The Last Chance (18 page)

Robert played the radio all the way into New York, and neither of them talked. What I really want to do when I get home, Nikki thought, is wash my hair and get into bed and watch television. I’ve been with so many people this weekend it’ll be a relief to be alone. She supposed Robert would be secretly glad to get rid of her too.

He pulled up in front of her building, but left the motor running. “Got everything?”

“Don’t you have to come up and pee or anything?”

“Nope.”

“Thanks for the ride, then. I’ll call you tomorrow, or you call me.”

“You know I will.”

“Bye.” She took her suitcase and let herself into the building with her key. She took her mail from her mailbox in the tiny vestibule, and when she looked back through the iron-filigreed glass door Robert was gone. Bastard, she thought.

Nikki opened the door to her apartment, surprised she’d forgotten to double-lock it, and dropped the mail in horror. It slid across the bare floor. The place had been ransacked, torn apart, systematically robbed. She felt as if she were choking. She ran around looking at the carnage: her fur rug was gone, her color television, her cassette player, her clock radio, her blender, her toaster, her
bedspread
, goddamn them, her jewelry of course, and almost all her clothes. They had left the air conditioner because it was too heavy. That meant it was probably not a them but a he. Her burglar had come back.

Oh, how she would like to get her hands around his throat! She would kick him in the balls, she would kill him! She felt personally molested, this was
her
burglar, he had defiled
her
private life. It took her a few minutes for the realization to sink in that it was he who could have killed her.

How had he gotten in anyway? The lock on the front door was intact. The balcony, of course. The window was still open. He had come in the window, which she never locked—not that a window lock would have stopped him—and undisturbed during the long weekend exodus from this fancy neighborhood, had taken all her pawnable things out the front door. That was why it wasn’t double-locked; she knew she’d double-locked it when she left.

Robert should have been here, the bastard. Then she thought about it and realized that Robert would have been so self-righteous, so smug, so hateful, insinuating that she had gotten what she deserved for leaving the nice safe country and him, that it would have been intolerable. She would never tell Robert. She wouldn’t even collect the insurance—because if she did, the rates would go up, and he would find out about the robbery. She would just have to save and scrounge until she had replaced everything. Maybe she should call the cops. They might never find her things, but at least she could try. She felt so lost; there were a million things to do and she didn’t want to do any of them, she just wanted to get into bed, pull the covers over her head, and cry. Why did he have to spoil her perfect apartment? She never let anyone in here unless it was a special friend. Who was this stranger who thought he owned her, who could just break in and help himself to anything he wanted? Now she would have to get an iron gate, bars, to put over her window, and then the burglars would be locked out, but she would also be locked in. She might as well be in jail. Trapped. A baby in a playpen.

She called the police, and then she called the locksmith. She wasn’t afraid the burglar would come back tonight. He knew she was home, that everyone who had gone away for the weekend was home or on the way. Besides, there wasn’t anything else for him to take except her air conditioner and the furniture, and he would have to wait for another long weekend for those. She wasn’t going anywhere. Not tonight, and not next weekend. She had rights too in this world. Nikki sat in her desecrated apartment and waited for the men in the uniforms and the man with the prison bars. She wanted a drink, but when she looked in the cabinet she saw with absolutely no surprise that the burglar had taken all her liquor too.

Jill Rennie had never quite gotten over her surprise that there were no bars on the windows at the mental hospital in the country and no locks on the bedroom doors. She had expected lunatics and attendants, straitjackets, all the stuff she’d seen in horror movies. But it was really a pleasant place. The kids were weird, but so were some of the “normal” kids at school. The patients here were separated according to age, sex, and degree of violence. Since she was neither violent nor suicidal she was allowed to spend her days as she pleased, provided she attended her daily session with the shrink, and let them feed her. She got regular meals, in small portions, and also a sort of milkshake they concocted with special things in it to build her up. One of the patients told her that the milkshake alone contained a thousand calories, and if you didn’t drink it you went back on I.V. There had been another anorexic girl here last spring, and that’s what had happened to her. The patient who told her this was a fourteen-year-old former junkie, and Jill didn’t know whether to believe her or not about the calories. She damn well believed her about the I.V.

