Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “I never noticed.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “I love Jacqueline. I was really crazy when I started going to her, you know. She really helped me a lot. I’m glad it wasn’t her you fucked in Boston.”

  “No, it was just a woman who … found me attractive, I guess.”

  “You are attractive.”

  “Thank you, but I wasn’t fishing.”

  “I love your looks.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you love my looks? And I am fishing.”

  “I adore the way you look.”

  “Do you like my being a redhead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like my being red down here, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “I used to hate it. I was shocked to death the first time I saw a girl with red pubic hair.”

  “When was that?”

  “In the locker room at school. I was eleven, I had nothing down there at all. This was an upperclassman. Woman. Person. An eighteen-year-old girl. She had red hair, too, on her head, I mean, much redder than mine. Seeing her naked scared hell out of me. I thought, Jesus, is that what I’m going to look like when I grow up? Those great big tits and that flaming red hair down there, Jesus! I never did get the tits, as you can see, but I sure as hell got the rest. This is my summer trim. You should see it when it runs rampant. It’s like a forest fire. Tell me about your Boston shrink.”

  “There’s not much to tell. We met at one of the seminars, and discovered we were both from New York …”

  “Both married …”

  “Yes, both married.”

  “How did I know that?”

  “Maybe because I told you she was lonely,” he says, and wonders why such an association would have come to mind. “Anyway …”

  “Are you lonely?” she asks at once.

  “I may have been back then.”

  “How about now?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you start up with me?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, we had dinner together, I forget who asked who to dinner …”

  “Whom. And I asked you to dinner, don’t forget,” she says. “And lunch, too. Don’t ever forget that. I was the one who wanted you,” she says, and kisses him again.

  Her kisses make him dizzy.

  Her hand drops to his naked thigh, rests there, the fingers widespread.

  She pulls her mouth from his.

  Looks into his face again.

  “Tell me,” she says.

  “We ended up in her room,” he says, and shrugs. “She wanted to be in her own room, in case her husband called.”

  “Did he call?”

  “No.”

  “Did your wife call? Helen? Did she call your room?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stay the whole night with her?”

  “No.”

  “Was it good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better than me?”

  “No one’s better than you.”

  “Mmm, sweet,” she says, and her hand moves onto him. “Did you ever see her again?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I felt too guilty.”

  “Do you feel guilty now?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she says, and gives him a friendly little squeeze.

  “I almost told Helen about her,” he says. “When I got back home.”

  “Don’t ever tell her about me,” she says, and squeezes him again, hard this time, in warning.

  “I was glad in the long run. If I’d told her, it would have meant the end of our marriage. We had just the one child then, Jenny. Annie wasn’t even on the horizon. If I’d told her …”

  “You have two children, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two little girls.”

  “Yes.”

  “How old?”

  “Six and nine.”

  “Annie, you said?”

  “And Jenny.”

  “Jennyanydots,” she says at once. “Put the names together …”

  “Yes, I guess they do, come to think of it.”

  “Oh, no question. Jennyanydots. That’s one of the cats in the show.”

  “I know.”

  “So you’re how old? If you were thirty-nine …”

  “I’ll be forty-six this month.”

  “Oh? When?”

  “The twenty-seventh.”

  “We’ll have a party. Do you believe in fate?”

  “No.”

  “I think we were fated.”

  “Then I believe in it.”

  “I’m not Glenn Close, by the way.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “I mean, I’m not going to boil Annie’s pet rabbit or anything.”

  “She doesn’t have a pet rabbit.”

  “Or Jenny’s. Or anybody’s, anydots. This isn’t Hollywood, there isn’t just one plot in the entire world, you know. Oh, it’s Fatal Attraction, I get it! But with a psychiatrist and a dancer, right? Wroooong! This isn’t that at all. If you think that’s what this is …”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good. Because you don’t have to worry about me, I know you’re married. In fact, I’m glad you didn’t tell her about that shrink in Boston. Because then she’d be suspicious, and I don’t want her ever finding out about us.”

  “I’m glad, too. She’d have left in a minute. And for what? A meaningless one-night …”

  “Am I a meaningless one-night stand?”

  “This is our second night,” he says.

  “I’d better not be meaningless,” she says, and kisses him fiercely, biting his lip, and then pulls her face back, and stares into his eyes again as unblinkingly as a cat, and bares her teeth an instant before biting him again. She is straddling him an instant after that, sliding onto him warm and wet and demanding, and an instant later he comes inside her.

  I was intoxicated, delirious, crazed, depraved, call it whatever you like.

  I don’t care what you call it.

  His nine o’clock patient has just left the office.

  David dials the number at the Menemsha cottage and listens to it ringing, four, five, six times, and is about to hang up, relieved, when Annie picks up the phone.

  “Chapman residence,” she says in her piping little voice, “good morning.”

  “Yes, may I please speak to Miss Anne Chapman?” he says, disguising his voice so that he sounds like a rather pompous British barrister.

  “This is Miss Chapman,” Annie says solemnly.

