The Last Chance (29 page)

“I thought I wouldn’t be able to see you until this afternoon,” Ellen whispered. “This must be my lucky day.”

“I couldn’t wait,” he whispered back.

They carefully avoided looking at each other in the crowded elevator. When they reached the street he asked, “Are you hungry?”

“There’s something to eat in the apartment, isn’t there?”

“I didn’t notice. Let’s pick something up.”

They took a cab and stopped at the deli near his building to buy sandwiches. Then he insisted on stopping at the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and a bottle of vodka.

“I suspect we’re planning to take the afternoon off,” Ellen said, smiling.

“We might,” Reuben said, but his answering smile was tight. She wondered what was the matter. Mad at his wife, probably. Certainly not mad at
her
, she hadn’t done anything.

“You seem upset,” Ellen said.

“Let’s get upstairs.”

They went into his apartment in the hotel. Ellen thought it seemed different, but she couldn’t figure out at first what it was. Then she noticed it was neat. All the papers and books that had littered the living room were gone. She took off her coat, and while Reuben was messing around in the kitchen she went into the bedroom and looked around. It seemed too clean and colorless too. The photos of his two sons were gone. She ran to the closet and looked inside. There were no clothes hanging there, but instead there were two large suitcases standing on the closet floor. She lifted one and it was heavy. She rushed to the dresser, opened all the drawers, and saw that they were empty, except for one, in which the few little things she had left in his apartment were neatly folded. They would all fit into a shopping bag, and indeed he had put a clean shopping bag next to them, folded too.

“Reuben!” Ellen went into the living room just as he was coming out of the kitchen with two large glasses of vodka and ice in his hands. “What happened, are you moving? What’s going on?”

“Take this,” he said. He handed her the drink and she saw that his hand was very steady. He didn’t seem upset, but he wasn’t himself either. He took a long drink from his glass. “Sit down, Ellen.”

She sat on the couch. “Will you tell me why you’re all packed?”

“Ellen, I’m going home.”

“You’re
what
?”

“I went to the lawyer with my wife—Look, don’t interrupt me, okay? This is hard enough as it is. I sat there and discussed dividing up our things, and the money she wanted, and all of a sudden the whole thing became terribly real. I mean, before it was a dream, a wish, a fantasy. But in the lawyer’s office, with papers to sign, it wasn’t make-believe any more. And my kids. I … I just couldn’t stand to look at their faces. They were scared, Ellen. They’re just little boys. They need their father. I felt so guilty. I missed them. I can’t go off with you, Ellen. We can’t get married. I can’t leave my kids.”

“Your kids?” At first, while he was talking, the enormity of what he was about to do to her had left her numb, but now she saw it all, and she was filled with anger. “
Your
kids? You can’t leave
your
kids? What about what I was going to do for you? What about
my
kids?”

“And my wife.”

His words hung there between them as if they were visible. They looked black, Ellen thought, like burned paper.
And my wife
.

“That’s it,” she said. “Coward.”

“I’m so sorry. You don’t know how badly I feel, Ellen.”

“Liar.”

“I never lied to you, I swear it.”

“You were going to leave them.”

“I was.”

“But you took one look at how much it was going to cost you …”

“Do you think that’s unimportant?”

“I’m sure it’s essential.”

He shook his head. “It’s the guilt, Ellen. I just can’t leave them. I’m going home tonight.” He finished off his glass of vodka in one long series of gulps and looked very relieved. “Drink your drink, Ellen, you’ll feel better.”

She threw the vodka in his face, glass and all. He ducked the glass, and it bounced against the rug and lay there. Some of the liquid had splashed on his shirt and tie. He took out his handkerchief and carefully mopped it off. “I don’t blame you if you hate me,” he said.

“I despise you. I despise cowards.”

“You have every right to despise me. And I’m sorry.”

Ellen looked at him, and suddenly she realized that she was doing all the wrong things. No man had ever left her before. Instead of throwing a tantrum she should be acting weak, crying, begging him not to leave her. Why would he want to come back to a woman who behaved the way she was doing? She let her eyes fill with tears, and then she was genuinely unhappy and she began to cry. “Oh, Reuben, don’t leave me.”

