The Last Good Night (10 page)

“The second time?” Carla asked.

I looked up, alarmed. “Never mind.”

Jay turned to Shana angrily. “I told you she didn't want us here. It's one thing to meet downtown in some lousy diner, but come up here and she don't know you. See?” He grabbed Shana's hand and took a step to the door.

“Wait.”

Shana turned her blue-lined eyes anxiously to me. I knew that look, had felt it wash across my own face, protective and fearful of the boy, the man, her man.

“I'm just surprised, that's all.” I looked at Jay. “Maybe if you had called first. That's what people do,” I said pointedly.

He shrugged.

“Well, come on, you're here now, so let's start off in my office.”

We walked in single file down the corridor of the newsroom. Shana kept her hands deep in her pockets as she went, taking in every detail of the computers, the writers bent over keyboards, the editors rushing by clutching videotape, the maps overhead, the clocks, the wires. Jay's step had an even more pronounced roll than usual, lifted by rebelliousness or boredom, I wasn't sure.

I shut the door to my office behind us. “Sit.” I motioned to the leather couch on the far wall and they perched on its edges while I hung up my coat and pushed the mail aside.

“What is it you'd like to see?” I asked.

Shana looked to Jay. I wanted to take her face in my hands, tell her to look at me, to speak for herself, but I didn't.

“Everything,” Shana said.

Jay shrugged. “Whatever.”

They came around to my side of the desk while I showed
them the NewsMaker program on my computer. The treacly smell of Shana's perfume and Jay's hair cream made me dizzy and I shut the program off. “Come, I'll take you to the studio.”

I ushered them back through the newsroom and down the barren corridor to the studio. At this hour, it was empty, dark, and cold.

“It looks so small,” Shana said as she stared at the news desk that filled the entire screen when she watched it at home. I glanced back at it. She was right, it did look small.

Jay didn't say a word, but he looked about intently, noting every cable, every camera. Even in the dark, I could see his chocolate eyes shining.

On our way back, I showed them the makeup room. Perry wasn't there yet and Shana sat on the Formica counter, dipping her fingertips into the pots of liquid and powder.

“How long does it take you to get all this stuff on?” she asked.

“About twenty minutes.”

“So you come right before the broadcast?”

“If I can. It depends if there's a late-breaking story.”

“Men wear this shit too?”

“They have to. The lights would bounce off your skin otherwise.”

Shana nodded.

“Actually, some of the men are far more vain than the women on TV. And you should see the politicians. Half of them come with their own hairdressers.”

“I believe that shit.”

“Well, I really do have to get to work,” I said at last. I walked them to the reception area. As I opened the glass door for them, Jay suddenly held out his hand solemnly and I shook it. “Thank you,” he said.

“You're welcome.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Shana said.

I watched as they stood side by side waiting for the elevator, their backs to me. Shana reached for Jay's hand, and I saw him shake it off, reject it. I hurt for her, for that hand hovering alone in midair, slowly returning to her side. But I understood, too, the rebuff, the need to be alone, to absorb without hindrance. To plan.

They stepped into the elevator without looking back.

 

I
RETURNED TO
my office and flipped the computer back on. A good deal more of the night's broadcast had been written and I rushed to study the copy and rewrite what I felt needed improvement. I was an hour behind schedule.

When I heard a knock on my door, I looked up, annoyed. “Yes?”

Quinn walked in. “Do you have a minute?”

Surprised, I nodded. He had never been in my office before—it had been up to me to go to his if we needed to talk for any reason—and he looked around curiously before sitting down opposite me.

“Who were those two people you were showing around?” he asked.

“Just some kids I know.”

“Did you get clearance? You've got to get clearance. I thought you knew that.”

“Security sent them up without asking me.”

He frowned. “I find that hard to imagine. That's never happened before.”

“Well, it happened this time. Take it up with them, not me.”

He leaned back and ran his hands through his hair, breathing once deeply. “Maybe I didn't make this clear at dinner, but I'm not the enemy, you know,” he said.

“I didn't know there was an enemy.”

“Look, Laura, we both know I wasn't the most enthusiastic supporter of your arrival. Why would I be? I was doing just fine by myself. Would you have wanted a co-anchor?”

I didn't answer, I didn't need to.

“But you're here now. The way I figure, if you look bad, I look bad.”

I put down my pen, listening.

“How old are you, Laura?” he asked.

“Thirty-eight.”

He nodded. “This business can devour you,” he said. “And if it doesn't get you, it gets everyone around you. Your kids, your marriage.” He wasn't looking at me anymore, he wasn't looking anywhere at all. “It's a hungry fucking beast, is what it is. You spend all this time getting here, and you think once you do you'll be able to make up for all the times you fucked up in the past, all the dinners you missed, all the school plays your kids were in and you didn't get to see, but you know what, Laura? You can't. By the time you get back to them, they're already someplace else. In the case of my beloved wife, in the arms of a two-bit diplomat from the British foreign office. But it's okay, because you want to hear another secret? It takes just as much time to stay on top. Ambition is just another bad habit that's impossible to break.”

“Without ambition there's no accomplishment. You make it sound like a crime to want to better yourself.”

“A crime? Hell, no.” He laughed. “It's the great American dream.” He picked a piece of lint off of his pin-striped pants and dropped it on my floor. “Well.” He sighed and rose slowly. “I'll see you in the studio.”

I watched as Quinn closed the door quietly behind him, and then I returned to my computer.

 

T
HE BROADCAST WENT
smoothly for the next few nights.

There was only one slipup on Wednesday when we started to speak at the same time, but we quickly recovered.

No one said anything afterwards, not Quinn, not Berkman.

The initial onslaught of media criticism died down and I tried to concentrate on the business of settling in to the job, to the increased numbers of looks on the street when I walked to lunch, to the extra berth people gave me in the hallway.