There were arts and crafts, painting, other hobbies, and sports. Jill had expected basket weaving, but there was none of that. She kept a notebook about the other patients because she thought it might make a good book some day. Most of them were upper middle class or rich. You had to be, at these prices. There were also a lot of legends, which she wrote down, about former patients. There was the girl who had swallowed ten pieces of silverware from the dining room in order to kill herself, then eaten a washcloth, and finally, when she had been very good and was declared cured, had gone to greet her happy parents in the hall, walked right past them, and jumped out the window. That window now had chicken wire in the glass.

The day after Jill arrived, an aide named Dorothy Gellhorn came to see her. Dorothy had looked her up because Jill’s mother and Dorothy’s mother—Nikki Gellhorn, an editor at a publishing company—were friends. Dorothy was nineteen and wanted to be a psychologist. Jill knew whenever Dorothy was trying to work on her, but she didn’t mind because Dorothy was such an amateur. They became rather friendly. Dorothy always had interesting stories. Jill’s favorite was the mystery murderer. The mystery murderer was a boy—or had been once—and he had killed both his parents. Since they were vastly rich and he was an only child, he had inherited their fortune, and instead of going to the state hospital for the criminally insane he was here, kept in seclusion, supported by his murdered parents’ estate. He was in his forties now, supposedly. Dorothy had never seen him. No one was allowed to see him but his keeper. Jill thought he might as well be dead. But maybe he thought he was better off than when he had been living with his parents. Who was she to put down someone else’s logic? She wondered if he’d planned it or if it had been done on the spur of the moment. Apparently he’d been fifteen at the time. The place where they kept him was way down at the other end of the campus, as Jill thought of it.

In return for her interesting stories Jill kept Dorothy up on what her shrink had said and what he had asked. Everyone here tried very hard to make Jill feel they really liked her and cared what happened to her, but Jill couldn’t help thinking they considered her an interesting and unusual case. Junkies and pillpoppers and suicides they got here by the dozen. Twelve-year-old girls who screwed around and shocked their mothers—so what? That sort of thing went on all the time in the slums and the parents didn’t go put their kids into a mental hospital. But rich people couldn’t stand having such a reflection on them living in their very own home. Some of the concerned parents didn’t even live in New York, a few didn’t even live in America. They traveled around all summer and figured their weirdo kid was out of their hair.

As for the other patients, Jill didn’t want to get too friendly with any of them. Her stay here was going to be so short that if she got to like someone she would miss her afterward. She liked Dorothy, but Dorothy was too old to be her friend on the outside. They had different interests. Dorothy liked men and sex, she had a boyfriend, she was planning her career. On her days off she went to parties with other aides and smoked pot. Jill had never even seen her in street clothes, just that uniform with
Miss Gellhorn
on the pocket. The patients were allowed to wear anything they wanted.

Jill’s clothes didn’t fit her any more, they were too tight. Her parents came to visit her and gave her new, prewashed jeans and some T-shirts. They also brought her some paperback books, even though there was a library here. Her parents tried to act like what their idea of perfect parents was, so the doctors wouldn’t think they were responsible for Jill’s bizarre behavior. They were so sweet to each other it turned Jill’s stomach. She was tired and relieved when they finally left. She went into the bathroom, made sure it was empty, and threw up. It made her feel much better. She was glad she could still do it. Wouldn’t do to lose her touch, when the doctors were giving her body back to her at the end of this month.

“Hello, Jill,” Jill said to her reflection in the mirror. It didn’t look like her and she had to keep reminding herself who it was. It looked like a puffy stranger. A pig with an apple in its mouth for them to carve up and eat. “Don’t worry, darling Jill,” Jill said to this poor, piggy thing, ninety-five pounds this morning before breakfast, “I’ll make you well again as soon as we get out of here.”

