The Last Good Night (2 page)

“Don't you think we should talk to someone about this?” David asked nervously. He was a first-time father at forty-one, the baby melted all his usual wryness, it just dripped away.

“I put in a call to the secretary of health, but she hasn't gotten back to me yet.”

“And I thought you finally had some clout.”

“Seriously, David, she's fine. We can't call the doctor at every sputter.”

“Actually, we could.”

“Does the story of crying wolf ring any bells with you?”

“No. I don't believe I've heard of that one.” He smiled, but he still looked worried.

I smiled and ran my hand down his bare arm. When we first met, his parents had both recently died and, beneath his sheen of sophistication, there was a stunned, raw quality about him, as if nothing had quite scratched him before. The first night we slept together, he clutched me even in his sleep with such tenderness that I felt something deep within soften, shift. The largeness of his six-foot-three-inch body, the way it wrapped so thoroughly about mine, seemed to offer a refuge when I thought I had long ago given up the possibility of such a thing. It was so alien to me at first, and so welcome, this first real taste of security. It still is.

“Come on,” I said now, prodding him gently. “Let's go look at her.”

We tiptoed into the baby's room and stood together over the wicker bassinet. Sophie was snoring lightly, the fluffy white blanket up about her ears. “Our perfect little girl, our perfect little peanut,” David whispered.

She opened her eyes and stared up at us.

“Come here, precious,” David said as he reached his large hands into the bassinet and picked her up. “Mmmm.” He nuzzled her neck and then looked over her drowsy marshmallow body and smiled at me. “We did a good thing,” he said softly.

“We did.”

“Family hug,” he said, and he reached his free arm around me, the three of us clinging to each other in the center of the room.

 

T
HESE ARE THINGS
I never thought I'd have: a husband, a child. Family.

Sometimes it feels like luck, pure luck. Someone else's luck, a mistake to be corrected.

 

O
UR NEW NANNY,
Dora, arrived twenty minutes later, bundled in layers of wool, two scarves, and a baseball cap, her wire-framed glasses misted with condensation. She washed her hands and went in to look at Sophie, who was swaying contentedly in an electric swing and batting with athletic determination at the hanging plastic rings. “Hello, little girlie, hello, little baby,” Dora cooed in her nearly impenetrable St. Lucian accent. I often found myself nodding in polite agreement when I hadn't the vaguest idea of what she had actually said.

I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Then I lay on the bedroom floor, did seventy sit-ups, twenty lifts with each leg, and fifteen push-ups before showering. I've always been terrified there's a fat woman lurking within, just waiting to escape. Staring in the mirror, I began to apply makeup to my long, narrow face with extra care. I paused for a moment and appraised myself. My thick shoulder-length hair is cut into a bob by the most expensive stylist in New York. Its once unruly curls are chemically straightened so that they fall in a smooth, perfectly natural-looking sheet by someone else, who uses a secret formula from Italy that frizzy-haired women fly across the country for. A third person painstakingly paints it with four different shades of blond, completely erasing any evidence of its black beginnings. My brows are professionally shaped and lightened to match. I even have a new nose, thinner, straighter, shorter than the original, acquired twelve years
ago because I was told it would look better on camera. Is it any wonder that celebrities sometimes slip and refer to themselves in the third person? I leaned closer and patted cream underneath my eyes to cover the circles. Other on-air women I know go to the studio bare-faced, letting the makeup artist start fresh, but I never do.

“You look good,” David said as I came out of the bathroom.

“Really?”

“You always look good.”

“Oh.”

“That was meant to be a compliment.”

“Thanks.”

“Did they messenger over an outfit? Did they give you rules about jewelry?” he asked. “Did they remind you that an open neck means an open person?”

I frowned.

“Come on. You need me to keep you honest,” he teased.

David maintains a certain ruefulness when it comes to the background of my work, as if the politics and image-making are somehow unseemly, or worse, amusing. His own brush with notoriety left him glazed, intrigued no doubt, but winded and suspicious. Within six months his book was off the bestseller list, the magazines were hungry for the next new face, and David was back where he said he preferred it, in the quieter and more manageable world of ideas, teaching his classes, working late in his study, giving occasional quotes to the more academic journals. Still, there was a passion and a pleasure in his eyes during that singular period of glare that I sometimes miss, even if he doesn't. Or says he doesn't.