But all the while, I knew that I was waiting. I didn't know the shape the blow would take, I didn't know the form. I only knew that it would come.

I thought I had given it up years ago, the waiting that once burned through all of my energy, my very being, so that it was my only true activity—waiting. It had faded gradually, but I realized that it had never really dissipated at all, only burrowed deeper in, so that now, when it reappeared, it was as recognizable as an old wound that throbbed in bad weather.

I crossed myself three times when I shut Sophie's door at night, and kissed her three times on the forehead every morning.

I tried not to wake David when I woke breathless and shaken by nightmares.

I dug my nails remorselessly into my skin until it bled whenever I thought of the past, of what I had done.

Psychologists say the fear that something you love will be taken away from you stems from guilt.

And there is that. Oh God, there is that.

But who's to say it isn't also simply a matter of being realistic?

 

T
WO NIGHTS LATER,
in the middle of the broadcast, I saw the red light of the telephone beneath my desk blinking. I waited until the next commercial break, my pulse racing, my imagination
working behind the words I was uttering. The phone was used only for pressing communiqués from the studio chiefs and true emergencies.

I thought of Sophie, Sophie bruised, Sophie mangled, while I raced through my copy.

As soon as the lights over the camera signaled that we were off the air for ninety seconds, I picked up the receiver. “Yes?”

“Hello, Marta,” Jack said.

“How did you get my number here?”

“You'd be surprised at some of the things I learned how to do.” He paused. “There's something I forgot to ask you at lunch.”

My back stiffened. I could feel everyone in the studio watching me. “What?”

“Do you ever think about what happened?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” I whispered.

“I think about it all the time,” he said.

I gently hung up the telephone.

When Quinn threw me the lead-in for the kicker, that last amusing story of the evening designed to leave a pleasant taste in the viewer's mouth, I stepped on the tail end of his sentence by mistake.

We both stopped, recovered, started again.

And then, smiling, we said goodnight to each other, to America.

 

A
FTER THE BROADCAST,
I called David and told him there was a post-production meeting I had to go to.

“I won't be long,” I said, “but you might have to put Sophie to bed without me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I just can't get out of it. I'm sorry. Give her a kiss for me, okay? Give her three. Tell her I love her.”

“All right.”

I hung up the phone, stayed in my office another ten minutes, my head in my hands, and then I left.

The black town car was waiting for me outside the studio door.

I went up to the driver, Mike, and said hello.

“I think I'll walk tonight,” I told him.

He looked at me skeptically. “I have orders to take you home.”

“I'm not an invalid.”

“Sorry. You know what I mean. I can follow you if you want to get a little exercise. I do that for some of them.”

“That's okay, Mike. Really. You have a good night now.”

He stood a moment longer by the door and then finally got in and, with one last glance to be sure, drove away.

As soon as he was gone, I hurried around the corner, looked both ways to be sure that there was no one I knew in sight, and hailed a cab. As we headed downtown, I wrapped my hair in a large navy wool scarf and, despite the darkness, put on a pair of black sunglasses.

 

T
HE DESK CLERK
at the Hotel Angelica stared at me as I strode quickly through the lobby. “Can I help you?” he asked loudly when I reached the desk. He wanted to make me squirm. Maybe it would help relieve his boredom.

“What room is Jack Pierce staying in?” I asked in a low voice.

“Pierce? Let me look.” He took an inordinately long time with the guest book before he glanced back at me. “Six fifty-eight.”

The deep walnut elevator, a vestige of the hotel's grander days, creaked ominously as it jerked its way up to the sixth floor. I clutched the mottled railing tighter with each lurch.

I walked hurriedly down the thinly carpeted corridor until I found 658 and knocked cautiously on the door.

Jack opened it after the third knock, dressed in a clean white shirt and chinos, but with cloudy tired eyes. “Come in.” While I entered, he went to turn off the television that had been playing. We both watched the image fade slowly, shrinking to a luminous white circle in the encroaching blackness, smaller and smaller, until that too was gone. He looked back at me and smiled.

“You don't seem surprised to see me,” I said.

“I'm not. I knew you'd come.”

I nodded. I was standing between the neatly made-up bed and a table by the window. Looking out, I saw a mountain of garbage bags in the alleyway below. “Jack?”

“Yes?”

“I know that I owe you more than I could ever repay.”

He stood completely still, watching me.

“Is there anything? Anything I can do?” I asked.

He remained silent.

“I have a life, Jack,” I pleaded.

“I lost everything because of you,” he said bitterly.

My lungs folded up, I could hardly breathe. “I know.”

“Was it so easy for you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever once think about going back?”

“Of course I thought about it. I thought about it all the time.”

“But you didn't.”

“No,” I agreed painfully. The nylon of my stockings squeaked as I shifted my weight.

We were staring into each other's eyes now, listening to each other's inhalations, exhalations, to the mysterious rhythms of each other's bodies.

“Did you even think of me? Did you ever wonder what it was like for me?” he pressed on.

“Yes.”

“Don't,” he said. He pressed his curled forefinger to the side of my chin and turned me around to face him. “Don't look away.”

I looked at him, straight at him, I had no choice. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for everything.”

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Did you ever love me?”

“Oh, Jack.”

“Answer me.”

“Yes. You know I did.” Tears began to cluster in my eyes. “I loved you.”

He reached over and pulled me to him with one swift motion. Suddenly he was kissing the side of my cheek, my neck, his lips chapped and rapid and raw.

I shut my eyes and felt my neck bending to him, giving in to him, to the blackness that was encroaching.

“Marta,” he moaned.

I broke away. “No.” I looked down, pushing my hair from my face. “I can't do this.”