The Last Chance Page 4

  At three in the morning Margot King and Kerry Fowler were lying in her bed. The record player had clicked off, the wine bottle was empty, they had made love, and she didn’t have to get up early the next morning. She would fix him English muffins with lavender honey. Real coffee, not instant. He was everything she had suspected he would be—loving, so loving, with the perfect, beautiful body only the young had. He still had his arms around her.

  “Would you like to move in with me for a while?” she asked. She waited.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I have to write my book.”

  “You’d keep your own apartment of course. You could write your book there. There are times I have to be alone too.”

  He looked at her and grinned. “For what?”

  “Just for me.”

  “You’re so beautiful.” He kissed her on top of the head.

  “There would be no house rules. Just honesty.”

  “That’s a rule,” he said, but she knew he was teasing her.

  “I’ll give you a key. I mean … lend you one.”

  “Give, lend—why are you so hung up on words? If I move in, you’re my old lady.”

  “Old lady!”

  They both laughed.

  “Would you?” she asked timidly.

  “Okay,” he said. “As long as we both understand the real nature of this relationship.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That I’m the grown-up and you’re the kid,” Kerry said.

  “How did you know that so soon?” Margot cried in delight. They bit at each other like puppies, giggling. Margot felt so alive and full of joy that she thought she might die of it.

  February 1975

  Jill Rennie, the older daughter of Ellen and Hank, was fifteen going on sixteen, five feet six, and weighed ninety-one pounds. At first you didn’t notice it because her face still had a childish roundness, huge dark-lashed eyes, soft mouth. In a previous time she might have looked like Twiggy. But while Twiggy’s little-boy look had been an accident of musculature, Jill’s was the deliberate product of starvation. She had been meant to look like her mother —athletic, rangy, filled out. Instead she still looked prepubescent. Her summer uniform was a boy’s undershirt and tight jeans, her winter uniform the jeans with a tight wool body sweater. She had no breasts, and she had not yet started her periods, although she lied about it to her mother. Jill wasn’t really aware of what she looked like; she thought she was too fat. She wanted to lose just a little more. She knew the adults disapproved of the way she looked, however, so she never let them know she was dieting. It was easy to fool them, they thought all teen-agers were crazy anyway. She pretended to be a health-food faddist.

  “Don’t you know there are weevils in flour?” Jill would cry in horror when her mother tried to get her to eat a piece of toast at breakfast. “There are preservatives in that jam. That fruit is full of poisonous spray. I’ll buy my own fruit and keep it in my room so you won’t mix it up with the other.”

  Her mother bought fertilized eggs and raw milk. Her younger sister, Stacey, who would eat anything, finished them up. Jill existed on natural spring water, which she bought by the gallon, vitamin pills, and an occasional dried, unsulphured apricot. At meals she either rejected the food or said she had eaten. When occasionally she was forced to eat, she went to her bathroom afterward and put her finger down her throat. She was absolutely convinced that if she ate an entire meal she would change overnight to a fat person with breasts and buttocks and sexual desires, waddling around looking for release, and furthermore that if she began to eat anything she would never be able to stop.

  She knew the latter was true. Although she was never hungry, once in a while she gave in, like the time her father took all of them to an amusement park. She ate ten hot dogs, six ice cream cones, two Cokes, and a whole large-sized bag of potato chips. Then she threw up in the refuse can without even having to put her finger down her throat. She was so sick and weak that they all had to go right home.

  “I told you,” Jill panted in the family car, looking like a rag doll flung onto the back seat of the enormous air-conditioned automobile. “There are rat droppings in hot dogs, and sodium nitrite, which gives you cancer.”

  “You’ve got to be in training to eat like such a pig,” Stacey said.

  “You should know.”

  Although they sniped at each other, she and Stacey were good friends, as good friends as a girl nearly sixteen can be with one only thirteen and a half. The little kid grasped things, she was smart. She knew about their mother’s men before Jill told her. In fact, Jill wouldn’t have brought the subject up, but Stacey did.

  “Do you think Dad knows?”

  “I don’t know,” Jill said. “If we know, he must know.”

  “Not if he doesn’t want to know.”

  “How come he doesn’t leave her and take us with him, do you think?” Jill asked.

  “Fathers don’t get custody of kids. Especially girls.”

  “They do if the kids are as old as we are. We could say we want to go with him.”

  “Would you want to go with him?” Stacey asked.

  Jill shrugged. “You know they’ll never break up, just because of us. They want us to be a family.” She said “a family” with deep sarcasm born of years of watching those ridiculous soppy families on TV. Nobody’s family she knew was the slightest way like that.

  “Listen,” Stacey said, “half the kids in my class at school their parents are divorced, and I’m not even fourteen. People are getting divorced with younger kids every day. They don’t have to stay together for us.”

  “It’s not for us,” Jill said thoughtfully. “They just pretend it’s for us. It’s for them.”

  “They think we’re so dumb,” Stacey said.

  “I never want to get married,” Jill said. “Marriage is a big fake. Why get married if you’re going to fall in love with someone else anyway?”

