The Best of Everything (9 page)

"I wonder too . . ." April said. She turned her cocoa cup around in her hand, looking at the roses that were painted on it as if they were very fascinating. "Are you a virgin?"

"I must admit I am. Are you?"

"Oh, sure. What do you mean, 'admit'? None of the girls back home will admit they aren't—if they aren't, which I don't know."

"I'm not so proud of it," Caroline said. "It's just something I can't quite bring myself to give up. If my mother heard me talking about this in such a casual way she'd have a fit. She taught me only two major rules for life: don't let boys touch you, and join the Radclifi^e Club."

April smiled. "Mine never taught me anything like that because we just don't talk about sex at our house. You just assume that every girl who isn't married is a virgin, unless there's somebody who there's a scandal about. My mother would no more tell me not to sleep with a boy than she would tell me not to go out and steal a car. She knows I wouldn't think of it."

"But you do think of it?"

"I think about it. All the time. That's a little different, though."

"When I'm twenty-six, if I'm not married by then, I'm going to take a lover," Caroline said.

"Really?" April sounded a httle shocked. Then she thought about it. "I think you're right. If you're that old, you have a right to live."

"I wanted to sleep with Eddie," Caroline said. "He was my fiance in college. I really wanted to, but at the last minute I was always afraid. I think it was a combination of being afraid I'd lose him and being scared that going all the way wasn't going to be as wonderful as everything I'd always imagined. I guess people build it up in their minds as being something marvelous, and then they wait and wait, and then it gets to be too important. Like the first kiss, or the first anything. It ought to be an accident, not something you plan too carefully, or else you're apt to be disappointed."

"I guess tiiis sounds awfully naive," April said. "But when I try to picture going to bed with somebody I can never figure out where tlie sheet and blankets go. Do you do it underneath the blanket, or do you take the blanket off?"

Caroline couldn't help laughing. "Didn't you ever neck on a bed with somebody?"

"My heavens, no. Not on a bed."

*^ell, when the time comes, whoever he is, he'll know what to do about the blanket."

They were silent then for a few moments, each with her own thoughts. "If you were to take a lover next week," April said, "just pretend—who would you want it to be? What land of man would you want for your first?"

"Someone I loved," Caroline said. "And, above all, someone considerate, who had enough experience to know what he was doing."

"Someone older," April said. "I think it should be an older man."

"Not too old."

"Oh, no. But not twenty-one either. Just pretend that you could have anybody and you had made up your mind to have a love affair. Who would you want? It could be a movie star, or someone in the office, or anyone."

"All right," Caroline said.

"Do you know?"

"Mnmi-hmm," All of a sudden she did know, and the choice seemed as natural as if she had always known it, and as exciting as

if it were crazily, improbably possible. "This is just pretend, mind

you."

*'Of course."

"Mike Rice," said Caroline.

Chapter 4

Girls like Caroline, who have just finished fifteen uninterrupted years of educational routine, find themselves still dividing the year into seasons in the way they are used to, rather than by the calendar. January the first is not the birth of the new year; September is. Spring is not a time of hope and blossoming; it is a time of leave-taking and faint pangs of unhappiness. The year breaks in half at the end of January, which is the time of exams, panic, dirty clothes, sleepless nights and frantic last-minute studying. It was therefore very strange to Caroline to find herself at the end of January in New York with nothing to stir her up emotionally.

She had been taking home a manuscript every evening to read and report on, and although at first she had to write the comments over and over like a composition in order to make them short and to the point, she soon had the knack of it and could type her feelings directly onto the oflBcial comment sheet. The first few books she reported on, she felt as though she would never be able to be an editor, but at the end of three weeks she had learned something startling and encouraging: that a thing which seems mysterious can finally become almost automatic. In fact, at the end of January, she began to feel a slight touch of resentment that Mr. Shalimar kept gobbling up her extra-hours production without ever giving her any sign of encouragement that she would be allowed to become an oflBcial reader.

