The Last Chance

by Rona Jaffe

  In return for her interesting stories Jill kept Dorothy up on what her shrink had said and what he had asked. Everyone here tried very hard to make Jill feel they really liked her and cared what happened to her, but Jill couldn’t help thinking they considered her an interesting and unusual case. Junkies and pillpoppers and suicides they got here by the dozen. Twelve-year-old girls who screwed around and shocked their mothers—so what? That sort of thing went on all the time in the slums and the parents didn’t go put their kids into a mental hospital. But rich people couldn’t stand having such a reflection on them living in their very own home. Some of the concerned parents didn’t even live in New York, a few didn’t even live in America. They traveled around all summer and figured their weirdo kid was out of their hair.

  As for the other patients, Jill didn’t want to get too friendly with any of them. Her stay here was going to be so short that if she got to like someone she would miss her afterward. She liked Dorothy, but Dorothy was too old to be her friend on the outside. They had different interests. Dorothy liked men and sex, she had a boyfriend, she was planning her career. On her days off she went to parties with other aides and smoked pot. Jill had never even seen her in street clothes, just that uniform with Miss Gellhorn on the pocket. The patients were allowed to wear anything they wanted.

  Jill’s clothes didn’t fit her any more, they were too tight. Her parents came to visit her and gave her new, prewashed jeans and some T-shirts. They also brought her some paperback books, even though there was a library here. Her parents tried to act like what their idea of perfect parents was, so the doctors wouldn’t think they were responsible for Jill’s bizarre behavior. They were so sweet to each other it turned Jill’s stomach. She was tired and relieved when they finally left. She went into the bathroom, made sure it was empty, and threw up. It made her feel much better. She was glad she could still do it. Wouldn’t do to lose her touch, when the doctors were giving her body back to her at the end of this month.

  “Hello, Jill,” Jill said to her reflection in the mirror. It didn’t look like her and she had to keep reminding herself who it was. It looked like a puffy stranger. A pig with an apple in its mouth for them to carve up and eat. “Don’t worry, darling Jill,” Jill said to this poor, piggy thing, ninety-five pounds this morning before breakfast, “I’ll make you well again as soon as we get out of here.”

  August 1975

  Jill came home from the mental hospital on the last day of July. Her family was delighted at the apparent change in her, and promptly stopped noticing her. It was not that they didn’t care about her, but she seemed all right and they had their own problems. So as August went by none of them paid any attention to the “lunch dates” and “supper dates” with friends that kept her away from the apartment at mealtimes, or that she was losing weight, or noticed that on the few occasions when she shared a meal with the family she went promptly to her bathroom and threw up. She had her sixteenth birthday, and everyone assumed she had finally become interested in a social life. She replaced her new jeans and T-shirts with others in a much tinier size, and nobody even saw. All jeans looked alike.

  Hank was worried about his business. The price of gas had gone up again, and summer motorists clogged the roads, but not in his big cars. It was impossible to switch franchises. He tried not to think of what might have been, but thinking about what would be was worse: bankruptcy. He had laid off employees, pared down his staff to the bone. There was ill will. Fear hung in his office like a poisonous vapor. He remained indecisive, helpless, afraid.

  Stacey was relieved to be back from Grandma’s. Her yearly stay among the geriatric set took quite a toll of her patience. She was happy to be back in the city she loved, where she could wander where she pleased, spend hours in the public library and museums, hang around with her school friends (the ones who were too poor to go away for the summer). Even the August heat wave didn’t bother her very much. Inside most buildings it was cool.

  Ellen’s problem was Reuben Weinberg. Her affair with him was more a pleasure than a problem, because his wife was still away and Hank was so easy to fool. She and Reuben planned to go away together for a weekend at the end of August. He booked a room at a small old inn in Connecticut. He rented a car. Ellen told Hank that she was going to stay with Nikki in Wilton that weekend because Nikki’s husband had to be away on business and Nikki didn’t want to be alone.