  “When we grow up nobody is going to get married any more,” Stacey said.

  “Well, even if they do, I won’t.”

  She never wanted to grow up and be like her mother. She hated even the way her face at some angles resembled her mother’s. She knew her mother preferred her to Stacey because of that resemblance, and it angered her. She wanted to destroy everything in her that was in any way reminiscent of her mother and be herself, a totally separate being. She had not given much thought to what she wanted to be when she grew up. Stacey had already decided she would be a doctor. She was always taking the subway downtown to the public library and reading medical books. Jill told her not to take the subway, she could get killed. Stacey didn’t care. She wandered around all over the city; once she’d gone into the Bellevue Hospital emergency room and sat there looking at all the accident and assault cases for two hours before anyone even noticed her and asked her what was the matter. She had been so pleased to be able to tell Jill about the stabbings and gunshot wounds and shock, and what had been done for them, and she wasn’t disgusted at all.

  “Well, what do you expect me to do, take a taxi on my allowance?” she would ask angrily when Jill yelled at her.

  “If Mom ever found out …”

  “She’s not going to find out. She’s not interested in me.”

  Jill didn’t know what to answer to that because she knew it was true. Her pain for her sister, whom she loved, made her anger at the suffocation of her mother’s devotion to herself even stronger. She only loves me because she thinks I’m like her. If she only knew how much I despise her.

  Her mother on the phone whenever there was a new man. Jill knew the voice her mother put on so well by now that she could even tell if it was a new man she was going to sleep with, a man she was already in the throes of sleeping with, or one of her rejects whom she liked to keep around. Sometimes she wondered if her mother really thought she was so stupid or if her mother in some strange way wanted her to know, as if to say, “I’m the grown-up woman around here, not you.” Wh
at made her mother think sleeping with men made you grown up? As far as Jill was concerned, if she never had to sleep with a man in her entire life it would be too soon.

  Her mother, the hypocrite, on the phone with her friend Margot. Margot was sleeping with a man sixteen years younger than she was. She’d been the same age Jill was now, even older, when that boy was born! But they weren’t hurting anybody. Neither of them belonged to anybody else. And there was her mother, lecturing Margot, warning her, telling her she’d be hurt, that his friends must be laughing at her, that he’d leave her for a girl his own age. Jill knew her mother was probably just jealous. She’d seen her mother’s last lover one day when he dropped her off at the apartment in his sports car on the way to the suburbs where he lived with his wife and children, and Jill had just been coming home. Her mother had had to introduce them. He was gray-faced and flabby, trying to look young in his sheepskin coat, driving that red Jag, and Jill couldn’t understand why her mother preferred him to Dad. What was so wonderful about that old man? She bet her mother would be thrilled to have a young lover like Kerry Fowler if one would want to have anything to do with her.

  In past years Margot had always found February the most difficult month. The New York weather had finally settled into winter, people were tired of it, short-tempered, depressed. No wonder whoever made the calendar made February the shortest month; it was almost too much to take as it was. But this February seemed too short, because she was in love with Kerry and they were living together in her apartment, and she saw the world through his eyes. Everything seemed to be happening for the first time, and in many ways it was. She had never lived with someone who wanted to be up at seven A.M. on a Saturday morning to rush down to Canal Street to buy plastics for projects. That was what little boys did! He was always doing things: building a Plexiglas coffee table (she’d had no idea how complicated that was), or making her a romantic collage called “The Sun and the Moon and the Stars,” or getting tickets to a midnight rock concert, or insisting they stand on line for an hour in the afternoon in the bitter cold because he wanted to see a hit movie the day it opened. He had to see everything, they had to keep running all weekend until she was exhausted. He took her to SoHo because she’d never been, she took him to a revival of an old Humphrey Bogart movie she’d seen the first time it ran, when he’d been too young to see it, and they went to the Planetarium because neither of them had ever been.

  She had gone all over New York with camera crews in the course of her work, but that had been the insider’s New York, the human interest stories, the disasters. Kerry’s was like a tourist’s New York, taking advantage of everything the city had to offer, as if his stay was only temporary. She remembered when she had been his age; she had been the same way, because everything was new, she was on her own, and at last she had some money to go places. The two of them shared all their expenses, like kids his age did, and that was good, because she didn’t want to feel she was keeping him and yet she felt guilty about letting him pay for things. He wouldn’t take much money from his father, just enough to get by until his novel made some money, if he was lucky.

  Perhaps Kerry wanted to do everything this minute because he was young, or perhaps it was because he knew, as she did, that their love was just for now. Neither of them ever discussed that. But even at the happiest moments Margot felt sad underneath the joy. On a winter Sunday they had been ice-skating in Central Park on rented skates, and came back to her apartment just as the early dusk fell. They stripped off their wet clothes and he lit a fire in the fireplace Margot had never used before she met him because she’d thought fireplaces were messy. Outside their windows it was black, inside the warm room it was safe. His naked body was lit with a roseate glow as he kneeled over the logs setting tapers to the kindling, and she thought she had never seen a body so beautiful as his. Young, slender, perfect, like no body she had ever seen. Did young men look that way when she was twenty-three? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t gone to bed with young men then, she had always been infatuated with older, married men who babied her, and then later, when she began to concentrate on men her own age in hope of finding something lasting, they had already gone to flab from their years as bachelor playboys or office drones. Kerry was looking into the fire with utter pleasure, and then he turned and looked at her with the same look of happiness, and she thought she had never been so happy in her life. At that same moment her throat closed with the beginning of tears and she had to fight them back.