She had fallen into the habit of taking the seven-o'clock express to Port Blair about three nights a week. Those evenings she would first stop at the Fabian bar to have a drink with Mr. Shalimar, Mike, April, and one or two or three of the other oflBce girls whom Mr. Shalimar managed to take in tow. She was pretty sure that Mr. Shali-

mar Kked her, because she and April were the only regulars. She did not like him particularly. She could not quite get over her fear of him, a fear which kept her from falling into a trance when he started telling his same old stories for the benefit of each new girl. The two things which kept her accepting his invitations were her desire to become anything like a member of the inner circle, and her companionable feeling for Mike Rice. She always managed to seat herself across the table from Mr. Shalimar, not next to him, so some other girl than herself would have to be the unwilling recipient of the affectionate hand. That meant she would find herself elbow to elbow with Mike. She often looked at him on the sly and had the same feeling about him as she had about April's apartment the first time she saw it: that so much could be done to improve the rundown fa9ade. Mike had the kind of aristocratic, well-formed face and athletic if wiry body that it is very difficult to destroy. He seemed to be doing his best to try, though.

Despite her midnight conversation with April that one night, Caroline never reaUy thought of Mike as a romantic possibility. She wasn't quite sure how she considered him. She hoped he could someday be her friend. She knew that she trusted him, and that he represented a kind of Hf e and a kind of world that were a mystery to her, and an interesting one. She never compared him to Eddie, nor brought up thoughts of Eddie as a defense against him. Eddie was a wound that had not yet healed, as if some important part of herself had been torn away. If she had gone out regularly with another boy, she would have been compelled to compare him with Eddie, but she did not have to compare Mike Rice with anyone. In fact, there was no one in her limited sphere whom she could have sensibly compared with Mike anyway.

Preoccupied as she was with her own feelings about a situation that was still new to her, Caroline could not help noticing the slow change that was coming over April. The first indication was the morning after their first payday, when April appeared triumphantly in the bullpen with her gold hair shorn, snail-curled and lacquered. The effect—or rather, the contrast—was somewhat frightening, like seeing a picture of one of those ancient Egyptian princesses quite bald without her headdress. At five o'clock that day April cornered Caroline. "It's wrong, isn't it," April said timidly. "There's stiU something not quite right."

"It's a bit stiff," Caroline said kindly.

"I wanted to look like you," April said. "Tell me where you have yours done."

The next day April returned looking like a stranger, fluffy short hair, new penciled eyebrows that gave her a gamin look and some kind of pale powder base that hid the farm-girl freckles. Caroline had forgotten what a really beautiful face April had, but now it was completely apparent. April was wearing a very simple black jersey dress that she had seen in one of her secondhand fashion magazines.

"^Vell, look at the movie star!" Mr. Shalimar said.

April still could blush, even under the Elizabeth Arden icing. "I bought two more dresses and shoes and a handbag and a coat and charged the whole thing," she confided to Caroline. "I'll be paying it off for the next year."

"It was worth it," Caroline said. "You look lovely, really lovely."

When April smiled her new eyebrows made her look reckless, or perhaps it was the line of the hair curving around her face. "Did you hear what he said?"

"Who? Pale hands I love by the Shalimar?"

"Oh, honestly, you're terrible," April breathed, laughing, and hurried into Mr. Shalimar's office holding her shortliand pad in one hand, and smoothing her skirt with the other.

Miss Farrow had a temporary secretary, the girl Caroline had seen sitting nervously in the reception room some weeks before. "They might as well hire a temporary girl," Mike had told Caroline. "None of them stay with her longer than a few months anyway." The girl was named Gregg Adams, and she was an actress. Caroline realized there must be thousands of actresses she had never even heard of, who make perhaps two hundred dollars a year doing walk-ons in television and bits in off-Broadway productions, and who spend the rest of tiieir time making rounds and waiting fitfully in unavoidable temporary office work. This girl, Gregg, was of medium height, and slender, with the face of a fourteen-year-old. She had long straight blond hair, not the stringy kind, but the sort that swayed all in one piece when she moved quickly. She wore all the necessary make-up but lipstick, which added to the teen-age look. Caroline was astonished to learn that she was twenty-three years

old. Gregg had the sort of mouth that made smoking a cigarette look somehow sinful.

