The Last Good Night (9 page)

I shrugged it off outside the door, the fame, and stepped back inside—as who?

 

W
HILE
D
AVID PAID
Dora and saw her to a taxi, I ran a hot bath, poured in half a bottle of French herbal bubble bath, and then felt instantly guilty. I still cannot help adding up how much everything cost, a remnant of being poor. Outside the door, I heard David returning to the bedroom, listening to the late news while he undressed, clicking it off when he got into bed. I lay back and let the steam fill my nostrils, my mouth. The only sound came from the cars outside. There had been so much solitude once, too much, all those frantic empty years when I thought I'd never be held, really held again. Now it was something I could find only behind locked doors. I lay still until I grew light-headed from the heat.

I climbed out of the bath, put on one of David's worn-out T-shirts, and got into bed, quickly falling into a heavy sleep.

But I woke at three in the morning in a cold sweat, breathless.

I sat up, pushed the damp hair from my face.

I lay back against the pillows, terrified to shut my eyes, terrified to sleep, to see them again, the gnats, the noose of hands, the eyes, the blood.

I got out of bed, made myself a cup of coffee, and watched the sun rise.

T
HERE ARE LULLS
that are so sweet, so simple, so calm, that for a little while you can almost convince yourself that this is how your life really is, this is how it will always be. Later, of course, you realize it was just a brief respite, a pocket.

After the broadcast on Friday night, David and I bundled up Sophie and then made three trips downstairs to the car. The amount of paraphernalia we suddenly needed for a weekend away was overwhelming: a stroller, a folding crib, a baby monitor, blankets, diapers, diaper wipes, formula, bottles, a bottle warmer, a first aid kit, toys, clothes. “So much for the days of traveling light,” David said grimly as the turquoise diaper bag slid from his shoulder. He wasn't really displeased, though, neither of us were. We had come to parenthood late enough to doubt that we would ever find ourselves there and now that we had, it was so new and wondrous, all this encumbrance, that even complaining about it gave us a sense of pride.

I strapped Sophie into her new car seat and settled in the back beside her, too uncertain of how she would react to sit up front with David. David never likes talking until he has maneu
vered out of the city, and we rode in silence through the Village streets crammed with taxis and people anxiously hurrying into those first promising hours of the weekend. I tucked a blanket about Sophie and stroked her fuzzy scalp. By the time we made it out of the Holland tunnel and were on the highway headed south through New Jersey, she had fallen into such a deep sleep that I shook her firmly to make sure she was okay. When do you get over the fear that your baby will somehow die, simply cease, the moment you turn your back, as if it is your attention alone keeping her alive? Sophie opened her eyes once, stared at me mutely, and then fell back into her motion-drugged slumber.

The dusky smell of the artificial heat filled the car. Outside, the night suddenly blackened and broadened, pierced only by the headlights of other cars. I looked up at David, his tall tousled head, his broad shoulders. He turned halfway and smiled back, and suddenly the world was only here, in this car, together, driving through the night, away. When we pulled into a rest stop forty minutes later, I climbed into the front seat beside him. I opened the package of gummy bears I had bought in the neon-lit gas station and put one in David's mouth as we got back on the highway. “Guess which flavor,” I said and watched him roll it about his tongue. It was something we always did in cars, eat gummy bears until our teeth grew matte with sugar. Last summer, I had left an open pack on the dashboard by mistake and they had melted into a glazed plastic river of yellows and greens and reds. I leaned forward now and peeled up remnants of it. “Red,” David said. “Was it red?”

I leaned across and kissed him.

Three hours later we followed the signs into Cape May and found the Victorian guest house we had reservations at on a street of other wedding cake houses a block from the Atlantic Ocean. I carried Sophie wrapped in blankets into the reception area crammed with floral rugs, wing chairs, and mahogany tables with yellowing doilies. The woman who ran the hotel stood
behind the desk in a period floor-length dress, white cap, and apron. “Breakfast is at eight,” she told us as David signed the register “Mr. and Mrs. David Novak.” “And there's sherry every afternoon at three.” Her husband, standing next to her in nylon jogging shorts, his ginger hair combed and sprayed to cover a bald spot, added, “There are bikes out back, and beach chairs if the weather holds.” We thanked them and walked carefully up a narrow staircase to our room, scented with cinnamon sachets, the four-poster bed covered in a floral duvet, lace and needlepoint pillows, the walls lined with silhouettes and cameos, a cluttered Victorian theme park. David opened the portable crib, and we both stared at its brilliant primary colors, suddenly so garish and synthetic. Sophie whimpered softly when we put her in it.

