The Last Chance (3 page)

She was dressed and having her second cup of coffee when Robert came into the kitchen. She kissed the back of his neck and his hand lingered on her rear end. “Nice ass,” he said. He said that every morning.

“Thank you. It’s comforting to be appreciated at my age.” She grinned when she said it because she really did think she was thirty; it was always a shock to see the numbers when she had to write her date of birth on a document.

“You’re just a baby,” he said.

“I’m going to be late tonight, sweetheart. I have to have business drinks. Do you feel like driving into New York and taking me to dinner, or should I leave something here, or what?”

“Or what,” he said.

“No, come on, tell me.”

“How late will you be?”

“Nine thirty if I have to come back, seven thirty if we meet in New York.”

“I’ll wait and take you out to dinner here. Take the express to Stamford and I’ll meet you at the station. Then you won’t have to cook. I have some work to do anyway.”

“Then I’ll leave my car here and you can drive me to the station now.” She saw his raised eyebrow. “I mean,
will
you drive me to the station?”

“Sure. When I’m dressed.”

She looked at her watch. “Shit, it’s not going to work.”

“Why not?”

“I have a meeting at nine. It’s important. If I wait for you to drive me, I’ll miss my train.”

“Well, then, why don’t you just come home and we’ll eat something here?”

“Okay.” She took two steaks out of the freezer and put them on a shelf in the refrigerator. “They’ll be thawed by tonight.”

“Goodbye,” he said, taking his cup of coffee into the bathroom.

“Bye, darling.”

That was really a scintillating conversation, Nikki thought with unaccustomed anger as she drove her car out of the garage. I wouldn’t have missed that conversation for the world. It was worth traveling two hours this morning and getting up at six
A
.
M
. just to have that conversation. What do a brilliant lawyer and a successful editor talk about at home, folks? Now you know.

The train was only five minutes late, and Nikki settled into a window seat with the manuscript she was going to read on the trip. She was a fast reader and could usually finish a whole manuscript each way. She hadn’t bothered to tell Robert that her business drink wasn’t exactly a business drink, even though she could put it on her expense account because Margot King was a television personality who might want to write a book some day. But Margot was mainly her friend, and keeping her girl friends was an important part of Nikki’s personal life. Because she had commuted for so long she didn’t have much of a relationship with the married women they knew in the country. She and Robert saw them and their husbands on weekends, as couples. Her lunch dates were all business ones, no time for just a lunch with a girl friend. She had business cocktail dates too, more than she would have preferred. There was never enough time for anything. She felt rushed and pushed and frustrated, knowing there were so many things she couldn’t fit into her life. This evening she would just sit in the bar at the Plaza for an hour with Margot, maybe get a little smashed, and they would talk about all the things that bored husbands and boyfriends. It would make her feel whole again for a while anyway.

Rachel Fowler, ornament, wife of Lawrence Fowler, international banker, woke up in the king-sized bed of the master bedroom in their Fifth Avenue duplex apartment at just ten minutes past noon. She always slept late, even when she didn’t feel like it. It made the day shorter. She had Porthault sheets and a Porthault breakfast set to match. She buzzed for the maid, and by the time she had emerged from the bathroom her breakfast was waiting for her on a white wicker tray table on the bed, the sheets having thoughtfully been smoothed as if she were an invalid.

The breakfast tray contained half a grapefruit, a pot of tea, some artificial sweetener, a rose in a bud vase, and
The New York Times
. She read the headlines, skimmed the front page, and turned to the crossword puzzle. She liked to do it in ink; it was one of the few things she did well. Once she had been a model, and she had done that well. Now she was thirty-five, still very beautiful, tall and slender, terrified of losing her looks, and she did being a wife very well.

Being Lawrence’s wife was not an ordinary job. He gave dinner parties every night if he was home. Large ones on certain weekends, medium-sized ones for thirty on certain week nights, six for cocktails if it was a private little thing before an opening. Rachel kept a leather-bound book with the names of the guests on each date, the food and wine served, which table linen had been used, what kind of flowers, and what she had worn, so that nothing would be duplicated. She had a round leather disc into which she could slip place cards as if it were their dinner table and move them until she found the perfect seating arrangement. She drew the circle with the names in her book too.

