The Last Good Night Read Free Page B

things we understand about each other, the love we bothhave for what we do, the room it takes. He leaned over to kiss me. “Good luck.”
    After he left, I stood in the foyer fingering the gold clasp of my pocketbook that rested on the otherwise empty marble table. I’ve always been wary of tabletops, fearful of what the artifacts that accumulate on their surfaces might betray. The choice of books, the odd necklace, the lipstick. The papers, the tissues, the detritus. When I was young, I thought: If a Martian landed here and saw this tabletop, what would he presume about my life? And I carefully chose and arranged the fragments accordingly. Though I no longer think of Martians, I am still careful.
    I told David about it once. Before I even finished speaking, he came up with a theory that had something to do with my being an expatriate (I came from Germany when I was nine, settling first in Florida). “You didn’t know anyone, you didn’t speak the language, so surfaces took on a particular importance,” he suggested, pulling thoughtfully at a stray lock of hair behind his ear. David has theories about so many things—the layout of a perfect city, how a married couple should divide their finances, the proper way to peel a cucumber—each embraced with equal hope and fervor.
    â€œMaybe,” I said doubtfully, and let it go.
    I finished collecting my papers and then, slipping out of my heels, I tiptoed once more to Sophie’s room, hiding behind the door. Dora was on the floor rattling toy keys at Sophie, who lay on her back with her feet and arms in the air, wriggling with delight.
    I watched them a minute longer, and then, reluctantly, I left.
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    T HE CAB CAREENED down a block of crumbling tenements, soiled liquor stores, hunched-over men, puddles of garbage, turned the corner, and pulled up to a row of brick buildings onthe far west side of Manhattan. I paid the driver, gave him an autograph for his wife, and got out in front of the only clean façade. Looking down the broad street, with its Toyota and Chrysler showrooms like glass-plated slabs of suburbia somehow misplaced on the edges of the city, I saw a wedge of the Hudson River, gray and forlorn in the late autumn sun. Across the street, where one of the more rabid of the daytime talk shows is filmed, a few tourists walked by pulling cameras out of thick down jackets and taking pictures of the marquee. The buildings are lower here, squat outposts with vast satellite dishes on their roofs aimed diagonally up at the sky, while on the ground, limousines and town cars wait to whisk guests away from this otherwise forsaken part of the island.
    I turned to the scrubbed creamy building with its famous matte gold logo sitting proudly above the entrance. My heart lurched a fraction of an inch. I wondered if it always would, if it does for all of them.
    I walked into the main lobby. The receptionist, Donna, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a white appliquéd sweater, glanced up from behind the large round desk and smiled. I smiled back and we looked awkwardly at each other, uncertain of whether to go further, inquire about health, ask for baby pictures. I often see other people pause and rest their attachés on Donna’s desk while they ask after her two-year-old daughter with cystic fibrosis, but she never mentions the child to me, just smiles shyly across the divide of those who go on-air and those who don’t.
    I stepped to the left where the entrance is watched over by two uniformed security guards standing beside the steel arch of a metal detector. I nodded to them both and walked slowly by the hip-height security scanner, which read the ID card inside my jacket and emitted four high-pitched beeps of acceptance.
    Instead of turning left to the local studio as I had for the past three years, I went right and walked down a long corridor ofthinly painted white brick to the elevator that would take me to the studios of