Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  The scheme she’s worked out is one that takes into account laundering and dry-cleaning time, which makes it virtually impossible to simply begin a recycling process two weeks from tomorrow but which requires instead a complicated balanced pattern of substitution and duplication. Not only does Susan M display her charts and lists, but she also details the number of days it will take to have a silk blouse dry-cleaned, for example, or a man’s tailored shirt laundered so that she’ll be able to wear one or the other of them in the rotating wheel she’s designed.

  As she explains all this to him, displaying the charts and the lists and the days on her calendar, she constantly checks her watch, fearful that her hour will run out before she completes the recitation and demonstration, thereby placing her mother in Omaha in extreme danger of decapitation or defenestration or any of a hundred other dire possibilities. It is with enormous relief—which David incidentally shares, so high is the level of anxiety in this office—that she is able to tell him in the remaining few minutes what she’ll be wearing to her session on the day after Labor Day. “The man-tailored pinstriped suit,” she says, “with black heels, black shirt and white-scarf tie, and black undies and panty hose, phew!” Before she leaves the office, she ascertains once again the date and time of their next session, and then holds out her hand like an embarrassed little girl, smiles shyly, and says, “Have a nice summer, Dr. Chapman.”

  He shakes her hand.

  “You, too, Susan,” he says.

  When he steps out of his office building at ten minutes to two, a long black limo is waiting at the curb. The rear window instantly rolls down, and Kate’s head appears. She says nothing, merely smiles. He walks immediately to the car.

  “Hi,” she says. “Want a lift?”

  He looks at her in wonder, slowly shaking his head from side to side in pleased amazement. “Where’d you get this?” he asks.

  “I ordered it, where do you think I got it? Get in.”

  He gets into the car. It smells of rich black leather and polished walnut panels. A bottle of iced champagne sits in a silver bucket on the side console. The driver turns to her.

  “Is it Newark, miss?” he asks.

  “It’s Newark,” she says.

  She is wearing what looks like a tennis skirt, short and white and flirty, topped with a sheer pink tank and a white cotton jacket. On her feet, she wears white strappy heels and shocking-pink anklets to match the top. Her fingernails are painted the same outrageous pink. Her legs are bare.

  “Why don’t you open the champagne?” she suggests.

  He fiddles with the wire, unwraps the foil, pops the cork. Foam overspills the slender dark neck of the bottle. He pours into two glasses from the side console, hands one to her, replaces the bottle, and then lifts his own glass in a toast.

  “To the fifteenth,” he says.

  “To us,” she corrects.

  “To us and the fifteenth.”

  “Four whole nights together,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll invite Gloria,” she whispers, and turns her head toward him. Her eyes meet his.

  “Just for one of the nights,” he says.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “I want you.”

  “You’d better,” she says. “But I know you liked Gloria, too, didn’t you?”

  They are still whispering. He glances at the rearview mirror on the windshield above the driver’s head. The driver’s eyes seem fastened to the road.

  “Yes, of course I liked her, but …”

  “I’ll get her again, she’s very sexy. Didn’t you think she was sexy?”

  “Very,” he says, and glances into the rearview mirror again. The driver’s eyes are still on the road.

  “Very, yes, right,” Kate whispers. “Or I can find someone else, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

  “I told you, all I want …”

  “Yes, but you’re lying. Last night you wanted Gloria, too. I’ll get her for you again. Maybe before you go back up again. On your last night here maybe. Like this time.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s what you want,” she whispers sharply, and begins furiously jiggling one sandaled foot.

  The big car rolls steadily downtown toward the tunnel. Holding hands, they sip champagne. She keeps jiggling her foot. He glances at her bare legs. Without looking at him, she tosses the switch that rolls up the glass privacy panel, and stretches one leg onto the folding seat in front of her.

  By the time they reach the airport, his lips are raw, his trousers stained. She gets out of the car after him, and throws her arms around his neck, and kisses him stickily, fiercely, in plain view of the passengers moving in and out of the terminal. Looking directly into his face, her eyes locked on his, her lips not inches from his mouth, she says, “You’d better not forget me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’d better not,” she warns.

  That evening before curtain time, a dozen red roses are delivered to her dressing room.

  The enclosed handwritten card reads:

  “Of course you do,” she says aloud.

  3: Saturday, July 29–Monday, August 14

  On Saturday evening, another dozen roses are delivered to the dressing room. Like the roses that arrived last night and again this afternoon before the matinee performance, they are long-stemmed and blood-red, nesting on a bosky glen of fern and baby’s breath, wrapped in green tissue paper in a long white box. The enclosed card again reads I love you, Kathryn. But each of the three bouquets—now arranged in vases that crowd virtually everything else off Kate’s makeup table—are from different florists, and the handwriting is different on each card. Which of course means that David called the orders in before he left and dictated the message for each card. I love you, Kathryn. Written in a different florist’s hand each time.