“And you need me to keep you from being too sanctimonious,” I replied.

He laughed. “I'll be rooting for you,” he said as he touched the small of my back, and I knew that he would be. It is one of the things we understand about each other, the love we both
have for what we do, the room it takes. He leaned over to kiss me. “Good luck.”

After he left, I stood in the foyer fingering the gold clasp of my pocketbook that rested on the otherwise empty marble table. I've always been wary of tabletops, fearful of what the artifacts that accumulate on their surfaces might betray. The choice of books, the odd necklace, the lipstick. The papers, the tissues, the detritus. When I was young, I thought: If a Martian landed here and saw this tabletop, what would he presume about my life? And I carefully chose and arranged the fragments accordingly. Though I no longer think of Martians, I am still careful.

I told David about it once. Before I even finished speaking, he came up with a theory that had something to do with my being an expatriate (I came from Germany when I was nine, settling first in Florida). “You didn't know anyone, you didn't speak the language, so surfaces took on a particular importance,” he suggested, pulling thoughtfully at a stray lock of hair behind his ear. David has theories about so many things—the layout of a perfect city, how a married couple should divide their finances, the proper way to peel a cucumber—each embraced with equal hope and fervor.

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully, and let it go.

I finished collecting my papers and then, slipping out of my heels, I tiptoed once more to Sophie's room, hiding behind the door. Dora was on the floor rattling toy keys at Sophie, who lay on her back with her feet and arms in the air, wriggling with delight.

I watched them a minute longer, and then, reluctantly, I left.

 

T
HE CAB CAREENED
down a block of crumbling tenements, soiled liquor stores, hunched-over men, puddles of garbage, turned the corner, and pulled up to a row of brick buildings on
the far west side of Manhattan. I paid the driver, gave him an autograph for his wife, and got out in front of the only clean façade. Looking down the broad street, with its Toyota and Chrysler showrooms like glass-plated slabs of suburbia somehow misplaced on the edges of the city, I saw a wedge of the Hudson River, gray and forlorn in the late autumn sun. Across the street, where one of the more rabid of the daytime talk shows is filmed, a few tourists walked by pulling cameras out of thick down jackets and taking pictures of the marquee. The buildings are lower here, squat outposts with vast satellite dishes on their roofs aimed diagonally up at the sky, while on the ground, limousines and town cars wait to whisk guests away from this otherwise forsaken part of the island.

I turned to the scrubbed creamy building with its famous matte gold logo sitting proudly above the entrance. My heart lurched a fraction of an inch. I wondered if it always would, if it does for all of them.

I walked into the main lobby. The receptionist, Donna, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a white appliquéd sweater, glanced up from behind the large round desk and smiled. I smiled back and we looked awkwardly at each other, uncertain of whether to go further, inquire about health, ask for baby pictures. I often see other people pause and rest their attachés on Donna's desk while they ask after her two-year-old daughter with cystic fibrosis, but she never mentions the child to me, just smiles shyly across the divide of those who go on-air and those who don't.

I stepped to the left where the entrance is watched over by two uniformed security guards standing beside the steel arch of a metal detector. I nodded to them both and walked slowly by the hip-height security scanner, which read the ID card inside my jacket and emitted four high-pitched beeps of acceptance.

Instead of turning left to the local studio as I had for the past three years, I went right and walked down a long corridor of
thinly painted white brick to the elevator that would take me to the studios of the
National Evening News
. My pulse raced and a film of sweat began to trickle down my back. I kept waiting for someone to tell me I had made a mistake, tell me to go back, who did I think I was kidding?

