The Best of Everything (25 page)

"Otherwise perhaps you could go to his family dinner," Caroline said. "Besides, I don't know where in the world you're going to get the money for your train fare."

"He gave it to me," April said. "He gave me a darling Httle red felt stocking with a roimd-trip plane ticket tucked inside it. He said he knew I was homesick, and we are getting four days off for Christmas."

"He is good to you!"

"The awful part of it is," April confessed, "I'm not a bit homesick. I'll be more homesick for him those four days if he stays here than I've been my entire year alone in New York. But I didn't have the heart to tell him after he'd been so generous about the tickets. Frankly, I was kind of hoping that I would be able to go to his family's Christmas party, because I've never met any of them but his mother and father, and I've never really gotten to know them well at aU. I had thought that when I got my two weeks off next summer I would go home then and really have a nice long stay. I'd be home for my birthday and everything." She brightened. "But now that I have the tickets and I know I'm really going home, I'm so excited I can hardly wait."

"Your family won't recognize you."

"I know," April said. "I was up all night thinking of ways to stun them when I get off the plane. I thought I'd buy a pair of white French poodles and carry one under each arm, and wear my new coat, and have Claude do my hair . . ."

"Let's not go crazy, now," Caroline said. "If I know mothers, the first thing yours will say is 'How thin you've gotten!' and not even notice the rest."

"I feel as if I've been away for years and years. I wish Dexter could come with me."

"He probably will," Caroline said reasstiringly.

"Well, I'm not going to think that he can't until it actually happens," said April. "That way I'd suffer twice. If I pretend he will be with me and then he disappoints me. 111 only suffer once."

And that, Caroline thought with the first faint stirrings of im-easiness, is April's whole philosophy of life in a nutshell. "Let's go

back to the party," she said gently. "Mike won't be able to save our places any longer and hell think we deserted him."

She walked out of the ladies' room after April, looking at the straight back, the burnished flu£F\' hair, and the model's profile as April turned her head, and she thought. It's almost a crime that she's so prett)' and chic. People always think that a girl who looks like her is strong and particular and lucky with men. What a lot of nonsense! It's like wearing armor made of Christmas ^Tapping.

When they came into the gallery it had aheady half emptied out, and the tables in the ballroom were beginning to be filled. People were pairing oflF, looking aroimd for their friends, waving at one another. Caroline looked at their table in the bar for Mike but he had gone. Then she saw him standing in front of a table in the center of the ballroom, tr}ing to catch her attention.

"Isn't he wonderful the way he takes care of us?" she said to April. They managed to edge their way through the closely packed rows of chairs and tables and milling employees to where Mike was waiting for them. In the comer the band, which had moved from the salon, was playing something with a great many stringed instruments, bright and jazzy and barely audible above the conversation and laughter.

"We're sitting with Mr. Bossart!" April whispered.

The table was really only large enough for six to sit in comfort but a seventh chair and place setting had been forced in with the others. There were Mr. Shalimar and Barbara Lemont, already seated, Mr. Bossart, who stood up when the two girls approached, two empty chairs and Mike Rice standing with his arm protectively around Mar)' Agnes. Mary Agnes looked awed and rather frightened, as if she wasn't quite sure what she was doing in this distinguished company.

"Do you know everyone here?" Mike asked. "You know Mr, Bossart, don't you? Caroline Bender and April Morrison."

Mr. Bossart held out his hand and Caroline took it. It was a very hard, square hand with a silky palm, a hand she somehow did not like. It was Kke shaking a block of wood. But he smiled ingratiatingly at her, showing white, chorus-boy teeth, and she smiled back and sat down next to him.

"May I sit here?"

"Please do," Mr. Bossart said.

April sat in the other empty chair between Carohne and Mike. There was a bottle of whisky on the table, a bucket of ice cubes, a pitcher of water and two bottles of soda. Mike poured drinks for Caroline and April.

"She's my little reader," Mr. Shalimar said, pointing at Caroline and leaning forward over the table. "D'you know that, Arthur? She's my little reader." His voice was slightly thickened and aggressive, and Caroline realized Mr. Shalimar must be the one responsible for the halfway mark on their whisky bottle.

