Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Yes.”

  “Mediocre, right? Like the show. God knows why it’s a hit. Dress people up like cats, and you’ve got a hit, go figure, no matter how boring it is. Would you like to go to the crafts fair? When we’re finished here. Or do you have other plans?”

  “No,” he says. “I have no other plans. Who’s Ron?”

  “Ron? I don’t know. Who’s Ron?”

  “In the program, you thanked …”

  “Oh. That Ron.”

  “You thanked your sister …”

  “Bess, yes. Well, Elizabeth, actually.”

  “… and especially Ron …”

  “My God, did you memorize that dumb thing?”

  “… for their support and encouragement.”

  “Ron was someone I used to know.” Her eyes meet his. “Why?” she asks.

  “I just wondered. I’ve never understood why performers thank people in the program notes …”

  “It’s stupid, I know.”

  “… sometimes even dedicate their performances to this or that person …”

  “Absolutely idiotic. How can you dedicate a performance? Mom, Dad, I dedicate this next pas de deux to you. Unless my partner objects. In which case, I dedicate the entrechat.”

  “And yet …”

  “I know, I know, you surrender to the stupidity. Everyone else is thanking everyone in sight, you figure the people you know and love will be hurt or offended if you don’t thank them. They put that in the program when I rejoined the show in January. After the Miss Saigon tour ended in Detroit. If you liked me in a white fur hat, you should’ve seen me in a black wig and slanty eyes.”

  “Was Ron in Miss Saigon?”

  “Well, yes, actually. He played the Engineer.” Her eyes meet his again. The Green Lantern’s eyes. Flashing across the table at him like a laser beam. “Why?” she asks again.

  “Just wondered.”

  “Mm,” she says. Eyes refusing to let go of his. “I had a dream about you,” she says. “Last night, when I washed and ironed your handkerchief, isn’t that odd? The very night you saw the show. That’s very peculiar, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “I washed and ironed it when I got home. It must’ve been two in the morning by then, some of us had gone out for Chinese after the show, we’re always starving after the show. Anyway, I washed and ironed it last night because I planned to drop it off either today or on Tuesday. There’s a three o’clock matinee today, but I pulled something in my leg last night, so I’m off, aren’t we lucky? We’re dark on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have a very abnormal Broadway schedule. Anyway, it was on my mind, you see. That I hadn’t yet returned it to you. Which is probably why I dreamt about you last night.”

  “What’d you dream?”

  “I dreamt you and I were making love in front of my mother’s house in Westport.”

  David says nothing.

  “On the lawn,” she says.

  He still says nothing.

  “Naked,” she says. “Well, in the dream, I’m wearing a white blouse, but that’s all. You’re entirely nude. And we’re making passionate love. Which is odd, since I hardly know you.”

  David nods. He feels suddenly as if he is taking unfair advantage of her. He is a skilled analyst, a person trained to interpret dreams. He should not be listening to …

  “My mother comes out with a huge pail of cold water and throws it on us. The way they do with dogs who get stuck, you know? But we keep right on going. I guess we were enjoying it.”

  He nods again, says nothing.

  “So how do you interpret that?”

  “How do you interpret it?”

  “Oh-ho, here comes the shrink.”

  “Force of habit,” he says, and smiles unconvincingly.

  He is feeling suddenly very threatened.

  And guilty.

  He is feeling that he’d better get the hell out of here fast because his wife and two adorable daughters are too far away on Martha’s Vineyard and he has no right sitting here with this beautiful dancer, never mind the wedding band on his left hand, never mind the purity of eggs over easy on an English muffin, side of bangers, please, sitting here openly and innocently in the noonday sun for all the world to see, but with a faint tumescence in his pants nonetheless, hidden under the table, a dangerous and guilt-ridden hard-on covertly ripening in his pants because this girl, this woman, this delicate and desirable creature sitting opposite him has dreamt of them making love together, making passionate love, as she’d put it, in fact enjoying it so much that not even a huge pail of cold water could break them apart.

