The Best of Everything (12 page)

Savage now stood by himself she was taken with panic. What could she say to him? Hello, I'm an actress. She might as well hold her hand out and ask for a dime for a cup of coffee. It would be greeted by the same entliusiasm.

What an attractive man he was! Satanic, that was the word for him. Thirty-five years old and on top of the world, with that knowing, civilized face looking down at all the ambitious people like herself who were sidling up trying to think of clever things to say to him. She looked down at her glass, wishing she could find a place to get rid of it.

"Who tlie hell are you?" he said pleasantly.

She looked up at him, surprised. "Gregg Adams."

"I'm David Wilder Savage. And as they always say at cocktail parties, what do you do?"

"I'm a dental assistant."

He smiled. "That's a surprise. You look like a parolee from boarding school."

"I was once. And very sophisticated, too. Black lipstick and all."

"Have you read a book called Many Faces?"

She had heard of it, the author was a Portuguese. "I read the reviews."

"That's not much help."

"You'd be surprised," she said, "how well I can discuss a book from the reviews."

"And a movie from the cast Hsting on the marquee?"

"That's right." There was an American couple talking French at her elbow. She nodded toward them. "And with people like that, I can say, I really understand your French perfectly, but I can't speak it back to you because my accent is unintelligible."

"I'm sorry you haven't read Many Faces," he said. "I would have liked to know if it did something to you too, and what. I'm a producer, and I think there may be a good play in it."

He had a way about him, something in the intimate lowering of his voice, that made her feel as if she and her opinions were very important to him. Actually, why should he care what she—a working girl he'd met at a party—thought of a book? Because he thought she was the average public, of course, a girl who came to Manhattan every day on the subway from Queens with her tuna-fish sandwich in a brown paper bag, who lived with her parents, and washed her

hair every Tliursday night and went to the movies with her boy friend every Saturday night. And yet, he had that way about him. . . .

"I'll read it tomorrow," she said. "Itll be too late to tell you what I think, but now I want to read it anyway."

"You'll love it."

Anyone else, she was thinking, could say "You'll love it" and it would be small talk, a mere figure of speech. With David Wilder Savage the sentence was like handing someone a gift. It was as if he wanted to give her the bit of pleasure of discovering a new idea, a magical story. Charm, she thought. Charm was just a word before, but now I know what it is. It's anything this man says.

He touched her arm. "See that couple over there? They've come to the wrong party. There's another one in the apartment downstairs, and that's where they were supposed to go. Now he wants to leave and she says she's having a good time and wants to stay. They're having a fight."

They were a young couple, a pouting bosomy girl in a white dress and a weak-looking man. "Look at the gestures and angry faces," Gregg said, laughing. 'They look like a TV set with the sound turned ojBF."

"Did you ever do that? Turn the sound off? Especially on a commercial? It's like an old silent movie."

"I know. I've been doing it for years."

"Look," he said, amused. "He's leaving and she's going to stay."

"And without even so much as a glass in her hand."

Gregg had expected to be afraid of David Wilder Savage and was surprised that she was not at all. She felt instead as if he and she standing here together laughing and observing the others were something special, the "in group," and everyone outside of the two of them were the "out group."

"Where did you get that diction?" he asked her.

"In speech class."

"You want to be an actress."

"I am an actress. One might say."

"Not a dental assistant."

She laughed. "No, I'm really an actress. I just didn't want to waltz up and tell you because it would have sounded so damned clubby."

"Like someone coming up to you at a cocktail party and saying,

We have something in common—as if that's supposed to make you like him."

"Exactly," she said. "Exactly!"

"Are you here with someone?"

Tony would understand, she thought, he'd do the same thing himself if he could. "No," she said. "No, I'm not."

"Not the dentist?"

"No one."

"This is a very boring party, don't you think?"

She looked up at him. "Not right in tliis corner."

He took her arm. "Let's take the comer with us."