“Please don’t cry,” he said sadly. “You make me feel worse. Ellen, please believe that I didn’t ruin your life. Nothing has changed for you. Thank God we didn’t do anything rash. You can go on just as before. You’ll find someone a lot better than me. You can have any man you want. You don’t need me.”

“I do need you,” she said. She blew her nose. “This is a terrible thing to do to me. How can you do it?”

“Guilt,” he said. “It’s my most prominent characteristic.” Surprisingly, he was smiling. He looked as if the confession had been a catharsis for him. He went into the kitchen and made them each another drink. Then he sat in the chair, still not next to her on the couch. Ellen had the horrible feeling that Reuben was never going to touch her again. She wondered if she should try to get him into bed. Would that work? If it did, for how long?

She wiped her eyes and drank a little of her drink, looking at him, and then she lit a cigarette. He let her look at him, sitting there silently under her gaze like a prisoner in the dock, waiting for sentencing. She looked at the old acne pits, the crooked teeth, the face she had found so irresistibly sexy, and she remembered all the reasons she had first chosen him. She had wanted him for his guilt. She had always chosen well, and she had never been wrong. Reuben Weinberg, she had thought when she picked him, is a man with the proper amount of guilt. He’ll never leave his wife.

She had been right. She had chosen him too well.

She let him leave the apartment first, with his suitcases, just to be sure he really meant to leave. She watched from the window and saw him drive away in a taxi. She threw her things into the shopping bag, and then she put it down next to her purse on the floor and made herself a fresh drink. She was in no condition to go back to the office this afternoon and she couldn’t go home yet. Methodically she smoked the rest of the pack of cigarettes even though they made her throat hurt, and drank two more glasses of vodka and ice although she disliked the taste. She felt numb and was probably drunk. She looked in the bathroom for her toothbrush, but it was gone. Then she remembered the piece of paper he had made her sign promising to join him on December 26. What a liar! He had even lied to himself, which made him weak besides. She hated him. How dare he ditch her? He had been lucky to have her. What had he done with that piece of paper? She looked into the wastebasket and saw some empty envelopes, some crumpled pieces of paper with scrawls on them, which, on inspection, seemed to be work from the office. And underneath all of that were some tiny pieces of paper that he had torn up as if a detective were going to come after him and investigate his tracks. Ellen put a few of the little pieces together. They were the infamous contract. “I, Ellen Rennie …”

She gathered them up and methodically flushed them down the toilet. Did Reuben think he was the only one who had to protect himself? Weak, castrated bastard! She had to get out of this place before it stifled her.

She fled to the street. It was dark already, and Sixth Avenue and the cross street were clogged with traffic, bumper to bumper. Everyone was going home. She had a home too. She would go to it. She only hoped that Reuben was as miserable as she was, and that he always would be, forever and ever.

December 1975

The Christmas holiday season brings out the worst as well as the best in everybody in New York. Christmas was truly meant for children. For adults it is a time of remembering, of depression, of loneliness. Every year there seem to be fewer celebrations. Perhaps it is a backlash against consumerism, or inflation, or simply the lack of money. When we were children Christmas was the time of anticipation, of decorating trees and waiting for Santa Claus with his gifts; as adults, it is we who have to buy the gifts, or make them, decorate the trees, pay the bills, and there is never enough time.

“Let’s not give each other presents this year,” Margot said to Ellen.

“But we always give each other presents.”

“It’s so expensive,” Margot said. “I’m not even giving those horrible office gifts.”

“I want to have a really bang-up Christmas and forget my troubles,” Ellen said. She had been nervous and irritable ever since Reuben had left her, and she avoided him in the office. Luckily she had no business to do with him anyway that couldn’t be passed on to someone else in the publicity department. “Nikki says we should have a party.”

“I hate parties,” Margot said.

“How about lunch! Someplace corny and terrific, like the Rainbow Room.”

“With presents?”

“We’ll just have the four of us,” Ellen said. “You, me, Nikki, and Rachel. That’s just four presents.”