  “You know, we’ll do boring girl things,” Ellen told Hank. “Probably go antiquing. You can take care of the kids.”

  “All right,” he said calmly. “Have a good time.”

  Ellen also told Nikki, to back her alibi. “But I haven’t been to the country for a weekend since the robbery,” Nikki said. “If Hank calls he’ll get Robert, not me.”

  “Hank never calls,” Ellen said.

  “What if he asks?”

  “You tell him we had fun. You certainly don’t know anything about cheating. If Hank asks, he doesn’t want to hear.”

  “I think it depends on the husband,” Nikki said. “Mine thinks I’m here in New York having a big love affair. Which I’m not. Yours is just a different kind of person.”

  “You never told Robert about the robbery,” Ellen said. “He never even suspected. When are you going to stop thinking your husband has X-ray eyes and jumps over buildings in a single bound?”

  “I stopped thinking that quite a while ago,” Nikki said.

  On the chosen weekend Ellen met Reuben at the garage. As soon as he drove out of the city limits and the ugly buildings were replaced with fresh, green, growing things, she felt as if all her problems had gone away. How wonderful to shed the past, to have another chance! She looked at Reuben, intent behind the wheel, but he noticed her watching him and turned to take her hand and smile at her.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you,” Ellen replied.

  Did she really love him? More than the others? He made her feel like her own woman, not the harried martyr she considered herself at home. She loved him, but she was aware now, and had been for a while, that she had deliberately chosen him, just as she had deliberately chosen all her lovers except Kerry, her one mistake. All her married life she had been making up for her greater mistake, that of choosing Hank—or letting him choose her—by being extra careful. Her love life was her sustenance. Without it she would dry up and die, or go crazy. But now, at forty, was that enough? This nice man, who loved her, might become available, as the others had. If he did, what would she do? Would she get rid of him as she always had with all the others, or would she consider him seriously? She was forty now, in young middle age, and she wouldn’t be able to go on having affairs forever. How good it would be to settle down, to get rid of Hank, to have a new life, and to be faithful. How peaceful it would be, and yet fun, because Reuben was fun to be with. This weekend would be a test for them both. Ellen had never known a weekend that hadn’t made a man see his moment of truth.

  “I hear that Mary Logan is fed up with her publisher,” Reuben said. “I’m having lunch with her agent next week and I’m going to see if I can sign her. Don’t say anything.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” Ellen said. How nice to be privy to these little secrets, to be so close to the source of power!

  The inn was on the outskirts of a tiny town nearly two hours away from the city. It was surrounded by trees and hills and had a lake with an old gristmill. The lake was stocked with trout and bass which were cooked and served up fresh for dinner in the inn’s dining room. Ellen and Reuben went to their room, made love, showered together, and went downstairs to have drinks on the terrace and watch the sunset.

  “Do you know,” Reuben said, “that Herbert Ellis called me up at home last night at four o’clock in the morning, collect, to complain that there were none of his books in the Everflow, Idaho, train depot?”

  “What a nerve.”

  “Well, he can’t find me this weekend.” He smiled and took her hand.

  They had dinner a
t a table in the quietest corner of the inn’s dining room, lit by candles, served by a waitress dressed in Revolutionary costume.

  “What would you like to do tomorrow?” Reuben asked Ellen.

  “Just poke around. What would you like to do?”

  “That sounds great.”

  After dinner they had brandy on the terrace until the mosquitoes drove them indoors. They went to their room, made love again, and went to sleep, nestled together in the too-small double bed with the antique four-poster frame built for midgets of a former generation.

  Saturday was sunny. After breakfast they got into the car and explored the countryside. They didn’t talk much but they were very companionable. Ellen felt she had known him for a long time. There would be no unpleasant surprises. When she saw a bam with a sign Antiques For Sale she gave a shriek of joy.

  “Oh, let’s look!”

  He parked and they went into the barn, looking at everything and pricing the things they liked. Ellen had hardly any money with her and didn’t intend to do more than look. She didn’t know the difference between real and fake anyway. They paused at a tray of old jewelry.

