The Last Good Night (6 page)

He laughed. I had forgotten his laugh. “Sure. One step forward, two steps back. We lost the store, you know.”

“I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

He shrugged. “Back taxes.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Well, I obviously couldn't practice law,” he said dryly.

I winced. It had been his dream once. When we first met,
just after the Vietnam war and Watergate, Jack had a great burning optimism, an overriding belief in using the law to correct all the injustices that he took so personally. All that righteousness had given him a certain nobility that seemed so wounded now, by age, by events, by me.

“There was a small inheritance,” he said. “And I draw.”

“You draw?”

“For the paper. You know, editorial cartoons, caricatures of local events, stuff like that.”

“I didn't know you could draw.”

“Neither did I.” He paused, inclining his face to me. “Do you want to know how I discovered it, this wonderful talent of mine?”

“Sure.”

“Drawing you.”

I looked at him curiously.

“That first year away, when I began to realize you wouldn't come back, I started to draw you over and over again. So I wouldn't forget what you looked like.” He stopped and, looking down, he pulled out his scuffed leather wallet and opened it up. Slowly, carefully, he extricated a small pencil drawing, the paper thin and cracking, its creases worn almost into oblivion. He looked at it once and then handed it to me.

It was me, exactly me at sixteen, my long dark wild hair, my scared and insolent eyes. My throat caught. They were strangers both, the man across from me, the girl in the picture, strangers and yet not, and for a moment I was lost in the dark vertiginous tunnel between the past and present.

I looked slowly back to him. “Oh, Jack.”

With a single motion, he took the drawing back from me, tenderly folded it, and replaced it in his wallet.

“Do you remember the boat we had, how we used to get splinters every time we sat in it?” he asked.

I took another sip of wine. “We were kids,” I said. “Just kids.”

“No one ever truly changes. Not really.”

I said nothing.

Our food came and we began to eat. I looked up at Jack, at once so familiar and so new, twirling his angel hair pasta, taking the fork into his mouth, swallowing. “That's what you eat for lunch?” he asked.

I looked down at my plate of steamed baby vegetables, my standard fare, and wanted to disown them, their glazed primary colors, their preciousness.

Jack leaned across the table suddenly. “I couldn't believe you would just vanish like that,” he said in a pained voice. “We could have explained what happened. If you'd stayed.”

“I'm sorry.”

“So you said.”

“I mean it.”

He looked at me closely to gauge my expression.

“Jack, I know I can't make up for what I did. But if there's anything I can do for you, anything I can do to help you…”

“Help me?” he asked. “I don't need your help. Is that why you think I came here?”

“No,” I admitted.

For a few minutes we ate in silence and then we both stopped, stopped the pretense of it.

“Have you ever been to New York before?” I asked.

“No. I don't travel much. Funny, the way things turn out, isn't it?”

I pushed my plate away. “How long are you staying?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, as long as you're here, you might as well see some of the city.”

I began to list sights that Jack should visit, the Metropolitan Museum, the Staten Island Ferry, the World Trade Center, the
Forty-second Street Library with its majestic lions, whatever came most immediately to mind, grabbing at them quickly, hopefully, cruise ship chatter among strangers.

He was hardly listening. “I didn't come here to see the goddamned Staten Island Ferry,” he interrupted.

“Why did you come?”

“To see you,” he answered simply.

“Jack?”

“What?” His eyes were watery with sadness and defiance.

“What do you want?”

“I don't know.”

I looked away. I wanted to tell him that people didn't say that here, I wanted to tell him to play by the rules, rules that I had studied, assimilated, clung to. But I didn't.

I glanced at my watch. “I've got to get back to work.”

“Busy lady. Aren't you going to invite me to dinner, meet your husband, talk about old times?”

I stopped and looked at him. “Jack, I meant what I said. I'm sorry, more sorry than I could ever say for what happened. But it was all so long ago.”

“Not to me.”

When the waiter brought our check, I reached for it, but Jack quickly put his hand on mine, his fingers dry and warm. I withdrew first.

“I'll pay,” he said. “Don't worry. I may not be as rich as you, but I can afford it.”

