Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  But it’s not like I had brain cancer. Or lupus. It’s not like his friends were gonna judge him badly for abandoning his sick, druginfested girlfriend. Far as they knew, I was fine.

  We went on like this for a few months. We brought Kam into the fold. The three of us hung out: movies, parties, concerts.

  One night Eric and I were having dinner at a restaurant in the theater district because theater was in our future. We were going to meet Kam and her boyfriend at the time. A guy was crooning at the piano. Our cheeseburgers were huge. We’d been talking about the florist for his last shoot. Or he’d been talking—I couldn’t. Some days, the words just didn’t come. But he was tired, needing much sleep and also, probably, me. Me when I could make myself reachable, which was not often. He carped at the waiter. He never did things like that, and I was startled. Then he carped at me. And next I knew, we were having the talk.

  “There’s just this thing in you,” he was saying. “I don’t know how to handle it. I guess I never did. But I thought, I thought that with me, after a while, you’d feel better.”

  “I know.”

  “If I can’t help you, and you won’t help you, how are we supposed to make this work? I don’t see how to make this work.”

  He was so upset, I wanted only to comfort him.

  “Can you stop that?” he said. He had never raised his voice to me before.

  “I’m agreeing with you. I’m trying to make this easy. Why are you getting mad?”

  “I don’t know any other couples like us. Look at Kam! You think it’s like this for her?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s no wonder you’ve had such a hard time getting people to love you back.”

  “Okay, that’s just mean. And not true.”

  “You said it yourself! That guy you worked with? Okay, forget I said that. I’m sorry.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, too.” And I was nodding because so far, he had not said anything I disagreed with.

  “You give in so fast,” he said. “Can’t you defend yourself? Can’t you say I’m wrong? Don’t you have any self-esteem at all?”

  I know now that I waited too long to respond. But I was dumbfounded. It sounded like he was asking me to say that I wasn’t white or a girl, as if such things are just a matter of perception.

  He sat back in his chair. “It’s just, it’s like you are more attached to being miserable than you are to being with me.”

  The breakup went on like that for another day or so. It was numbing. And he and Kam were a good team. I saw the romance between them eons before they did. By the time they noticed, I was upstate at rehab. A few months later, Kam showed up with flowers and news of the engagement. This was less numbing. I went on a rampage. Slept with the acupuncturist and woke up pricked from head to toe. I did not leave my house for a week. I dropped so much weight, it seemed the skin of my face might rip any second, so thin and taut was it against my bones.

  I had not seen Eric since then and this was almost a year ago, which made his appearance at our door completely appalling.

  So this was Alfred’s photographer.

  “Meet Eric Ludlow,” he said, and I winced. I could have been Lucy Ludlow!

  “Actually, we’re old friends,” Eric said, and nodded at me.

  “Oh, good. Then we won’t have to break the ice. It’s hard being photographed by a stranger.”

  Hannah was amused. She may be twelve, but that doesn’t mean innuendo is lost on her. Course, I couldn’t tell who was giving off the vibe, me or him. He’d let his hair grow out. It was floppy, which I liked. I noticed razor burn on his neck, which meant the rest of that stubble was by design. I liked that, too. He was wearing Burberry pants that hugged his ass and a green T-shirt that said spatula.

  “This is Kam’s doing,” he said, and began to unpack his gear. “I wasn’t going to take the job but she wants to check up on you.”

  My shirt needed depilling. It gave me something to do. I picked and yanked and then there was a hole. Did I only imagine we were intimates? I think my judgment on the matter is sound. I have never conflated sex with love. How could I? Barring Eric, the two had yet to meet. Sex passes the time. Sex is orgasm and infection. It’s someone between your legs while you read a book. It’s hoping you don’t use your teeth by accident. It’s exploratory. A venture. It’s mapping the body, yours and his. Is it fun? I guess. But so is white-water rafting. I prefer chess. I can’t play chess, but I prefer it anyway. A tussle of minds. Empathy at work. Chess, in fact, might be love. Absent the whole demolish-your-opponent thing, it is love. And me and Eric, we had that. Banter that made us laugh for hours. Hours of solace just from being in the same room, doing a crossword, reading the paper. When you share your silence, you share everything. Now I was looking at the concentration on his face—setting up his gear—and thinking: How many other chances am I going to get? All doors are closing.