  “Those wedding rings always make me feel sad,” Reuben said.

  “Why?”

  “I wonder who they belonged to and why they ended up here.” He picked one up and showed it to her. “See inside? They put their names. They must have loved one another. Maybe she died and the ring ended at auction with all her things … maybe the marriage didn’t work and she sold it.”

  “People didn’t get divorced in those days,” Ellen said.

  “I wonder if they were happy or unhappy,” he said. “You wear a ring and you’re not happy. I wear a ring and I’m unhappy too. I wonder if my wife is happy. We don’t discuss it. Is your husband happy?”

  “I suppose so,” Ellen said. “I don’t know.”

  “In those days it didn’t really matter,” Reuben said. “People accepted their fates. Today it’s the opposite; they can’t wait to change things that don’t suit them. You and I are caught in the middle. We’re living with values that no longer apply, but we’re used to it. There ought to be something better, something more.”

  “May I help you?” The owner, who had waited respectfully in the background, came up to them.

  “Where did you get these rings?” Reuben asked.

  “Oh, all around. That’s an old one, a hundred years old. See the color? Eighteen karat.”

  “I wouldn’t want someone else’s ring,” Ellen said. “It might be jinxed.”

  “The kids like them a lot,” the owner said. “Antiques are big with them. It’s the whole back-to-nature thing. An antique doesn’t count as jewelry, it’s more like heritage, history. I sell a lot of old wedding rings to kids.”

  “Kids are so romantic,” Ellen said.

  “We are too,” Reuben said. “Except our wedding rings are antiques.” He smiled, and the owner smiled back and put the case of jewelry away.

  “Just look around till you find something you like,” he said, and left them to their browsing.

  “I feel like having a drink,” Reuben said.

  They drove back to the inn. They sat on the cool porch overlooking the lake and Reuben ordered champagne. When it arrived at once, cold in a silver bucket, and Ellen saw that it was Dom Pérignon, she realized he had ordered it in advance. When? This morning after breakfast? Last night? In the city?

  “You didn’t mind when I said our rings were antiques?” he asked her.

  “I was a little insulted,” she said with a smile, “but as long as you don’t think the same thing about the wearers …”

  “No, we’re younger than we ever were. It’s our marriages that are old.” He refilled their glasses. Ellen felt a little high. She hardly ever drank before lunch. “I want you to think about something,” Reuben said.

  “Okay.”

  “Are we going to have just another romantic, self-deceptive love affair or is this going to be important to us?”

  “It happens I have been thinking about it,” she said.

  “And …?”

  “I think it’s something one has to think about. I haven’t found any answers yet, have you?”

  “Yes. I know it’s important. To me anyway. I wanted to tell you this so you wouldn’t be afraid to start thinking it might be very important to you too.”

  Ellen sighed. “I’m afraid it is important to me already.”

  He beamed at her. “Then maybe we’ll be among the few lucky ones.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The ones who change their lives just when they’ve given up hope that they ever could.”

  For the first time in one of her affairs Ellen didn’t ask what would happen to her children or his children. She just drank her champagne and looked into his eyes. He was the same as the others. He wasn’t special, he had just come along at the right time. Timing. That was the whole secret of love. She realized she hadn’t loved any of the others at all. It was just that love was part of her peculiar morality. But she could love this one, she could adore him, because he would save her. No, because she would let him save her.

  “Do you believe me?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you let yourself trust me?”

  “Should I?”

  “Yes,” Reuben said. “Because I won’t hurt you. I never could.”

  And I won’t hurt you either, Ellen thought. She didn’t say it, because she knew it would scare him too much to think that she was perfectly able to do so.

