Dick was asking Rudy to let him have the remote transmitter for a moment.

"Oh, no, God, no, not at all; I didn't mean that at all," I said. "Career considerations didn't come into it at all."

Letterman rubbed his jaw. He looked at the sports coordinator. He scratched his head. "Not a factor, then?"

"A decision without factors," I smiled. I leaned toward him conspiratorially. He leaned over his desk toward me. I looked furtively from side to side. In a stage whisper, I said "I did the Oreo commercials for fun."

I worked my eyebrows up and down.

Letterman's jaw dropped with glee.

"I did them for nothing," I said.

"Oh, now, come now, really,"Letterman said, laughing. He pretended to appeal to the studio audience: "Ladies and gentlemen...."

"In fact," I said, "I called them. I volunteered. Almost begged. You should have seen it. Not a pretty sight."

"What a kid," Paul Shaffer tossed in, pretending to wipe at an eye under his glasses. Letterman threw his index card at him, and the sound man, in his red sweater, hit another pane of glass with his hammer. Letterman seemed to be having the time of his life. He smiled; he said, "Ha ha"; his eyes came utterly alive; he looked like a very large toy. Everyone seemed to be having a ball. I touched my ear.

"This is inspired," I heard Dick telling Rudy.

We talked about the cookie commercials I'd appeared in.

"David, there were more people on that set taking care of the cookies than there were taking care of me." I laughed.

"Have to make those cookies look good, I'll bet," Letterman mused.

I heard my husband thanking Dick.

"God," I said. "We'd be rolling, and I'd be hitting my stride, you know, really starting to emote--and they'd all of a sudden yell, 'Cut!' They'd come rushing out onto the set: 'Ohmygod, the cookie doesn't look good.'" I looked at him. "David, the cookie must look good."

"Words, really, to live by, if we pause to reflect just a moment, ladies and gentlemen," Letterman said, looking out at the audience. I laughed. Everyone laughed. Letterman smiled warmly at me as we went to commercial. It was then that I felt sure in my heart I was safe. Because, when we cut to that commercial message, David Letterman was still the same way. The director, in his cardigan, sawed at his throat with a finger, a cleverly photographed bumper filled all Six-A's monitors, the band got funky under Shaffer's direction and the cameras' lights went dark. Letterman's shoulders sagged; he leaned tiredly across his obviously cheap desk and mopped at his forehead with a ratty-looking tissue from his yachting jacket's pocket. He smiled from the depths of himself and said it was really grotesquely nice having me on, that the audience was certainly getting the very most for its entertainment dollar tonight, that he hoped, for her sake, my daughter had even one half the stage presence I had, and that, if he'd known what a thoroughly engaging guest I'd be, he himself would have moved molehills to have me on long before this.

"He really said that," I told my husband later in the NBC car. "He said 'grotesquely nice,' 'entertainment dollar' and that I was an engaging guest. No one was listening."

Dick had gotten a driver and gone ahead to pick up Charmian and would meet us at The River Café, where the four of us try to go whenever Rudy and I are in town. I looked at our own driver, up ahead, through the panel; his hat was off, his hair close-clipped, his whole head still as a photo.

My husband, in the back seat with me, held my hand in his hands. His necktie and handkerchief were square and flush. I could almost smell his relief He had been terribly relieved when I saw him after my appearance. Letterman had explained to the audience that 'I needed to be on my way, and I'd been directed off stage to much applause as David introduced the self-proclaimed king of kitchen-gadget home sales, who wore an Elks pin.

"Of course he really said that," my husband said. "It's just the sort of thing he'd say."

"Exactly," I maintained, looking at what his hands held.

We were driven south.

"But that doesn't mean he's really that way," he said, looking at me very directly. Then he, too, looked at our hands. Our three rings were next to one another. I felt a love for him and moved closer to him on the soft leather seat, my face hot and sore. My empty ear did feel a bit violated. "Any more than you're really the way you seemed when we were handling him better than I've ever seen him handled." He looked at me admiringly. "You're a talented actress," he said. "You took direction. You kept your head and did us both credit and survived an appearance on an antishow." He smiled. "You did good work."

I moved away from my husband just enough to look at his very clean face. "I wasn't acting, with David Letterman," I told him. And I was sincere. "It was more you and Dick that I had to...handle." Rudy's smile remained. "He wasn't savage," I said. "He was fun, Rudy. I had fun."

He lit a long Gauloise, smiling. "Did it just for fun?" he asked wryly. He pretended almost to nudge my ribs. A high-rent district that I had remembered as a low-rent district went by on both sides of us.

And I'll say that I felt something dark in my heart when my husband almost nudged me there. I felt that it was a sorry business, indeed, when my own spouse couldn't tell I was being serious. And I told him so.

"I was just the way I am," I maintained.

We both listened as something sweetly baroque filtered through the limousine intercom's grille.

"It's like my birthday," I said, holding my second husband's hand in mine. "We agreed, on my birthday. We drank wine to it, Rudy. We held the facts out and looked, together. We agreed just last week about the way I am."

My husband disengaged his hand and felt at the panel's grille. The Hispanic driver's hatless head was cocked. A part of his neck was without pigment, I saw. The lighter area was circular; it spiraled into his dark hair and was lost to me.

"He leaned across right up to me, Rudy. I saw freckles. A little mole, near that label. I looked at him. I saw him."

"But we told you, Sue," my husband said, reaching into his jacket pocket. "What put him on television in 1989 for you to see is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen."

I looked at him. "You really think that's true."

His cigarette crackled. "Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him."

"You believe that," I said.

"I believe what I see," he said, putting his cigarette down to manipulate a bottle's cap. Its label read TAKE SEVERAL, OFTEN.

"That strikes me as really naïve."

Certain pills are literally bitter. When I'd finished my drink from the back seat's bar, I still tasted the Xanax on the back of my tongue. The adrenaline's ebb had left me very tired. We broke out of the tall buildings near the water. I watched the Manhattan Bridge pass. The late sun came into view; it hung to our right, red. We both looked at the water as we were driven by. The sheet of its surface was wound-colored under the March sunset.

I swallowed. "So you believe no one's really the way you see them?"

I got no response. "Dick doesn't really have a mouth, I noticed today. It's more like a gash in his head." I paused. "You needn't defer to him in our personal lives just because of your positions in business, Rudy." I smiled. "We're loaded, cookie."

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadows.

"If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me," I said. "And you."

Rudy admired the sunset. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he was looking only at the water. I saw him.

"Oh, my", is what David Letterman said when Reese the coordinator's distinguished but raccoon-ringed face had resolved out of a perfect ring of exploded dynamite. Months later, whenever I'd come through something by being in its center, surviving in the stillness created by great disturbance from which I, as cause, perfectly circled, was exempt, I'd be struck all over again by what a real and simply right thing it was for a person in such a place to say.

And I have remembered and worked hard to show that, if nothing else, I am a woman who speaks her mind. It is, yes, the way I'm forced to see myself. To live.

And so I did ask my husband, as we were driven in our complimentary limousine to join Dick and Charmian for drinks and dinner at NBC's expense, just what way he thought he and I really were, then.

Which turned out to be the mistake.