"Oh, yes," Arthur Bossart said silkily. He glanced at Caroline with somewhat heightened interest. "Cigarette?"

"Thank you."

"She's been here only a year and she's a reader," Mr, Shalimar persisted. "Only a year ago . . . She's very ambitious. Very ambitious."

"And talented too, I presume," Mr. Bossart said.

"What's talent?" Mr. Shalimar said. His tone had become more aggressive. "Training, that's what you need. Experience and training. Little college girls walk in here and think they're going to tell everybody what to do. Think they can eat the world in three bites. They don't know how long it takes to become an editor."

"I'm sure Miss Bender will get the best of training from you," Mr. Bossart said pleasantly.

"Talent," Mr. Shalimar said. "She thinks she can get there with talent."

Caroline clenched her hands together under the table and took a deep breath, smiling at Mr. Shalimar in what she hoped was an innocent and winsome way. "I guess the thing that first made me feel I could ever hope to be an editor was something you said to me when I first came here, Mr. Shalimar," she began, looking at him and then at Mr. Bossart. "I remember that we were all down in the bar—Mike was there, remember?" She turned to Mike and then back to Mr. Shalimar and Mr. Bossart. "You told me that an instinct for the work was die most important thing an editor could have. That and enthusiasm. It seems to me that proper instinct is a form of talent, wouldn't you say so?"

"Seems that way to me," Mr. Bossart said, nodding. Mr. Shalimar was silent, beginning to scowl.

"Here's the soup," Mike said. "Look out, girls, it's hot." He moved

aside as the waiter put down the plates of steaming soup, and when Carohne glanced at him he winked at her almost imperceptibly.

He remembers, Caroline thought. And he knows that it wasn't Shalimar who said instinct was all-important but Mike himself. But it was what Mr. Shalimar had been thinking. How Mr. Shalimar must dislike me, and I never really realized it!

Mr. Bossart was stirring his soup so it would cool. Mr. Shalimar's attention was momentarily distracted by a fresh highball which he was consuming instead of the soup, and Barbara Lemont was looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. Cornered between Mr. Shalimar and Mike, Mary Agnes was mechanically spooning up her soup because it was in front of her. The room was very noisy with the cacophony of voices and the clink of spoons against heavy china.

"Where did you go to college, Miss Bender?" Mr. Bossart asked. Somehow he had a way of making even a simple question like that sound intimate.

"Please call me Caroline."

"Caroline."

"I went to Radcliffe."

"Oh, really?" His youngest daughter was tr)'ing to get into Radcliffe this year, Caroline knew, but she was sure he wouldn't mention that or the daughter. He didn't. "I hear they're still wearing raccoon coats to football games up there," he said. "Is that true?"

"Some of the girls do. They buy old ratty ones for five or ten dollars, left over from the twenties."

Mr. Bossart laughed. "With built-in hip flask pockets and built-in fleas."

"Gee, I hope not fleas."

"Did you go to the Harvard-Yale game this year?"

"No."

"Watched it on television, I hope."

"I'm afraid not."

"What kind of alumnus are you?"

"Nose-in-the-book type, I guess," Caroline said, smiling.

"I don't believe that. You're too pretty."

"Thank you."

Across tlie table Mr. Shalimar was talking to Barbara, looking at her intendy. Without being able to read lips, Caroline was quite sure

he was telling her about his former glories. Barbara had never heard his stories before and she was listening with respectful interest but not with the kind of fascination that April had shown. She had, instead, the unguarded look people have when they are in one-way conversation with a garrulous drunk; and she looked as if she were trying to figure out what sort of man he was when he was sober.

"Do you live here in the city?" Mr. Bossart asked.

"I do now. My family lives in Port Blair."

"Oh, really? You go up weekends, I suppose."

"Not always," Caroline said.

"Too much social life here, eh?"

She smiled prettily.

The waiter had taken away the soup bowls and replaced them with plates of chicken and peas and tiny potatoes. Mr. Bossart took out of his pocket something that looked like a fourteen-carat-gold Boy Scout knife and began to cut his chicken with it. "Christmas present," he said to Caroline, not the slightest bit abashed.

"It's beautiful."

