Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

“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 around 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.