August 1975

Jill came home from the mental hospital on the last day of July. Her family was delighted at the apparent change in her, and promptly stopped noticing her. It was not that they didn’t care about her, but she seemed all right and they had their own problems. So as August went by none of them paid any attention to the “lunch dates” and “supper dates” with friends that kept her away from the apartment at mealtimes, or that she was losing weight, or noticed that on the few occasions when she shared a meal with the family she went promptly to her bathroom and threw up. She had her sixteenth birthday, and everyone assumed she had finally become interested in a social life. She replaced her new jeans and T-shirts with others in a much tinier size, and nobody even saw. All jeans looked alike.

Hank was worried about his business. The price of gas had gone up again, and summer motorists clogged the roads, but not in his big cars. It was impossible to switch franchises. He tried not to think of what might have been, but thinking about what would be was worse: bankruptcy. He had laid off employees, pared down his staff to the bone. There was ill will. Fear hung in his office like a poisonous vapor. He remained indecisive, helpless, afraid.

Stacey was relieved to be back from Grandma’s. Her yearly stay among the geriatric set took quite a toll of her patience. She was happy to be back in the city she loved, where she could wander where she pleased, spend hours in the public library and museums, hang around with her school friends (the ones who were too poor to go away for the summer). Even the August heat wave didn’t bother her very much. Inside most buildings it was cool.

Ellen’s problem was Reuben Weinberg. Her affair with him was more a pleasure than a problem, because his wife was still away and Hank was so easy to fool. She and Reuben planned to go away together for a weekend at the end of August. He booked a room at a small old inn in Connecticut. He rented a car. Ellen told Hank that she was going to stay with Nikki in Wilton that weekend because Nikki’s husband had to be away on business and Nikki didn’t want to be alone.

“You know, we’ll do boring girl things,” Ellen told Hank. “Probably go antiquing. You can take care of the kids.”

“All right,” he said calmly. “Have a good time.”

Ellen also told Nikki, to back her alibi. “But I haven’t been to the country for a weekend since the robbery,” Nikki said. “If Hank calls he’ll get Robert, not me.”

“Hank never calls,” Ellen said.

“What if he asks?”

“You tell him we had fun. You certainly don’t know anything about cheating. If Hank asks, he doesn’t want to hear.”

“I think it depends on the husband,” Nikki said. “Mine thinks I’m here in New York having a big love affair. Which I’m not. Yours is just a different kind of person.”

“You never told Robert about the robbery,” Ellen said. “He never even suspected. When are you going to stop thinking your husband has X-ray eyes and jumps over buildings in a single bound?”

“I stopped thinking that quite a while ago,” Nikki said.

On the chosen weekend Ellen met Reuben at the garage. As soon as he drove out of the city limits and the ugly buildings were replaced with fresh, green, growing things, she felt as if all her problems had gone away. How wonderful to shed the past, to have another chance! She looked at Reuben, intent behind the wheel, but he noticed her watching him and turned to take her hand and smile at her.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” Ellen replied.

Did she really love him? More than the others? He made her feel like her own woman, not the harried martyr she considered herself at home. She loved him, but she was aware now, and had been for a while, that she had deliberately chosen him, just as she had deliberately chosen all her lovers except Kerry, her one mistake. All her married life she had been making up for her greater mistake, that of choosing Hank—or letting him choose her—by being extra careful. Her love life was her sustenance. Without it she would dry up and die, or go crazy. But now, at forty, was that enough? This nice man, who loved her, might become available, as the others had. If he did, what would she do? Would she get rid of him as she always had with all the others, or would she consider him seriously? She was forty now, in young middle age, and she wouldn’t be able to go on having affairs forever. How good it would be to settle down, to get rid of Hank, to have a new life, and to be faithful. How peaceful it would be, and yet fun, because Reuben was fun to be with. This weekend would be a test for them both. Ellen had never known a weekend that hadn’t made a man see his moment of truth.

“I hear that Mary Logan is fed up with her publisher,” Reuben said. “I’m having lunch with her agent next week and I’m going to see if I can sign her. Don’t say anything.”