The Last Chance

by Rona Jaffe

  When they came back from their honeymoon she met his brother, who had been in the Army overseas and had just been released. Tony was short and lively, not much like Hank at all, and Ellen fell madly in love with him. They had a brief, passionate affair, heightened by the knowledge that they were doing a terrible thing to Hank and there was no way they could keep on doing it. The day they finally decided was the last time they would ever sleep together and that Tony would go to live in Europe until he got over her, Ellen did to him the thing Hank had made her do to him on their wedding night. It was her idea. She didn’t mind doing it at all, in fact she enjoyed it. It made her feel happy.

  Ellen discovered that a wedding ring was an aphrodisiac to men at parties. She had thought that marriage would put her out of the game, but instead she found that men were after her more than ever. It did not occur to her until many years and many affairs later that it was not the gold band that drew them to her but her own aura of secret sexuality. She was tall and rangy, the sort of woman other women were not afraid of, but men sensed the rest of her. She liked to hold forth on her intellectual opinions, she read widely and retained well, she wasn’t afraid to argue, but underneath this façade which lulled the wives there was that burning which awoke the husbands, made them try to be alone with her, made them phone her at home in the mornings from their offices when they knew Hank would be in his. She had her pick, and she was careful. She became involved with a man only when she fell madly in love. Each of her affairs lasted for over a year, and when Ellen broke it off to save her marriage, the man always remained her devoted friend.

  Jill, their oldest daughter, nearly sixteen now, was born in New York, and then Ellen and Hank moved to the suburbs. Stacey was born two years later. They had decided to have only two children even if the second was a girl. Hank wanted to be able to give them the best. Ellen always liked Jill better than Stacey because Jill was so beautiful. Jill was slender and graceful and lovely, while Stacey looked like a little fireplug. Stacey looked like Hank’s mother. But she was cheerful and sweet and had dimples. When Jill was ready for high school Ellen decided she couldn’t stand to live in the suburbs another minute, it was a trap, they were going to go back to New York where there were things to do. She was tired of being a chauffeur, she wanted to go to museums and the theater. They sold their house, found a beautiful apartment, and put the girls into private school. Hank’s business was doing well enough. He should have been doing better but he didn’t have a head for business. His brother, who had no head for business at all, was living in Paris married to a French girl. There was only Hank supporting all of them, including his mother.

  It was around that time that Ellen realized Hank knew she had been cheating on him but had never said anything. She wondered if he was afraid a confrontation would make her leave him. She didn’t want to leave him because of the kids. The girls adored Hank, and in all fairness, he was a wonderful father, patient, attentive. It was just that he was so weak! What would he do without her? What would she do without him? He let her alone to do what she wanted and he was someone to take her out at night. She could always depend on him. In his doglike way he had come to depend on her completely. They never fought. She just blocked him out when he annoyed her, the way her father had blocked out things he disliked so many years ago. Everything was really all right until the gasoline shortage and the recession.

  One of the businesses hardest hit was big cars. The sales figures were so low they were frightening. There were Hank’s monoliths sitting there, rapidly becoming extinct, a product that was dated and unsalable. Every month the interest on the bank loan came due, every week there was a payroll to be met, but how? The millions of dollars that had moved so easily on paper were now a real debt, a real threat. The calls came from people in Hank’s office; at night, frightened voices. Sometimes there were calls during the day, usually on Friday, from Al or Bernie. Tell your husband he has to face his business problems. Even Al and Bernie didn’t respect him. Is there trouble at home? Al asked. Is there trouble at home?

  Hank was stubborn. He was sure the economy would turn around. But he was also frightened, Ellen could see that. The worst thing of all was that years ago, when they were first married, Hank had been offered a wonderful chance to switch from big cars to the then-new Volkswagen, and he had refused. His friends had advised him to consider it, and Ellen had agreed with his friends. “People are used to quality,” Hank had said stubbornly. “They don’t want it any other way. I’m known for quality.”

  Now he would be known for bankruptcy. How like Hank to have missed his chance, and to keep pretending even now that he had some kind of foresight. He said that over the holidays people didn’t buy cars. He said wait until spring. They were just words.

  They were living on their savings. Ellen wondered if there would be enough for the girls’ private school next year and she worried. She didn’t want them going to public school, she’d heard too many horror stories about how the kids carried knives. And drugs—thank God the girls weren’t into that. They had always been open with her. She figured out how much money they had left in the bank and how much it would cost them to live this year if they were frugal, and she realized it wasn’t going to work. She would have to get a job. She couldn’t imagine what she could do that would bring in enough money to support them all, but at least her salary would be better than nothing.

  That was why she had called Margot. Margot knew everything about working in interesting fields. Margot would help her. Margot didn’t like Hank, because she considered him spineless and dull, so she would be sympathetic to Ellen’s plight. It was going to be all right, it had to be. There was just no other alternative than all right.