  “I see Isifrid is about the same,” he said. She’d moved from the fireplace to a corner of the room. She looked ferocious. “Should I—”

  “No.”

  “Right.”

  He saluted Hannah. She snorted, but I could tell she liked it. That she liked him. Most kids do, especially the girls. They are as animals who can suss out a bad character ages before the rest of us.

  “Whoa, Alfred,” I said, and pulled him from the brink of Isifrid. I think he was squatting to hear her better.

  Eric gave Aggie a kiss on the cheek, which jiggled. I hate to be repulsed by the natural process called aging, but I can’t help it: I am repulsed.

  They exchanged a few words. When he and I split, she took it badly. I’d explain what went wrong and she’d say, But I don’t understand, you love him. I’d say, It’s complicated. And she’d say, But you love him. This could go on for hours. Now that I have her sailor in mind, I guess I understand better.

  “It’s nice to see you,” I ventured.

  “You, too.”

  I was close to tears. I wanted to say many things, but come on, how futile. Under the circumstances, probably the best I could do was cry. And I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry so that he could see me cry because I am a woman of feeling, and sometimes all it takes is one feeling to revive another.

  He turned on his heels to look at me. I do not hold up well under scrutiny, which means my face tends to lose shape pretty quick. It goes slack. I was ready for a face-lift by age three.

  He smiled and said, “Okay, why don’t you just stand over there next to Aggie.”

  I asked if it was okay to leave Mother out of the shot. Alfred said that rather defeated the purpose. I asked if we could arrange ourselves around her so that instead of looking strung out, she just looked down-to-earth.

  “Maybe we should come back another time,” Eric said.

  But since Alfred was clearly never coming back, he nixed the idea.

  I wanted to know more about the Minnesota Man. I demanded Alfred’s e-mail address. He didn’t have e-mail. I demanded his phone number. He relented. I took him aside.

  “Alfred,” I said. “Is it the same strain from my father’s lab? If you’re here, I’m guessing yes.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Really, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s deadly and no one has ever seen anything like it. So you do the math.”

  Throughout, Isifrid had been fairly quiet. I know she was wanting more crack. I know she was waiting for her rocks to dry. Can’t boil an egg, but she can still make crack. It’s that easy. All you need is baking soda, a pot, and a strainer. I never understood why crack didn’t get fashionable. It’s cheap, okay, but not if you make it yourself with premium cocaine. Maybe the laboratory part is too junkie for rich people. Or snorting is just more debonair. Needles get a bad rap. And freebase, that’s out, though it used to be a tough call until Richard Pryor self-immolated in his kitchen, trying to react cocaine with ethyl alcohol. Guy sets himself on fire and he’s black and forget it: freebase is fo
r junkies.

  The thing about crack, it hijacks the good in you. I am immured behind Alcatraz-like defenses, so Isifrid cannot get to me. But Hannah, I hated to see her so protected. It’s good in the short run, she won’t get hurt, but it also forebodes an indolence of spirit that conduces drug abuse. And I’ll die if she turns into me.

  Eric had us assume various poses and expressions. I always loved to watch him work because you just couldn’t see what he saw until the film got developed. Not like there’d be any great art to be had from us. I was pretty sure no matter what Hannah did, she looked nonplussed. And that Aggie’s eyes were insufficiently suggestive to compensate for what was lost behind the mask. And that Mother was dour. Dour at best. So it was up to me. But since I couldn’t imagine Alfred writing that I am the pillar of strength in this family, I just felt exposed.

  Eric said we were finished. Alfred said, Thank God. He was done hiding his contempt for us, he had gotten what he needed. I leaned against the wall as Eric packed up. How many times had I seen him do this? Tripods, screen, easel collapsed and in the duffel bag. Lenses in the bag, light in the bag.

