The Last Good Night (4 page)

“Thanks.”

“But what happened at the end?”

I said nothing, just shrugged apologetically.

“I realize that you were used to happy-talk on the local news,” Berkman continued, “but we do not engage in banter on national broadcasts.”

Quinn stood with his rolled-up
Wall Street Journal
in his hands, banging it against his thigh.

I looked nervously back to Berkman, who had nothing more to say. He slowly uncrossed his arms and turned back in the direction of his office.

“Thanks for the flowers,” I called after him as he began to walk away.

Berkman swiveled, looked at me, nodded, and left.

“Flowers?” Quinn asked. “What's next? Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates?”

 

I
WENT BACK
to my office and shut the door.

I sat at my desk, resting my head in my hands, my eyes shut, feeling my skin peel off my body layer by layer, leaving a pulpy space behind. Only during the live broadcast did it seem to fit airtight.

I glanced at my watch.

David would be waiting for me at home, Sophie snuggled tightly in his arms. Sometimes he dances about the living room to Patsy Cline with her, Sophie smiling at the first notes of Patsy's smooth and mournful voice, turning to the speakers, anxious for more.

There had been offers of celebratory dinners from my agent, Jerry, from the network news director, from people who suddenly wanted to know me better, but I only wanted to go home.

 

T
HE AIR WAS
dense and moist as I left the building. I pulled up the collar of my coat. The streets were dark save for the pools of yellow light from the street lamps. I had gotten into the habit long ago of walking at least part of the way home alone, though David tried to talk me out of it, reminding me of the muggings and rapes I reported every night on the local news, about the dangers of the neighborhood, and the possibility of deranged fans. He even bought me an illegal Mace spray to carry in my pocket. Still, I continue, finding in the night streets the promise of anonymity that first brought me here. Even now, I told myself, I can change neighborhoods, change names, dye my hair, who would find me?

I turned the corner onto Eleventh Avenue, where a trio of men stood before the liquor store pooling money, and headed south, walking quickly, my arms wrapped about me while I
played it over and over in my mind—Quinn's lopsided toothless smile, Berkman's voice, “We do not engage in banter on a national broadcast”—dissecting it, putting the fragments back together one way, and then another.

And I thought of Sophie, of going home to Sophie, with her scent of cherry wood and cobwebs, and the way she fit into my chest like a long-lost puzzle piece.

Half a block away, I turned around suddenly, thinking I heard someone behind me. I fingered the tiny canister of Mace in my pocket. But there was only emptiness, silence. I continued walking.

I heard the voice again, just a mumble at first, the words indistinguishable.

And then I heard it clearly. “Marta.”

I kept on, my head down, my arms tight about my torso.

“Marta,” the man said louder.

I froze, the blood suddenly still in my veins as I turned around and saw him.

H
IS DARK BLOND
hair was pushed straight back and his face was whittled as if someone had taken a chisel and removed everything extraneous until all that was left was its purest geometry. A nearby street lamp cast conical shadows across it, striping it with light.

“Jack,” I said at last.

He reached to touch me, his fingertips grazing my cheeks, then pressing into my flesh as if to verify—
you are here
. “Marta.” His voice was anxious and defiant, scratched with longing and disbelief.

“My name is Laura,” I said quickly.

He looked blankly at me.

“Laura,” I repeated.

He nodded and continued to stand in silence, taking me in, as if looking for scraps whose shape and texture he could recognize, seize, and stand on as dry land.

I took a deep breath and was just about to speak when a young couple in matching down coats walked by and turned to do a double-take, seeking my face, embracing it.

He watched me take in the recognition, meet it, absorb it, let it go.

“Jack?” I said when they were out of earshot.

“Yes?”

I shook my head, looked down at the street and then slowly back to him as an iciness spread across my scalp, the back of my neck, my throat. “What are you doing here?” My own voice was dim and tinny in my ears.

“I saw your picture in the magazine.”

Our eyes met and held before slipping off to a more comfortable distance. Our breath curled white between us.

“It's been so long,” I said.

“Twenty-one years,” he answered. “Twenty-one and a half years, actually. Since that night.” There was a bitterness in his tone that made me wince.

Two men in suits and woolen overcoats were walking in our direction, their footsteps audible down the street.

Jack did not see them, did not care. “Marta?”

“Not here,” I whispered urgently.

“What?”

“I can't do this here,” I said, stealing another look at the approaching men, both from the publicity department at the network.

“But I came all this way to see you. You owe me that much, at least,” he insisted. “Don't you think?”

My body was completely still except for my fingertips, tapping nervously against my thigh again and again. “Yes,” I admitted.

He took a step closer. “Marta.”

“Please, Jack. Not here,” I repeated nervously.

“I can't believe I finally found you.”