  Oh yes he knows, of course he knows that the forty-six-year-old man in her dream could easily stand for her father, and he knows yes of course that the intercourse on her mother’s lawn, naked on her mother’s lawn, could stand for a flaunting of whatever unresolved Electral feelings she may still nurture. And he knows, yes yes quit it already, that her mother throwing water on them, trying to stop them, most likely stands for society’s taboos against incest, he knows all of this, he realizes all this, but the developing hard-on in his pants keeps reminding him that the person she chose to be Daddy’s stand-in and stuntman is none other than David himself.

  Moreover, she has confessed it to him, she has revealed her unconscious choice … well, not confessed it, surely. She has only mentioned it to him, actually, rather matter-of-factly, as if she’d dreamt of the two of them merely having tea at the Plaza—but mentioned it nonetheless. Which means, the way he interprets it to his now insistent hard-on, that she’d wanted him to know, wanted him to understand that the person she’d chosen for her fantasy, albeit unconsciously, the person with whom she elected to fuck her brains out on her mother’s lawn was none other than David Chapman, M.D., P.C.

  “You come all over the blouse,” she says. “In the dream. Your semen stains my blouse. I guess that refers to the handkerchief, don’t you think? My getting blood on your handkerchief?”

  “I … would imagine,” he says.

  “In the dream, I have to wash my blouse to get the stain out. Your semen. In the dream, I’m standing topless, washing my blouse and then ironing it.”

  They are staring at each other across the table.

  “Do you really want to go to the crafts fair?” she asks.

  Her cat is named simply and sensibly Hannah.

  She is a great fat tubby thing that Eliot might have called a Gumbie Cat, her coat “of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.” She sidles up to Kate the moment she enters the apartment, rubbing against her, and then looking up at David as if knowing in her infinite cat wisdom that he will soon be making love to her mistress. David knows this, and Kate knows it, and the cat knows it, too.

  Her apartment on East Ninety-first is a one-bedroom, for which Kate—she tells him as she opens a can of food for the cat—paid a hundred and ten thousand dollars four years ago, and which she is now trying to sell for seventy-nine thousand, if she can get it, so she can move to the West Side and be closer to the theater section. The cat keeps rubbing against her as Kate uses the can opener. Kate keeps saying, “Yes, darling, yes, baby,” tossing the lid of the can into the garbage pail under the sink, and then spooning its contents into a red plastic bowl, “Yes, baby,” all the while telling David that the closest offer she’s had so far is forty-five thousand, which means she’d be losing thirty-four thousand non-tax-deductible dollars, “Yes, baby, here you are,” she says and sets the bowl down on the floor near the refrigerator and comes immediately to David and drapes her arms over his shoulders and leans into him and kisses him.

  Sitting beside her on her bed, his arm around her, Arthur K hears his sister’s plaintive cry for help, I wish someone would give me lessons, and the words break his heart. She is so very beautiful and innocent and vulnerable that he is enraged by just the notion of someone like Howard Kaplan kissing her and telling her later that she doesn’t even know how. Sitting beside her on her bed, his arm aro
und her, her head on his shoulder, the bedside lamp bathing them in a soft indulgent glow, he keeps patting her shoulder and saying, “No, no, Sis, don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about,” all at once afraid her crying will awaken their parents down the hall, though surely there is nothing wrong going on here in her room, a brother comforting his sister is all, there is nothing wrong with that. So why is he worried about them waking up?

  “I can teach you in a minute,” he hears himself say.

  And she answers, “Then do it.”

  “Yes, do it,” Kate says, her mouth under his, her lips murmuring against his lips, “Do it, do it.” They have kissed their way to the sofa against one wall of the living room, awkwardly moving in embrace toward the sofa heaped with pillows against the wall. The wall itself is hung with three sheets of the shows in which she’s performed, the Cats poster in the center with its big yellow eyes pupiled with dancers in black, and the Miss Saigon poster with its rising helicopter that looks like Asian calligraphy, falling blindly onto the pillows, their lips entangled, “Yes, do it,” she keeps saying, though he scarcely knows what he is doing anymore, his hands all over her, his lips on hers, do it, do it, and the Les Misérables poster with its French waif and her dark soulful eyes.

