The Last Chance (2 page)

Hank Rennie respected her. So tall and blond and well dressed, already at twenty-five the owner of his own business because his father had died and left it to him. He sold big, expensive cars. But instead of necking with Ellen in one of them, he used cars for transportation, driving her to romantic restaurants in Westchester where they could watch ducks on a lake and play with each other’s fingers over a dimly lit table. They were grown-ups now. Grown-ups didn’t just fool around. When Hank proposed, Ellen accepted immediately. The happiest day of her life was when she quit that damn typing pool where the other girls hadn’t even gone to college, and she had been Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and all they cared about was how many words a minute.

Ellen and her mother and Hank spent the entire spring preparing for the wedding. The china, the silver, the linens, the trousseau, the apartment they rented “until the children come and we move to the country.” It was a June church wedding, with the reception at the Plaza Hotel. Upstairs they had rented a suite for Ellen and Hank to spend their wedding night. The next morning they would fly to Bermuda.

Margot and three of Ellen’s other friends were bridesmaids. Margot had been annoyed because the bridesmaids had to pay for their own dresses but Ellen had picked them, and they were Margot’s worst color. Ellen had done it deliberately, not wanting to be upstaged. Even then …

Before the wedding, waiting for her grand entrance, Ellen had cried. She didn’t know why. She felt trapped. She didn’t love Hank.

“Why are you crying?” Margot asked, her arms around Ellen, letting her smear mascara on the dress Margot hated anyway.

“Why did he get a haircut?” Ellen sobbed. “I hate his hair so short.”

“Bride’s nerves,” Ellen’s mother said cheerfully, rushing with a towel to clean Margot’s dress and a whole makeup kit for Ellen’s ruined face.

It was barbaric to have to change into her traveling suit and jump into a taxi, drive around the block, and go into a side entrance and upstairs to their wedding suite to be officially deflowered. Everybody who mattered knew what they were going to do. Her mother, his mother, her father … oh, God, how humiliating. Ellen wondered if her father was blocking it all out of his mind the way he did everything that bothered him. She was tired and embarrassed and hot and Hank was too. She wished they could run away, or put on jeans and go to P. J. Clarke’s and get drunk, or just go to sleep. But not have to go into that huge white marble bathroom and change to her white satin nightgown with the matching peignoir and go out to the living room to face this stranger she was welded to now, who was in his bathrobe too and even had the mandatory bottle of champagne waiting in a cooler, just like in a bad movie.

She couldn’t tell him how she felt. Girls didn’t tell men how they felt about things. She had to let him undress her like in that same bad movie and try to pretend she didn’t notice how scared he was. This time they wouldn’t be necking and touching and doing all those wonderful sensual things that drove her crazy. They were Married now and they had to Do It. He even had a condom ready on the night table. She had never felt less like Doing It in her life.

She knew he didn’t feel like it either. She had never been close to Hank without his getting an erection, but this time it just lay there, and she pretended not to look. She had never seen him fully naked before. Not even in a bathing suit, because they had met in the winter. She had never seen any man naked.

He took her hand and put it on his penis. He couldn’t even speak to her, ask her, tell her what to do, and his embarrassment compounded hers until she felt nauseated. She began to stroke it with the hand that had the wedding ring on it. She was so used to the boys doing everything to her, trying to go as far as they could, that she had never done anything to them. But it didn’t bother her. She had been curious to know what a bare penis felt like. It just lay there in her hand.

Then she felt his hand on the back of her neck, pushing her head down. She knew what he wanted her to do but she wasn’t going to do it. How dare he? Why didn’t he
ask
her instead of shoving her? If he’d only said something, if he’d been a person instead of this frantic frightened animal, she would have done it for him. She didn’t know what to do, but she let him put it into her mouth and she felt it finally grow big, no, enormous, and she wanted to gag. I hate you, Ellen thought. I hate you, you make me sick, and I will hate you for the rest of my life.

She lay passively while he consummated their marriage, and she wondered if her mother knew what a hoax it all was and why she had never told her.

The next morning they went to Bermuda and the weather was perfect. They swam, sunned until they were mahogany color, snorkeled, rented bicycles, ate lobster, drank champagne, and took “a nap” every afternoon. Hank never had any more trouble and Ellen never had to do that thing again, but she was determined never to do it even if he begged her. He became aware after a while that she remained totally unmoved, and finally he even asked her timidly what she would like, and she told him, but nothing he did made her feel anything but cold and dead. Anger burned inside of her for having been cheated. She felt as if they were mirror skaters, doing everything perfectly in synchronization but never touching.

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 than 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.