Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“Yes, that’s it, Susan.”

“If you have any questions about custody, I suggest you call my lawyer. I’m busy right now, and I—”

“I have no intention of calling that mealymouthed shyster you—”

“I’m sure Eliot McLaughlin would enjoy knowing you think of him as a mealymouthed shyster.”

“He already knows it. This has nothing to do with custody, Susan. You had Joanna for Easter, and you’ll have her again for Christmas. I get her for Thanksgiving. And I’m taking her to Mexico with me, period.”

“Not if the redhead goes with you.”

“If by the redhead—”

“You know exactly who I mean.”

“Are you referring to Dale O’Brien?”

“Oh, is that her name? And here I thought Dale was a man’s name.”

“Susan, cut it out.”

“Cut what out?”

“This bullshit about Dale.”

“I certainly hope you don’t use that kind of language in Joanna’s presence. It’s bad enough—”

“I’m trying to tell you there’s no legal way you can prevent me from taking her any damn place I want to take her!”

“No? How about corrupting the morals of a minor?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Taking a fourteen-year-old to Mexico, where you’ll be living in sin with—”

“Living in sin ? Come on, Susan, this isn’t the Middle—”

“What do you call it, Matthew? You’ll be in the same house with Joanna and what ever her name is—”

“Her name is Dale O’Brien.”

“For four days, isn’t that what Joanna told me? Four days in Sam Thorn’s cozy little villa, with you in one bedroom screwing your brains out with the redhead while across the hall Joanna—”

“What I do in private has nothing to—”

“Public is more like it.”

“There are four bedrooms in the villa. Joanna will have her own—”

“How kind of Sam to provide such luxurious surroundings for you and your little bimbo.”

“This must be the Middle Ages! I haven’t heard the word bimbo since—”

“What would you prefer calling her, Matthew?”

“What do you call Arthur Butler?”

“What ever I call Arthur is between—”

“Where will you be sleeping with him this weekend?”

“Wher ever we’ll be sleeping is none of your business. And besides, Joanna won’t be with us.”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“I said who says Joanna won’t be with you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean I’m taking her home to you right this minute. Back to your custody , darling. So you can protect her rectitude .”

“What?”

“I said—”

“You told me she could stay with you this weekend.”

“That was before you started pulling all this stuff about Mexico. Will you be there for the next ten minutes or so? I wouldn’t want Joanna coming home to an empty house. Might not look too good when I challenge your custody.”

“What?”

“Let me spell it out for you, Susan. One, we’re divorced. I don’t like being dragged into your personal life, and I wish to hell you’d keep out of mine. Two, I don’t enjoy these screaming contests on the telephone. Anger is a form of intimacy, and I don’t want to be intimate with you. And lastly, you’ve got a choice. Either Joanna goes with me to Mexico next week, just as she’s supposed to, or else I take her back to you as soon as I hang up, and you can decide then whether you want to stay home this weekend or take her to Tampa with you, where you’ll be ‘living in sin,’ as you choose to call it, with a man named Arthur Butler, an act the courts might consider unfit behavior for a woman who has custody of a fourteen-year-old.”

“This is blackmail,” Susan said.

“Nonetheless, what’s your answer? Does she come to Mexico with me, or to Tampa with you? Or do you stay right here in Calusa this weekend? I’m sure your friend can find someone to take those football tickets off his—”

“You are a son of a bitch,” she said.

“Decide, Susan.”

“Take her to Mexico.”

“Thank you.”

“A rotten son of a bitch,” she said, and hung up.

I felt as if I’d just successfully pleaded a case before the Supreme Court of the land.

Oddly and surprisingly, it was my daughter Joanna who helped me make up my mind about George N. Harper. Her reaction to the news that her mother had “reconsidered” the stand she’d taken on Mexico was completely ecstatic, but she fell almost immediately into a blue funk that indicated to me she had something more important on her mind. I have learned over the years that it’s never wise to pry when Joanna is mulling a problem. If she wants to tell me about it, if she wants my advice or my solace, she’ll eventually spill it all out, often quite suddenly, as she did that night after dinner.

In Calusa, the temperatures at night sometimes drop alarmingly, even in the best of months. November is not one of the better months, although we’d been blessed these past few weeks with benign temperatures and sunny skies while my partner Frank’s pals back in New York were suffering through ten-below-zero temperatures. The house was chilly tonight. I had set fire to one of those fake logs you buy in a drugstore, and I was pouring myself a cognac when Joanna said, without preamble, “Do you think Heather is a slut?”

For a moment, I had difficulty remembering just who Heather was. Ever since Joanna first entered nursery school, there had been a constant parade of young girls in the house, all of them with chic, sophisticated names like Kim, Darcy, Greer, Alyce (with a y ), Candace, Erica, Stacey, Crystal, and yes, Heather. I sometimes wondered what had happened to all those good old-fashioned names like Mary, Jean, Joan, Nancy, Alice (with an i ), and Betty.

“Heather?” I said.

“Yeah, Heather.”

I dimly recalled a plump little girl with mousy brown hair and dark brown eyes who — at the age of six, anyway — had an alarming habit of bursting into tears whenever she was supposed to spend the night at our house. I could not reconcile this sobbing little tyke with the image Joanna’s word had conjured: a slut was somebody who stood on a street corner in Frank’s beloved New York City, swinging a satin handbag, skirt slit to her thigh, winking at passing strangers and asking them if they’d like to have a good time.

“Everybody’s saying she’s a slut,” Joanna said.

“Who’s everybody?”

“Everybody.”

In Joanna’s lexicon, “everybody” meant all the girls in the eighth grade.

“Do you think she is?” I asked.

“Well, she may be fooling around a little, but who cares? So’s everybody else.”

In Joanna’s lexicon, “fooling around” meant being intimate with a member of the opposite sex; “everybody else” meant a handful of girls who were precocious.

“Not me,” she said quickly, and grinned, and then became immediately sober again. “That’s not the point,” she said, “whether she is or she isn’t. I just don’t like them saying she is without knowing for sure, I mean.”

“Is she a close friend of yours?”

“No, not close.”

“But a friend?”

“Not even a friend, really. I mean, I know her to say hello to, that’s all. I mean, she’s not a very attractive person, Dad. She’s fat, and... well, she’s sort of dumb for a place like Saint Mark’s, which is pretty hard to get into, even if it isn’t Bedloe. And her language... well, she curses a lot, even more than any of the other girls do — that’s normal for Saint Mark’s, cursing a lot, the whole ‘shit, piss, cunt, fuck’ routine, you know? But Heather really goes over board with it, like she’s trying to prove how mature she is, you know what I mean?”