  The only performers with private dressing rooms are the five principals in the show—what Actors Equity calls white contracts—and only one of these is a woman, Grizabella. The rest of the cast are all so-called pink contracts and share dressing rooms to a greater or lesser extent. Kate shares her dressing room with eight other dancers and two booth-singer swings. In a so-called dancing show like this one, most of the performers have at one time or another gone on for anyone who is sick or merely “indisposed,” as the expression has it, or responding to a “family obligation.” The dancers who share this room are interchangeable cogs in a choreographic machine; on stage, under all that heavy makeup and furry attire, they even look alike.

  Now, as they paint on their cat faces and squeeze into their cat costumes, even their voices begin to sound alike, their conversation echoing a thousand backstage dialogues Kate has heard in dozens of other dressing rooms. Tonight—as is almost invariably the case—the talk is of men. Or, to be more exact, the talk is of a specific man, Kate’s “Secret Admirer” or—as she is surprised to hear him called by dancers even younger than she is—her “Stage Door Johnny” or “Sugar Daddy,” expressions that went out of fashion long before any of them were born.

  “Roses don’t come cheap these days,” Rumpleteazer says.

  “Marla Trump better watch out,” Sillabub says.

  “Is this the guy who picked you up earlier this week?” Jennyanydots asks.

  “When was that?” Demeter asks. “Wednesday?”

  “The tall gangly guy with the glasses?”

  Wait’ll he hears that description, Kate thinks. But she is secretly pleased that David’s extravagance has caused her to become the center of attention here in a room she shares with women she secretly believes are much better performers than she is. The other “kids.” All of whom can sing and dance rings around her.

  “Oh, I get it,” one of the dancer-swings says. “Some girl named Kathryn is sending you flowers with I-love-you notes.”

  “This is beginning to get ridiculous,” Bombalurina says.

  “Yeah, who died?” one of the singer-swings asks.
/>
  “I hate the smell of roses.”

  “I hate the smell of all flowers.”

  “Some flowers have no scent at all,” Jellylorum says. “Did you know that?”

  “Good.”

  “How many does this make, four?”

  “Three.”

  “In sequence though.”

  “Five dollars a rose, they get nowadays,” the other singer-swing says.

  “Four.”

  “Not in Grand Central.”

  “Long-stemmed roses? Five dollars. Grand Central, wherever.”

  “Who is this guy, anyway?”

  “A friend,” Kate says shyly.

  “Meaning he’s married.”

  “Sounds possessed. Three performances in a row?”

  Across the room, one of the dancers throws an ankle up onto her dressing table. Bending from the waist, leaning into the leg, stretching, she says, “I heard the kids in Oh! Calcutta! used to get all kinds of expensive gifts.”

  “That was centuries ago.”

  “Also, they were dancing nude.”

  “That was during the days of the Holy Roman Empire.”

  “The Pilobolus company still dances nude.”

  “So does the Netherlands.”

  “Maguy Marin, too.”

  “It wasn’t just the nudity. Calcutta was a dirty show.”

  “It was even dirtier when it first opened.”

  “How would you know?”

  “My mother told me. They had a scene where one of the girls goes down on a flashlight.”

  “Your mother told you that?”

  “Well, I think she put it a little differently.”

  “My mother thinks fellatio is a little town in Italy.”

  “That’s not how the joke goes.”

  “How does it go?”

  “I’m not sure, but that’s not it.”

  “Does this guy come to every show?”

  “No,” Kate says.

  “Just sends flowers, huh?”

  “Every performance of Calcutta, there used to be a dozen bald heads in the third row. Same guys every show.”

  “It’s two Japanese towns. The joke.”

  “I heard it with an Italian town.”

  “Fucking and Sucking. The woman in the joke thinks they’re two Japanese cities, that’s it.”

  “Used to send all kinds of expensive presents back.”

  “Has he seen the show at all?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “Once.”

  “How’d he like me?” Jennyanydots asks, and shakes her fanny and switches her tail.

  “These bald guys. All kinds of expensive presents.”

  “She’s a Jewish American Princess. The woman in the joke.”

  “I like it better with an Italian town.”

  “Does he live here in the city?”

  “Or is he some big Texas oilman?”

  “He lives here,” Kate says.

  She is enjoying all this talk about David. Well, not really about David because he is, after all, married and she must be careful. But almost about him. Just talking almost about him is somehow exciting. And somehow, it adds permanance to their … affair, she supposes you could call it.

  A knock sounds on the door.

  “Half-hour,” the stage manager calls.

  When her phone rings at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, she thinks it’s David calling from the Vineyard, and immediately snatches the receiver from its cradle.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “Katie?”

  Her mother.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Has he called you yet?”

  For a moment, Kate believes her mother is prescient.

  How else could she know about David? How else could dear Fiona McIntyre, who’s been using her maiden name ever since the divorce nine years ago …

  “Has he?” she asks again.

  Fiona’s voice, as always, is a subtle cross between an ambulance siren and marmalade. Kate cannot understand how she manages to sound both strident and plaintive at one and the same time, an acquired skill she envies not in the slightest.

