The Last Chance (12 page)

He was getting braver. For a moment in the hall he thought she had noticed him and his excitement almost exploded him into his fantasy. He could have come out of the utility closet and confronted her. She was alone, and so close. He had been following her all day, to the store, to the university, getting closer and more reckless in the noonday mob. It was getting harder for him to separate his fantasies of her from the real thing because his secret encounters with her were so like fantasies. He had even started dreaming about her at night, and these dreams mingled with his daytime imagining. Sometimes he worried that he was losing his mind. The important thing was control. There were too many things to worry about during the normal day, to keep control over, without trying to hold down these lapses too. A man had to have somewhere to blow off steam. You couldn’t hold everything down forever. There was an image to keep up—a job, a life, a family—and then there was his feeling about Rachel. It was all so carefully held in check, but once in a while something opened up a crack and he knew something very dangerous was going to come out. He didn’t want it to happen at home or at work; those areas had to be protected. It was why he had let himself follow his needs in this secret obsession with Rachel. He didn’t think he would ever hurt her. She was one of the only people in the world for whom he felt absolutely no hate. To her he was just another one among her large group of friends and acquaintances. He wondered why he didn’t resent more being so unimportant to her. He ought to hate her for it. Maybe one day he would find a way to test her.

The people on Margot King’s television show, like all the news shows lately, put on a great public display of their friendly relationships. They teased each other on the air, they laughed, they had fun. With the arrival of the good weather, there were base-ball games in the park against the staffs of other news shows. But after all of this was over, they were like the people who worked in any office anywhere in the city; some were friendly, most went their separate ways. The commuters dashed home, those who lived in the city had errands to do, friends to meet. Enough was enough, they all seemed to feel. Margot, in particular, had always been a loner. While reporting the news she had been totally isolated in her own world. If their appearance on television made all of them more visible than most people, they had to try harder to keep to themselves the part of their lives that was private. One of the women on the show was pregnant and the world saw it, when she was absent because she was having her baby the world knew it, and cards and little presents came flooding in. But- she never invited Margot to come home with her and see the new baby, and Margot didn’t expect her to. She mentioned on the air that the baby was a boy, but she didn’t say what his name was, nor did she tell anyone that the name she used professionally was not her married name. There had been a kidnap threat. It was obviously from a lunatic, but it had been handed over to the police and was not mentioned on the show. Being a public person had dangers.

Margot was used to receiving crank letters. She got fan letters too, even proposals of marriage from strangers. She wondered what kind of lonely people sat around writing to total strangers. The hate mail was the most perplexing. When the members of the show were photographed for a newspaper ad, people cut out the photograph and sent it to their favorite hates, writing on their faces. Margot got six pictures of herself with penises drawn on her body, one with a moustache, one with a big nose, and one with swastikas all around the margin. She was called bitch, cunt, whore, fascist, and communist. One letter said: “You believe in abortion, you will die.” She kept all the crank letters in a folder in her file cabinet, just in case someone killed her. It was probably paranoid, she was aware that people who wrote crank letters seldom went further; but by the same token, she knew that anonymous people who sprang to prominence by killing a celebrity had been known to write crank letters that were ignored. She had an unlisted number and never discussed her personal life on the show. She never answered letters unless they were from schoolchildren who seemed sweet and bright. Even then she kept her letters brief and typed them on office stationery. She felt no warmth toward her public. She had often heard celebrities gushing on talk shows about how much they loved their public, and she wondered if it were possibly true. You needed your public in order to remain popular and employed, but how could you love them when so many of them obviously hated you for no reason?

She thought of herself as a reporter, not a personality. She did her own hair, even though expenses for a hairdresser were tax-deductible. She had it professionally cut every three months. Her clothes were simple, and while she was careful not to wear the same thing twice during the same week, because that too brought angry letters, she also repeated her wardrobe in order not to antagonize the have-nots who wrote in asking for her old clothes, money, and her head on a platter. She thought how ironic it was that while she was not really famous she was visible enough so that some strangers felt she should also be accessible.