  Nikki was aware that she was changing, and she liked it. For one thing, she noticed the world around her in a less romantic way, and instead of being disappointing or making her bitter, it made her feel more secure. All her life she had lived in a pack, and now she only had to take care of herself. She talked to Robert every day on the phone, but when he asked her which train she was taking up to the house on Friday she always had some excuse—special meetings at the office, extra work. The August heat wave gave her a good excuse because they’d never had their house air-conditioned. One weekend she invented an ovarian cyst. Gynecological problems always repulsed Robert, and he asked if she would be all right and then dropped the subject. He never offered to come into the city. He had never given in to her on anything without a great deal of subterfuge on her part, and she didn’t intend to trick him now. She regretted that she still didn’t have the courage to tell him that she found weekends in the country with him unpleasant, that they made her uncomfortable. The secret excuse she had given herself, fear of another robbery, was no longer valid. Her windows had bars, her door its super lock, and she was not afraid. Saturdays she went to the stores, which were all having sales, and replaced her wardrobe. Luckily all she’d had in the apartment was her summer clothes. The winter ones were in Wilton in garment bags with mothballs, a dread habit she’d inherited from her mother.

  The clock radio, the little color TV, the cassette player, all were replaced too, by Nikki, not the police. The police never did find any of her things. She realized that she had never really expected them to. She registered with an organization that fed your Social Security number into a computer at the police station, and she stenciled her number on everything of value with a special marker they lent her. The point seemed to be that a burglar wouldn’t steal something that was registered, because he wouldn’t be able to fence it. She was quite proud of herself for never having told Robert about the robbery.

  The last thing she replaced was the rug, but instead of fur she got a Rya on sale. Fur was nouveau riche anyway, she decided. She didn’t get a new bedspread either. A bedspread was something a suburban matron had. She bought a blanket cover, so she could lie on the bed and read, and found it cut her morning bed-making time too. She was less neat than she used to be. She did things in order of their importance to herself, not to other people. Perhaps it was the hot weather, or the fact that it stayed light so much longer in the evenings during the summer, but Nikki discovere
d she wasn’t as frantic as she used to be about having a dinner date every night. She was getting used to her own company, and she found she liked it.

  At the office she automatically asked for a raise, as she did every August. To her great surprise she was not only given the money she asked for but was promoted too. She was now managing editor. Everybody in executive positions had been stepped up one notch. She had new stationery with her name and title on it. All her spring books had done well, and she had brought in two good new authors, but she suspected that the main reason she had been promoted was the change in her attitude and behavior in the office. She still flirted and acted cuddly, but she was stronger, more sure of herself, and occasionally she dropped the pretense altogether and let them know she was aware of how bright she was. This did not seem to offend anyone—in fact they respected her for it. I am probably the last of the emancipated ladies, Nikki thought ruefully. Look at all I missed!

  She had decided not to take her vacation this summer. Robert had not said anything about it. When she suggested casually that they might take their vacations together in the fall and go somewhere instead of just puttering around the house in the country, he replied vaguely that it might be a good idea if he could clear up his work load. She realized he wasn’t looking forward to going away with her any more than she was looking forward to going away with him. Fall was such an exciting time in New York, and Nikki decided to get tickets to a lot of plays. If Robert didn’t want to go she could take Rachel or Margot or Ellen.

  There was a rumor going around among all the female employees of Heller & Strauss, from typists to editors, that they were going to snare John Griffin. Movie stars writing their autobiographies was in this year, and Nikki wasn’t surprised that John Griffin would join the group; if every taxi driver thought he could write his life story, why shouldn’t every actor? But what surprised her was that John Griffin’s book was going to be a serious novel and that she was assigned to be his editor. She doubted that John Griffin, from the image she’d gotten of him, would have enough respect for a woman to let her mess around with his words. He couldn’t even walk in the street without women clutching at him, his two marriages (and divorces) had been stormy and well publicized, his love affairs equally so. He was known to relax in the company of men and had no women friends or business associates. Women were to marry and have children with, or to take to Europe on location as part of the entertainment. She hoped his manuscript wasn’t bad and that they would get along. It would be a rotten trick if they had assigned him to her just because she was known to be a devious flirt.