The Last Good Night (3 page)

I leaned forward and began to scan the stories themselves. The second item was about a terrorist bomb on the Paris Métro that had killed two young girls. I stopped, shuddered. Since having Sophie, any story about children being hurt makes my stomach collapse and a well form in my throat. More than once during my maternity leave, I found myself tearing up while watching the local news, which specializes in such catastrophes.

I told myself it was hormones, that it would stop, lessen, but it hasn't. I'm terrified that it will show on-air, that I'll drip, leak. I know that a single blunder, a drop of sweat, a blank stare, an emotional gaffe, will be instantly more memorable to viewers, and to the network, than an entire career of professionalism. On television, where two seconds can come to define a life, the only truly unpardonable sin is losing control.

I moved on to the item on negotiations in the Middle East. Though I miss reporting now that my job is behind a desk, the recitation of the action fascinates me in itself, the irrefutable fact of other lives, other calamities, other triumphs, other worlds.

And then there is the camera. The camera that grants life with its glass eye.

The very first time I sat before it and let it train its eye on me, I felt like an amorphous shadow finding its contours, its colors, its fit at last.

Though it's more fashionable now to deny that. To talk only of the responsibility, the importance of the news. And surely that is part of it.

Still, everything pales next to the time I spend before the camera, when every gesture, every breath, every nanosecond matters as I speak live to thousands and thousands of people—and they listen. Tonight, it would be millions.

I pulled my chair closer to the desk, my forefinger moving down the computer screen, my lips moving soundlessly.

But somewhere during the read-through—was it the third story, the fourth?—I realized that I'd been running through the print without seeing it, without connecting to it at all. What I was watching instead, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, far away, miniaturized, adrift in space, was Sophie, curled up soft and fleshy, wriggling exactly as she had when I left.

I wondered if she was sleeping, one dimpled hand pressed to her perfect mouth, her tiny fingers bent, or whether she was beginning to stir, to cry.

No one told me how physical this love would be, like a craving.

I was startled out of my reverie by the ringing of the white phone on my desk. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

No one answered.

There was breathing, only breathing, a man's, a woman's, I couldn't tell.

“Hello?” I said again.

After a few more breaths, the other person hung up.

I put the receiver down. It was probably just someone who had forgotten that I had moved into this office.

I moved the cursor three pages back, and started again.

 

A
T FIVE O'CLOCK,
I left my office and headed for the makeup room down the hall. I settled into the thickly padded mustard vinyl chair and stared into the mirror. The makeup artist, Perry, looked up from her brushes and her pots. “Well, hey there.”

I smiled, and watched the smile form across my face in the mirror. “Hi. How are you?”

“Fine. Well not really fine, but you know. Okay. I finally broke up with my boyfriend, Billy. I forgot, you're new, you don't know about Billy, the alcoholic, can't commit, sometime Broadway stagehand. Anyway, it took me two years, but I finally ditched him. I'll tell you all about it later. More important, how are you?”

“All right. A little nervous, I guess.”

Perry stepped closer and tipped my face up to the fluorescent lights as she began to wipe off my old makeup. “Not bad. Not bad at all. Motherhood agrees with you. You wouldn't believe the undereye cream I usually have to use. I'm impressed.”

“You're easy.”

“I may be easy, but I'm honest.” Perry laughed. Twenty years
ago, she was a cheerleader in Nebraska, and though her waist has thickened an inch or two, she still has the pert-nosed clear-skinned good humor of one of the truly popular girls, just bad enough around the edges to make her interesting. I'm fascinated by her, by all of them, the girls things came so easily to, the girls who, even when they stumble, do it with an innate confidence that I can only imitate. “Pictures,” Perry demanded. “Let's see some pictures.”

I slipped a single photo out of my suit pocket. Sophie, just after a bath, swathed in a hooded towel, her skin dewy, translucent, her grinning face as fat and ruddy as a Brueghel.

“God, you're lucky,” Perry exclaimed.