  Her blue eyes are wide in expectation. Her long blond hair frames her face, delicate strands electrifying the back of his hand when he brushes her hair away to reveal the pale oval of her face. From the corner of his eye, below, he can see the flimsy pink nightgown with its intricately laced hem where the blue robe has parted over it, her long white legs. He catches a fleeting glimpse of her left breast as she turns to him, the robe gapping slightly, and is suddenly enraged by what Howard Kaplan did to her, or tried to do to her, hurting her that way, the anger coursing through his veins, causing his temples to throb, causing his cock to swell suddenly inside his pants.

  “Part your lips, Veronica,” he says like the good older brother he is, and she lifts her face to his and does exactly as he says.

  Her kiss is surprisingly adept. He wonders, but merely for an instant, if she was lying to him about Howard telling her she didn’t know how to kiss. Then again, what the hell does Howard know, the jackass? His sister—he remembers that she is his sister and that he is merely performing a brotherly service that will enable her to cope more effectively in any future boy-girl relationship—his sister immediately and expertly draws in her breath in the same instant that he does, their simultaneous inhalations creating a tight seal that fiercely joins their lips and causes him to remember, yet again, that she is, after all, his sister, although the insistently clamoring erection in his pants seems determined to prove otherwise.

  Nonetheless, he is here to teach her, sister or no, and so he gently inserts his tongue into her mouth, meaning to pull away an instant later—but the seal is so tight—to explain that tongues play as important a role as lips in this serious business of kissing, fully intending to explain the procedure step by step, but suddenly her own tongue is alive in his mouth, actively seeking his tongue, coiling around his tongue like a serpent, even though she said she didn’t know how to kiss. Or, more accurately, all she said was that Howard told her she didn’t know how to kiss, she didn’t say that she herself believed she didn’t know how to kiss.

  In fact, she now seems ferociously determined to demonstrate that Howard was wrong, that for all her tender years—but she’s fifteen, after all, and so was Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac who dug her fingernails into the back of his hand the moment he cupped her chin preparatory to kissing her and ordered him to take her home right that very minute. His sister Veronica, his little sister Veronica, his blue-eyed blond and beautiful baby sister Veronica is the same age as big-titted Shirley Fein who’d sent him home all desolate and forlorn, a condition his sister with her questing mouth and writhing tongue is rapidly reversing. The hard-on he’d had in the Pontiac, subsequently shriveled by Shirley’s rejection, surprisingly revived when his sister leaned in to accept his kiss and the robe momentarily opened to show that single small white breast with its little pink nipple—she is his sister, he keeps reminding himself, she is his goddamn sister.

  Which is perhaps why his indecorous and inappropriate hard-on causes a sudden wave of terror to sweep over him, almost nauseating—suppose his parents wake up? Because now, you see, this isn’t just a dutiful brother comforting a distraught sister, patting her shoulder and trying to still her fears of inadequate osculatory technique. This is a seventeen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl kissing passionately, their arms wrapped around each other—yes, but don’t forget we’re just sitting here, we’re not lying on the bed, we’re not pressed against each other or anything, no matter how it may look, the robe somehow having ridden up over the lace-hemmed nightgown, the nightgown itself having somehow ridden up over Veronica’s long white naked legs. Suppose his mother, God forbid, comes down the hall and finds them, well, kissing this way, suppose his mother sees the hard-on straining in his pants, a hard-on provoked by the sight of his own sister’s girlish breast and nipple, a hard-on bulging not inches from where Veronica’s hand rests upon his leg, her robe somehow slipping off her left shoulder now to fully expose this time the breast and nipple he merely glimpsed earlier.

  In that instant he becomes utterly confused.