Her life centered around Kerry. Her schedule was erratic and difficult, but so was his. This worried her. She had to be on call for her job, but when he didn’t come home he was wherever he was by choice. During the past few weeks his hours had become more unpredictable. She always told him where she would be that day, and he told her he didn’t know where he would be. She had to accept that. He liked to wander around the city, see friends, do things on impulse. She was afraid to phone him at his apartment during the hours she thought he might be writing. But when he knew she had prepared dinner and was waiting for him, and he did not arrive, then she did call, and when he wasn’t in his apartment she felt a chill go through her. Whenever he showed up he always had the same innocent excuse, he had met a friend, he’d forgotten what time it was. He didn’t even bother to make up something melodramatic, so Margot had to accept what he said as truth. She was less important to him than his moment-to-moment life. She hated that, but she had to take it. She wished she had been the kind of person who had a life like his, who met friends in the street and wandered off with them for hours of talk, who didn’t plan, who forgot meals. The only thing Kerry planned for was their fall vacation in the Greek islands. That, at least, still existed, and she held on to it whenever she became nervous or frightened. She wished she could think of a way to make herself more important to him now.

She brought the folder of crank letters home. She showed them to him. She wasn’t sure what reaction she expected them to evoke, probably his wish to protect her. She was totally unprepared for the reaction they did evoke.

“These are fantastic!” Kerry said, delighted. He was sitting on the floor, her hate mail spread all around him. “These are the most incredible social document! The neurosis of our time … they’re a book. Did you ever think of making a book out of them, love?”

“You’re joking, I hope,” Margot said.

He looked at her with eyes that were clear, innocent, and enthusiastic. “No, I’m not kidding. It could have photographs of nice, ordinary people, mowing their lawns, having supper, walking their dogs, kids doing homework, housewives ironing, people in front of TV sets in sleazy hotel rooms and nice apartments with crocheted things on the arms of chairs—you know, those old things my grandmother used to have.”

“Antimacassars,” Margot said coldly. She did not like being put in the memory bank with his grandmother.

“Right. And then you’d have the letters. You’d have a little girl on the swing in the park, having a great time, and then you’d have the letter that says you’re a cunt and a whore.”

“Those were written to me,” Margot said. “
Me
! Don’t you realize that? They’re not for your entertainment. Some real people out there somewhere wrote those letters to
me
.”

“Then they belong to you,” Kerry said. “They’re not signed. You can publish them as a human document and make some money.”

She scrambled around the rug, furiously gathering up her hate mail. “I’d just get more.”

“Those people don’t read books,” Kerry said pleasantly.

“I’m glad I never wrote you any love letters,” Margot said. “You’d probably publish them if you thought they had any com mercial possibilities.”

He smiled. “You’re angry.”

“No, I’m hurt.”

“Why are you hurt?”

“I guess I thought you might be concerned.”

“I guess I’m different from you,” Kerry said.

“Not where it matters,” Margot said quickly.

She took the letters back to her office that evening and locked them away in her file. Had she made a fool of herself? No, Kerry thought she’d brought the letters home to amuse him. She hoped he didn’t know she had been trying to get him to pay more attention to her. He would accuse her of crying wolf. She knew you couldn’t make someone love you by making him sorry for you. When she’d been young and in love with married men, they had always said they were sorry for their wives, sorry for their children, but she had finally realized they were only saying that. Their wives and children were their protection from young girls like her who wanted to marry them. Their families did deserve sympathy, but those men were the last ones in the world to realize it. Pity was a burden. She would never again try to make Kerry feel sorry for her. She was glad she was old enough to know some tricks of her own—the most difficult of which, and the most successful, was self-control.

