Story 14: Last Chance

It was the first time Natalie had been to the Country Club Plaza since the lights had been lit that Thanksgiving, and as she got out of the car, the effect of the more distant lights seeming to hang on air filled her with happiness. Surely good things could happen on such a magical night.

She had agreed to meet Chris at a French restaurant on a side street, a quiet place where they could have a conversation without shouting. He was sitting at a smallish booth when she walked in, and she settled in next to him. The waiter brought bread, and Natalie ordered a bottle of wine. When she reached for a piece of bread, he took her hand and held it. Her eyes began to well up.

“Jennifer and I are not together anymore,” he told her. “We broke up before we left Chicago in August. My problem is, I don’t know if we are either.”

“I think we’re hanging on for the sake of the past,” Natalie said.

“So over this Christmas vacation,” he said, “we need to make a future.”

The waiter came back, and Natalie ordered a lobster bisque. Chris ordered a salad.

“I’d agree to that,” Natalie said, “if there wasn’t so much from the past hanging over us.”

“Like the death of your uncle?” he asked.

“Like the death of my uncle,” she repeated. “And the fact that you met someone else.”

“That too,” he acknowledged.

“Let’s not worry about a future,” Natalie said. “Let’s concentrate on getting comfortable with each other again.”

This Christmas was the last they would celebrate as college students, which gave it a certain bittersweet quality, and the reminder of her uncle’s death only strengthened that feeling. Just after Tom had died, she had withdrawn from Chris to dwell on her grief, and now she could see how that had wounded him. But in the eighteen months since then, Chris had been the only comfort for the loss of her uncle. She moved closer to him, so that their shoulders touched when they reached for bread or picked up a fork. They sat there with their hands on each other’s thighs and kissed for the first time since last Christmas, during their junior year. When their food arrived, they ate mostly in silence, breaking it only to comment on the meal or offer each other a taste.

After dinner, they walked the Plaza until they came to the fountain outside Woolf Brothers. The store was dark inside and the fountain dry, but they sat down by it nevertheless, listening to the voices of holiday shoppers and the rush of cars down Ward Parkway. For Natalie, it recalled the sound of voices that she could hear sitting at night on the dock at Lake Tapawingo. In winter, of course, those voices moved inside, or perhaps, she thought, moved here. Kansas City had become a place of voices caught on the wind, heard for only a moment before she could decipher what they were saying. It was a place of words without context. She and Chris huddled there for almost an hour, comparing notes on school and talking about family and mutual friends. When they could stand it no longer, they walked down to Houlihan’s and warmed up at the bar by drinking Irish coffees.

The next day, Natalie found a poem in her mailbox, hand-written on thick paper. She walked down to the dock to read it and sat at the top of the ladder, cracking the lake’s semi-frozen surface with her heel.


“Hero-Worship”
by Amy Lowell

A face seen passing in a crowded street,
A voice heard singing music, large and free;
And from that moment life is changed, and we
Become of more heroic temper, meet
To freely ask and give, a man complete.
Radiant because of faith, we dare to be
What Nature meant us. Brave idolatry
Which can conceive a hero! No deceit,
No knowledge taught by unrelenting years,
Can quench this fierce, untamable desire.
We know that what we long for once achieved
Will cease to satisfy. Be still our fears;
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.

There was no name on it, but she recognized Chris’s handwriting. He had never given her a poem before. She read the poem again, noting how it fit their relationship: they had met more than two years ago, when he had seen her walking down the street around the lake and had stopped her. That he had found a poem so appropriate for them delighted her. Was he saying that she had made him a man complete? That he still believed in the two of them? And if he didn’t, how could she criticize him? She didn’t believe in a future for them, but she still dreamed of one every night before she fell asleep.

Natalie eye fell on these lines:

We know that what we long for once achieved
Will cease to satisfy.

She shivered and ran back to the house, where she rummaged through her father’s desk. Using his best pen, she calligraphed that line on the nicest piece of paper she could scrounge up. Underneath, she added, “But first we must achieve it.” And below that, she added these lines from “Sappho” by James Wright:

Love is a cliff,
a clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars,
smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea
till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more,
till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again.

It was an austere view of love, but one that had always seemed true to her. She wanted a love that would reshape her, but instead she had one that was always receding from her. She feared that their future might never arrive. If she wasn’t careful, Natalie thought, she might wait forever.

She punched holes in both pieces of paper and tied them with a scrap of ribbon, pulling the sides of the green bow out until they were exactly the same length. Then she replaced them in the original envelope. Late that night, when she was certain Chris’s entire family would be in bed, she left her room to deliver the original and the response back to him. As she tripped going down the dark stairs, she heard murmurs in her parents’ bedroom. Her father called after her, “Natalie?”