I nodded and followed him out.

The sky had darkened while we were having lunch, and a coming storm had turned the only remaining light to mercury. We stood just outside the restaurant's doors, our hands thrust deep into our pockets. “Goodbye, Jack.”

“Just like that?”

“I don't know what else there can be.”

“I'm staying at the Hotel Angelica, on Twenty-seventh Street,” he said.

I nodded and, at the last moment, I leaned over quickly to kiss him on his hollow cheek.

He pulled me closer and I felt his moist breath as he whispered in my ear, “Don't forget, I know you better than anyone. I always will.”

The lover's lure, the lover's threat.

I
LAY IN
bed trying to shut out the early morning sounds, to shut out the day itself, postpone its arrival as long as possible. I closed my eyes, trying to go back to sleep, but Jack's face, his words, his hurt, swam before me. I jumped when the telephone rang. It was just seven o'clock. David, already showered, picked up the cordless phone on the other side of the bedroom, mumbled a few words, and then handed it to me. “It's for you. It's Jerry.”

“Why would he be calling so early?”

“Joan Lunden called in sick and they want you to sub?” David suggested, and left to finish dressing.

“What's up?” I asked as I took the receiver.

“I might ask you the same.”

“Jerry, it's too early for riddles. Shouldn't you be out jogging, or having a ten-dollar bagel in a midtown hotel?”

“Have you seen the
Post
?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“There's an item in it about you having lunch yesterday with a mystery man at some hole in the wall.”

“What?” I sat up.

“It doesn't actually come out and say anything, just goes into the wife-and-new-mother thing. Implications, you know.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“I hope so.”

“I can't believe you're taking this so seriously, Jerry.”

“Yeah, well let me tell you something, a lot of people who would never admit it take it seriously, too. If the supermarket tabloids pick up on this, they'll have a field day.”

“Jesus Christ, can't I even have lunch without explaining it?”

“No. Not anymore. Let's be honest, at least with each other, okay, kiddo? The network could have gone with a diva like Sawyer or maybe even Walters, for chrissakes, but they figure they've got their hands full with Hartley. Part of the charm of taking someone from local and making them a star is they're easier to control, at least at first. But people have to trust you, that's the whole point of a news anchor. You've got to project sobriety, responsibility, not secret rendezvous. Laura, this is the best chance you're likely to get. Don't blow it.”

“But it was nothing like that,” I protested.

“Listen, in your business illusion is reality. You should know that by now.”

“Don't worry.”

“You're paying me big bucks to worry. And right now, you're getting your money's worth. You've got to know the tabloids are all going to be scrounging around for dirt on you. It's how they make their money. Just stay clean, okay? Don't give those fuckers anything to work with.”

“All right,” I said and hung up the phone.

“What was that about?” David asked, dressed now in a charcoal suit.

“Nothing. Just some bullshit on Page Six.”

He went to the kitchen and picked up the top of the three newspapers we had delivered every morning. He opened the
Post
to the gossip page and read the item about me out loud while he walked back to the bedroom. He dropped the paper on the bed.

“Not bad. Upper-right-hand corner. Boldface.”

“Very funny.”

“All right, I'll bite. Who was your hot lunch date?”

“It was nothing, David. I had lunch with an interior decorator, and all they saw was me with an unidentified man.”

“Are we decorating something?”

“We've been talking about fixing up the bedroom since we moved in. It was going to be a surprise,” I said indignantly, convinced for a moment of my own righteous anger.

“Oh.” He went into the bathroom and shut the door. I heard him turn the water on and begin to brush his teeth.

I lay in bed picking at my fingernails for a couple of minutes and then I got up and opened the bathroom door without knocking.

“I'm sorry about the paper,” I said as I came up behind him.

“It's okay. I know it's not your fault. What's that expression, ‘No press is bad as long as they spell your name right'?” He reached for a towel and dried his face. “It's not your fault. It's just going to take some getting used to, that's all.”

David once told me that he didn't particularly like watching me on television, that there was something disturbing to him about the smoothed and sanded version of me, a small portion of the woman he knew sprayed and buffed and shrunken onto screens throughout the city, his and yet not his.

