'd say it was unavoidable. An artist or a genius can't help doing what he does. But you're knocking yourself out for that third-rate little publishing company."

"It's hardly little," Caroline said, hurt.

"Do you honestly think you're doing a job that some other girl couldn't step in and do just as well five minutes after you've left?"

"As long as we're being nasty tonight," Caroline said, "you're

hardly Clarence Darrow. But that doesn't prevent you from living with your job twenty-four hours a day and talking about it whenever you're not in the office or bent over some work at home. There are boys in law school right this minute preparing to take the bar exams, perhaps to take away your potential clients a year or two from now."

"That's different," Paul said.

"Why is it difiFerent?"

"This is my career. It's an integral part of my life. What am I going to do if I don't do this? Starve or become a playboy, depending on my economic situation. Neither prospect appeals to me at all."

"It's exactly the same with me," Caroline said indignantly. "What am I going to do? Sit home in Port Blair and polish my nails and wait for a husband? This isn't the nineteen-hundreds. A girl has to do something."

"You could get married if you wanted to," Paul said.

She sipped at her drink with intense concentration, trying not to say the wrong thing. It was easy enough for him to say that; she seemed popular, there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing except that there was no one she loved.

"With a little push," Paul went on, "I would marry you myself." The tone was bantering and sentimental both, the words were slightly slurred from the strong drink she had given him. But even drunk, Paul Landis could never be anything but precise and intelligent and self-protective, Caroline realized. He was waiting for her to make the move. If she made a joke of it he would too, if she told him she had always loved him he would fall on his knees and propose. How easy it would be, Caroline thought, and how easy everything would be forever after.

"You're not ready for marriage," Paul said finally when she had not answered. "I guess you're too happy living the way you are."

Happy? Caroline thought. Happy? Oh, my God, it's that I don't love you.

"You're still thrilled with your girls' dormitory existence," Paul said. "But you'd better watch out. Getting to like it too much can turn it into a trap."

"All right," Caroline said. She was too tired to argue, too bone weary to try to break her way through this incredible evenness that hid and protected whatever were Paul Landis' true feeHngs. Or per-

haps what she saw of him on the surface actually was what lay inside too. Perhaps he really was Bermuda Schwartz. He was good and kind and contented to the point of smugness, and maybe he had a right to be. She looked at her watch and stood up. "It's awfully late."

He stood too. "I was just leaving. I have to be at the office early tomorrow."

They walked to the door of her apartment, she staying a little away from him so that he could not reach out and put his arm around her. "Thank you for a wonderful evening," she said.

"It was my pleasure."

At the door they stopped. Paul took her by the waist with both his hands but she turned her head away so that they ended in an embrace but not a kiss. Paul kissed her on the side of her face and she put her head against his shoulder. "I have a fierce headache," she murmured into the cloth, wondering whether he would ever accept such a lie. "I guess it's the hang-over I deserve, but a few hours early."

He did not release her. "I just want to keep my arms around you for a minute," he said, almost gruffly.

Caroline put her arms around Paul's waist and they stood there like that for a moment, leaning against each other. He needs tenderness too, she thought, he must. Everyone does, even Bermuda Schwartz with his hat and gloves. Oh, Paul, I wish with all my heart that I could give that tenderness to you, and that you could give it to me, and that it would be enough.

He moved away from her finally and gave her a little pat. "You feel wonderful," he said lightly, "even for a thin girl." He picked his hat up off the chest of drawers. "Next Saturday," he said. "I'll call you before. I've inherited two tickets to the opera, my parents are going to Europe."

"That will be lovely. Good night, Paul. Sleep well."

As she shut the door she could hear Paul's jaunty footsteps going down the stairs. He was actually whistling. I envy him, Caroline tliought, for being busy and content and for finding refuge in Things. His best girl rejects his proposal of marriage; he thinks how nice it will be to go to the opera. Maybe I should try to be more like him. Tomorrow at the office wiU be better. Tomorrow some-

thing good will turn up in my life. When tilings are darkest, something always does.

What turned up the next day was something Caroline could never have thought of even in a daydream. She was in her tiny oJBfice when Miss Farrow came in with an armful of manuscripts that were so dusty and split on the edges from rubbing against their rubber bands that they looked as if they had been shunted around for months.