“Yes?”

“Is something the matter?”

“No, I’m just going for a walk.”

“At this time of night?”

“Just a short one, Dad. I’ll be right back.”

Chris’s house was completely dark. Natalie knew no one around the lake locked their doors much. She amused herself with the idea of sneaking in, creeping up the stairs to Chris’s room, and sliding into bed with him. She still wanted him, but it was hard to find privacy at Christmastime. Their sex life had always been freer in the summers. But she didn’t feel courageous enough to actually try to get that close to him that night, in the dark, without permission. She left the poems in his mailbox.

Chris stopped by the next day to thank her for the poems and invited her to take a walk around the lake. As they walked, she told him about her fantasy of the night before and how she’d lost her nerve.

“I want to show you something,” he said as they rounded the other side of the lake. Two streets up from the houses on the lake proper, a new house was being built on an oversized lot. It had all its walls, but past the holes where windows would go, construction workers moved, carrying tools and pieces of wood.

“See that path?” he asked her, indicating a driveway that dwindled to a single track. “The people in the houses on either side can’t see anyone walking there because of the garage and fence in the way. And the house itself is far away from all the other houses.”

Natalie thought her entire body might be blushing. “It is isolated,” she said softly.

“Let’s pretend to go out for a movie Christmas night.”

“And we’ll come here,” she responded.

“Yes,” he said, and kissed her.

**

At least they had this brief season of being together, Natalie thought on Christmas Day, when Chris and his parents walked in the door. All of them remarked on how long it had been since they had gathered in one room, and then they sat down to the serious business of opening presents, eating dessert (Christmas dinner would come later), and drinking holiday punch.

Natalie and Chris sat on the floor, between their two sets of parents, and smiled at each other underneath all that scrutiny. Their presents for each other were singular and simple: books. Natalie gave Chris the autobiography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the journalist who had exposed the economics of lynching, and he gave her clothbound copies of all four of Toni Morrison’s books.

“Thank you,” Natalie said. “I always need more books.”

“Always,” Chris said, laughing.

Natalie discovered that all four copies were signed. “Where did you get these?” she asked, impressed.

“In a used bookstore in Chicago,” he said. The comment hung in the air, pleasing Natalie because he had thought of her last summer, but reminding them of what had come between them.

Chris began reading the first paragraph of Tar Baby to her: “He believed he was safe…” His parents exchanged glances and sighed about the high school classes they would resume teaching in the new year. Natalie’s father mentioned how he was looking forward to his spring semester class at CU on American politics. “I’m going to recruit every last one of them to work on defeating Reagan in the 1984 election,” he declared, laughing. And her mother kept passing boxes of chocolates and plates of cookies to her left and her right.

After dinner, Natalie and Chris left, ostensibly to get his car and go to a movie, but instead they circled stealthily around her house, listening to the voices of their parents inside, and then walked around the lake to the house under construction. Once they started up the driveway, Natalie’s fears stopped her. The two of them stood furtively where the track began.

“Let’s make sure the coast is clear,” Chris whispered. They looked around and saw no one. The lit rooms of houses around them held little but Christmas trees and the remains of dinners. They crept across the lot and took off their shoes before entering the house. They had nothing with them except their coats, which they made into their bed, their hats and gloves for pillows, and their desire to forget they’d been apart or ever would be separated again. Once inside the inner rooms of the house, there was no light; all they could see was their eyes and the occasional flash of teeth.

“I want to make up for all the time we’ve spent apart this last year,” Chris told her, pulling her down onto her coat. “I loved every minute of the internship at the Chicago Tribune last summer, but I missed you. I wanted to be there, and I wanted to be here with you.” But Natalie wasn’t quite convinced yet.

“I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Are you going to wear a condom?”

But he shook his head. “I don’t need to,” he said. “I never slept with Jen. Just you for the past two years.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her.

For the first time this Christmas season, Natalie felt happy. “Why not?” she asked.

“I thought one long-distance relationship was enough. I didn’t want two,” he answered. “And I couldn’t imagine how I would tell you.”

He slid his hands under her clothes. “I’ll keep you warm,” he said, and covered them with his coat. It was so silent where they were, except for the occasional slam of a door and a burst of Christmas music into the night. They said very little to each other, and that only in whispers. The first time they had ever admitted loving each other had been over Christmas break of their sophomore year, two years ago. On Natalie’s last night of vacation, she had rushed the words out. Tonight, she was glad she’d said them, glad she hadn’t waited to be sure, because here they were two years later, and she felt that she would never be certain of him.