"I'll get my coat." She slipped o£F to the hostess' bedroom to retrieve her coat, looking for Tony out of the comer of her eye but hoping that she would not be able to find him. She paused for an instant at the mirror, looking at her face. How dark her eyes were, and how much they revealed, even to herself. She had noticed another quality to David Wilder Savage, something just under the surface—a kind of hidden cruelty. It was as if he were basically a ruthless person but had a tender side that he would show only to the one person he cared about. His charm told her that the person could be her, and her sense told her it was a lie, a trap, one that few girls could be cautious enough to resist putting to a test. She pulled her coat on and lifted her long hair out of the collar. She was a near stranger to him and he to her, but she had seen the challenging combination of cruelty and tenderness. She saw it all in an instant, as a drowning person sees his life pass before his eyes, and then she plunged out of the safe room to where he was waiting for her in the hall.

It was odd—ordinarily she would have been impressed and delighted by the wave of recognition that went around the room when he took her into the restaurant for dinner. She liked walking into a room with someone who was known, it gave her confidence. And at the back of her mind was always the hope that she would be introduced to or discovered by someone who could help her in her career. But with David she found herself resenting the table hoppers who took his time, the greeters who demanded his attention. Everything he said to her seemed important, and every time he turned away to speak to someone else, she felt as if she had left the safe

"in group" for a moment and she remembered who she was and how alone she would be again in an hour or two.

When they had finished dinner it was after midnight. The diners had left tlie restaurant and the drinkers had appeared. "Come uptown to my house," he said.

Knowing herself, she tried to think of any inane remark to play for time. "Why?"

He looked at her perfectly calmly, as if it were not an inane remark at all, and said, "Because I want to make love to you."

"I . . . don't want to," she stammered.

"All right," he said. He helped her with her coat and they went out to the street, where he hailed a taxi. "Where do you live?"

She told him, and shrank into her comer of the taxi in a state of growing depression as the streets slipped by. He was taking her home and she didn't want to go home. Like a child, she was afraid of the dark and loneliness, and, like a child, she reached out and tugged at his sleeve. He took her hand. She knew she would never see him again and she couldn't bear it. He was something strange and exciting that had come into her life, only for one evening—really just a few hours. And what was she to him? Someone he'd had fun with, whom he might remember if her name were ever mentioned to him again. "I don't want to go home," she said.

"Where do you want to go, then?"

"I don't care. I just can't stand to give you up."

He didn't seem to think it was a frantic or silly thing to say; he simply leaned forward and gave the driver his address, and then moved back and put his arm around Gregg, comfortingly, with none of the appurtenances of passion. She felt suddenly as if what she had just said to him was somehow romantic and important.

She had never seen an apartment like his before. She had always felt that you could tell more from one look at a person's apartment than you could from an hour of talk with him. There were the people who didn't care about their homes at all, and there were those who cared but had nothing to add to them. David's apartment must have contained over a thousand books. Books were in the tall bookshelves that lined an entire wall of the living room, and they spilled over to every chair in the room. On the round dining table were at least a dozen play scripts. On the floor beside the table was a large straw basket filled with magaziues. He took off her coat, and with the coat

still in his hand walked to the phonograph and turned it on. She noticed his records then—long-playing records, four feet of them from end to end.

At the far end of the room, between the bookshelves, was an old-fashioned fireplace with a carved black marble mantelpiece. It was a much used fireplace, with a fire screen and blackened fire tools, and logs waiting to be burned among the coals. He put her coat into his closet and knelt down to light the fire. In front of the fireplace was a long black sofa. She could imagine him sitting there in the dark staring into the flames, and it made him seem more satanic-looking than ever.

"Would you like brandy?"

"Yes, please."

He brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses to the low coffee table in front of the sofa, and sat beside her. The music on the phonograph was a classical piece that she had never heard before, and he had it turned up loud, as if he really enjoyed hearing it, not as if it were background music to a seduction.