  There was not enough room in the elevator for Alfred, Eric, and gear. So Alfred went alone. By then, the rest of the family had retired. Eric seemed to notice this before I did. He was tapping his fingers against the doorframe. I should have probably just said bye, but I hated to foreclose on any opportunity to be loved. Because I figured maybe he could still love me. In some fashion. The elevator was almost here. I said, “Well, there’s a story for the grandkids.”

  He shook his head. Laughed. “You’re still a nut,” he said. “Maybe that’s what I’ll tell Kam.”

  “You can tell her I’m fine.”

  He looked away, put his bag down, and I didn’t even see it coming until he’d gotten me in an embrace so snug, it was breathless. The elevator opened. I think Eric said to keep in touch, but I couldn’t know because Stanley was announcing great results from the lab and man was he hungry and did I see the snipers on the roof, some dignitary at the hotel across the street, and, as they traded places in the elevator, Hi, I’m Stanley, I’m Eric, oh.

  Stanley pecked me on the forehead. I asked why he was laughing. He said it was because I looked like a child. And it was true; I got this a lot.

  Eight

  Now, Eunice, they said, you’re not gonna die. Euuuuuuuuuuuunice, you’re not gonna die! But they lied. So before Lucy was me, and before me were other kids like me. And now I don’t listen to what people say. There’s one adult here with a helmet and animal pants who keeps yelling that we’re on a ladder. He doesn’t spend much time with me—I think maybe he doesn’t like me—but one time he explained how my ladder looks: Sal into Randall into Jack into Christina into Howard into me into Lucy. Six kids born dumb. I lasted the most, to when I was seven. At school, our teachers made us write poems so that other kids like us would not be alone. Everyone but Sal because he died before he could even talk. Oh yeah, and Christina, too, because she was blind.

  A poem:

  I am a failure to my dad.

  I am a failure to my mom.

  What if what I dream

  is not their dream?

  When God made me,

  I wish he’d paid attention times three.

  Sometimes dinner with the other people who keep coming back, it’s fun. But mostly it’s not. If I put burger on my mashed potato, it looks like a ski slope in summer and who wants to eat that. I wonder how it would look on my face. It’s nice on my face. Lookit, my face!

  My teachers said I was special and I guess that’s true because I looked different from my brother and the kids at school, and I thought that was okay except for the people who made ugly faces when they saw me or the people who got upset because I guess they were scared.

  Randall happened in 1927. He got polio when he was three, but since everyone was starving, it did not seem so bad, only he was starving with polio. He was sick a long time and Hoover was saying everyone should just laugh and then that big building in New York got lights at the top and Randall’s mom was getting fifty cents a week and his dad was getting nothing at all and not so many babies were being made plus lots of adults were going to heaven and so when Randall got into Jack, he thought maybe the world had not ended after all.

  Jack lasted until five. He could not get enough air to his brain, so he couldn’t think very well or run around. He and his mom lived in Oahu on the base because the doctors were free since his dad was in the army. One time he got to sit in a fighter plane. He was four but had to be gated in so that he didn’t do anything stupid while his mom was asleep. When the bombs came she held him tight and after, when everything was on fire and she was listening to the radio, Jack thought maybe this was the end of the world.

  It’s hard to come back. It’s not really another chance because your parents and friends live someplace else and you can’t talk and Lucy doesn’t eat any of my favorite foods. And lots of times I want to play and she’s just sleeping. She sleeps a lot. I don’t think it’s fair that she can get around without a wheelchair and her hearing is good and she can see fine and she knows left from right but still doesn’t do much and is not any fun. I know Howard did better for Christina. She couldn’t do letters for a tumor in her head, but Howard did lots of letters. See?

  Being dyslexic is okay, its the other stuff that makes it hard to tie my shoes and get to school and playing and dancing and sports.