Afterward they lay together, shivering a little, for as long as they could stand the cold. Natalie felt oddly light. Then it came to her: she hadn’t thought about Tom all evening. In fact, she hadn’t thought about her uncle much since Chris had taken her out to dinner several nights ago. Maybe, she told herself, Tom’s loss had blended with Chris’s absence, so that when she was away from Chris, she thought she was mourning her uncle. Natalie wondered what she had been grieving these last few months.

As she tiptoed up the stairs that night, she saw that her parents had left their door ajar. They lay entwined, her father’s head on her mother’s shoulder, and Natalie felt desperately tender toward them but also jealous. She’d loved this entire day, spent with Chris and their families, but she wanted the two of them to be able to go about openly. She was tired of sneaking around. She and Chris had not been able to spend a night together since their sophomore year of college.

The next morning, Natalie stayed in bed and daydreamed. Chris had always been a good lover, but the night before she had felt closer to him than she ever had. For the two hours they had lain together on the plywood subfloor of that halfway-constructed house, she had felt like he was the only person in the world. One thing seemed clear: she had at least the possibility of a future with Chris.

She was wondering how soon they could find their way to that house again when the phone rang, and she picked it up. It was her best friend Debbie.

“Merry Christmas a day late!” Debbie said. “I was so busy yesterday, I forgot to call.”

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Natalie said.

“How’s it going?” Debbie asked, too casually. Natalie knew what she meant.

“We spent two hours last night in a new house that’s being built on the other side of the lake,” Natalie told her, laughing. “It was great.”

“I guess you’re getting along then,” Debbie said. “That’s good.”

Something in her tone resurrected a feeling in Natalie that she’d been pressing down all week, ever since their dinner. A feeling of doubt that what was happening with Chris was any more permanent that anything that had ever happened between them. A fear that her heart might be broken for a second time—her uncle’s death being the first. Natalie curled up under the covers and listened to Debbie.

Debbie was saying, “Is he still going out with the woman he met in Chicago?”

“No, he isn’t. And he said they never slept together.”

“Did you think he was telling the truth?”

“Yes,” Natalie said, realizing that she had never even questioned him. That made her feel happy again, briefly. She still had some faith in him left.

“Be careful, Natalie,” Debbie said. “Don’t rush into thinking everything’s OK. You have time to figure things out.”

“Do I?” Natalie challenged her. “How am I ever going to figure this out when he and I are apart so much?”

Debbie didn’t have an answer for that.

**

It was the last night of Christmas vacation. Natalie’s parents were out with friends, and she found herself waiting for Chris. What would they say to each other tonight? He came in with a cold breeze and a bag of cheese, fruit, and chocolate. “Leftovers,” he explained. He sat down and fed her some strawberries and Russell Stover chocolates. Then he turned serious.

“We need to make a plan,” he told her.

“A plan for what?”

“Us,” he said.

“How can I plan anything with you?” Natalie said. “I have no say in your decisions. You proved that by going to Chicago last summer.”

“You could,” he said. “If we planned our future together.”

Natalie thought of her conversation with Debbie. “Don’t rush,” Debbie had said. Now more than ever, it sounded like good advice.

“You think now is the right time?” she asked him.

“I do,” he said.

“I haven’t even started looking for a job, though I always assumed I’d stay in Boulder.”

He was silent for a minute. “I’ll apply for a job at the Denver Post, but obviously, the place where I have the best connection is at the Tribune.”

“I know,” she said, thinking she should just break up with him then. It would make things so much easier.

“Why am I always the one doing this, Natalie?” he asked.

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Keeping us together. You’re were reluctant to get involved when we met, and it seems like that’s never really changed.”

She stared at him. He was curled up in a corner of the couch, eating one chocolate after another.

“Because there’s so much against us,” she said.

“Yes, there is,” he agreed with her. “I’m asking you to disregard all that and try one more time. We’ll give it six months from graduation. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll break up.”

“I’m happy when I’m with you, but my doubts keep returning,” Natalie said. “I need time to think.”

“Will you promise to make a decision by this summer?” he asked her.

She nodded.

“All right, Natalie,” Chris said, very quietly. “Think all you want. Just be careful you don’t think yourself out of a relationship that might work if you gave it a chance.” He moved closer to her and kissed her. “I’ll call you this week,” he said, and left.

Natalie sat by herself for a long time, finishing off the fruit and chocolates. Then she went upstairs to pack.