Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  No need to sketch Arthur K’s kitchen, David knows it intimately. No need to look at the clock on the wall; it is midnight. And there, sitting at the kitchen table, just as Arthur K has conjured her for him many times before, is a fifteen-year-old blond, blue-eyed girl wearing a pink angora sweater, a dark blue pleated skirt, a string of pearls, bobby sox and saddle shoes; this is fifty years ago, but Arthur K recalls everything in vivid Technicolor. The cup of dark brown chocolate pudding on the table. Topped with frothy white whipped cream and a red maraschino cherry. The glass of bone-white milk. Veronica’s ivory-white skin. The blue-white pearls around her neck.

  As David listens, his mind begins to wander.

  Another movie intrudes.

  The girl seems to appear out of a shimmering haze. Where a moment ago the path was empty, there is now a young girl on a bicycle, fifteen or sixteen years old, sweaty and slender, wearing green nylon running shorts and an orange cotton tank top, tendrils of long reddish-gold hair drifting across her freckled face …

  He yanks his attention back to the present, Arthur K’s movie that is already condensed here on the lined yellow pages in the notebook on his desk, recalled again as his patient recites it for perhaps the hundredth time. Well, not that often; the man has only been seeing him for the past six months. But certainly a dozen times, perhaps thirteen or fourteen times, and yet Arthur K seems unaware that he keeps remembering this same scene over and over again, perhaps fifty times, yes, a hundred times, bringing it back in identical detail each and every time. All you did was kiss your sister, David wants to scream. That isn’t such a terrible crime, it didn’t cause her death in an automobile!

  But, no, he says nothing of the sort. For now, his task is to encourage Arthur K to talk about his problems—among which is an inordinate fear of driving his own car—to listen in a nonjudgmental manner, to support and to reassure. Later, when Arthur K has fully accepted David’s seeming unresponsiveness as an essential part of the therapeutic “coalition,” so to speak, then perhaps David can begin to offer tentative interpretations of why Arthur K (or any of his patients for that matter) experiences such feelings or why he acts or reacts in such and such a manner on such and such an occasion.

  For now, Arthur K’s movie.

  Again.

  Arthur K sits at the table beside his sister. Veronica seems distracted as she pokes at the chocolate pudding with her spoon, red juice from the cherry staining the frothy whipped cream.

  David’s earlier notation on the lined yellow page reads

  Veronica the Virgin sips at her milk, white against her virginal white skin, blue-white pearls at her throat. Arthur K has taken a second chilled dark brown chocolate pudding from the refrigerator and he sits beside his sister now, both of them eating, he hungrily, she disinterestedly, almost listlessly. Their family is among the first on their block to own a “fridge” rather than an icebox, and his mother keeps it full of desserts like chocolate puddings, or rice pudding with raisins (over which they pour evaporated milk) or lemon meringue pies, or juicy apple tarts.

  “She was a terrible cook,” Arthur K says now, “but she gave great sweets.”

  David makes no comment.

  This is the first time he has heard this particular reference. On his pad he sketches a woman’s lips descending on what is unmistakably a penis.

  Beneath the drawing he scrawls in his tight, cramped hand:

  Arthur K’s voice is still narrating , the big hit movie of 1945. David’s attention is asked to focus yet again on a two-shot of Arthur K and Veronica in close-up. Arthur K is asking his sister what’s troubling her, why does she seem so gloomy tonight? “Gloomy” is Arthur K’s exact word; David has surely heard it four hundred and ten times by now. Why is Veronica so gloomy tonight? And Veronica shakes her head and replies, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just … I don’t know.”

  Arthur K covers her hand with his.

  “What is it, Sis?” he asks.

  “Howard told me I don’t know how to kiss!” she blurts, and suddenly she is sobbing.

  Arthur K puts his arm around her, comfortingly.

  She turns her head into his shoulder, sobbing.

  In the other movie that intrudes again, unbidden, the girl with red hair, golden hair, in the sun more red than gold, is sitting on the ground, both hands holding her ankle, bent from the waist, studying her left leg.

  “I hit the ground kind of funny,” she says, “I hope I didn’t hurt my leg.”

