The Last Chance

by Rona Jaffe

  It wasn’t until she stopped to wait for the light to change that Rachel realized the entire street was deserted except for a man who was following her. When she stopped, he stopped at the other end of the long street and looked at her. She couldn’t see who it was. If he was following her, why did he stop? If he wanted to snatch her handbag, why didn’t he just come at her? She started across the street, and when she reached the other side she looked back fast and saw that he was following her again. Oh, this is silly, she thought. He’s just going in the same direction. But to test him she darted around the corner and into a Spanish grocery store she saw there. Poking around among the cans of exotic foods on the shelves she glanced out the window and saw that he had stopped on the corner. He was looking down the street she had just turned into. Then he disappeared.

  Rachel left the grocery and walked back to Central Park West. She felt confused. It was too easy to get paranoid about things in New York. He’d seemed well dressed, what she could see of him at such a distance. He didn’t look like a mugger. Maybe he’d just thought she was a celebrity in that funny outfit. Garbo, or Jackie Kennedy or somebody. Nevertheless she waved down the first empty taxi she saw.

  For one moment he thought she had recognized him. He felt the adrenaline singing through his body—panic, guilt, and then lust again. He didn’t know what had finally made him follow her this morning. He had been toying with the idea for a long time, but it was too risky, and besides it was juvenile. He just wanted to know what she did all day. He could have asked her, of course, but she might have thought it was peculiar. You didn’t ask a woman what she did all day; she would either take it as a put-down of her idleness or as a pass. So today he had decided to take the morning off and see for himself. He liked the bad weather because it kept people off the streets unless they were hurrying somewhere, and he could be alone with her. When he saw Rachel come out of her building in that sort of disguise he took a taxi and followed the one she had taken, and when she went into the building on Central Park West he waited for her. There were a lot of doctors in that building, and he hoped she wasn’t sick. She looked so pale this morning that he wanted to take her in his arms and make her happy. He would just tell her … what? That he wanted to take her away from her husband? But he didn’t. If Rachel were the sort of woman who would ever cheat on her husband then she wouldn’t be the woman he worshiped. He was convinced she was faithful. She could never turn out to be like the rest of those bitches. They were all fakes and bloodsuckers, every one of them, his own wife included. His scruples had put him into a trap. There was no way he could ever have Rachel. If he tried to have an affair with her and she gave in to him, then he wouldn’t want her any more.

  He’d had a new fantasy lately about her. In this fantasy he was wearing a ski mask, so she didn’t know who he was, and he followed her into her apartment when she was alone and then he raped her. She fought him and was terrified. He had her, but it was entirely against her will. She was still unsoiled. He didn’t hurt her, he just made her angry. But she was angry at the stranger in the ski mask, not at him. He would still be one of her friends who was invited to her home. The fantasy was highly satisfactory in one way, because it made him come, but in another way it wasn’t complete. He didn’t know why not, but he would wait. His life had a way of running its own course lately, showing him what he wanted without his having to understand until it happened.

  March 1975

  Ellen Rennie’s current lover’s name was Jim Vector, he was an advertising executive and had a wife and three children in Scarsdale. Although her daughter Jill thought he was gray-faced and flabby, Ellen thought he was handsome, charming, considerate, and superior in bed. He always gave her so many orgasms she thought she would faint. They had been going together for a year now, and to celebrate they met for cocktails in the dim and elegant recesses of the Plaza bar, at a table by the window where they could gaze out at the park when they were not gazing into each other’s eyes. He had told his wife he had to work late again, she supposed. She had told Hank she had to meet with someone from her office. It didn’t matter if anyone who knew Hank saw them. Her husband didn’t know anything about her job, any more than Jim’s wife knew about his, she imagined. The channels of communication were so much more open with people you weren’t married to.

  After dinner they would go off to “their” motel—or perhaps they wouldn’t even bother with dinner. Jim had wanted to be bold and rent a suite at the Plaza, but Ellen had refused, shuddering.

  “Something horrible happened to me there on my wedding night,” she said. “I could never stay there again.”

  “What, sweetheart, what? Tell me.”

  “No … I don’t want to talk about it. Even to you.”

  Especially to you, was more like it, Ellen thought wryly. The Horrible Thing was what she always did to Jim with great mutual enjoyment. But she had been so much younger then, and so innocent, it was as if all that had happened to another person who just happened to be wearing her body.

  “That’s why your marriage went wrong from the start,” he said.

  She nodded. “That was the main reason.”

  “I’d like to punch him!”

  She put her hand on his, gently, and then lifted his hand to her lips. “No. Forget Hank.”

  Tonight in the bar Jim ordered champagne. Ellen’s recollections of her traumatic wedding night did not include a distaste for champagne. They toasted their one beautiful year together.

  “People will think we’re rich,” Ellen said.

  “I’ll tell them you just got a promotion.”