Finally, I reached the studio and pushed open the heavy glass door. I walked past the reception desk and paused at the edges of the main newsroom. The far wall was dominated by a large map of the world, the countries marked off in pastel colors, at once vast and manageable. Beneath clocks set to every time zone, forty people sat huddled over desks cluttered with video monitors, computers, and straggly copies of the day's newspapers, calling out to each other, glancing up at the four television sets overhead each tuned to one of the networks, rushing thin white and pink sheets of copy back and forth, eating candy bars, yelling into telephones. Up front at the assignment desk, three women sat monitoring the wire reports and the constant hum of their voices mixed with the churning of the computer printers and the newsroom banter. The sound wrapped around me, seeped into my skin, wriggled into my arteries, the insistent hum that obliterated everything around it, outside it, with its steady pulsing rhythm of
now, now, now
. It is what I love best.

Susan Mahoney, the assistant producer of the news, glanced up from her computer and smiled. “Well, well. Look who we have here.”

Others in the room turned. A slow ripple of applause waved through the air and then trickled out as people called out greetings, wishes of good luck, congratulations.

Susan stood up and began to wend through the narrow aisle between the desks, her legs, encased in black leggings and intricately stitched cowboy boots, moving with a sure athletic stride. Her long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she wore no makeup on her pretty dry-skinned face. With her Chapstick and her readiness with a curse and her delicate gold pinkie ring with
its aquamarine flower, she is a unique blend of the girlish and the macho that thrives in the hothouse of newsrooms, fueled by alcohol and sarcasm and working hours inhospitable to outside romance. “Welcome to hell,” she said, as she came up to me. “Are you ready?”

“I hope so.”

Susan stepped back and looked me up and down. “So do I.” She smiled. “You'll be great. Just don't let Quinn big-foot you. He's sure to try to step on every line.” Susan knows on-air talent well, how to treat us, coddle us, soothe us, and she knows too how to set us up against each other just enough to get the best results. We are children to her, talented and precocious children.

Just then, an assistant hurried over and announced to Susan, “The tape on the Métro bombing just came in.”

Susan nodded. “We'll talk later,” she said to me, and rushed away to one of the fourteen editing rooms that line the newsroom behind walls of tinted brown glass.

I walked around to a few of the other producers' and writers' desks, said hello, and then went into my new office to the left of the main room, shutting the door behind me. I flipped on the lights. With its pale pink walls, gray couch and carpet, it had the sterile cleanliness of a hotel suite. There were no loose papers yet, no photographs. The large Sony TV was dusted and blank, an imposing matte black. I slid out of my coat, put it on the mahogany stand, and walked over to my desk, where three bouquets of flowers were waiting. I quickly read the cards to see who they were from—the executive producer, Frank Berkman, the network news vice president, Ken Draper, and my agent, Jerry Gold. I slipped the white cards into my desk drawer and sat down.

The buzz outside was distant now, the voices neither male nor female, just a carpet of words. Occasionally, when something is happening, something big, involving wars, flames, hostages, guns,
ambulances, death counts, the intonations change and the heightened syllables spread through the room like a virus. But today it was just a steady even pulse. I glanced at the corner of my desk, where there was a basket stuffed with unopened fan mail forwarded from the local show. I had asked the station to stop messengering it to me at home after reading too many letters filled with unwarranted advice on child care, diatribes about my hair style, descriptions of problems in the writers' own lives, sad and intimate scrawls from people who thought they knew me. The worst were filled with rambling sexual fantasies, with dangerous offers, with a fierce if incomprehensible anger.

There was one man who wrote me every week for a year. He broke into my house and ate dinner in my kitchen, leaving dirty plates and a love letter behind. When the police finally caught him trying to sneak into the studio, he didn't understand what all the fuss was about. He was certain we belonged together. Couldn't they see that? Sean McGuirre, his name was. He only got six months.

I shifted my eyes, turned on my computer and brought up the station's NewsMaker program where the stories that were slated for the day were listed. Next to each story there was an initial to specify who would read it, “L” for me, “Q” for Quinn. I carefully counted the “L's” and then the “Q's,” making sure that they were balanced. Airtime equals power, and I learned early on that you won no points for sweetness or self-sacrifice. Quinn would always do the lead-ins, though. It was one of the many things he made sure of when he got the bad news of my arrival.