“It doesn't have anything to do with us,” I tried to reassure him now.

“Doesn't it?”

“Not if we don't let it.”

I wrapped my arms around him and kissed the back of his neck beneath the soft fringe of his hair, and then his ear, his throat.

“What's this?” he asked.

“Sshhh.” I moved my hand over his chest and into his pants, down through the thicket of hair until I felt his cock, already thickening.

He turned to face me. “I'll be late.”

“So?”

We collapsed back onto the bed and he moved into me, the sheets and the quilt sliding about beneath us.

I wanted to want only this, this man, my husband, his hips grinding against mine, going in and in.

I dug my fingers into his back and shut my eyes.

But what I found waiting in the darkness was Jack.

I wondered what it would be like to make love to him now, this new and whittled Jack, wondered if I sniffed him closely I would once more smell the salt, the sea, the heat itself on his skin.

David gave a single final lurch, reared, and then collapsed against me.

 

A
FTER HE LEFT,
I dressed quickly in jeans and a merino wool turtleneck and, as soon as Dora arrived, I tucked my hair under a baseball cap, put on sunglasses, and took a cab downtown to the Red Hat diner on the corner of Essex and Delancey on the Lower East Side where I met Shana Joseph every second Wednesday. She had been my little sister, as the jargon goes, for the past year and a half. In fact, she was seventeen, three inches taller than me, and weighed at least forty pounds more.

Shana wasn't there yet.

I sat down at one of the peeling linoleum tables in the back under a string of neon red hats and ordered a cup of coffee. The breakfast rush was over, and after the waiter brought me my coffee, he began mopping the stained gray floor. The smell of ammonia made my eyes water.

When I first volunteered years ago in Burlington for a similar
program, I thought they'd give me a sweet motherless nine-year-old whom I could make popcorn with on rainy afternoons and gossip with about boys. But most of the girls turned out to be teenagers, and their mothers weren't dead, just disinterested, or worse. Which was something I understood. Perhaps that's why I do it.

Or is it to prove something to myself, that anyone can change if given the right chance, that the possibility of redemption exists for all of us?

Anyway, it is part of my personal deal with God, my endless attempt to rebalance the scales I had tipped so long ago. If I try to be good now, really try to be good…

Shana came in fifteen minutes later. She walked slowly, as if to show how little she cared to be here, her wide thighs dimpled beneath kelly green leggings. As soon as she sat down, she called out her order of a bagel with extra jelly and two cups of hot chocolate. We both watched the waiter reluctantly put down his mop and go to the counter, where he opened twin foil packets of cocoa into mottled white mugs and poured hot water in.

Shana downed the first one in a single gulp and wiped the corners of her mouth before she looked across the table at me. Her long blond hair was frazzled and lifeless except for the oily black roots. Her pasty face was heavily rouged. Still, even with the sullen expression, there was a certain prettiness that another girl, an uptown girl, would have been able to do something with. I noticed she was wearing gold button earrings just like the ones I'd worn on the broadcast two nights ago. It was odd, really. She often managed to find a scarf like one she'd seen me wear, the fabric a little shinier, the colors too brightly acidic, but close. Or use a complicated word I'd used, an expression. An intonation, even. She had lately begun to hold her hands as I did, interlaced and still.

We always start this way, her surly, withdrawn, every look designed to remind me that this is just a condition of her proba
tion—going to school, meeting with me. But there are times when I break through and it feels like such a victory I keep coming back. Once, when I took her on a tour of the local studio, she was so shy and silent, so cowed, and her smile was so broad afterwards, that it made my heart ache. After that, she slowly began to release pellets of information about her life. Her mother had moved in with her boyfriend and his four kids a few blocks away, leaving Shana alone with her older brother, Cort. Cort was on crack again after four months in Rikers. There was no mention of a father. Shana never exhibited any surprise, any pain or anger, when she spoke of her family. She only shrugged as if to say, everyone has a story, after all.

She took a bite of her bagel and then looked under the table to see what I was wearing. She was disappointed it was jeans. Shana felt I didn't dress suitably for what she called my “station in life.” I didn't tell her it was because I was uncomfortable wearing expensive clothes to meet her.