“I know.”

I smiled and put the photo back in my pocket while Perry pushed aside the black quilted imitation Chanel bag on the Formica counter and reached for her instruments. She began to apply foundation to my face with a wedge-shaped white sponge. I closed my eyes, soothed by the strokes, by the thick creamy layers themselves, and listened to Perry's love problems.

She stopped talking when Quinn Hartley strode in. “Nice suit,” she said to him.

“Armani.” He glanced at himself in the mirror, straightened the lapels of his jacket, smoothed the temples of his black gray-streaked hair, and turned to me. “Just stick to the script tonight, all right? Let's not try any of this ad-lib stuff right off the bat.”

I nodded. I'd watched Quinn Hartley, and respected him, for years, first as a White House correspondent then as an anchor, impressed with his deep resonant voice and his debonair clothes, his disheveled hair and his ruthless questions. Known for his fiery attacks on the status quo in his younger days, he now projected a calm and erudition that fledgling anchors around the country imitated. Still, I'd heard rumors that he once punched a colleague in the face in an effort to get to the President first as he rushed to board the helicopter on the White House lawn, that
he had purposefully left the blood streak from a bullet graze on his forehead when he reported from Angola. In a business where a large ego is considered a necessity, his is legendary. We both knew he didn't want me here, sharing the show that had been his alone for the last six years. Everyone knew that.

Quinn sat down and waited for Perry to finish with me. “So,” he said, “today's the anniversary of the California earthquake. Last time I checked, they were still arguing about whether to show the famous ‘dead woman on the freeway' footage.”

“The one with the mutilated arm sticking out the window?” I asked. “I was in Providence when that happened. We didn't show it, but the rival station did. And let me tell you, they whupped us in the ratings.”

“That was local. You're in national now. Decisions have more far-reaching implications,” Quinn said. He turned to Perry. “What do you think of this tie? The colors looked brighter in the store. Is it too dull?”

Perry picked it up and fingered the cool heavy silk. “It's perfect.”

“Armani.”

 

W
ITH MY HAIR
and face in place, I went to say hello to the people in the control room. I walked up the back stairs by the side of the studio and entered the long narrow room, where two levels of desks and computers sat facing a wall of forty monitors. The engineers and assistant directors were just settling in for the newscast. Tony DeFranco, whose job was to slug in the by-lines beneath the faces on the news, was the first to look up. “Well, L.B., good to see you.” He wiped a sprinkling of fine white powder from his jelly donut off his hand and offered it to me. It was a good sign that I already had a tag, L.B.

“How's it going?” I learned from the very start, a number of
cities ago, that these men and women who others never saw could make me look good, or not. I needed all the help I could get.

“Just fine, ma'am.”

“Ma'am? When did I become a ma'am?”

“When you went from local to national.”

I smiled, shook a few more hands, and left.

When I got back to my office, about sixty percent of the newscast had been completed. I began to read the stories that were tagged for me out loud, playing with intonations, “The thirteen-year-old boy doesn't
consider
himself a hero. The thirteen-year-old boy doesn't consider himself a
hero
.”

Over the loudspeaker that reached every corner of the newsroom, I heard the announcement, “Five minutes.”

My foot began to jiggle rapidly up and down beneath my desk. I turned off the computer, went to the locked file cabinet, got out a pair of gold button earrings, put them on, took them off, put them back on, and left my office.

No one in the newsroom looked up, no one talked to me as I made my way to the studio. Everyone has their pre-show ritual, ridiculed but respected, and this is mine. I pumped my fists again and again until my knuckles ached.

All I could think of was this: Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up.

 

T
HE STUDIO WAS
dark save for the brilliant white lights trained on the small set itself, the desk with its built-in video monitors and two chairs anchored in the harsh white light, a separate constellation. The air surrounding it was black and icy, the air conditioning cranked as high as it would go to counteract the heat under the lights. The cameramen wore sweaters and leather jackets. I stepped carefully over the thick black cables on the floor and said hello to the studio director, Al.

