Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “Could you make a martini for me?” she asks.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “Thank you,” she says. “Vodka? With a twist?”

  “Sure.”

  He was hoping she’d prefer something simpler, Scotch on the rocks, bourbon and soda, anything but a drink that will require time-consuming preparation, because truly he wants to get this over with before …

  Before what?

  Well, before the telephone really rings and it’ll be Helen calling from Menemsha.

  He doesn’t know what he can possibly say if Helen calls.

  Pouring the Absolut, adding a dollop of vermouth, skimming a bit of lemon peel from the big yellow lemon he takes from the refrigerator, the phone hanging on the wall behind the counter, fearful the phone will ring, Oh, hi, Helen, I was just making myself a martini, but the phone doesn’t ring. He carries the drink back into the living room, where Kate has taken off the combat boots and now sits on the couch with her legs tucked under her and one arm draped across the back of the couch. She has also taken off the beret. Her red hair shines under the glow of the ceiling spot that illuminates the abstract painting behind her. He carries the drink to her …

  “Aren’t you having something?”

  … pours himself a little Scotch over ice, goes to the couch to clink glasses …

  “To us,” she says, and smiles up at him.

  “Kate,” he says, “we …”

  “Mmm,” she says, sipping at the drink.

  He sits beside her. The couch is blue. He hopes she hasn’t powdered herself after showering, hopes she won’t leave traces of her powder, her perfume, her scent in this apartment for Helen to discover after Luis casually mentions this little nocturnal visit from a redhead.

  “So what is it?” she asks, and turns her head and her eyes to him. He takes a long swallow of Scotch.

  “Kate,” he says, “I think you should know I’ll be leaving for the Vineyard as usual this Friday night …”

  “Yes?”

  “… but this time I’ll be gone the entire month of August.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He looks at her.

  “You’re a shrink, you’ll be gone all of August, I realize that. We still have the rest of the week. Anyway, why don’t you just marry me? Then you won’t have to go to the Vineyard at all.”

  “Kate …”

  “Or at the very least, why don’t you go up there on Saturday instead? Or even Sunday. Why do you have to rush up there on Friday? Friday’s only the twenty-eighth. Do your patients know you’ll be leaving so early?”

  “Effectively, Friday’s the end of the month.”

  “No, the end of the month is next Monday. The end of the month is the thirty-first, that’s when the end of the month is.”

  “I know, but …”

  “I’m glad you’re not my shrink, David, I have to tell you. Ducking out before the month even ends. By the way, I’ve planned a big surprise for your birthday, so I hope you’re not planning to run up to the Vineyard even earlier than you …”

  “No, I won’t be going up till …”

  “Good. My place at eight then. We’re dark on Thursday nights, so I won’t have to worry about getting to the theater, will I?”

  “Kate, I think we …”

  “Wait’ll you see what I got you.”

  “I hope you didn’t spe—”

  “You’ll love it. Will you have another birthday party when you go up to the Vineyard?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Friday night.”

  “Is that why you’re going up so early?”

  “I’m not going up early. My patients …”

  “Ducking out three days before the month ends,” she says, and turns fully toward him now, swinging around in a dancer’s position or perhaps a yoga position, he doesn’t know which, bringing the soles of her feet together, holding them together with her hands, sitting quite erect, her knees wide, the black shorts rising higher on her thighs so that he can now see the edge of her panties beneath them, white like the ones she was wearing in the park that day long ago, the side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposing a hint of white cotton panties beneath, strengthening the image of youth, white like the ones she was wearing yet longer ago when one day at the beginning of September with russet leaves drifting onto the parking lot she unzipped her cutoffs for him and removed them and lowered her panties and sat on his desk and spread herself wide to him.

  “My patients know when I’m leaving,” he says. “We’ve talked about nothing else for the past three weeks.”

  But this isn’t quite true.

  They’ve talked about other things as well.

  And all at once it was dark, and in the dark she could have been anyone, in the dark she was opening her robe and spreading her legs, warm and wet and pulling me into her.

  “Kate,” he says, “what I think we should do …”

  “What I think we should do is get a bit more comfortable here, don’t you think?” she says, and rises suddenly from whatever odd position it was, dance, yoga, exercise, whatever, rises with arms extended for balance, rises slowly like a swimmer coming up out of icy blue water, stands barefoot on the cushioned blue couch for only a moment, and then springs to the white-carpeted floor with a single catlike leap, yanking shorts and panties down over her knees at once. Delicately, she steps out of them, lifting one long dancer’s leg, and then the other, and then tosses them over her shoulder. Smiling, she takes a step toward him, and then another, dancer’s steps, knee coming up high, toes pointed, foot slowly descending flat to the carpet, slow-motion steps, moving closer and closer, like a cat stalking its prey, but there’s a smile on her face.

  “Would you like to fuck me now?” she asks, and falls to her knees in a dancer’s soft collapse. “Say,” she says, and unzips his fly, and whips him free of his trousers and his underwear, gripping him tightly in her fist. She looks up into his face. Her eyes hold his in an innocent green gaze. Her eyebrows are raised. Well? her expression is saying. “Or would you rather stick this big beautiful thing in my mouth?” she asks, and smiles radiantly.