  “Who do you mean?” she asks cautiously.

  “Your father,” Fiona says.

  This is the man who used to be “Dad” or “Daddy” until he left his wife and family when Kate was eighteen and Bess was sixteen, running off to Dallas, Texas, from Westport, Connecticut, at which time he became in Fiona’s lexicon “your father,” the unspoken words “the bastard” or “the son of a bitch” tacitly implied by the sneer in her alarmingly honeyed voice.

  “Why should he call me?” Kate asks.

  “He’s in New York,” Fiona says.

  Oh shit, Kate thinks.

  “How do you know?” she asks.

  Fiona knows because her closest friend on earth, a woman named Jill Harrington who lives at the Lombardy on East Sixty-first Street and who visits Fiona whenever she goes to La Costa, called last night to say she’d run into him at Le Cirque …

  “Of course Le Cirque,” Fiona sneers in her jellyhorn voice …

  … with a blonde who was definitely not the horse-faced bitch he ran off to Texas with, lo those many moons ago, gone but not forgotten, as the saying goes.

  “My guess is he’ll be contacting his darling little girl …”

  His darling little girl, Kate thinks.

  “… the moment he gets a few drinks in him. You always were his favorite,” Fiona says thoughtfully, as if she hasn’t said this a hundred times before, always thoughtfully, always as if in discovery.

  Most often in the presence of poor dear Bess.

  Your sister was always your father’s favorite, you know.

  Thoughtfully.

  “I just thought I’d warn you,” Fiona says now.

  “Thanks,” Kate says.

  “How’s everything otherwise?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you still in that show?”

  She’s been in Cats, on and off, for the past ten years now, but her mother still calls it “that show.” Well, this is understandable. Difficult title like Cats. Be different if it were something simpler. Then you could blame her for not taking the trouble to learn the fucking name of the show her daughter is dancing in. Or for having known it and forgotten it.

  “Yes, I’m still in it.”

  Cats, she thinks. It’s called Cats, Mom. C-A …

  “What time is it out there, anyway?” she asks.

  “Seven.”

  “Isn’t that early for you?”

  “I had a bad night.”

  I don’t want to hear it, Kate thinks.

  “Whenever I remember what that son of a bitch did to us,” Fiona starts, and the recitation begins yet another time, a conversation Fiona believes is privileged and therefore welcomed, a conversation Kate knows to be hurtful and therefore loathsome. It took Kate six years in analysis with Dr. Jacqueline Hicks, her dear Jacqueline, to stop hating her father for what he did, though it’s not what her mother thinks he did. Six years to stop hating her mother as well, for constantly reminding Kate of what he did—though, again, it’s not what she thinks he did. But each time Fiona hops on the goddamn treadmill again, Kate starts hating both of them all over again, something she is supposed to have stopped doing a year ago come October.

  One would think that her mother’s so-called friends would refrain from telling her they just ran into Neil Duggan at Le Cirque or McDonald’s or wherever the hell, but no, they keep feeding her rumors like Romans tossing Christians to the lions, delighting in her initial inquisitive reaction and her subsequent tearful tirades—though it is most often Kate who gets the waterworks, as she is getting them now on a Sunday morning when David might be trying to call her collect, as they’d agreed he should do whenever a phone booth presented an opportunity. Why don’t you go cry in church? she thinks. Don’t they have any churches in San Diego? Doesn’t the very name of the town suggest Spanis
h missions all over the place? Why cry all over me, Mom?

  But lest the world forget that she is the only woman in history whose husband left her for another woman, Fiona is relating yet again how Kate’s “father” (the son of a bitch) ruined her life, which makes Kate desperately hungry for a cigarette, as seems always to be the case whenever her mother traps her in one of these labyrinthine monologues. Before Kate started going to Jacqueline, she smoked incessantly, a suicidal habit for anyone, never mind a dancer. Now, listening to her mother, she wants a cigarette again. She wants a whole pack of cigarettes. She wants a whole pack of Camels. She wants to eat a whole pack of Camels.

  “… destroyed all our lives,” Fiona is saying, which of course her father didn’t do. He didn’t destroy her mother’s life, and he didn’t destroy Kate’s, either—even though Kate was his favorite, as if anybody cared who his favorite was, as if anybody now cares who his goddamn favorite is! The promise of him calling, the threat of him calling is enough to cause Kate to break out in a cold sweat, her mother’s earlier words hovering like a swinging scimitar over her head, My guess is he’ll be contacting his darling little girl the moment he gets a few drinks in him. You always were his favorite, her mother’s monologue grinding relentlessly onward …

  “… humiliated me in front of the entire town, Westport was practically a village nine years ago, everyone knew everyone else, especially in our circle, running off with a woman every man in town had known before him, your wonderful father, did he have to pick her, the town slut? Forgive me, Katie, I know you adored him, but what’s right is right, as God is my witness he didn’t have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly, I’ve always tried to be a kind and thoughtful person, he didn’t have to be so mean to us, he didn’t have to abandon us …”