I bent over the crib to pick her back up.

“Don't,” David said. “Let her be. She'll put herself to sleep.”

I knew that he was right, but every cell in my body was pushing me to reach for her, hold her, comfort her.

“Come here,” he suggested, patting the bed.

I lay still beside him, staring up at the ceiling, my stomach in knots, while we waited for the crying to subside. When it finally did, we both exhaled. Slowly, David's fingers reached for mine, stopping, intermingling, squeezing, before moving up my arm, along the sides of my chest, my stomach. I rolled over to him and we pressed into each other, our outlines new and unfamiliar, the gift that travel brings, while Sophie slept a few feet away, the restriction of silence adding to our excitement. I traced the muscles of his arms, his butt, his long thighs as he kneeled between my legs.

I remember the exact instant I fell in love with David. One late blustery Saturday afternoon, three months after we started seeing each other, we were sitting at a wood-paneled bar in Soho, drinking port after having made the rounds of galleries. I had left my pocketbook, a Bottega Veneta woven pouch, on the
stool next to mine, and when we stood to leave, I noticed for the first time that it was gone. The owner, immediately disavowing any responsibility, told us there had been a rash of such thefts in all the bars and restaurants in the area.

David slapped some money on the bar and stormed out into the darkening streets.

“They probably just took your wallet and ditched the bag,” he told me. He hurried to the first garbage can he saw, a block away, and rifled through the papers and half-eaten food looking for it, and then the next, and the next, circling the block, moving on, a determined gleam in his eyes.

Long after I had given up hope and begged him to forget it, David kept on, his circle ever widening.

Finally, he took me home. As we sat on the front steps of my brownstone in the wet cold night, waiting for the locksmith, I looked over at him, his hands ragged and stained with dirt, his hair disheveled, and I realized that this, too, was love.

David opened his eyes now and watched his cock moving in and out of me and for a moment I watched him watching himself. He always likes to see himself come, where I want only forgetfulness, the flash of obliteration.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
we walked with the stroller down streets lined with ornately layered Victorian houses to the ocean. The seaside scent of taffy and popcorn and hot chocolate poured from the open stands next to the video arcade, mixing with the coconut suntan lotion of the diehards soaking up the season's last rays. We settled Sophie onto the sand and watched her roll into it, nervously at first, and then avidly. She had learned just a week ago to feed herself a cracker and before we could stop her, she grabbed a handful of sand and began to practice her new technique. We dug our bare toes into the cool and clammy mounds.
David let the sand drip slowly onto Sophie's belly and she laughed, her nose crinkling with delight.

“It's odd to think that she won't remember any of this,” I said.

“But it's in there somewhere,” David answered. “It will always be in there somewhere.”

Later that afternoon while Sophie napped upstairs we drank sherry out of tiny engraved glasses on the empty porch, sitting in wicker rocking chairs and playing backgammon, the red light of the baby monitor between us. The pastel bed-and-breakfast next door had a large gold cross on its roof, and a trio of nuns in heavy black habits emerged out of the screened door and settled into rocking chairs on the porch, their faces round and pink, their eyes hidden by sunglasses while they slept in the waning sun.

In the evening, the woman who owned the hotel baby-sat and David and I went to dinner at a restaurant on the docks famous for the freshness of its seafood. We sat outside eating clam chowder, lobster salad, fried clams, and onion rings, and drinking cold beers while we watched the fishermen unload their wares from the belly of a large boat before us.

“New York is one of the few cities I know of with such a dreadful waste of its waterways,” David said in between spoonfuls of the spicy chowder. “In my perfect city, there would be promenades along every river's edge, there would be…” I listened to him talking while I watched the gulls clustered on the boat's deck waiting for handouts. There's a dreaminess, a glow when David speaks about his work (the very term
urban planning
bespeaks a certain optimism, after all, as if cities can actually be managed, the future itself plotted out in grids), and it was this dreaminess that first intrigued me. A pragmatist by nature, grounded in facts, in the limitations of history, I've never been able to afford such dreaminess. For isn't it a luxury, as much as a character trait?