  He throws his head back and stares up into the blinding light above the painting, lost in the glare of the light and the insistence of her relentless hand, the light radiating spikes of rapture, losing all resolve within seconds, lost within seconds in her youth, lost beyond recall in her incandescent passion, utterly bewilderingly ecstatically lost.

  “Which?” she demands. “Say!”

  On Monday morning, he calls Stanley Beckerman to say he’ll go along with the August deception.

  Everything in his life has a title now.

  The August Deception.

  As is usual at this time of the year, each of his patients comes up with different but not entirely original ways of coping with what they consider David’s wanton neglect and lack of consideration. How dare he leave them for the entire month of August? More than that. Five weeks and four days if you count the days he’ll be gone at the end of July and the days he’ll be gone in September before he returns on the fifth. Five weeks and four days, never mind any goddamn month, who’s kidding who here?

  Arthur K’s way of dealing with this abominable situation is to try to wrap up the analysis before the end of the month. Not merely put it on hold until after Labor Day, but wrap it up forever. End it. Which David knows from experience is not always a simple thing to do. But Arthur K—who’s been telling him that the night on his sister’s bed after the dance was the one and only time he’d ever touched her—seems eager to confess this Tuesday that he and his sister had been making love on and off, every now and then, ever since that night, even after they were both married …

  “To other people, of course. She’s my sister, marrying her would be incest.”

  … had been doing it regularly, in fact incessantly right up to the time of her death twelve years ago, when Arthur’s phobic reaction to autom
obiles started. If David would like to know, in fact—and then perhaps they can put this thing to rest once and for all and bring this so-called analysis to its long-awaited conclusion—if David would like to know what really happened that day …

  Veronica’s husband, Manny, is off at work as usual, he owns a ladies’ ready-to-wear store on Fourteenth Street, he sells mostly to Spanish people, yellow dresses, red dresses, the cheap gaudy shit they like to wear. His sister and Manny live up in Larchmont, which is where Arthur goes to see her at ten o’clock that Wednesday morning. Wednesday is when he goes to his chiropractor and then drives up afterward to see his sister. He does this every Wednesday. He does not think he can get through a week without seeing his sister, without doing to his sister what they started doing together all those years ago. He loves his sister more than anyone on earth.

  “I was never ashamed of my love for her. I still love her, if you want to know.”

  On that fateful day that will mark the end of her life, she is wearing for him what she wears each and every time they make love, a blue robe not unlike the one she’d worn when she was fifteen and a virgin, and a laced pink nightgown, though shorter than the one back then.

  “Veronica never had any children,” Arthur K says. “She always kept her body nice. Same body she had when she was fifteen. Firm belly, breasts, everything, even though she was … what … fifty-three when she got killed in the accident?”

  His voice catches.

  David waits.

  “I really want to end this fucking thing,” he says.

  Should David risk a prompt?

  End what? he wonders. The belief that their transgression is what caused his sister’s death?

  Or the analysis?

  He waits.

  “She told me … she said she …”

  David waits.

  “She said she told Manny.”

  There is a long, shattering silence.

  “I said … I … I was flabbergasted. I said What? You told Manny? I told Manny, she said. About us? I said. About us, she said. She said this would have to be the last time we ever, what we did, what we just finished doing. She said Manny never wanted to see me again, never wanted to talk to me again, never wanted to hear about me again, fucking my own sister, the shame, the shame. This is what Manny told her. Said I was fucking my own sister. We had just finished … she was sitting on the edge of the bed naked when she told me all this. This was afterwards. We always had a cigarette afterwards. We were sitting there smoking when she told me this. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, I was in this little easy chair she had with the gold fabric. We were both smoking. I said Veronica, how could you tell him this, are you crazy? She said she couldn’t bear the guilt any longer, she had to tell him. I said What guilt, what are you talking about, guilt? We love each other, what guilt? How could you do this? She said I’m sorry, Arthur, I couldn’t bear it anymore, the lying.

  “I … I got on my knees in front of her, I took her hands in mine, her cigarette was in the ashtray, smoke was coming up. I said Veronica, you’ve got to tell him you were kidding, and she said Kidding? How can I tell him I was kidding? Who would kid about something like this, Arthur? I kissed her hands, I kept kissing her hands, I kept saying Please, Veronica, over and over again, and she said Arthur, you have to go now, I have a manicure appointment, I have to drive over to my manicurist, and I said Please, Veronica, I was crying now, I said Please don’t leave me, and she said I have to, and I said Please please, Veronica, and she said Go now, Arthur, please, he’ll kill me if he knows you were here, and I said I hope he does. She was crying when I left. Her Camaro was parked in the driveway outside the house.”

  She comes to his office on his lunch hour that Tuesday afternoon. She brings bagels and Nova and they make love on his couch afterward. She tastes of onions when he kisses her.

  On Tuesdays, the show is dark.

  He goes to her apartment again that night.

  But he makes sure he is home again by ten so that he can call Helen before she goes to sleep.

