Free The Last Good Night by Emily Listfield Page B

makeup tips from the stars?”
    â€œThey’re not Vogue . They don’t pay big bucks for my ideas on mascara,” Perry said. “Half the hair and makeup people at the studios are on the tabloid payrolls. They’re great sources. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we hear.”
    â€œYou’re kidding me.”
    Perry laughed. “I didn’t figure you to be the naïve type.” She glanced over me at her own reflection in the mirror, fingered a red strand of hair from her forehead, and then went back to applying my foundation.
    â€œWhat were they asking?”
    â€œWe didn’t get that far. They know I don’t dish.”
    I nodded.
    â€œSo how is Billy, anyway?”
    Perry laughed and rolled her eyes. “Italian men, they’re the best. Impossible, but the best. All that Mediterranean blood makes them wild in bed and all that Catholic guilt has them crawling for forgiveness.”
    I laughed. “You sound like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
    Quinn, walking by, peered in, frowned at the sound of our laughter, and walked away.
    Perry stuck her head outside the door to make sure he was gone, then turned back to me and held up her forefinger and thumb an inch apart. “This big,” she said.
    I laughed. “How do you know that? Don’t tell me you…?”
    â€œI told you, we hear everything,” she said. “Maybe that’s why his wife’s leaving him,” she added as she put the finishing touches on my face. “Poor Quinn. He’s losing the woman he wants, and getting the woman he doesn’t.”
    â€œWho’s that?”
    She looked at me and smiled. “You, of course.”
    Â 
    A N HOUR LATER, I sat in my studio chair beneath the hot lights while the clocks clicked by the final three minutes, now two, now one.
    Quinn came in with forty-three seconds to spare. He clipped on his mike, pulled down his jacket, whistled one refrain of the Beatles, and stared out into the camera.
    It was a slow news night. The lead story was about the upcoming anniversary of the U.N. After that, there were pieces on a train derailment in New Mexico and the last hurricane of the season threatening the coast of Texas.
    Quinn and I alternated stories, passing the ball back and forth, the perfect team, the perfect husband and wife, which was what we were subconsciously supposed to mimic.
    The lights pierced the skin of my face, heating it, sharpening it.
    There was no external time, there was no postcard, no coffin, there was only this.
    During the first commercial break, Quinn stood up, cracked all his knuckles, rolled his neck, and then sat back in his chair. He leaned over to write a note on my pad. We were both miked and it was the only way for us to communicate without everyone in the control room and the studio hearing what we said. I waited until he was done scribbling before I leaned down to read it.
    â€œDon’t trust Perry,” he had written.
    I took his pad, annoyed. “The politics here are worse than the Kremlin,” I wrote back.
    He shrugged. “Nice item in the Post, ” he said out loud.
    I heard snickering in the dark studio.
    Susan whispered in our ears, “Nine seconds to camera four.”
    We both smiled serenely as the red light signaled that we were back on the air.
    Â 
    W HEN I GOT back to my office, I unlocked the safe where I had crammed my pocketbook, and pulled the postcard out.
    I looked at the Breezeway Inn one last time.
    I looked at the carefully rendered coffin.
    And then I ripped it in half, and ripped it again.
    I ripped and ripped it until the pieces were no longer recognizable as anything but shreds of color, tatters of confetti, and then I ripped it more.
    But nothing could rip it from my brain.

F OUR
    A LEXANDRA H ARRISON, THE journalist from Vanity Fair, arrived at nine-thirty the next morning with a photographer in tow.
    She wore a short fitted black suit and flat