  David is all at once a costar in this bottom half of the double feature, entering the shot, kneeling beside the girl.

  Dappled sunlight turns her eyes to glinting emeralds. Strands of golden-red hair drift across her face like fine threads in a silken curtain. The side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposes a hint of white cotton panties beneath.

  “It’s beginning to swell,” she says.

  David looks at the penis he has drawn on the yellow lined pad, a woman’s lips parted above it.

  His mind snaps back to:

  Veronica is telling her brother for the eight hundred and thirty-second time about the young man who took her to the synagogue dance that night, the very same dance Arthur K had attended, but which he’d left early so he could “make out”—Arthur K’s language—with a brown-eyed, black-haired girl named Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac sedan. Shirley, coincidentally, is also Arthur K’s mother’s name. Should David’s notation be amended to read Tarts = Veronica + Mother + Shirley?

  “My father was a car salesman,” he says now. “He sold Pontiacs. I always drove new Pontiacs.”

  He never fails to interject these words at this point in the story, a voice-over narrator in a movie David knows by heart. Years later, Veronica will be killed driving a Chevy Camaro. Perhaps this is why Arthur K insistently mentions that he himself has always driven Pontiacs, would drive a Pontiac today, in fact, except that he is scared to death of getting behind the wheel of any car.

  In Arthur K’s movie, his sister is saying “Howard Kaplan told me …”

  No names, please, but the damage is already done. A thousand times over, in fact.

  “… I don’t know how to kiss!”

  And bursts into tears again.

  “Come on, Sis, stop it,” Arthur K says. “You don’t have to cry over somebody like Howard Kaplan.”

  There is a close shot of his face, solemn, sincere … pimply, too, as a matter of fact … his dark eyes intent behind the thick glasses he is wearing even as a youth.

  “What the hell does he know about kissing, anyway?” Arthur K says soothingly, his arm around his sister, patting her shoulder, the blue robe slightly open to show …

  Wait a minute, David thinks.

  … her luminous pearls.

  Wait a minute, what happened to the pink angora sweater and the pleated blue skirt? How’d she get in a blue robe all of a sudden? Did the costume designer …?

  “Jackass could use a few kissing lessons himself,” Arthur K says.

  “I wish somebody would give me lessons,” Veronica says, her eyes brimming with tears, which the camera catches rolling down her flushed cheeks in extreme close-up.

  The key words in the movie.

  I wish somebody would give me lessons.

  The essential words in Arthur K’s retelling of a steamy Bronx interlude fifty years ago, almost missed this time around but for the fact that David has memorized every frame, every line, every word, every inflection in this saga of adolescent lust and desire.

  I wish somebody would give me lessons.

  In a blue robe this time around.

  Slightly open, no less.

  To show luminous pearls.

  David is drawing a pair of breasts on a fresh page in his notebook when Arthur K suddenly stops his narrative.

  Perhaps he, too, has recognized that he’s changed his sister’s long-ago attire, has put her in a robe instead of a pink angora sweater and a pleated blue skirt. Perhaps he is realizing t
hat a slightly open robe lends sexual intensity to the kiss that inevitably follows in this well-remembered story, the kiss he teaches her at her request. Perhaps he is discovering that what they have here is a young girl ardently kissing her brother at midnight while wearing what now turns out to have been a robe, slightly open to show the luminous pearls around her neck. “Just part your lips, Veronica,” he has repeated in previous retellings of the tale, after which he proceeds innocently to teach her—like the dutiful older brother he is—how to kiss, a calling for which she demonstrates tremendous natural aptitude, by the way. At midnight. In a merely slightly open robe.

  But the film has stopped.

  The projectionist has gone home.

  “Isn’t it time?” Arthur K asks.

  “We have a few more minutes.”

  “Well,” Arthur K says and falls silent.

  He remains silent as the minutes tick away.

  And finally David says, “I think our time is up now.”

  They both rise simultaneously, David from his black leather chair behind the desk, Arthur K from the black leather sofa at right angles to it. Before he leaves the office, Arthur K hurls a glare of pure hatred at him.