  I got old really fast. My bones broke. I lost all my hair. Kids at school called me Yoda. That made me feel bad, but my mom said I could make it feel good because Yoda has lots of powers and can do stuff with his mind. So I did stuff with my mind. My skin was like crepe paper. The whites of my eyes were cloudy. My feet were claws. When a really old monk came from Tibet to see me, we looked the same. The picture ran in the paper. I was tired a lot. And I never got to learn much except that when stuff hurt it was better to hide it because my mom would get sad and stay sad long after the hurt was gone.

  They call it progeria. Rhymes with wisteria, which my mom says is a flower.

  One time she didn’t want me to see a movie where lots of people got sick and there’s a man playing chess with a dead person. But I cried a lot so she let me. I asked if this could happen and she said yes but that it would not happen because this was a modern age and I thought that was weird but okay because I didn’t want everyone to be scared and get the disease. I thought it was okay for me to die but I did not want her to get the disease. We talked more about it. She said that when I got to heaven I should make a bed for her because she’d come stay with me after a while. And that we’d come back together as new people but that she would still be my mom and I’d still be me only not old but more like the other kids. I guess I thought this was okay back then. Now not so much. I can’t find her anywhere.

  I wish it was true that when we are new we are actually new. That everyone’s smart and has a good heart. But people are jerks and wishes don’t work and I’m still the same and pain is still pain.

  I don’t feel good. These people are mean and shepherd’s pie is gross. Why do I have to sit here? Mr. Animal Pants is a thousand years old. And he yells at me nonstop. How come I have to look like his grandpa? I’m just a kid. I’m just a kid! I want to start over. I want a sundae.

  Nine

  What I like about a twelve-step program is that you can put yourself in the presence of recovery and not be recovered at all. Not even close. Lotta people I know, they’ll come to a meeting high. Or get high once they’re there. Not that they ever get caught, but when a lady comes out of the john all itchy, all smiles, you know something’s up. It’s not the worst idea, really. No one is gonna give you grief, and in the event of overdose, everyone will know what to do. I’ve been hanging around the rooms for six years. I’ll put together an hour, a day, a week clean, but that’s about it. No one claps when I announce my day count anymore. They all know it won’t last, which is a relief. I hate to be a disappointment.
<
br />   Tonight it’s powdered donuts in the basement of a church near Mother’s place. I’ve come because I have nothing else to do and also because Agneth gave me the guilt. I hate the guilt. Dirty Ben’s sitting in the first row. He gives me a hug, as do about five other people. I have come to tolerate these human moments because there’s no avoiding them.

  The guy who chairs the meeting has been in prison eight times. From him I have learned how to make a knife out of cotton. Also that quinine stops an eye twitch. He’s got a Traumatizing Brain Injury. His name is Frank, and he’s a sweetheart.

  Tonight’s speaker has a lisp. I think this is because he had a stroke, but it turns out he’s just got a razor blade in his mouth, acquired for protection. If you look hard, you can see it glinting against his cheek. He’s sharing on the first of the God steps, which are a doozy for the atheists among us, even though we are promised the steps are a spiritual undertaking that can exclude belief in God. Despite how many meetings I’ve been to, I am so far from belief in a higher power that when the Blade talks about his HP it still takes me several minutes to realize he doesn’t mean health care provider.

  The Blade lives with his mom. He probably weighs about ninety pounds. Last night he jabbed the butt of a revolver in his eye and might have done it, only his mom slipped in the bathtub and broke her pelvis. At this he starts to cry. I’m glad we’re not supposed to talk because how do you comfort someone over that? He says he is grateful to be clean today, and wipes his face with the back of his sleeve.

  Comes time to open the floor, a lot of hands go up. I’ve known these people forever, it seems. The dancer in the rear lives alone and owes her landlord ten months’ back rent. She claims incapacity to buy food though she will buy books. A lot of books. She tends to chop at the air with her hands. In Serbia, her parents were jailed for being enemies of the state. Her mother was murdered. She’s been in New York for thirty years, but her accent is paramount.