He wiped the blade he had used on his napkin. "See, it has three blades of diflferent sizes, and a bottle opener, and a nail file and a chisel. You've never seen a pocketknife with a chisel in it before, have you?"

"I never saw a gold one either."

"I have seventy-two knives at home," Mr. Bossart said. "Been collecting tliem for years."

"My heavens, you could start a revolution."

"And I have thirty-five antique guns. I have a pair of authentic seventeenth-century dueling pistols, and one of the first single-action revolvers ever made. But you probably don't know what I'm talking about."

"It's very interesting."

"Collecting guns and knives is purely a man's interest, women are bored to death when we talk about it. You're a sweet girl to pretend you care." He smiled at her in a chummy sort of way, with just a touch of condescension.

What sort of bird have we here? Caroline thought. "I'll admit it's a bit above my head," she said.

"I've been thinking for a long time of starting a man's magazine," Mr. Bossart said. "I discussed it with Clyde Fabian before he had his

stroke, and he was interested too. You know, there are a slew of magazines in the field, but they're mostly girlie magazines—sexy pictures, lewd jokes, photos of girls in negligees. Even the ones with good fiction and articles go very heavy on the sex angle. What I want to do is something new. A real man's magazine, with nothing about women in it. Just hunting, fishing, sports cars, mountain climbing, bullfighting and derring-do."

"Do you think most men would like that?" Caroline asked dubiously.

"Why not? There would be nothing in this magazine for college boys, or for the armchair athletes. Oh, we'd have entertainment features. Theater, books of interest to men, and of course a section on the bar."

"How about food?" Caroline asked.

"None of these fancy color photographs of apothecary jars filled with uncooked macaroni," Mr. Bossart said scornfully. "We'd have a piece on how to dress and cook wild ducks after you've shot 'em, on how to barbecue venison and antelope, and so forth."

And in December you can bind the Christmas issue in fur, Caroline thought. "It sounds different," she said.

"It is different."

The waiter removed the main course and brought ice cream with chocolate sauce. Caroline turned around for a moment and April nodded at her with a little half-smile, as if to say. Well, you're doing all right. She smiled back.

"We won't have any women on the staff," Mr. Bossart went on. 'Tou know half these magazines for men are dominated by harpies. Women don't know what men want." He winked at her. "Well, at least, they don't know what men want in a magazine. We'll keep the women in the kitchen and in the typing pool, where they belong."

"How about at Derby Books?" Caroline asked.

He looked a little flustered, but only for an instant. 'TDerby Books is a good place to have a woman or two because many of their readers are women. A woman should not try to think like a man, because she can't even if she tries. A woman's weapon is in her femininity."

That's not where Miss Farrow's weapon is, Caroline thought. "You're absolutely right," she said.

"It's fun talking to you," he said. "More coffee?"

"No, thanks."

"Well, why don't we dance?"

"I'd love to."

He stood up, pulled out her chair, and nodded to the others at the table. Then he led her across the ballroom to the tiny space that had been left clear for dancing. Caroline walked into his arms. It was like embracing a slab of burr-covered wood. The hard mechanical palm he had extended to her in his handshake had not been a unique phenomenon, it had simply been an uncovered part of the entire unyielding whole. I can't imagine him and Amanda Farrow as lovers, Caroline thought. I can hardly think of two less loving people in this world.

They danced v^dthout speaking. Caroline glanced surreptitiously around the room and saw Brenda look at her with round eyes and tifien nudge the girl next to her. Caroline could already imagine what they would say to her on Monday. I saw you dancing with Mr. Bossart! The waiters, who were anxious to clear the tables and get home, were removing coffeepots and plates of petits fours before they had been emptied and snatching partly filled whisky bottles off the tables. Caroline caught sight of Mike Rice with a bottle under each arm heading for the salon, followed by April.

"There's more room in the salon," Mr. Bossart said. "Do you want to go in there or shall we head for the bar?"

"Maybe there's a bar in the salon. Let's look." Caroline liked being seen with him, but she didn't want to be seen going off with him alone. It would be too easy to start office gossip and what would be the good of having Miss Farrow's reputation witliout any of Miss Farrow's privileges?