  David leafs back through his lined yellow pages.

  Sure enough, the first time he ever heard of Veronica eating chocolate pudding, he drew a picture of a girl with long straight hair, wearing a shaggy sweater and a pleated skirt, pearls around her neck.

  Now she’s in an open robe that shows those luminous pearls.

  We’re making progress, he thinks, and is almost sorry he will be flying up to Martha’s Vineyard tonight, and will not see Arthur K again until after the long Fourth of July weekend. He glances again at the breasts he’d started to draw in his notebook. Two smallish globes, a dot in the center of each.

  All at once, he remembers the sharp outline of the girl’s nipples …

  Hey! My name is Kate.

  … Kate’s nipples against the thin sweaty fabric of the orange top.

  Remembers, too, the way he turned away.

  And closes the spiral notebook.

  Helen and the children are all wearing white T-shirts, the two girls in matching white cutoff shorts, Helen in a long wraparound skirt in a printed blue fabric. He spots them the instant he begins crossing the tarmac to the terminal building, such as it is. They all look even browner than they did last weekend, each the butternut color of the sandals they’re wearing, each grinning, their teeth seeming too glisteningly white against their faces.

  The kids have inherited Helen’s ash-blond hair, thank God, and not his “drab” brown, he guesses you might call it, although “mousy” brown seems to be the pejorative adjective of choice for women’s hair of that color. The girls’ hair is cut short and somewhat ragged for the summer months. Helen wears hers falling sleek and straight to the shoulders, bangs on her forehead ending just a touch above the eyebrows. She is an extravagantly beautiful woman, and he is stunned each time he discovers this anew. David is the only one in the family who doesn’t have blue eyes. His are brown to match the drab hair. Helen insists her eyes are gray, even though no one has gray eyes except in novels. David calls the kids the Blue-Eyed Monsters. They burst into giggles whenever he quavers the words and backs away from them in mock fright; it is easy to delight daughters of their age.

  Annie, the six-year-old, begins telling him at once and excitedly all about the shark they’d seen off Chilmark, and Jenny, her elder by three years, immediately puts her down, telling David it was only a sand shark and a small one at that.

  “Yeah, but it was a shark, anyway,” Annie says, “wasn’t it, Mommy?”

  “Oh, it most certainly was,” Helen says, and squeezes David’s hand.

  “I nicknamed him Jaws,” Annie says.

  “How original,” her sister says.

  Chattering, hopping from foot to foot in front of him, walking backward, squeezing in to hug him every now and then, they make their disorderly way toward where Helen has parked the station wagon. A sharp wind blows in suddenly off the field, puffing up under the wraparound skirt, opening it at the slit to reveal long slender legs splendidly tanned by the sun. So damn beautiful, David thinks, and she catches his glance, and seemingly his inner observation as well, for she smiles over the heads of the little girls and winks in wicked promise as she flattens the skirt with the palm of her left hand, her golden wedding band bright against her tan.

  The summertime rate for a direct flight from Newark to the airport near Edgartown is two-seventy-five round-trip, and the flight takes an hour and twelve minutes, to which he has to figure another hour to the airport from the city—all told a journey well worth it. He left his office at two-thirty this afternoon, and it is now only twenty past five. They have been renting here on the island for the past seven years now, from when Helen was pregnant with Annie. And even though the place is overrun with writers, movie stars, and politicians, among them—God help us—even a president of the United States, David still finds in their Menemsha cottage a haven truly distant from the stresses of the city and the incessant turmoil of his patients. Here among the pines and the inland marshes and the soaring skies and sheltering dunes, he feels honestly at peace with his family and himself.

  Lobster dinners are a tradition every Friday night. Then again, anything the Chapman family does more than once becomes an instant tradition with Annie. Sucking meat from a claw, she listens wide-eyed as David relates the tale of this afternoon’s bicycle theft in Central Park.

  “You should have minded your own business, Dad,” Jenny says. “What you did was extremely dangerous.”

  “It was,” Helen agrees.

  Each of them looks so gravely concerned that he feels like leaning across the table and kissing them both. On the other hand, Annie wants to hear more.

  “Did he kill her?” she asks.

