The Last Chance
A Novel
January 1975
At five A.M. in New York at the beginning of January it is black and silent. The new carbon arc lights that are supposed to make the streets safe from muggers illuminate the fact that not even a mugger wants to be out in that lonely cold. Every ten minutes, perhaps, a lone taxi might cruise by, doors locked, bulletproof shield between the driver and his passengers firmly closed, smeared with the fingerprints of the night’s innocent travelers, who hated shouting their destinations through the money slot. The large alarm clock next to Margot King’s bed went off with a shriek that seemed to shatter her brain. The pain of it made her heart pound, but she didn’t shut it off until she was sitting up on the side of the bed, otherwise she knew she would go back to sleep.
It’s my job and they need me. I promised. She had never been a morning person, and five A.M. was unspeakable. She had to bear it for two weeks, because she was doing the morning news while the regular newscaster was away. She wondered if he was sleeping now in the Bahamas where he had taken his vacation. Margot did the evening news every night on local television, and sometimes the late night news as well if a substitute was needed. She thought of it as the swing shift. Ten years as a television reporter, going to be forty years old at the end of the summer, thankful for the myopic camera that missed all the tiny lines she had begun to notice, and no steady slot of her own. People knew her, but she wasn’t really a name. It was her own fault. She had never fought for anything and had even turned down promotions when it seemed they would take up too much of her time. She remembered when she had been fresh out of college, so long ago, turning down a job as a researcher at Time-Life because the personnel director told her she would have irregular hours and never be able to make a date in advance. “I don’t want my job to interfere with my life,” Margot had said. And now she realized that her job was her only life.
She brushed her teeth, squinting against the harsh bathroom light. Two drops of eyedrops in each eye (“for forty-year-old eyes,” the commercial said—next year she would have them). She washed her face in the shower because it took less time, although she knew soap and water were lethal for delicate skin. But then she slathered on moisturizer, quickly so as not to dwell on the wrinkles, and watched them smooth away under the yellow liquid. Television makeup wasn’t helping her skin any. Maybe she would have a facial this week. She stepped on the scale, not surprised and yet always relieved that the needle never wavered from the point where it had been the day before.
There would be coffee at the studio, but it would be even worse than her own instant, so while she waited for her coffee to cool she made the bed. It seemed futile and depressing because no one would see it, but you never knew. She might invite a man home for a drink. She thought that every morning, but she hadn’t had a lover for nearly a year, and while part of her felt old because of it, another part didn’t care. Sometimes she felt frustrated, but she couldn’t seem to turn the feeling toward any of the men she met every day who would have been delighted to help her out. The more she didn’t have sex, the more distant it seemed, the more difficult, as if she were a virgin again.
The last man who had lived with her had drifted away, not walking out cleanly but nicking at little bits of her until she felt as if she were covered with tiny wounds. Finally she took his key away and told him not to call. It had taken a long time to recover. Maybe it was true that when you got older everything took longer to heal.
She walked to work. The streets were deserted, and she walked out toward the middle of the sidewalk in case anyone was hiding in a doorway, and kept the handle of her bag firmly knotted around her wrist. Her steps were swift and aggressive out of habit, and her glance darted all along both sides of the street, but she was not afraid. It was only six blocks. She had deliberately moved to West Fifty-seventh Street so she would not be at the mercy of transportation. She liked to be independent. She had more anger than fear in this city because she had always loved New York and now it had been ruined. It was filthy, noisy, filled with junkies, rapists, muggers, murderers, and the paranoid hostility of the average citizen who felt he had been taken. We’ve all been taken, Margot thought, but nobody made us come here. We all wanted to come here. This was dream city. There is no place else.
In her office she started typing the news items she wanted from the Teletype machine. That machine had always fascinated her, sputtering out the endless roll of paper with items of mayhem from places so far away they seemed not to exist. And in between a garden party. She chose just the right combination of world and local news, knowing her viewers were as interested in a tenement fire in the Bronx in which one child had died as they were in a catastrophe in Asia in which a hundred had.
“Little Denise could have been saved if it had not been for the rash of false alarms that left her neighborhood without any fire engines. It took twenty minutes for fire fighters to come from …”
“Henry Kissinger said today …”
“Convicted Watergate conspirator …”
“In the nursing home scandal …”
There had been a time when everything had affected her, and now she no longer cared. She could watch a man sob and shove a mike into his face, her only feeling the fleeting hope that he wouldn’t push it away. Some reporters never stopped caring, and they were the best ones. Margot had become numb, but it had seemed the only way she could save herself from caring too much. She worked better this way. She could write sharply, she could be funny or make people cry, but inside she remained untouched. Outside was unreal; her inner life was all that mattered. She wondered if that was good, and what would become of her.
On her desk there was a note someone had left for her about a phone call that had come last night after she’d gone home. She realized she’d forgotten to call her service again. Gone to bed with a drink and a sleeping pill, turned off the phone, thinking only of getting up at five. It was a frantic message from Ellen. All Ellen’s messages were frantic if they concerned Ellen. She had been Margot’s roommate at college, had gotten married soon after graduation, had two teen-aged daughters, and spent her entire existence relentlessly trying not to become a housewife. This desire, however, did not extend to having a steady job. Call Ellen Rennie. Urgent. Ellen called only when she wanted something.