  “I wish I would. I have such good ideas for publicity. I feel wasted doing what I do. But it’s been only two months. They said I’d get more responsibility very soon. Funny, I was wasted in my job eighteen years ago, and I’m still being underused. Opportunities for women aren’t all people say they are.”

  “We won’t talk about the office tonight,” he said. They smiled at each other.

  “Tonight it’s just us,” Ellen said.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said. “I told my wife.”

  Ellen felt her skin prickle. If she’d been an animal with guard hairs they would all be standing up. “Why did you do that?” she asked shrilly.

  “Don’t be afraid. I had to tell her. I couldn’t stand it any more. I told her I love you and I want a divorce.”

  “Oh, no,” Ellen breathed. “No.”

  “You’re such a good, dear woman,” he said. “I know you don’t want to hurt her. But I can’t go on like this any more. I’m not good at dissembling. I want to marry you.”

  He’d ruined it. What an anniversary present! How could he have done such a stupid thing? “You can’t leave your children,” Ellen said. “I can’t leave mine. It’s not their fault you and I fell in love.”

  “I’m willing to leave my children,” he said. “And you can get custody of yours. They can come to live with us. I’d be glad to have your children live with us.”

  “You don’t understand. My children adore their father. They’d be heartbroken …”

  “Children are selfish little beasts,” Jim said. “If they have two parents trying doubly hard to make it up to them they don’t mind a divorce at all.”

  Ellen sighed deeply and trotted out her lie. “Jill, my older daughter—you know, the beautiful one you met?—she came to me just this Christmas and she said to me; ‘Mommy, promise me you and Daddy will never split up. I want us to be a family.’ How could I ever hurt her?”

  He looked down at his glass, and when he looked up there were tears in his eyes. “Ellen, my wife … she … she cried all night. Then she said she would stay with me anyway. She knows about us and she’s willing to stay with me anyway. Why are we so insensitive?”

  “I’m not insensitive.”

  “I am. I would leave her even though she’s willing to stay with me. She said she hoped I would stop seeing you, but she wouldn’t demand it. She said she’d put up with
even that.”

  “She sounds like a wonderful woman. You mustn’t hurt her any more,” Ellen said.

  “Look, if I could talk to Jill. We could all go somewhere together, the zoo or something, and she could get to know me …”

  “Sixteen is too old for the zoo,” Ellen said coldly.

  “All right, all right, we’ll take her to the theater. To the ballet? We’ll take her to the Rainbow Room.”

  “You are the most heartless man I ever met.”

  “I’m not. I only want to do the right thing.”

  “Then don’t ask me to break my children’s hearts,” Ellen said. Her panic was beginning to subside and she felt in control again. He could go back and tell his wife he was willing to try again. It wasn’t too late. Jim was too impetuous—it was part of his charm but it was also his downfall. She could never marry him. He might give her daughters everything in the world, but he wasn’t the father they wanted. They wanted predictable old Hank. “You know how little girls are,” she said. “They think their father is perfect. They don’t see him the way I do. I think Hank is boring, they think he’s brilliant. But you see, darling, as a father he is brilliant. I never want them even to suspect about us.”

  “Do you think Jill suspected when she saw us?”

  “Maybe. Maybe that’s why she said what she did. I think you and I ought to be more careful.”

  He looked around the bar. “There’s no one here we know. From now on we’ll go to very out-of-the-way places.”

  “I think we shouldn’t see each other for a while,” Ellen said. She saw the color drain from his normally rather pale face until she was afraid for a moment he might have a coronary.

  “That’s silly,” he said.

  “No it’s not. We’re too much in love with each other and we’re losing our sense of reality. It’s getting too dangerous.”

  “My wife doesn’t mind.”

  “I don’t want you to leave her,” Ellen said. “Tell her you’ll try again. Please? For me?”

  “But when will I see you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m so confused and upset. I just had a picture in my mind of Jill’s face, and …”

  “You’re so good,” he said sadly. “All this time you’ve felt guilty. How awful it must have been for you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted you.”

  “I want you now.”

  “I want you too,” Ellen said.

  There were tears in his eyes again and she hoped he wasn’t going to cry in public. If he did cry it would set her off, that sort of thing always did. She felt so sorry for herself. Why was she doomed to have to make sacrifices all the time? You did one stupid thing—married the wrong man—and then you compounded it by having children, because that was what a marriage was for, and then you were trapped forever. She knew she could never see Jim any more, because he was too unpredictable, too emotional, too dangerous. All the qualities that made him exciting to her were the same ones that had made their love affair self-destruct. Why did this keep happening to her?

  He paid the check and they left. They went to their motel and made love for hours. Ellen wanted it to be perfect so she could always remember it.

  “I’ll never give you up,” he said. “Never.”

  “I know,” she murmured, as one would to a child. They all said that.