Miss Farrow treated her new secretary as one might treat a horse or a dog until the A.S.P.C.A. caught up. She had a contempt for temporary ofiBce help, holding that by the time you taught them anything they were gone anyway, so it was a waste of time. "You know what Miss Farrow did last Friday?" Mary Agnes told Caroline breatlilessly. "She gave a cocktail party and invited Gregg to come, and then she made Gregg spend the whole evening carrying hors d'oeuvres to the guests and emptying ash trays and making drinks. Just like a maid! Did you ever hear such a nerve?"

"What did Gregg do about it?"

"Notliing," Mary Agnes said.

"You're crazy," Garoline told Gregg later in the ladies' room. "If you let her push you around like that she'll do worse next time.''

"It's all right," Gregg said sweetly. She had a very tender, littie-girl voice. "Afterward, before I went home, I stole two bottles of Scotch."

Caroline liked Gregg, and they began to have lunch together nearly every day, often with April. Gregg came from Dallas, from an upper-middle-class family, and Caroline couldn't resist asking her immediately if she knew Helen Lowe. She didn't, but she had heard of the family, of course. Gregg was the youngest of three sisters, and she had spent most of her time in boarding schools, always alone because her nearest sister was five years older and was in college when Gregg was starting high school. The parents had each been divorced and remarried several times. "If I ever get married," Gregg told Caroline, "I'm going to stay married. I've been saying goodbye to people all my life and I'm sick of it." The middle sister, in Texas, was twenty-eight and starting her third marriage. The oldest was divorced also. "We're not a very faithful family," Gregg said. "Except me. I've got all the glue they forgot to hand out to the rest of the family, if I only had somebody to use it on!"

Neither Caroline, Gregg nor April seemed to be able to meet many boys in New York. Caroline managed a date every two weeks, mostly blind dates who were too dreadful to see again or pass on to her friends, and Gregg knew several boys from her dramatic class who had as little money as she did. Gregg's mother sent her money, enough for rent on a tiny apartment, food and some clothes, but not

for the acting classes or the ballet lessons she was taking at night, which was why she had to put up with Miss Farrow at Fabian.

"Look," Gregg said to Caroline, "if you want to live in New York, why don't we share an apartment? I have two studio couches in my apartment, and we could share the rent, which is a hundred dollars a month. You could never find a decent apartment yourself for fifty."

"When I get to be a reader and I get my raise, I will," Caroline said.

"Hooray! No more cleaning La Farrow's latrines! A year away from that bitch is like five minutes away from anybody else."

Gregg lived in a second-floor walk-up over a Chinese laundry in a respectable and safe, if run-down, neighborhood. The proprietor of the laundry had a yearning for fresh air and kept the door to his establishment wide open all day, winter and summer. Walking past it to enter the house you could hear the whoosh of the pressing machine, and on cold days the clouds of steam rising into the air gave anyone entering Gregg's apartment the feeling that he was boarding a train. Caroline didn't mind it at all, and she liked the apartment, which, being in a converted brownstone, had enormous windows from floor to ceiling with domed tops like the windows in a church. There was a tiny balcony outside each window, just large enough for several inches of grit and soot and Gregg's striped alley cat, who used the balconies for his daily promenade.

There was now more reason than ever to want the promotion, and Caroline began to worry about it. Mr. Shalimar's secretary had long since returned, so April was back in the typing pool and could not tell Caroline whether or not he was considering doing anything about her reports. Every afternoon he would stop briefly at Caroline's desk and say, "Thank you for your comments. They're very useful." Once in a while he would say, "I read your comment with interest, and I hope to God you're wrong." She didn't want to push him or appear anxious, but she began to have tlie fear that he was using her to do two jobs at once for the salary of the lesser one and she didn't quite know what to do about it.

Meanwhile she typed up any odd work that there was no one else to do, helped the other girls, and walked past Mr. Shalimar's ofiice whenever she could think of a good excuse to do so, not because it would do her any good but because it made her feel better. She began to find an influx of work from Miss Farrow's oflBce piled on