There were things she did not write but which she remembered: who had his or her eye on whom, who had clicked, and whose mate had found out. It was as important to keep certain people apart as to keep others together.

None of this being a hostess was really very difficult. There were phone calls to be made to the florist and the liquor store. To the butcher and grocer if the cook was preparing the food, otherwise to the caterer if it was a large party. She had standing appointments at the hairdresser’s, the gym, and the salon where she had her facials. A masseuse had come to the apartment three times a week until Rachel read that massage could give you broken capillaries, then she had stopped. Last year, at thirty-four, she’d had an eye lift. It was better to have these things done when only you noticed they were needed, before other people noticed.

The new important novels and nonfiction books were piled on the bedroom desk. Rachel read two every week in order to have something to talk about. If they invited anyone who had written a book, of course she would read it before the author came, but she never said more than one thing about the book to the author unless it was obvious that more was called for. She wanted to seem informed but not pushy. The one thing she said about the book was always a carefully chosen compliment even if she thought the book was garbage.

Lawrence never took a vacation. Sometimes he went to Europe on business and took her with him. Rachel had learned to speak several languages rather well in order to make the other people feel at ease when they went out socially in foreign countries. Lawrence spoke only English no matter which country he was in. He said that when you were doing business you couldn’t afford to make mistakes. He always used a translator, although he could speak and understand most languages better than Rachel did.

He was older than she was; they had been married for ten years, and they were hardly ever alone together. When they weren’t entertaining people at home or being invited out he was out with businessmen. He seemed to like that best of all. He went to different bars or sometimes drank in offices where executives had their own bars, talking business or just having a good time with the men, and he never came home before eight. If she felt lonely she couldn’t call him, because she never knew where he was. When he did come home, if they were alone they ate in front of the television set. He was a very fast eater. She ate almost nothing. It took them fifteen minutes to have their entire dinner, including coffee, and then Lawrence liked to go into his den to work. At eleven he emerged and watched the evening news on television, then he went to sleep. He was up and gone to the office long before Rachel ever woke up in the mornings. Once in a while, when he remembered, they had sex together. He was very observant, he knew exactly what she liked in bed, just as he knew what sort of presents she liked to be surprised with on the birthdays and anniversaries he never forgot. She had a safe deposit box at the bank full of Fabergé
objets
. She used to keep them out on the tables in the living room, but then one of them disappeared. It was expensive and irreplaceable. Rachel knew the maid hadn’t taken it, because it wasn’t the sort of thing a maid would steal, and besides she trusted the help. She was sure it had been one of their guests. That made her feel creepy, because you tried to invite the best people into your home, you made yourself vulnerable to them, and then one of them turned out to be a kleptomaniac or, worse, a common thief.

Lawrence hadn’t been upset when she told him. He bought her another
objet
like it. Rachel, however, couldn’t forget about it for a long time. She kept half expecting to see her Fabergé egg sitting on somebody’s coffee table when they went to a party, but of course she never did.

Ellen had lunch with Margot that day. Margot had made a reservation at the Russian Tea Room, and Ellen was a little nervous because the tables were so small and close together and the place was so crowded that she was afraid people would hear her discussing personal business. But it was also very noisy, and there was a certain anonymity in that. Besides, she didn’t know them. The hell with them. Her survival came first.

“I hope this is all right,” Margot said. “If you hate Russian food you’re out of luck.”

“If you think I care what I eat … Hank’s on the verge of going bankrupt, Margot.”

“Oh, no!”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s so typical of him. Only Hank could inherit a perfectly good business from his father and then let it fail. He had his chance to switch to small cars years ago. But Hank is incapable of an original thought. What was good enough for Daddy was good enough for him. And now nobody wants big cars. We’re broke and in debt and I’m hysterical.”

“I’m so sorry, Ellen,” Margot said. “That’s just terrible.” Ellen could see she really meant it. “You know what I think of Hank, but I can’t help thinking how rotten it must be for him too, losing his father’s business—the Oedipal thing.”

“Margot, when you’re about to go on Welfare you don’t have Oedipal problems, you have real problems. I need a job.”