  “Miss Chapman, you have just inherited a million pounds from your aunt in Devonshire.”

  “A million pounds of what?” Annie asks.

  David bursts out laughing.

  “Is that you, Dad?” she asks.

  “That’s me,” he says, still laughing.

  “A million pounds of what?” she insists.

  “Feathers,” he says.

  “I’m busy eating,” she says. “Did you want Mom? She’s still in bed.”

  “Wake her up, it’s five to ten.”

  “When are you coming up here?”

  “I told you. Friday night.”

  “We’ll have lobster,” Annie says, and abruptly puts down the phone.

  When Helen picks up the extension upstairs, she sounds fuzzy with sleep.

  “Hullo?” she says.

  “What are you doing in bed?” he asks.

  “I know what I wish I was doing in bed.”

  “Late night?”

  “Oh sure, a drunken brawl. I was in bed by ten, but I just couldn’t fall asleep. When are you coming up here?”

  “Must be an echo in this place.”

  “Everybody misses you.”

  “Who’s everybody?”

  “Me,” she says.

  “I have to lay out my clothes in advance, or I’d never get dressed,” Susan M is saying
. “You know that, I’ve told you that a hundred times already.”

  She is one of David’s so-called Couches, a twenty-four-year-old “obsessive-compulsive,” or “obsessional neurotic”—you pays your money and you takes your choice unless you happen to suffer from a disorder where choice seems obstinately denied.

  Susan M has been suffering from her disorder for the past three years now. Her disorder was what forced her to drop out of college. Her disorder is what brings her here twice a week, to discuss over and over again the ritual that keeps at bay her personal hounds of hell.

  What Susan M does, compulsively, is lay out in advance the clothing she will be wearing for the next two weeks. Every flat surface in her apartment—tables, chairs, countertops, floors—is covered with the neatly folded garments she will wear on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on, this week and next week, each careful little stack labeled with a note naming the day and date. Two weeks ago today, Susan M knew what she would be wearing to this ten o’clock session on Wednesday morning, the nineteenth day of July. She knows, too, what she will be wearing on Wednesday of next week. She has told David she will be wearing the blue shirtdress with a red leather belt and red French-heeled shoes. Her bra and panties will be white. That is the uniform of the day for the twenty-sixth of July, a day before David’s forty-sixth birthday.

  Susan M doesn’t know this. She knows scarcely anything about David, except that he listens patiently behind her while she details her lists, frequently planning her wardrobe aloud, well in advance of actually laying it out in her apartment. Counting the hours she spends talking it over with David—“I don’t really need blue underwear with the blue dress, do I? I mean, it’s still summertime”—she will often have her wardrobe planned three weeks in advance of when she actually will be wearing it.

  “You lay out your clothes, don’t you? Everybody I know decides in advance what he or she is going to wear to work tomorrow, or to school tomorrow, or to a party that night, or even to bed that night. My mother always made sure I wore clean panties to school because a person never could tell when she’d get run over by a car and have to be taken to the hospital. A clean bra, too, when I got old enough to wear one. I was very big for my age … well, that’s obvious, I guess … I started developing at the age of twelve, very early on, I had to watch what I wore, the boys could be so cruel, you know. What bothers me is why I should be so concerned about performing a simple act everyone else in the world performs. Why should I worry so much that if I don’t get it right, something terrible will happen?”

  Silence.

  She has said this before.

  She knows she has said it before.

  “Look,” she says, “I know this is all in my head, why the hell else am I here? I know my mother’s not really going to die if my shoes don’t match my bag next Friday or whenever the hell. She’s in Omaha, how’s she going to die if I don’t have everything laid out? What is this, voodoo or something? Which thank God I do know—what I’m going to wear next Friday, I mean—because I wouldn’t want that on my conscience, believe me. The white sandals with the white leather sling bag I bought at Barneys and the white mini and white tube, a regular virgin bride, right? That’s next Friday, I’m pretty sure it is, anyway. I have the list here if you don’t mind my checking it, I’d like to check it if you don’t mind.”

  She sits up immediately, not turning to look at him, embarrassed by this behavior she knows to be irrational but is unable to control, digging into her handbag, green to match the green slippers she’s wearing, and locating her Month-At-A-Glance calendar into which she relentlessly lists all her wardrobe schedules. Still not looking at him, she says, “Yes, here it is, Friday the twenty-first, white bag, white sandals, yep, all of it’s right here, I guess you won’t get hit by a bus, Mom,” and laughs in embarrassment at her own absurdity and then lies back down again and sighs in such helpless despair that she almost breaks David’s heart.

  She falls silent for the remainder of the hour.

  When at last he mentions quietly that their time is up, she rises, nods, and says, “I know I’ve got to get over this.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says, and nods, and sighs heavily again. “So we’re back to the regular schedule now, right? Until August first, anyway.”

  “Right,” he says.

  “So I’ll see you on Friday, right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Same time, right?”

  “Yes, same time.”

  She seems more anxious when she leaves his office than she did when she came in this morning.