Margot looked at her watch, clipped the message to the top of the folder containing things to do after the show, and tried to decide if she should scratch the Watergate item in favor of giving more time to the new story that had just come in about a man who had died as a result of last evening’s trapped subway. Hell, everyone was sick and tired of Watergate, but they had to take the subway every day. If the world she presented to her viewers kept getting smaller, perhaps that was good. Maybe it would give them something they felt they could do something about. The worst feeling in the world was to feel helpless.
She went into the makeup room when she saw that both chairs were unoccupied. Everyone on the show knew that you were not allowed to speak to Margot in the morning. She had let them know she was a grouch, but the truth was she couldn’t stand to be near smoker’s breath that early. Ever since she had given up smoking two years ago she had become a fanatic. The only one she spoke to before the show was the makeup man.
“Save me, Ralph, I’m in your hands,” she sighed, and sank into the chair.
Ellen Rennie woke up at five thirty that morning, wide awake with anticipation. She had hardly slept at all, formulating her plans for getting a job, making lists in her mind of whom she could call, what she should tell them. Naturally she would see Margot first. Margot knew everybody. Ellen was more jealous of Margot than she liked to admit, always had been, even though she was fond of saying to her friends, “Poor Margot, we must find her a man.”
Poor Margot, pretty and slim and ethereal and brilliant, always being deserted by men because she chose the wrong ones, while she, Ellen, trapped in a marriage, was always attracting the right man, the perfect, considerate lover, and was never able to stay permanently with any of them because she was stuck with this clod.
She looked at Hank, sleeping peacefully on his side of their king-sized bed. What kind of man hadn’t touched his wife for six years, even though they slept in the same bed, just because she had told him not to? What kind of man would stay with his wife for seventeen years even though he knew she had lovers? How could you respect a man like that? It would be different if she thought he had someone, anyone, even his ugly secretary, but she knew Hank was faithful, and somehow that annoyed her even more. If he would just do one thing that wasn’t predictable. The thing that was most predictable was his failure.
His large, clean white feet with the tufts of blond hair on the toes were sticking out from the covers. Six feet four of white bread, Margot had called him. Oh, Margot could kill with her tongue when she wanted to. Ellen stifled a giggle. She remembered what fun they’d had at college, all the men phoning them and camping on their doorstep, the two most popular girls in the dorm. In those days when someone wanted to get Ellen a blind date she never asked, “Is he cute?”—she asked, “Is he tall?” She’d thought tall was sexy. Perhaps because she was tall, and in the fifties that wasn’t considered sexy in a woman, it was liability. She liked big hands holding her breasts in a parked car, huge arms holding her on the dance floor.
All those long, lazy hours of foreplay in parked cars before curfew, without ever arriving at the moment of truth. A girl had to stay a virgin, she couldn’t risk getting pregnant. Although it was rumored half the girls in the dorm weren’t virgins, Ellen was, and Margot was until her senior year. Ellen was afraid. She didn’t want to risk not getting the best husband in the world because he might disapprove of her past. She had totally bought the myth of marriage and children and happily ever after. She would have liked to be somebody, to have an interesting job, but she was afraid to be alone. All the wonderful touching in the cars—she had orgasms from just necking, and she knew that some of the girls who had gone all the way didn’t even know what an orgasm was. She was afraid of what she would do if she was lonely and single. She would be a wonderful wife.
She and Margot shared an apartment in New York after they graduated, subsidized by their parents. Living together was supposed to keep them pure. Margot began to have an affair with her married boss. Wrong from the start, but nothing Ellen told her could change her mind. “I’m too young to get married right now anyway,” Margot had said cheerfully. Having Margot sleeping home every night was no protection at all, Ellen discovered. All her dates had their own apartments. They could jump on you before dinner when you were sitting there totally unsuspecting, listening to their records, having a drink.
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.
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.
The party was held on a Friday night, starting at eight. Rachel had decided that people should dress up. There was a buffet dinner, a lot to drink of course—mostly white wine, because people wanted that lately—and she had hired a pianist. Handsome young men sent from the caterer were running all over the place. Rachel preferred them to maids. It made the wives feel sexier, even though the waiters were homosexual.
Dressed, Lawrence presented himself to her for her approval. It was nice of him to do that, she thought, it made her feel important to him, and it was one of the few times she felt that he, not just his environment, needed her. She in turn presented herself to him for his approval. They shared a glass of champagne together in the library before the guests came. It would probably be the last time they would see each other until the party was over.
The Christmas decorations were long gone, and Rachel had managed to have spring flowers flown in. The large apartment looked fresh, blooming and cheerful. She supposed everything would go right, it always did. It was too bad she couldn’t get drunk and enjoy herself, but champagne was fattening. She would just be charming and bored.
Ellen was thrilled. She had wanted to be the first to arrive so she would have time to chat with the Fowlers, but then she decided Hank was a detriment and it would be better to arrive later so she could lose him in the crowd. When they got there Nikki and Robert were already there.