  “It was like a dream,” he will later tell David. “I don’t know where I am in the dream, I don’t know who it is I’m with, there is just …”

  … this beautiful girl whose mouth is insistently, whose tongue is demandingly, forgets in that instant, but only for an instant, that she truly is his sister, her hard pink nipple erect under his grasping fingers, fearful she will reach up at once to remove his hand as forcefully as Shirley had when he, but she doesn’t. Instead, her own hand drops to where his cock is seething inside his pants, and suddenly he doesn’t care if she’s his sister or his aunt or his mother or his grandmother, suddenly his hands are inside the robe and under the gown and she reaches past him and over him, turning slightly, lifting herself slightly, her right hand still tight on his cock inside his pants, and turns out the light with her free hand, and then lies beside him in the dark and opens her robe to him and opens herself to him.

  There is a frenzy to their joining.

  It is as if they have been waiting all their lives, each and separately, for this moment to arrive, and now that it is here, they must cling to it desperately and drain it of every last passionate drop. They writhe on her pillows in shafts of light slanting through open blinds across the room, glide in silvery sunlight as if through something wet and viscous, yellow cat eyes watching from the wall behind them, helicopter rising against a yellow moon on the wall behind them, little French-girl eyes peering curiously from the wall behind them. And Hannah. Hannah the cat. Watching indifferently.

  Only once does his wife cross his mind, briefly, her name, his wife’s name, Helen, and then her face, her blue eyes, Helen’s face and eyes, but he banishes her at once, excluding her from all he has already done to this woman in this room, all that he is doing now to this woman in this room, all that he will continue doing to this woman, in this room, in frenzy, forever—or at least until the afternoon shadows start to lengthen and all at once it is dark and time to go home.

  “Stay the night,” she says.

  “I can’t.”

  They are standing just inside her door. He is fully dressed. She has put on a man’s white tailored shirt, which she wears unbuttoned and hanging loose, the sleeves rolled up. He wonders whose shirt it was, or perhaps whose shirt it still is. Does the shirt belong to Ron? Is it Ron’s shirt she wears after sex on a Sunday afternoon? Old “Especially Ron,” who together with sister Bess offered such support and encouragement?

  “When will I see you again?” she asks.

  “When do you want to see me?”

  “Tomorrow morning. The minute the sun comes up.”

  Standing barefoot inside the doorway, looking up at him, green eyes an
d blue fingernails, wearing only Ron’s or whoever’s white shirt open over her breasts, the nipples still erect and looking angry and raw, the tangled patch of red pubic hair showing at the joining of her long naked legs.

  In the dream, I’m wearing a white blouse, but that’s all. You come all over the blouse. In the dream. Your semen stains my blouse.

  He pulls her fiercely to him.

  He does not leave her apartment until eleven that night.

  By the time he gets home, it is too late to call Helen.

  On the phone early Monday morning, he tells Helen that shortly after he’d spoken to her yesterday he’d gone over to the crafts fair on Amsterdam Avenue, where he’d eaten his way serendipitously from food stand to food stand.

  “I didn’t see anything I wanted to buy,” he says, “not even for the kids. I went over to the office afterward, to study some notes I’d made, and then I went back to the apartment and took a nap before dinner.”

  “Did you eat in?”

  “No, I went to a place over on the West Side,” he says, and names the restaurant where he and Kate had brunch.

  “The West Side again?” Helen asks, surprised. “How come?”

  “There was a movie I wanted to see over there.”

  “Oh? What movie?”

  The Arts & Leisure section of yesterday’s Times is open before him on the desk in what they both laughingly call “the study,” a room that had been a butler’s pantry at one time, but which they converted into a windowless office when they bought the apartment. He has circled with a felt-tipped pen a foreign movie playing at the Angelika 57, and has underlined the time of the screening that would have got him home sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty, which was when he had got home, eleven-twenty to be exact, he’d looked at the kitchen clock when he walked in. He reels off the name of the movie casually now, tells her it wasn’t all that good, and is starting to ask how the kids are, when Helen says, “I was wondering why you didn’t call.”