  Through those long, wonderful winter evenings they made plans for the summer. He wanted to take her to the Greek islands. Neither of them had ever been there. They would rent a small boat. For the first time the strange names had the ring of reality. She would take two weeks, perhaps in July. No, he said, better make it the end of September; there wouldn’t be many tourists then and he would have finished his book. She was glad he was the one who set the date farther ahead. At least she would still be seeing him in the fall.…

  She was obsessed with his body and he seemed as obsessed with hers, or perhaps young men just wanted sex all the time. He wore her out, but she didn’t care. She didn’t need sleep, she only needed him. He told her he loved her and she finally let herself believe it. If caring so much made you pay more afterward, then that was a risk you had to take. She felt this could never happen again, she would be different afterward—she would have to act her age. But now there was still time to do all the things she’d missed when she was young.

  There were times, of course, when the world intruded. He took her to a party to meet all his friends. He’d told her not to dress up, so she wore pants, but they were the wrong sort of pants; everyone else was in blue jeans. They were all young and skinny and long-haired, the boys and the girls dressed alike, and they were all lying on the floor on batik cushions smoking grass. Margot hated grass. Since she’d stopped smoking cigarettes, it made her just as sick as tobacco. The air stank. The kids—his friends—looked at her as if she were an intruder, some old person who didn’t belong there. Nobody bothered to talk to her. She felt self-conscious and ugly. The next day Kerry took her to some store on First Avenue and bought her a pair of blue jeans that were so tight she couldn’t sit down in them. He seemed to think her attire was the only barrier between her and his friends, while she knew better. It was her face and her mind and her life.

  Another time they went to Sherry’s to pick out wine. Kerry stood there quietly, not knowing one wine from another or caring either, while she knew all about them, and suddenly she wondered if the salesman thought the obvious and humiliating thing about them. Did they seem like a joke to other people?

  “You care too much what people think,” Kerry told her when she said she didn’t want to go to his friends’ next party.

  “That means they do think I have no business being there.”

  “I don’t know what they think, but I don’t care.”

  So she went, and she saw the absolute disinterest on their faces, far more cutting than an insult. She was too old to exist for them. In self-defense she took him to places where her friends were, to Ellen’s dinner party, for a winter Sunday at Nikki’s in a borrowed car. If Kerry was uncomfortable with her friends, he hid it well. He was quiet and pleasant. But what was he thinking? That some day he and his friends would be old like that? He might not like it, but it was a lot better than her knowing that she would never be young again like his friends.

  For about a year now Nikki Gellhorn had felt that her life had stopped. She was not a person who had ever been able to put up with a static existence, she always had to be stirring things up, even if it was just a couple of harmless flirtations. She had more energy than she could cope with, but using her energy on the dreary commuting to and from her job was meaningless effort. She wanted to do new and different things before it was too late.

  The feeling that she was trapped had started when the twins went away to college. She knew they would come back to visit, of course, but it would never be th
e same. They would never again come home to live. And although they had protested that that was not true, Nikki knew better. Last year, at the end of their freshman year, the girls were surer, stronger, looking for their own lives, talking about themselves and their futures as separate entities from the family. Nikki made herself accept it wholeheartedly so they would continue to be her friends as well as her daughters. Now, home for the midterm holiday in their sophomore year, Dorothy and Lynn were even more whole persons than they had been the year before, and Nikki knew she had lost them.

  Dorothy was going to major in psychology, she wanted to work with disturbed teen-agers. Last summer she had been a counselor in a nice middle-class camp, but this summer she was going to work in White Plains in a mental hospital. It was a branch of Payne Whitney, she said. Would she live in Wilton with her parents and commute? No, Dorothy said, the trip was too much, she would have a little room in the dorm on the hospital grounds, she was damn lucky to get it, she said, nurses got first choice. One gone, like ten little Indians, but Nikki had only two. Lynn had a boyfriend. She had been living with him almost all term. He was a senior at her college, and they were going to hitchhike through Europe together this summer. Lynn already had maps and lists of all the cheap youth hostels. She was going to be a political science major, although she would have preferred English. Lynn carefully chose her courses with an eye to getting into the best graduate school so she could get a good job afterward. How different her girls were from her at their age, Nikki thought with admiration and a sense of loss. Not loss of them, but loss of her own youth, her own best years. She had chosen to have marriage and a career; it had been a brave decision in her day, but now as she looked back on her life and compared it with the life her daughters were entering, it seemed as if she hadn’t really had all of either part, the job or the marriage. She had flirted and cajoled her way through her jobs, and she had flirted and cajoled her way through her marriage. She had never dared be completely honest in any segment of her life.