Ellen Rennie, for the first time in her life, was getting a lesson in self-control. Every day in her office she jumped whenever the phone rang, hoping it would be Kerry, and it never was. She got to work promptly at nine and stayed until six, hoping he would call, but finally she realized it was useless. He wouldn’t call, ever. She had been a moment of gratification to him, nothing more. Maybe even less—maybe he thought he’d done her a favor. That thought panicked her. He
had
done her a favor, that was what was so humiliating, but instead of being grateful that he had found her, as all her other men were, he probably felt like a boy scout who had helped an old lady to cross the street. She would never, never go to bed with a young boy again. Sex was too easy for them. She needed a man who would find her important, valuable. A man who was well married, who seldom cheated, who would find himself overwhelmed by passion and guilt, but not so overwhelmed that he wanted to stop. She wanted to be someone’s great love. She needed it. No matter how often Ellen had choreographed her great romance in her mind, it always happened as something fresh and new.

She looked around the company for the first time, seeing the editors and authors in a new light. There wasn’t much to her taste. The man she was looking for had to send a particular kind of tingle through her. He didn’t have to be of any particular type, but he had to have the chemistry. Ellen was so angry at Kerry that he no longer seemed sexy to her at all. She wanted someone totally different, starting with Considerate and Kind.

When she walked into Reuben Weinberg’s office Ellen knew he was the one. She wasn’t really sure whether it was the way his thick, dark hair curled over his neck or his wife’s picture on his desk in a Kulicke frame.
She
had put it there, not he, and it was an old picture. Ellen had once seen his wife. It had been a long time since this man had cared about looking at his wife’s picture on his desk, but he obviously felt he had to keep it there. Ellen looked at Reuben Weinberg with new interest. He was the executive editor and a vice-president. Some of the women in the office had crushes on him, but he had never been involved with any of them. He had power in the company, he was sweet, he was four years older than she was, and he was Jewish. He had just the right amount of guilt.

“I came to ask you,” Ellen said, “if that Russian of yours is taking his interpreter on tour with him.”

“He always takes her,” Reuben said. He smiled, because the interpreter was a pretty young thing and the Russian author spoke quite good English.

“Should I get them a suite or are we being proper?”

“I’m sure he’d be thrilled to have a suite. With or without her.”

“I’ll book them a suite,” Ellen said. “It makes him look successful for the interviewers. It doesn’t cost any more than two rooms.” She sat comfortably on the edge of his desk and gave him a long calm look. Slightly crooked teeth—that meant his parents couldn’t afford to have them fixed. A hint of acne scars on his cheeks, not enough to be unattractive, but it meant that he’d probably had an inferiority complex as a teen-ager. Pimples, no money, and bookish, just when he had been at his horniest. Married young, probably for sex. Just at the age now when he realized all he’d missed. Nice body, what she could see of it. Not too tan—that meant he wasn’t a tennis or a golf freak. A man shouldn’t have too many outside interests, they siphoned off his interest in cheating. He blushed slightly under her gaze. She looked into his eyes and smiled, and then she looked at his mouth. When she knew she had made him uncomfortable enough she eased off his desk and walked casually to the door. When she got back to her office her phone rang.

“Maybe you should get two rooms,” Reuben said. “Alexi’s married.”

“Who isn’t?” Ellen said.

“Of course, his wife’s in Maine and speaks no English.”

“She sounds perfect,” Ellen said.

“You’re frisky today.”

“No more than usual.”

“I had a lunch date canceled on me,” Reuben said. “If you want I’ll buy you a sandwich.”

“Terrific.” She replaced the receiver gently and ran her hands over her breasts and down her slim waist. She would go slowly with him. He was going to be easy. She felt better already. It was going to be a marvelous summer.

June 1975

For the first time in her life, this summer Nikki Gellhorn felt like one of her own daughters. They were setting off on their own adventures, she on hers. College over for the summer, Lynn and her boyfriend flew to London, the first leg of their European summer. Lynn had her knapsack, her passport, her traveler’s checks, her map of the London subway system, her map of the French wine country, her list of youth hostels, her birth-control pills, her blue jeans, her paperbacks, and (under protest) was wearing her silver Medic Alert bracelet that said she was allergic to penicillin. She and her boyfriend had not even bothered to buy wedding rings in the five-and-ten, a suggestion Nikki had tentatively offered, which was met with hoots of laughter.