  In Wilton, Connecticut, Nikki Gellhorn woke up at six o’clock. The first thing she always did was look out the window to make sure it hadn’t snowed during the night. She hated snow, it seemed a personal affront just to make commuting more miserable. She didn’t mind getting up at six, but she hated all the rest of it—the fear that the car wouldn’t start in the cold, the rush to the train and the hope it wouldn’t get stuck or be late—which it usually was anyway—the hike from Grand Central Station to her office lugging all those heavy manuscripts because there never were enough taxis when you needed them, and then the same rotten thing all over again to get home, except that by then she was exhausted and had different manuscripts to lug. She was a senior editor at Heller & Strauss, she loved her job, she adored her husband and her children and was delighted with her life except for the total inconvenience of their illogical living arrangement.

  Robert, her husband, was a lawyer in Stamford, which was nearer to Wilton than to New York, and therefore, since they’d lived in this reconverted farmhouse ever since the twins were born nineteen years ago and it was their home, he drove easily to work in Stamford and she had to commute a total of four hours every day to get to and from her job in New York. It was always the woman who had to make the sacrifices. It annoyed the hell out of her.

  She went into the kitchen and plugged in the electric coffee maker, which she’d prepared the night before. Robert could sleep until seven. At least that gave her solo bathroom privileges, although now that the twins, Dorothy and Lynn, were away at college there were two free bathrooms she could use. There was no reason any more to live here except that she and Robert loved it on weekends in the summer—and that was not much of a compensation for the rest of it. They could use it for weekends and have a place in New York, but then he would have to make the long haul, and his job was more important.

  Who says his job is more important? Nikki thought again as she was beginning to think every morning. His job is more important to him, but mine is just as important to me.

  She did love him. He was sexy and bright and cuddly, but she felt she was beginning to need more; not another man, but a part of her own life where she could be completely selfish. She was forty-two, with fresh, bright coloring and bouncy hair, a firm, curvy body—she looked no more th
an thirty. Even in the middle of summer she always looked as if she’d just come from a bath in a wonderful air-conditioned room. Her clothes were never wrinkled, her nail polish (she was the only woman she knew who even bothered to wear any) was never chipped. She was always carrying tote bags the size of small suitcases in order to look that way, but it was all part of her struggle to have something just for herself.

  She had met Robert when she was in college and he was at law school; he was three years older. She was twenty when she graduated, and they were married the day after her graduation. They had both grown up in the suburbs and it seemed natural to them to buy the farmhouse as soon as they could afford the first down payment. When the twins were old enough to walk to the school bus by themselves she started working part time in New York because she was bored. First she was a fill-in secretary, then a reader, and then an editor. She was working full time when the girls were in high school, and it never seemed to bother them any. They always enjoyed their time together more, and she was pleased to be able to say that Dorothy and Lynn were nice people, that she would have liked them even if they weren’t her daughters.

  She was dressed and having her second cup of coffee when Robert came into the kitchen. She kissed the back of his neck and his hand lingered on her rear end. “Nice ass,” he said. He said that every morning.

  “Thank you. It’s comforting to be appreciated at my age.” She grinned when she said it because she really did think she was thirty; it was always a shock to see the numbers when she had to write her date of birth on a document.

  “You’re just a baby,” he said.

  “I’m going to be late tonight, sweetheart. I have to have business drinks. Do you feel like driving into New York and taking me to dinner, or should I leave something here, or what?”

  “Or what,” he said.

  “No, come on, tell me.”

  “How late will you be?”

  “Nine thirty if I have to come back, seven thirty if we meet in New York.”

  “I’ll wait and take you out to dinner here. Take the express to Stamford and I’ll meet you at the station. Then you won’t have to cook. I have some work to do anyway.”

  “Then I’ll leave my car here and you can drive me to the station now.” She saw his raised eyebrow. “I mean, will you drive me to the station?”

  “Sure. When I’m dressed.”

  She looked at her watch. “Shit, it’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a meeting at nine. It’s important. If I wait for you to drive me, I’ll miss my train.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you just come home and we’ll eat something here?”

  “Okay.” She took two steaks out of the freezer and put them on a shelf in the refrigerator. “They’ll be thawed by tonight.”

  “Goodbye,” he said, taking his cup of coffee into the bathroom.

  “Bye, darling.”

  That was really a scintillating conversation, Nikki thought with unaccustomed anger as she drove her car out of the garage. I wouldn’t have missed that conversation for the world. It was worth traveling two hours this morning and getting up at six A.M. just to have that conversation. What do a brilliant lawyer and a successful editor talk about at home, folks? Now you know.