“Well, you do the calling,” Margot said. “I’m too busy.”

What a grouch Margot was lately, Ellen thought. You’d think a nice Christmas lunch with three friends was a big effort for her. “All right,” she said pleasantly. “What day? Let’s see, Christmas comes on a Thursday this year, so Wednesday they’ll shut the office early. It’s a short week and everybody always has to shop at the last minute, and there are all those office parties, so what about Friday the nineteenth?”

“It suits me,” Margot said. “I have nothing to do for the rest of my life.”

Nikki said the nineteenth was fine, and so did Rachel. Lawrence had to be away Thursday and Friday on business that week, so lunch with her friends would cheer her up. Rachel said she would make the reservation in her name at the Rainbow Room, which they all agreed was an inspired choice. So high in the sky, with the magical view that made the city look wonderful instead of the way they saw it every day, the aerie beloved of tourists and lovers.

“Would you believe,” said Rachel, “I’ve never been there?”

“Neither have I,” said Nikki. “Let’s make it early, twelve thirty, so we can get good and drunk.”

Each of them marked down December 19 in her appointment book. A festive pre-Christmas lunch, one decent thing to look forward to. And so, each was now going toward her destiny.

It had not occurred to Margot that anyone would find her recent behavior different, for the reason that she didn’t care what anyone else thought. It was hard for her to concentrate on people at all. She was in a deep state of what she could only describe as grief. At night she drank her vodka and took her sleeping pills, feeling as heavy and invisible as a black star in the galaxy, burned out, dead. In the mornings when her alarm rang she lay in bed for a long time wondering where she would find the courage to get up and face another day. Pain held her heart in a vise. It made her head ache and her breathing labored. Often she sighed deeply. She thought she must be the loneliest person in the world.

How could she ever go on? This year was coming to an end, another would start, and what would be different for her? She could hardly imagine struggling through the rest of this week in her pain, much less another whole year. She couldn’t remember when she had taken a vacation. Year after year she let the opportunities slip away, taking her vacation as vacation days, wasting time, because she never had any place to go or anyone to go with. She thought now of all the places she had wanted to see and never had because she had been working so hard. Kerry was taking Haviland to Paris for Christmas. He was rich now. His novel had been sold to paperback for two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Margot had money saved, she could have gone to Paris, but who wanted to spend Christmas in Paris alone? Or Christmas anywhere alone? She didn’t miss Kerry at all any more, but she would always miss the happiness of those months when she really thought she would at last have someone to go somewhere wonderful with.

So long ago, when she was in college, she had spent two weeks with another girl on Cape Cod. After college she was too busy working and too poor to go anywhere. For a few years she had spent vacations with her family, until she found the difference between their idea of fun and hers insurmountable. She had been young then, she had wanted to be out, to dance, to laugh, to flirt. Now she felt like a robot. The smile, when it came, was automatic, forced. Two days she called in sick and didn’t go to work, but lying in bed immersed in this black grief was worse than facing people, so she returned. Always she carried within her this pain, irremediable. What could stop the anguish—a drug, an adventure, a love, death? She knew that if love came now she would be unable to accept it. How would she be able to see love or even kindness when everyone seemed at such a distance? She was apart from them even while they were face to face, speaking. The pain made her move slowly as if deep in thought. But her thoughts were empty, and sometimes she did not even think at all. Sometimes hours went by without her noticing, and other times she thought she had been sitting in the same place for an hour and it was only minutes.

She was never hungry any more, but she was very thirsty. It was from the sleeping pills and the liquor. She had two doctors now, and neither of them knew about the other. One gave her Seconal, the other Dalmane. Dalmane gave her a bitter taste the next day. They always made you pay, one way or the other.

She had not sent Christmas cards this year. Last year’s cards, enough left for this year, lay dusty on a shelf. She received cards and didn’t bother to open them. She merely glanced at the return address. She wasn’t even curious enough to open the ones with no return address on them. A voice inside her said that some of them might be invitations to parties where perhaps she might find someone who would change her life. But Margot knew that was no longer possible. She could not go to a party, and if she did she would find no one who could possibly want her the way she felt now. She longed only to die.