“Welcome to the nuthouse,” Al said.

“Thanks.”

I walked up to the set and settled into my chair, into the warmth of the lights. I glanced down at the three video screens inset in the desk, and then up at the TelePrompTers, at the cameras aimed at me, and at the clock, ticking away the seconds in red.

I touched the edges of the desk, the papers.

I plugged my tiny headphone into the desk and heard Susan Mahoney up in the control room say hello into the earpiece.

Fifty-four seconds before we were to go on-air for the six-thirty broadcast, Quinn hurried in and sat down beside me. It's a game to him, how close he can cut it, how fine, how dangerous. “Do us all a favor and don't screw up,” he said.

I looked over at him and decided to take it as a joke. “I'll try.”

Quinn nodded as he leaned back in his chair and began to whistle “Hard Day's Night.” His ritual.

I checked myself one last time in the small compact I stashed behind the desk while Al rushed up and put the last of the fresh pages of copy in front of us.

I heard Susan whisper in our ears, “I have a good feeling about this.” And then, “Twenty seconds…fifteen seconds…ten seconds…and go.”

I could feel the blood rush to my face and suddenly everything was gone, everything but this. I looked directly into the camera and smiled as I heard Quinn say, “Good evening. Tonight I'd like to welcome Laura Barrett to the
National Evening News
….”

 

T
HREE MINUTES INTO
the broadcast, while film of the Paris Métro played across the screens, Susan spoke into my ear from the control room. “You're doing great.”

I smiled. Despite all the odds, I am one of those who flourish
before a live camera. I can feel its magnetic particles shimmering in my pulse, my heart, my brain. I've known better reporters, better
news
people, who are not so lucky, who become dull and flat and thickened in the camera's presence. There are many honest people who appear shady and untrustworthy, while credibility, the ultimate coin of a news broadcast, emanates from others with little effort. Luck, again.

When the tape ended, I leaned forward and read the story of a San Diego high school hero who rescued his teacher from drowning on a class trip with more authority than I ever could have alone in my office, without so many eyes on me, without the thrilling risk.

“How come the heroes are always honor students?” Quinn asked no one in particular while a commercial played. “Even the psychopaths always turn out to be honor students. ‘He was such a nice guy, until he opened fire in the mall that day.'” He stood up to stretch, cracked his knuckles, and turned to me, his eyes piercing. “You have a drop of sweat on your upper lip. It's been there for the last four minutes. I tried to motion to you.”

I didn't have time to check in my compact before Al stepped up and said, “Fifteen seconds to us, two shot, then Laura to camera four.”

Distracted, I read the next story too quickly, skipping a line and tripping over the name of the secretary of defense. In the end, we had twenty long seconds to fill because of my mistake. There was no choice but to banter.

“And we're off,” Al finally announced.

Quinn leaned back and smiled out into the dark studio. It was an odd smile, rising only on the left, baring no teeth.

 

A
FTER THE BROADCAST,
Frank Berkman, the executive producer, came out of his office for a brief postmortem. Berkman, who
came armed with a string of Emmys and a reputation for journalistic innovation, was brought in ten months ago from a rival network to help the show rise out of third place. I was his idea. Everyone quieted at his approach. He is an achingly thin man with thin dry lips and thin hair and thin gray skin, as if the incessant rhythm of the newsroom had eaten through his flesh. Even his sentences are parsed, thin, minimal. Unlike many in the business, he keeps his personal life out of the office and out of the press, which only adds to the rumors and the mystery about him. He is loyal, untrustworthy, brilliant, or merely lucky, depending on whom you believe. The only hard facts that had become known in the newsroom so far were that he always walked to work no matter how bad the weather, he ate lunch at his desk as often as possible, he never returned phone calls, and he had a predilection for Savile Row suits.

He leaned against an empty desk and crossed his arms before his concave chest. “Not bad,” he said, looking at me.