She straightened up. “I watched you on TV,” she said.

“What'd you think?”

Shana can be a surprisingly accurate critic. She once told me I talked too quickly whenever I had a hard name to pronounce and when I rewatched the tapes, I realized she was right. She was good on clothes, too, though she wouldn't give up trying to get me to wear false eyelashes. “Jay thought you had to chill out a little, but I thought you were all right,” she said.

I frowned. Jay was Shana's new boyfriend. She and I had a deal that she wouldn't tell anyone who her “big sister” was, but she told him right away. She even brought him to our apartment on a Saturday afternoon without calling first. Jay stood in the center of the living room, scanning the decor like an auctioneer at a wake. “This real?” he asked, picking up a Cartier travel clock we had gotten as a wedding present. “What about this?” Since then, Jay has been something of a sore spot between us. Some
times when we meet for coffee, I spot him cruising by the window of the diner in his baggy jeans and massive hooded leather coat, back and forth, back and forth.

“You get a raise when you went on that new show?” Shana asked.

“Yes.”

She nodded. “That's good. How much they pay you for doing that shit?”

“More than they should and less than the other guy. So how's school going?” I asked. “Have you been getting to English class?” She had a special dispensation to meet me during gym on Wednesday mornings, but she didn't always make it to the English class afterwards. When I had time I walked her back to the large tan brick building filmed with soot and made sure she at least entered the front door.

She shrugged.

“You're making me look bad,” I said. “You want the principal to call me and make me sit in his crummy office?”

“That ever happen to you when you were a kid?”

“Sure.”

“No, I bet you were one of those fucking cheerleader types, straight A's, hall monitor, all that shit.”

I laughed. “Not quite.”

“Right,” she said sarcastically. “You were stealing hubcaps and getting tattoos.”

“Well, we can't all have your sterling résumé,” I countered, “but I had my fair share of trouble.”

She looked at me condescendingly. “Sure.”

I took a sip of my acrid coffee.

“Jay says you're just one of those do-gooders,” Shana continued. “He says all of you feel guilty about something. He says you think you can buy yourself a good night's sleep for the two dollars you spend on my goddamned hot chocolate.”

“Jay says, Jay says. Don't you have a mind of your own?” I teased.

Shana stared blankly at me, puzzled as always by my nudges toward feminism. “How's your little girl?” she asked finally.

The only time I had really gone up in her estimation was when I had a baby. I knew that she wanted one herself. It was one of the things I was trying to talk her out of.

“She's fine.”

“How much does she weigh?”

“Nineteen pounds.”

“Is she sitting up on her own?”

“She just started to.”

“I'm gonna come see her again soon.”

“I'd like that. Shana, you're not thinking about having a baby with Jay, are you?”

She shrugged.

“How are you going to go to college with a baby?” I asked.

“Girls like me don't go to college.”

“There's no such thing as ‘girls like me.' You can be whatever ‘kind of girl' you choose to be.” I realized that I sounded like some irritating self-help book, but I believed it nonetheless. I had to. Shana sighed theatrically.

Nevertheless, I pulled out a catalog from the State University in Syracuse from my bag. I brought her a different one every time we met, thick glossy catalogs of verdant quadrangles and fresh-faced kids, hoping that the pictures would prove to her that there were other worlds out there, other climates. “I can help with the applications,” I offered. “And I'd be happy to write you a recommendation.”

“They have a communications department?” she asked. “You know, like, TV?”

“Yes. Why? Is that what you're interested in?”

She shrugged noncommittally, and slid the catalog into her knapsack. “Jay wants me to ask you if he can meet Quinn Hartley,” she said as I motioned for the check.

“I'll think about it.”

“Is your husband jealous of him?”

I laughed. “Not that I know of.”

Shana didn't smile, she only nodded, taking in the information, collating it. She has a disconcerting habit of asking me the most personal of questions with no warning. Once, she asked me how many times a week David and I had sex. Another time she wanted to know precisely what I ate at every meal. Whatever I answered, she always took it in impassively and added it to whatever map she was trying to chart.