  March was the beginning of spring and it was the beginning of Nikki Gellhorn’s new life in her New York apartment. Whereas in the country she had always been rather untidy, here she was immaculate. Everything was hers and she wanted to protect it. She had a great many books from the publishing company where she worked, and she brought all the ones she liked best, plus all the ones she herself had worked on with the authors. She arranged them in alphabetical order in the bookcases she’d had built, like those in the public library, but her books were all fresh and clean. She bought a few prints and photographs she loved and had them framed in transparent plastic so they seemed to float on her white walls. She bought a small color television set for her alcove-bedroom and a white fluffy rug to put in front of the fireplace. The leather couch from Bloomingdale’s was a floor model on sale, so she was doubly lucky, because that meant immediate delivery. She went to Tiffany’s in a spurt of extravagance and bought four place settings of Red Dragon china. Not those awful overdecorated wedding plates she had in the country and never used, service for God knows how many people she didn’t like enough to invite home, and not the chipped, mismatched everyday dishes she’d acquired during the years of her childrens’ growing up—these were her own dishes, for herself and her own carefully chosen friends. Meals would be served on a glass and chrome table that doubled as a desk for the work she brought home from the office. She hadn’t bought sheets in years and was shocked at how expensive they’d become. Her bank account was almost down to zero when she finished her decorating. But it was her bank account, not the one she shared with her husband.

  Robert had never seen her apartment. He remained inflexible. She tried to mention it twice on weekends when they were together, but he turned her off with a look of quiet rage. She told herself he was as entitled to his anger as she had been to hers, but in her heart she was hurt and resentful because of his attitude. He only wants to share when it’s on his terms, she thought. For the first time in all the years they had been married she had no sexual feelings toward him. She knew they had vanished into her anger. While one part of her wanted to be a better wife when she was home, the other part asked her why she felt she had to pacify him all the time. Before, when they had been living together all week, she had felt free to say so when she didn’t feel like having sex. Now she felt she had to do it every time he wanted to, but she couldn’t respond, because it seemed so terribly important that she respond more now.

  He misinterpreted her lack of passion and accused her of having a lover.

  “You’re crazy!” Nikki said.

  “It’s all so obvious,” he said. “You wanted your own place, and now you’re free to do as you like. You don’t need me any more. You have him. You never were able to hide anything from me.”

  “I’m not hiding anything from you, you jackass. If I had a lover, which I don’t, I’d tell you.”

  “You call me crazy and jackass,” Robert said. “Thank you very much. Are you going to call me cuckold next?”

  “You make me so mad I’m going to kill you!” Nikki screamed. Her voice seemed to echo in the room. They both stared at each other. Damn him, damn lawyer, with all his precise words. Damn his literal mind. He was probably imagining the ways she might murder him now—gun or poison? Unaccountably, she wanted to laugh, but she knew it would enrage him, so she cried instead. That always worked.

  “Don’t cry,” he said.

  “I’m so alone … you don’t care about me,” Nikki sobbed. She felt so upset at having to cry to win him over that it made her cry in earnest. She couldn’t stop crying. Robert became genuinely concerned. He took her in his arms.

  “Don’t cry, Nikki. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. Do you want to come home?”

  She shook her head, no. “I don’t have a lover, and now you’re mad at me and mean to me and I don’t have you on my side any more and I’m all alone.”

  “I’m always on your side,” he said, patting her back, stroking her damp hair. He handed her a wad of Kleenex to blow her nose.

  “You won’t even come to see my pretty apartment.”

  “I’m hardly ever in New York,” he said.

  “Aren’t you even curious?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I could give you a key.”

  “If you like.”

  “Don’t you want a key?” she asked.

  “It’s your apartment, you’re paying for it. It’s up to you.”

  She had stopped crying and had become coy. “Wouldn’t it make you feel like my lover if you had a key?”

  “It would make me feel castrated,” Robert said.
r />   “Why?”

  “Because you should have a key to my apartment.”

  “I do. This house.”

  “This is our house,” he said.

  “Robert, stop, stop, stop doing that horrible thing you do, being so precise. You use words like weapons. You’re always looking for shades of meaning. For God’s sake can’t we just feel things any more?”

  “You’re the one with the problem of not feeling,” he said.

  She didn’t answer. There was nothing she wanted to say.

  But when she was in New York during the week she was happy. She met friends and authors after work for drinks, she took certain business guests to dinner instead of lunch, and investigated new restaurants she’d always wanted to try. She discovered that there was one great drawback to living alone in the city; she had to have a dinner date or she got depressed. The days were busy, and it was wonderful to come home to her little apartment, take a bath, watch the evening news, change her clothes, but she had to go out. The thought of eating alone made her almost frightened. Even if she had a manuscript to read overnight, she preferred a quick dinner with a friend to sitting in bed with a container of yoghurt and the manuscript. She didn’t feel like cooking for herself. She had never eaten dinner alone in her entire life. First it had been her parents, then the dormitory, then she had been married to Robert. Even on the few occasions when he’d had to work through dinner she’d had the twins for company. She associated meals with conversation and love. The television set was no substitute.