  “No, honey. Just hit her a lot.”

  “Urgh,” Annie says, and pulls a face, and then asks, “Mommy, can you crack this for me, please?”

  Helen takes the claw Annie hands across the table.

  “Who was she, do you know?”

  “Kate something.”

  “There’s a girl named Kate in my class,” Annie says.

  “This isn’t the same Kate,” Jenny informs her.

  “Duhhhhh, no kidding?” Annie says, and twists her forefinger into her cheek, a repeated gesture David has never understood.

  “Kate what?” Helen asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, didn’t you ask?”

  “No.”

  “Suppose she needs you?”

  “For what, Mom?”

  “Suppose they catch the guy?”

  “They won’t,” David says.

  “They won’t,” the girls echo simultaneously.

  “Won’t you have to testify?”

  “I doubt they’ll pay much attention to a stolen bike.”

  “They better not steal my bike!” Annie says, and makes a threatening gesture with the lobster claw.

  “Still, Dad,” Jenny says, “you could have just called the cops or something. You didn’t have to rush in like a hero.”

  “I am a hero,” he says, and flexes his muscles like a weight lifter.

  “Some hero,” Helen says. “The guy got the bike, anyway.”

  “Ah yes, but I yelled at him,” David says. “At the top of my lungs.”

  “Daddy is a hero,” Annie says.

  “He is, darling,” Helen agrees. “But he should have been more careful.”

  “Suppose he had a gun or something?” Jenny asks, frowning now.

  “Daddy would’ve yanked it away from him.”

  “Pow!” David says, and swings his fist at an imaginary assailant.

  “One out of every two teenagers in New York has a gun,” Jenny says.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Helen asks. “Who wants more corn?”

  “Me.”

  “Me.”

  “I
n the Times. It’s a fact. Me, too.”

  “This one didn’t have a gun,” David says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I didn’t get shot, did I?”

  “Daddy didn’t get shot, did he?” Annie says, nodding, buttering her corn.

  “Or a knife,” Jenny persists. “He could’ve had a knife.”

  “Daddy would have grabbed it like Crocodile Dundee.”

  “Is she going to report it to the police?” Helen asks.

  “She said she would.”

  “She should.”

  “I told her.”

  “I’d be afraid,” Jenny says.

  “No, something like that should be reported.”

  “I’d be afraid,” Jenny says again.

  “Not me,” Annie says. “Could I have the salt, please? If I’d’ve been with Daddy, I’d’ve broken his head.”

  “You’d have broken my head?” David says in mock alarm.

  “Not yours,” Annie says, and begins giggling.

  “Who’s for dessert?” Helen asks, and begins clearing.

  “Me!” Annie says, raising her hand at once.

  “Me!” Jenny says, raising hers a beat later.

  “Let me help you, hon,” David says, pushing back his chair.

  “I’ve got it,” Helen says.

  A look passes between them.

  Private, almost secret.

  “Sit,” she says, and smiles and goes out into the kitchen.

  There is a spectacular sunset that night.

  Annie calls each night’s sunset a tradition.

  The house they are renting affords lavish views of both Menemsha Pond and the Bight. They stand on the deck overlooking both, the pond in the near distance, the bight and Vineyard Sound further to the northwest. The pond has already turned pink. The waters of the sound are still a fiery red. As they watch, the sky turns first a dusky purple and then a dark blue that becomes yet deeper and darker and eventually black and finally …

  “Boop!” Annie says.

  They put the children to bed and then sit on the screened porch, listening to the clatter of the summer insects and the murmur of the distant surf. Whispering in the stillness of the star-drenched night, they hold hands as they had when they were young lovers in Boston, discovering that city together, and themselves as well, discovering themselves through each other in that city. She was thinner when he’d met her, perhaps too thin, in fact, with incongruently abundant breasts—well, 34C, she told him, the first time he’d fumbled with her bra—and hips made for childbearing, she also told him. She is still slender, what he considers slender, although she constantly complains that she can stand to lose a few pounds. As they whisper in the hush and the dark, he keeps remembering the wind blowing her long skirt back over her lovely bare legs.