"Have you really read all those books?" she asked, gesturing.

"Yes."

"And those magazines? And those scripts?"

"Yes. I'm always looking for something."

On one of the side tables beside an armchair there were no books at all. Instead there was a large silver-framed photograph of two men on a sailboat in summer, smiling and squinting into the sun, wearing white trousers and white sweatshirts and standing with their arms loosely flung around each other. She stood and wandered over to it. One of tlie men was David, many years younger, with a softer, vaguer face, and the odier was a rather handsome, sensitive-looking young man with the build of a large tennis player.

"Who's that?"

"Gordon McKay."

"Oh . . ." she said. "The one whose play you just put on."

"That's right." His voice seemed to have tightened, as if he were very conscious of the way it sounded in tlie room.

She didn't know what to say. She couldn't say, "I'm sorry about your friend's death," or "I'm sorry about your friend's flop" either; somehow she felt that if she said anything like that it would destroy

instantly the intimacy she and David were feeling together at this moment.

"I'm sorry I never got to see the play," she said finally.

"More brandy?" he asked, and filled her glass without waiting for a reply.

She remembered something Tony had told her once about David Wilder Savage and Gordon McKay, some spiteful thing, the sort of thing unsuccessful people often say about successful ones, a kind of name-dropping gone one step further to become insult-dropping. What was it he'd said? Oh, yes—"No one knows for sure whether they were in love with each other. But now we'll see if he can ever put on another hit or if the light has gone out for him." That was the worst thing she had ever heard said about David WOder Savage; most of tlie kids at the class discussed instead his theatrical genius and his reputation as a wolf. Why did people have to say that two men were in love with each other when they merely loved each other? Couldn't people realize what a rare and miraculous thing closeness could be, without trying to dirty it? She felt suddenly that the world was full of cruel and silly people like Tony and her family and a long, long string of girls she had gone to school with and boys who had pawed her—all of them separate and lonely and spitefiJ and afraid to love each other.

Like a sleepwalker she went to the sofa where David was sitting motionless. The room was dark and the redness of the flames shone on the fabric of the couch and made it look black and red both, and on the glass of brandy on the table, making it shine like a garnet. She touched his face.

He did not pull her down to the couch but stood up in one swift gesture, put his arms around her and took her to the couch with him. She felt a touch of surprise at his first kiss, as she always did with anyone's, because the shape of the mouth never seemed to be related to the feeling of the kiss it gave. With his she felt astonishment that a cruel mouth could be capable of such warmth and gentleness.

"You have the softest mouth in the history of the world," he murmured.

"And you too."

He was taking off her dress and slip and stockings without ever removing his lips from her mouth and face, as if his hands were an efficient, unobtrusive part of him and his love-making. She had an

instant flash of her old caution at this, thinking, Oh, how practicedl He must have made love to hundreds of women. . . . And then his hands were no longer disembodied and she was glad for the experience they had, as if it had all been waiting for her. The one fear hit her then, of pregnancy and disgrace, and she hated her own passion-thickened, fearful little-girl's voice which had to ask that damned question that hurtled her out of the clouds.

"Do you have something?"

"Don't you?"

"I didn't know . . ."

"All right . . ." For the moment that he was gone from her she closed her eyes, shaken with dizziaess, and then he returned and took her into his arms. She felt the coolness of his skin and the warmth of the firelight as if it were all in a dream filled with pleasure that was like pain and the old, old words of demand and obscenity that seemed like words of love ia his mouth. He spoke them to her and she spoke them back to him, both of them urgentiy, both of them with their eyes open searching each other's faces, trembling, until the last moment when passion separated them.

He did not draw away when he was finished, or let her go, but kept his arms around her, looking again into her face. The music on the phonograph had long since played out and the room was silent except for the clicking of the needle against the last groove, forgotten and alone. She held him in her arms as if he were the child this time and she a woman, and stroked his hair, wishing they could stay that way forever. Finally he drew away.