The two network executives were just a few feet away now, regarding me curiously. I stared at Jack another moment, unable
to speak, and then I ran out into the street, waving my arm wildly at a passing cab. It screeched to a halt and I jumped in, slamming the door.

The taxi raced down the avenue until, when I looked back through the rear window, Jack was lost in the traffic, in the night itself.

 

I
SLIPPED MY
keys quietly into the top lock.

“Congratulations,” David called out. “You were great.”

I went into the living room, still wearing my coat, and found him on the couch with a spiral sketchpad balanced on his knees, a rapidograph in hand. It's a nervous habit of his, this continual drawing of lines, of buildings, of rough city overviews. I find them on napkins, envelopes, sometimes even on toilet paper. Tonight, there was an unopened bottle of champagne on the coffee table in front of him and he was smiling broadly. “Look,” he said, holding up a stack of yellow telegrams. He began to read the names of the senders, all people we knew well enough to give our closely guarded home address.

I nodded and tried to appear pleased.

“You look wiped out,” David said. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.”

“Just fine? That's it? You're jaded already? How was the dapper Mr. Hartley? Does he spit when he talks? Did you play footsie under the news desk? Should I be jealous? What did everyone say afterwards?”

“I bantered.”

“What?”

“I bantered. You know, unscripted talk that has the distinct ring of mindless chatter.”

“You mean like our dinner conversations?” He smiled, lean
ing forward. “Laura, don't you think you're being a little hard on yourself?”

I shrugged. “David, did I have a bead of sweat on my lip?”

Before he could answer, Sophie began to whimper. “You relax, I'll do it,” he said, pushing his papers aside.

“No, it's all right. I'll go,” I interrupted hastily, glad for the excuse to get away.

When I reached down into the wicker bassinet, Sophie stopped whimpering and grinned up, her toothless mouth a single gummy squiggle, her fists banging into the mattress as if her body could not hold all of her delight at seeing me. Her back, as I lifted her, was damp with sweat.

I held her against my chest tighter than usual, bending down to sniff her scalp, and in the rolls behind her neck, in the three creases of her thighs, trying to memorize the woodsy odor, imprint it on my lungs. Finally I rested her back in my arms and watched as she clasped the bottle greedily.

Perhaps I had always known Jack would find me.

Years ago, when I first left, I was waiting for him, waiting with every corner I turned, every bus I boarded. And then when he didn't find me (was it possible that he never even looked, that none of them had?), I began slowly to relax, unknotting one muscle at a time, stretching out—but warily, always warily. It is not always so simple to tell when something is over, after all—love, for instance, or grievance, is sometimes only hiding no matter how hard you try to convince yourself that it is gone.

My skin burned where his fingertips had pressed into me under the street lamp.

Sophie closed her mouth tightly, stubbornly refusing the last ounce of liquid. I looked down at her face, her eyes closed now, myriad expressions playing across it, flickering contortions of worry and of pleasure. Sometimes when I return to bed, I feel my own face unconsciously mimicking hers. I watched a few moments longer and then put her back in her bassinet, angling
her around the black-and-white geometric mobile and tucking the white blanket firmly about her.

And then I went out and drank champagne with David.

 

L
ATER
, I
LAY
beside him, trying to fit my body to his, my breath to his breath, so steady and so regular and so oblivious.

But each inhalation caught in my throat as my heart beat out its wild staccato adrenaline-laced rhythms.

I moved my hand gradually down my stomach and wriggled it between my legs, working slowly, and then faster.

In the last months of pregnancy, there was a frantic immediacy to my desire for sex that riled me, gnarled me. I would bring myself to orgasm three, four times a day. It only took a minute, sometimes less. Once or twice, I sat behind the desk in my office, the lights and the conversations of the newsroom moving busily just outside my door, as I worked my hand recklessly between my legs, biting my lip into a relieved silence. I told myself it was the pressure of the baby, so low and so heavy, and maybe it was that.

David murmured something deep inside his dreams. I stopped, lay completely still. He was grinding his teeth in his sleep, gnawing at tensions he rarely admits to in waking hours.

And then I started again.

I shut my eyes and felt my body seize up and then ease.

 

I
DREAMT THAT
night of the tropics, of being trapped in the thick wet Florida heat, always the same heat, the same dream, the gnats that filled my eyes, my mouth, my nostrils, my lungs, the noose of arms tightening and tightening about my throat as I tried desperately to breathe, to scream, to escape…

A large hand spread across my back.

Terrified, I slapped and clawed at it, my arms flailing.

“Laura. Laura, wake up.”

Gradually, I became aware of David kneeling beside me on the floor. “It's okay,” he said gently. “It was just a nightmare.”

I ran my hands over my neck as I struggled out of the darkest recesses.

“Sshhh. It's okay. Come back to bed now.”