  He calls Menemsha again at seven the next morning, and tells Helen he’ll be leaving for the office early, lots to do before he comes up there on Friday. She asks him what he’ll be doing on his birthday tomorrow. He tells her he may go to a movie. She says he ought to go celebrate with Stanley Beckerman. He tells her he’ll think about it.

  “Anyway, we’ll be talking again before then,” he says.

  Today is Wednesday.

  Matinee day.

  But not in his office. No matinee on the black leather couch today because Kate must be at the theater by twelve-thirty for a real matinee at two. The moment he puts the receiver back on the cradle he runs downstairs and catches a cab to her apartment.

  At ten that night, he calls Massachusetts again and tells Helen he’s going down for a walk and a cup of cappuccino at that place on Seventieth Street. She advises him to be careful, and he tells her he’ll call again in the morning. As soon as he hangs up, he heads for the theater. The stage door is on Seventh Avenue. He gets there just as the cast is coming out. She takes him by the arm.

  “Hi,” she says and reaches up to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Goodnight, Kate,” one of the girls calls.

  “Goodnight!” another one calls, waving.

  They have cappuccino together in a place on Sixth Avenue. He kisses her frequently and openly as they sit holding hands at a corner table. Later, they go to her apartment where they make love frantically and hastily. He does not get home until midnight, and is relieved to see that there are no messages from Helen on the answering machine.

  Alex J has his own way of dealing with the imminent month-long hiatus. Month and more, don’t forget. Alex J clams up. He has been silent all this week. Today is Thursday, and the hour is ticking away, and he is still silent. This is his way of punishing David. You want to go to wherever you’re going and leave me flat? Okay, I’ll pretend you’re already gone, how’s that? And if you’re already gone, I don’t have to talk to you. I can just lie here and look up at the ceiling, okay?

  “Yes?” David asks, as if reading his mind.

  “What?” Alex J says with a start.

  “I thought you were about to say something.”

  “Why would I be about to say anything?” Alex J says curtly.

  “Sorry. I thought you were.”

  There is another long silence. David wonders what sort of a surprise Kate has cooked up for his birthday tonight. She keeps calling it a “party,” but he hopes she hasn’t been foolish enough to have planned a real party, with guests other than themselves. He recognizes that over the past week he’s become if not entirely reckless then certainly somewhat less than cautious. He hopes she hasn’t taken this as a signal to …

  “… weather will be hottest,” Alex J is saying.

  “Yes?”

  “Were you asleep?” he asks.

  “No, no.”

  “Then what did I just say?”

  “You said the weather will be hottest,” David says, and takes a wild guess. “While I’m away. In August.”

  “Yes. How often do you fall asleep when I’m talking?”

  “Never.”

  “I’ll just bet.”

  “You’d lose.”

  “When the dresses are thinnest,” Alex J says. “These flimsy little dresses they wear.”

  David says nothing.

  He waits.

  “When the weather is hot, I mean,” Alex J says. “Did you ever read that story by Irwin Shaw?”

  “Which one is that?”

  “‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’?”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s what it is, you know. The way they dress in the summertime. I wouldn’t be doing this if it was the winter. Following them home, I mean. It’s just because it’s …”

  What? David thinks.

  “… the summer. These skimpy little dresses they wear.”

  Following them home? David thin
ks.

  Alex J is a thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker who commutes all the way from West Ninety-third to Wall Street by subway every weekday and sometimes on weekends as well. He is married and has three children, and the reason he’s been coming to see David for the past year now is that a month before he sought help a woman he was rubbing himself against on the subway suddenly jabbed her elbow into his gut and yelled, “Get the hell away from me!” To Alex J, this was the equivalent of finding snakes in his bed. Fearful he would be arrested the next time he rubbed up against someone, or inadvertently touched someone, God forbid, Alex J came to David to confess his irresistible urges.

  Alex J is what is known in the trade as a frotteur, from the French word for “a rubber,” he who rubs. In Alex’s case, “he who rubs” does so against thinly clad women in the subway, a crime defined as submitting another person to sexual contact without the latter’s consent, or—as David had reason to look up seven years ago when he was treating another such patient—“any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person not married to the actor for the purpose of gratifying the sexual desire of either party, whether directly or through clothing.” In other words, if Alex J gets caught doing what he’s been doing (for the past six years, it turns out, and not for just the six months prior to his subway epiphany a year ago this July) he is in danger of spending anywhere from three months to a year in jail—small potatoes unless you happen to have a wife and three kiddies at home, hmm, dollink?

  David is not here to keep Alex J out of jail, though this in itself is not a minor consideration. He is here to lead Alex J to a discovery of the root causes underlying his behavior, so that he may better understand it, and control it. But now …

  And perhaps this is simply a ruse, perhaps Alex J is merely telling him all this as a way of making sure David is really listening. Think you can go away for the whole month of August, huh? Okay, now hear this, Doctor!

  What David now hears is that Alex J, in addition to deliberately seeking out on train platforms any woman or girl of any age who seems clothed in what he calls “a flimsy provocative dress,” and following her from the platform onto the rush-hour train, and allowing himself to be pushed against her by the rush-hour crowd, positioning himself strategically behind her, and rubbing himself against her until he achieves erection and on at least one occasion orgasm …