He looked up suddenly. “I'm boring you.”

“No,” I said, smiling, and we kissed, tasting the seafood in each other's mouths.

“Go on,” I urged, and he did, we did, continued playing the game of city planning together. It was something we used to do all the time, back when we were new. Walking through the snow in Washington Square Park, eating Chinese food on the floor, taking turns planning the streets and the avenues, the buildings and the parks, a perfect world of ours.

“In my perfect city,” I said, “we'd always have dinners alone like this.”

“Don't turn into some sappy romantic on me, okay?” David warned.

“It must be all those cinnamon sachets rotting my brain.”

“Maybe that's what happened to the Victorians.”

The waiter cleared the table and brought our dessert.

We took turns dipping our forks into the pecan pie. “Why don't you write another book?” I suggested as I put down my coffee.

“About what? How too many sweet odors lead to a plethora of wedding cake houses?”

“I'm serious.”

“Why? Because you'd feel better if I published again?”

“I didn't mean that.”

He stabbed a piece of crust and ate it. “Never mind.”

“I'm sorry.”

He chewed, swallowed, relented.

It was just a flash, though, the kind all couples have.

He put his arm around me as we walked back to the car and we were together again.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too. You can go sappy on me anytime.”

“I've had worse offers.”

When we left the following afternoon, the weather turned suddenly cold, and a hard freezing rain pounded against the windows and roof of the car. David drove slowly, carefully. It was as if nature had given us this weekend, and only this weekend, but it was over now.

It was dark when we saw the Manhattan skyline loom before us. I remember the first time I saw New York. I was nine years old, coming with Astrid from Germany by boat because she was too nervous to fly. After six days, we arrived in the harbor early on a shrouded morning, the city's outline a majestic gleaming paste-up in the distance.

New York spread before me then, a vortex of strange tempting smells and rapid indistinguishable words, but I was whisked away to Florida before I was allowed to enter it. Even then, it felt like banishment. The city loomed before me, a destination, a promise, a last resort, through all the difficult years that followed.

I didn't see it again until I was seventeen, riding in on a bus with everything I owned hurriedly crammed into one small floral canvas suitcase. The Manhattan skyline had risen up, a picture postcard of skyscrapers, steppes of glittering glass against the sky, but I was too frightened to admire it. I had come to lose myself there.

I dreaded entering it tonight, dreaded finding myself once more within its confines, with the studio, with Jack, with all the unlit corners, waiting for me.

David looked over at me and smiled. “Almost home,” he said, and gently squeezed my hand.

 

W
HEN WE GOT
upstairs, the red light of the answering machine was blinking. I didn't check it until David went to take a shower.

But there were no messages from Jack, no unexplained breaths, no hang-ups, nothing.

 

S
OMETIMES EVEN FORTY-EIGHT
hours away can give you enough distance to glance back at the workings of your days and believe that they are manageable, changeable, if only you put your mind to it. It is all a matter of control, of discipline.

When I headed back to work on Monday morning, I was determined not to let myself grow flustered, on-air or off.

I was half an hour earlier than usual, my head buried in briefing papers the studio had messengered over, when I walked through the glass door and was surprised by Shana and Jay waiting for me on the white couch in the reception area. Their hands were entwined and their faces were as grim as if they were in the waiting room of an oncologist. Shana looked down at Jay's hand in hers, tracing the crude homemade tattoo of a cross near his thumb while Jay stared blankly at Carla, answering the incessant phones on her desk while she unconsciously straightened the gold-framed picture of her nine-year-old son in his crisp navy parochial school uniform.

Carla looked up at me with relief. “They say they know you.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

They both stood up as I turned to them. Shana was wearing a short purple suede skirt and a black single-breasted blazer not unlike the one I had worn two nights before. Jay's light brown skin was freshly shaved and speckled with tiny red pricks rising across his prominent cheekbones. His long leather jacket was zipped up to the neck, and his short curly hair glistened with pomade. “What are you two doing here?” I asked.

“Jay wanted a tour,” Shana said.

“How did you get past security downstairs? No one is supposed to get up here without an appointment.”

“We told them you was expecting us.”

“And they didn't check?” I glanced back to Carla, who shook her head.

“Goddammit,” I muttered. “What's wrong with them? This is the second time something like this has happened.”