I nodded, my heart still thrashing in my chest.

David helped me up and led me back to bed. He smoothed the damp hair from my forehead and picked up the sheets from where I had wrangled them to the ground.

“You're still shaking,” he said. “Come here.” He wrapped his arms about me. “What was it? The same one?”

“I don't remember,” I mumbled.

I don't know whether he believed me or not.

 

A
S SOON AS
I got to work the next day, I told my secretary, Carla, that if a man by the name of Jack Pierce called not to put him through. Guilt coiled through me as I spoke, as I pictured his face, as I remembered. But I was too scared to change my mind. Carla looked up curiously, waiting for an explanation, but I offered none. She is a consummately efficient woman who believes above all in playing by the rules. In her late forties, she favors well-made knee-length tweed skirts that are never quite in style and never quite out of style, sheer stockings and pumps. Her fair skin and cerulean eyes only sometimes exhibit surprise and betrayal that, in this business at least, it is the people who don't play by the rules who get ahead. “It's important,” I reiterated, and walked away.

I closed the door of my office and breathed in the thick sickroom odor of too many flowers, too much heat. On my desk,
there was a stack of messages congratulating me on my debut, including one from the network news head, Thomas Greenville, as well as various other memos that needed my attention. I read a few and then I walked to the window, looking down at the street below, looking for Jack.

He was not there.

I returned to my desk, sat down, and punched up the NewsMaker program, waiting impatiently for its primary colors to fill the computer screen, waiting for the stories, the hum of the news wires, the ticking of the second hands on all the newsroom's many clocks to do their work, draw me in, wall me in with the immediacy of their demands.

The lead story so far was the President's upcoming budget proposal, a dry report made only slightly more interesting by the scare tactics of threatened cuts in Medicare.

I tried to make sense of the figures, but the digits remained abstract, meaningless. The story was not yet tagged “L” or “Q” and I knew that I'd better have a good working comprehension of the sums, the implications. Quinn was sure to throw me unexpected questions to make me nervous as well as expand his own airtime. I was beginning to realize I couldn't trust him. I ran my forefinger along the screen, reciting the numbers out loud.

I got through the entire story once before looking over the monitor at the window again.

All that was visible was a tiny sliver of the empty street below and the beveled steel cutout of the city's skyline.

I crossed my legs and returned to the computer, still filled with details of the budget proposal.

As the hours passed and I did not see Jack on the street, did not hear from him, I began to think that I dreamt the incident last night, his face beneath the street lamp, his touch.

Or perhaps he had changed his mind, gone away, back to wherever he had come from, back to the past.

 

S
USAN
M
AHONEY BARGED
into my office without knocking. “I guess you've heard by now that the overnight ratings were the highest they've been in months. Seven point nine. That's only a quarter-point behind second place,” she said excitedly. She didn't mention that the reviews in the morning papers were only mixed. One critic quoted “an anonymous network source” who doubted I'd still be here in six months.

I looked up from my computer. “People just tuned in to see if I'd screw up,” I replied.

“I don't care why they tuned in. The trick is to make sure they keep tuning in. Look, half the magazines in the country have been calling, but I think we have to be careful about overexposure right now. The only one I agreed to was
Vanity Fair
. We can reevaluate later and maybe hit the women's magazines.”

“You agreed without asking me?”

She looked taken aback. “I'm sorry. I just assumed you'd say yes. Do you know how many television personalities would kill to have a feature in
Vanity Fair
?”

“I'm not a ‘personality,' I'm a news anchor.”

“Of course. Look, if you're worried about your image, they've assured me they have every intention of treating you seriously. We're not talking glamour girl shots here.”

“I need to think about it.”

Susan frowned. “You're not going to give me this ‘I don't owe the public anything' crap, are you?” she asked. “They're the ones that keep you in business. The fastest way to get in trouble is to forget that.”

“I'm not forgetting it.”

“So?” She leaned forward.

It was too late, I was beginning to see that now. Too late to stop it, control it. Any of it.

I looked away, said nothing.

She took my silence as a yes. “Talk about your baby a lot, okay?” Susan suggested brightly. “They love stuff like that. It'll humanize you. And babies always help ratings. Look at Katie Couric. Look at fucking Kathie Lee Gifford.”

“I can think of people I'd rather look at,” I groaned. And then, more seriously, “I'd like to leave my daughter out of this.”

“Just think about it.”

“All right. Listen,” I said as she began to turn the doorknob to leave, “would you mind arranging for a studio car for me tonight?”

“Of course not. Why?”

“No reason. I just had trouble getting a cab last night.”

“No problem. We can have one every night if you'd like.”

“Maybe that would be a good idea.”

She smiled and I saw in her face a flicker of both condescension and relief. I would be like all of them, then. Grabbing all the perks, suddenly convinced that we deserved them.