“I’ll be glad to help,” Margot said. “I’ll look.”

“Isn’t there something at your station I could do?”

“They’re not hiring anybody right now. Wait … wait, let me think. Nikki! I’m going to make a call.”

Margot went to the phone booth and called Nikki Gellhorn at Heller & Strauss. She knew Nikki would be out to lunch but always left word where she’d be, and Margot then called her at the restaurant.

“What’s up?” Nikki asked. “Are you calling off our drink date?”

“No. I wanted to know if that opening in your publicity department has been filled yet.”

“Not yet, but they’re seeing some people tomorrow.”

“I have someone for them to see today. It’s a big personal favor for me,” Margot said. “I can send her over this afternoon. You’ve met her, it’s Ellen Rennie, my friend since college.”

“But it’s a kid’s job,” Nikki said. “It’s boring, and the most it would pay is two hundred a week.”

“She really needs the money,” Margot said. “And besides, Ellen’s so aggressive she’s perfect for publicity.”

Nikki giggled. “I always like to do a favor for a friend. Especially a pushy one. Tell her to come by at three thirty. I’ll pave the way before.”

“Thanks a million, Nikki. I’ll tell you the whole story later. You’ll understand how much she appreciates it.”

“You can pay for the drinks,” Nikki said.

Margot came back to the table beaming. “I’ve got you a job, I think. You have an interview at three thirty. You remember my friend Nikki Gellhom. She’s a senior editor at Heller & Strauss.”

“The commuter,” Ellen said. “What’s the job?”

“It’s in the publicity department. They need someone to book tours for authors: get plane tickets, coordinate schedules, reserve cars and hotel rooms in various cities, make sure that when an author shows up at seven forty-five in the morning to do a television show, they know he’s coming and he knows where to go.”

“I can do that,” Ellen said. “I’m very efficient.”

“It only pays two hundred a week, but you haven’t got a résumé and …”

“Are you kidding? That’s a thousand dollars a month! Do you realize the terrible weight you’d be lifting from my heart with a thousand dollars a month?”

“It’s independence,” Margot said.

“It’s beautiful. Tell me everything about the company so they’ll think I’m smart.”

“Well, let’s see. Heller & Strauss is one of the biggest and richest publishing companies. They have a very good list. Both Heller and Strauss, who founded it, are long since retired—or dead, for all I know—and nobody really knew much about Heller except that he was very rich and very ugly, and he had a horrendous wife who insisted on looking over every secretary and reader in the entire company to make sure she wasn’t pretty. If she was pretty, she got fired. Mrs. Heller was sure that every woman in the world was after her husband, even when he was eighty.”

“How did Nikki get the job, then?”

“She came from elsewhere after Heller had retired. Strauss, on the other hand, became quite well known because he was the darling of the talk shows. Now that I think of it, he
is
dead. He gave the company a kind of panache and a lot of good publicity. Now the company is run by a publisher, a president, the editor in chief, the executive editor, and some senior editors, one of whom is Nikki, and under them some ordinary editors and readers. Then there’s the copy department, the art department, the sales department, and of course the publicity department, where you will be.”

“It sounds like they have a lot of authors,” Ellen said.

“They do. But they don’t all tour. Just the ones who can get on talk shows and be interviewed by newspapers.”

“I don’t actually book them for that?”

“No, you’ll be sort of the in-house travel agent. Move them around and make sure nothing gets screwed up.”

“I can hardly wait!” Ellen said. “You’re a real friend, Margot.”

Rachel and Lawrence fowler were giving a large party to help one hundred of their closest friends recover from the after-holiday doldrums. Margot and Nikki were both invited, Margot as “Celebrity—TV” and Nikki as “Intellectual—Publishing.” Neither was aware of the categories in which they were listed in Rachel’s party book, but they suspected. Actually, they both liked Rachel, for they had decided that there was more to her as a person than the role that life, her husband, and she herself had put her into. Ellen and Hank were invited too, having been on Lawrence Fowler’s “Large Party” list ever since Hank had sold him his first limousine at a discount. Lawrence had switched to a Mercedes several years ago, but he didn’t like to drop people, and the Rennies seemed personable enough.