  The train was only five minutes late, and Nikki settled into a window seat with the manuscript she was going to read on the trip. She was a fast reader and could usually finish a whole manuscript each way. She hadn’t bothered to tell Robert that her business drink wasn’t exactly a business drink, even though she could put it on her expense account because Margot King was a television personality who might want to write a book some day. But Margot was mainly her friend, and keeping her girl friends was an important part of Nikki’s personal life. Because she had commuted for so long she didn’t have much of a relationship with the married women they knew in the country. She and Robert saw them and their husbands on weekends, as couples. Her lunch dates were all business ones, no time for just a lunch with a girl friend. She had business cocktail dates too, more than she would have preferred. There was never enough time for anything. She felt rushed and pushed and frustrated, knowing there were so many things she couldn’t fit into her life. This evening she would just sit in the bar at the Plaza for an hour with Margot, maybe get a little smashed, and they would talk about all the things that bored husbands and boyfriends. It would make her feel whole again for a while anyway.

  Rachel Fowler, ornament, wife of Lawrence Fowler, international banker, woke up in the king-sized bed of the master bedroom in their Fifth Avenue duplex apartment at just ten minutes past noon. She always slept late, even when she didn’t feel like it. It made the day shorter. She had Porthault sheets and a Porthault breakfast set to match. She buzzed for the maid, and by the time she had emerged from the bathroom her breakfast was waiting for her on a white wicker tray table on the bed, the sheets having thoughtfully been smoothed as if she were an invalid.

  The breakfast tray contained half a grapefruit, a pot of tea, some artificial sweetener, a rose in a bud vase, and The New York Times. She read the headlines, skimmed the front page, and turned to the crossword puzzle. She liked to do it in ink; it was one of the few things she did well. Once she had been a model, and she had done that well. Now she was thirty-five, still very beautiful, tall and slender, terrified of losing her looks, and she did being a wife very well.

  Being Lawrence’s wife was not an ordinary job. He gave dinner parties every night if he was home. Large ones on certain weekends, medium-sized ones for thirty on certain week nights, six for cocktails if it was a private little thing before an opening. Rachel kept a leather-bound book with the names of the guests on each date, the food and wine served, which table linen had been used, what kind of flowers, and what she had worn, so that nothing would be duplicated. She had a round leather disc into which she could slip place cards as if it were their dinner table and move them until she found the perfect seating arrangement. She drew the circle with the names in her book too.

  There were things she did not write but which she remembered: who had his or her eye on whom, who had clicked, and whose mate had found out. It was as important to keep certain people apart as to keep others together.

  None of this being a hostess was really very difficult. There were phone calls to be made to the florist and the liquor store. To the butcher and grocer if the cook was preparing the food, otherwise to the caterer if it was a large party. She had standing appointments at the hairdresser’s, the gym, and the salon where she had her facials. A masseuse had come to the apartment three times a week until Rachel read that massage could give you broken capillaries, then she had stopped. Last year, at thirty-four, she’d had an eye lift. It was better to have these things done when only you noticed they were needed, before other people noticed.

  The new important novels and nonfiction books were piled on the bedroom desk. Rachel read two every week in order to have something to talk about. If they invited anyone who had written a book, of course she would read it before the author came, but she never said more than one thing about the book to the author unless it was obvious that more was called for. She wanted to seem informed but not pushy. The one thing she said about the book was always a carefully chosen compliment even if she thought the book was garbage.

  Lawrence never took a vacation. Sometimes he went to Europe on business and took her with him. Rachel had learned to speak several languages rather well in order to make the other people feel at ease when they went out socially in foreign countries. Lawrence spoke only English no matter which country he was in. He said that when you were doing business you couldn’t afford to make mistakes. He always used a translator, although he could speak and understand most languages better than Rachel did.

  He was older than she was; they had been married for ten years, and they were hardly ever alone together. When they weren’t entertaining people at home or being invited out he was out with businessmen. He seemed to
like that best of all. He went to different bars or sometimes drank in offices where executives had their own bars, talking business or just having a good time with the men, and he never came home before eight. If she felt lonely she couldn’t call him, because she never knew where he was. When he did come home, if they were alone they ate in front of the television set. He was a very fast eater. She ate almost nothing. It took them fifteen minutes to have their entire dinner, including coffee, and then Lawrence liked to go into his den to work. At eleven he emerged and watched the evening news on television, then he went to sleep. He was up and gone to the office long before Rachel ever woke up in the mornings. Once in a while, when he remembered, they had sex together. He was very observant, he knew exactly what she liked in bed, just as he knew what sort of presents she liked to be surprised with on the birthdays and anniversaries he never forgot. She had a safe deposit box at the bank full of Fabergé objets. She used to keep them out on the tables in the living room, but then one of them disappeared. It was expensive and irreplaceable. Rachel knew the maid hadn’t taken it, because it wasn’t the sort of thing a maid would steal, and besides she trusted the help. She was sure it had been one of their guests. That made her feel creepy, because you tried to invite the best people into your home, you made yourself vulnerable to them, and then one of them turned out to be a kleptomaniac or, worse, a common thief.