“I love your wife,” Nikki said to Hank. “I think she’s enchanting. She’s going to be so good at her new job. Everyone loves her.”
Hank looked pleased but uncomfortable. “Don’t be jealous, dear,” Ellen said to him.
“Oh, why would he be jealous?” Nikki said cheerfully. She was bubbling and bouncing all over the place like a blond cheerleader. In a minute there were three other men around her, all admiring her. Robert hovered over her for a while and then went to the bar.
Ellen lost Hank as soon as possible. In a few minutes she had her own group of men around her. One of them brought her a drink. They were a banker, an advertising executive, a doctor, and an actor. They were all married, except for the actor, who had a possessive date at least twenty years younger than he who kept clutching onto him. No wonder poor Margot never finds anybody, Ellen thought. All the men are divine but they’re all taken.
Margot, in the library where it was quieter, kept looking at her watch. She had to be back at the studio soon to prepare the news. There was a very attractive boy standing by the fireplace, maybe twenty, watching everything with that cool, self-possessed air young kids put on when they’re uncomfortable. She was immediately attracted to him in a way she hadn’t felt for a long time, and she thought how funny it would be if at last he turned out to be the one who could move her. He looked at her, right into her eyes, and smiled. “Hello,” he said without moving toward her.
She moved toward him.
“You keep looking at the time,” he said. He had a soft, sweet voice, sexy. But just a kid. Nothing for her—she’d have to be crazy.
“I have to go to work soon,” Margot said. “I do live news on TV.”
“I’ve seen you,” he said. “Margot King. Murder and mayhem at eleven.” He smiled. He had sensual lips and perfect teeth.
“You know who I am, but who are you?”
“I’m Kerry Fowler.”
“Related to …?”
“Lawrence Fowler’s son.”
Oh, God, someone’s son. She had graduated from someone’s husband to someone’s son. Her aging was complete. Lawrence and Rachel didn’t have any children, and Rachel was too young to be this boy’s mother anyway, so he must be from Lawrence’s long-ago first marriage. She found herself laughing.
“What’s funny?”
“Me,” Margot said.
“Are you having a good time?”
“I don’t like the noise and smoke, but I like parties. At least, I always think I’m going to like them. When I was a little girl my mother always used to get me something new when there was going to be a party, a dress or shoes or something, and she would put it in the closet and say, ‘Now, you can’t wear this until the party.’ So I’d wait and wait, thinking something wonderful was going to happen, and then the party was always a disappointment. I guess the fantasy of what would happen to me when I wore that dress was better than what ever did happen.” She smiled, looking carefully at this boy, Kerry, to make sure he wasn’t laughing at her. “I guess I’m still that way.”
“Me too,” he said. “I used to go to camp, and my parents would buy me all this stuff, and I’d fantasize about camping out in the woods and how great it would be, and then I’d always get in trouble with the counselors about breaking some rule, and they’d have to send for my parents and it would be a big hassle.”
“I loathed camp,” Margot said. “I’d sit in my bunk and read instead of being good at athletics, and all the other girls hated me.”
“We have the same memories.”
“We can’t possibly have the same memories,” Margot said, “you’re too young.”
“I’m twenty-three.”
Sixteen years older than he is. But if I were a man and he was a young girl, nobody would think it was so terrible. “I’m thirtynine.”
He absolutely beamed. “That’s great! You don’t look it. I thought you were about twenty-eight.”
“Only because at your age thirty-nine is unimaginable,” Margot said. “What do you do anyway?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Published?”
“I have a contract for my first novel, which is about halfway finished. It’s not autobiographical.”
“Okay.”
“It’s sort of a fantasy.”
“They’re the best,” Margot said. “My entire life is fantasy.”
“The news?”
“No, my private life. In self-defense against the news.”
“Can I come with you when you go to work tonight?” He sounded so earnest, like a kid.
She shrugged. “I guess so. You can watch me type.”
“I’m not much good at parties anyway,” he said. “And besides, I thought then maybe you and I could go have a drink somewhere.”
I wonder if he thinks I’m a celebrity. No, he wouldn’t; he’s been around celebrities all his life. Maybe he just thinks I’m interesting. “Okay.”
His eyes were big and green, like a cat’s, curious and knowing. “You’re wondering why I want to be with you,” he said. “But I’m wondering why you want to be with me. I think you’re beautiful.”
“Let’s just say I think you’re beautiful too,” Margot said lightly, but she felt her heart turn over. I think I’m not so dead after all, she thought.
Rachel saw Margot King leave with Kerry and she smiled. Women just loved that boy and he loved them too. If she’d been a different type of woman she might have wanted to have a go at him herself. But she had never cheated on Lawrence in the ten years they’d been married. Even with the little sex he gave her, she had no inclination to cheat. She liked to flirt a little, she touched people a lot, lightly, innocently, but without desire. It was a part of communication to put your hand on someone’s arm, to give a brief hug, a butterfly kiss. It was the language of the group they traveled with and meant no more than “How are you today?”