  He is not at all sure that she will get over this.

  He tries Kate’s number several times that day.

  The voice on her answering machine chirps, “Hi. At the beep, please.”

  The third time he hears it, he wants to strangle the machine.

  He knows she had a performance this afternoon, and further knows she has to be at the theater again by six-thirty tonight, she has explained all this to him. Kate’s makeup isn’t as intricate as what some of the other cats wear, but it nonetheless takes her a full half hour to do her face and another twenty minutes to get into costume. She spends the rest of the time before curtain stretching and warming up; a dancer can really hurt herself, she’s told him, if she goes on cold. Half-hour is at seven-thirty. Fifteen is at a quarter to eight. Five is five minutes before curtain, and then it’s show time, folks. He tries her apartment again at ten to six, immediately after his last patient leaves the office, and again at six sharp, on the walk home from his office, from a pay phone on Lex. He gets the same damn brief chirpy message each time. To get to the theater by six-thirty, Kate will have to leave her apartment by six-ten at the very latest. He calls from another pay phone at five past, and gets the same infuriating message again. Frustrated, he realizes he will not be able to talk to her until she gets home later tonight.

  If she gets home.

  “We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” Stanley is telling him, even though he is the one who called David to say he simply had to talk to him. The two men have eaten dinner in a Turkish restaurant on Second Avenue, and now they are strolling along like two old men in the park, a bit flat-footed, their hands behind their backs, though they are not in any park, and David certainly doesn’t think of himself as old, either. Not now, anyway. Not anymore.

  Kate has promised him a party on his forty-sixth birthday.

  It occurs to him that she doesn’t yet know he’ll be leaving for Martha’s Vineyard the day after that.

  Or that he’ll be gone the entire month of August.

  The night is sticky and hot.

  The heat has driven everyone outdoors, and the avenue is thronged with pedestrians. Somehow, the city seems softer and safer tonight. At sidewalk tables outside colorfully lighted restaurants, diners seem engaged in spirited conversation, and there is laughter and a sense of gaiety and old world sophistication here on the privileged Upper East Side where for a little while the entire world is strung with Japanese lanterns and everyone is sipping French champagne and dipping Russian caviar and Vienna waltzes float dizzily on the still summer night.

  He supposes he’s in love with her.

  “I think I’m in love with her, hmm?” Stanley says. “This is ridiculous, I know. For Christ’s sake, Dave, she’s only nineteen years old, if she were a little younger I’d go to jail. I’m a doctor! I’m her psychiatrist!”

  Although I don’t even know her, David thinks.

  How can I love someone I don’t even know?

  “I couldn’t believe we were doing it right on the office couch,” Stanley says. “I’m so ashamed of myself.”

  He does not, in all truth, appear terribly ashamed of himself. He is, in fact, beaming from ear to ear as he makes this admission, wearing tonight the same beachcomber outfit he wore to Cats, but perhaps it’s the only good beachcomber outfit he owns. The same khaki slacks, and rumpled plaid sports jacket, the same
brown loafers without socks again, the same white button-down shirt open at the throat, no tie. David is positive it’s the same shirt because there are still stains on it from the duckling à l’orange Stanley ordered that night. His beard has grown several thousandths of an inch since then, but it is still an unsightly tangle of hairs of another color. His grin appears in these incipient whiskers like a flasher opening a raincoat; Stanley is proud of the fact that he seduced a nineteen-year-old patient on his office couch.

  “I leave for Hatteras on the twenty-ninth,” he says now, the smile vanishing to be replaced by what he supposes is a look of abject sorrow but which comes across as a clown’s painted-on mask of tragedy, the mouth downturned, the eyes grief-stricken. “I haven’t told her yet. I don’t think she knows that psychiatrists take the month of August off, I don’t think she’s read the Judith Rossner novel.”

  Has Kate read the Rossner novel? David wonders.

  “I don’t know how to tell her,” Stanley says.

  But haven’t you already told all your patients? David wonders. Haven’t you been preparing them all along for the traumatic month-long separation to come, more than a month, actually, since sessions won’t begin again till the day after Labor Day, the fifth of September?

  I have to tell Kate, he thinks.

  “I don’t want to go,” Stanley says. “If I can find some excuse to stay in the city, I’d do it in a minute, hmm? Can you imagine being on my own here for an entire month, no patients to worry about, Gerry way the hell down there in North Carolina, just me and Cindy Harris …”

  Might as well break all the rules of the profession while you’re at it, Stan.

  “… rollicking in the hay up here? Oh God, I’d give my life for that. A whole month with her? More than a month? I’d give my left testicle.”

  The men fall silent for several moments. The swirl of pedestrian traffic engulfs them. A buzz of conversation hovers on the thick summer air, snatches of words and phrases floating past as they move silently through the crowd. David is wondering whether it would, in fact, be possible to find some reason to stay in the city during the month of August … well, certainly not the entire month, but perhaps part of the month … no patients to worry about, just him and …

  And realizes that Stanley is undoubtedly wondering the same thing.