Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

On the phone early Monday morning, he tells Helen that shortly after he’d spoken to her yesterday he’d gone over to the crafts fair on Amsterdam Avenue, where he’d eaten his way serendipitously from food stand to food stand.

“I didn’t see anything I wanted to buy,” he says, “not even for the kids. I went over to the office afterward, to study some notes I’d made, and then I went back to the apartment and took a nap before dinner.”

“Did you eat in?”

“No, I went to a place over on the West Side,” he says, and names the restaurant where he and Kate had brunch.

“The West Side again? ” Helen asks, surprised. “How come?”

“There was a movie I wanted to see over there.”

“Oh? What movie?”

The Arts & Leisure section of yesterday’s Times is open before him on the desk in what they both laughingly call “the study,” a room that had been a butler’s pantry at one time, but which they converted into a windowless office when they bought the apartment. He has circled with a felt-tipped pen a foreign movie playing at the Angelika 57, and has underlined the time of the screening that would have got him home sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty, which was when he had got home, eleven-twenty to be exact, he’d looked at the kitchen clock when he walked in. He reels off the name of the movie casually now, tells her it wasn’t all that good, and is starting to ask how the kids are, when Helen says, “I was wondering why you didn’t call.”

“I thought you’d be asleep,” he says. “I didn’t get home till eleven-twenty.”

Which was the God’s honest truth.

“Actually, I was still awake,” she says.

“I didn’t want to risk...”

“I was worried. I hadn’t heard from you all day.”

“Honey, I spoke to you...”

“I meant after that.”

“I’m sorry, I was just on the go all...”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry, really.”

“Did you call Stanley to thank him for the evening?” she asks, abruptly changing the subject.

“Do you think I should? He let me pay for dinner, you know. Even though he said we’d be going Dutch.”

“Yes, but the tickets came to more than that, didn’t they?”

“Honey, the tickets were free . A patient gave him the tickets.”

“Even so.”

“Well, I’ll see. I really don’t like to get into conversations with him, Helen. I really don’t like the man.”

“Well...” she says, and lets the rest of the sentence trail.

“How’re the kids?” he asks.

“Fine. Well, I’m not sure. Annie may be coming down with something.”

“What do you mean?”

“She has the sniffles. I kept her out of the water yesterday, and she got very cranky. Well, you know Annie.”

“Tell her I love her.”

“Tell her yourself,” Helen says, and shouts, “Annie! Jenny! It’s Dad!”

Annie is the first one to come on the line.

“Mom wouldn’t let me go in the water yesterday,” she says.

“That’s cause your nose is running.”

“No, it isn’t. Not now , it isn’t.”

“That’s because Mom wouldn’t let you go in the water.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you got all better.”

“Sure, Dad. When are you coming up here?”

“Friday.”

“Jenny has a boyfriend.”

“I do not!” Jenny screams in the background, and snatches the phone away from her. “Dad? I do not have a boyfriend. Don’t listen to her.”

“How are you, sweetie?”

“I’m fine, but I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m going to kill you, I swear to God!” she shouts.

“You can plead temporary insanity,” David says. “I’ll testify on your behalf.”

Jenny begins giggling.

Annie grabs the phone from her.

“Why is she laughing?”

“She’s temporarily insane,” David says.

“Permanently,” Annie says, and bursts out laughing at her own sophisticated joke.

“Let me talk to Mom.”

“Bye, Dad, I love you, see you Friday!” Annie shouts.

Jenny grabs the phone from her.

“Bye, Dad, I love you,” she echoes. “See you Friday!”

“Love you, too, honey. Put Mom back on.”

“What was all that about?” Helen asks.

“Temporary insanity,” he says. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Why, you want to take me out?”

“I wish.”

“I’m going to dinner at the McNeills’.”

“Who’s baby-sitting?”

“Hilda.”

“She’s not the one with the wooden leg, is she?”

“Oh, come on , David, we haven’t used her in years! ” she says, laughing.

“Remember the time she lifted her skirt to show the kids that leg?” he asks, laughing with her.

“Oh dear,” she says.

Their laughter trails.

“What time will you be home tonight?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Ten, ten-thirty.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow morning then,” he says.

“Not too early, please.”

“After my nine o’clock, okay?”

“Yes, good.”

“Give my love.”

“I will. I miss you, David.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I love you, darling.”

“I love you, too.”

The week drags by in sullen torpor.

Kate does not call him that Monday or on Tuesday or Wednesday, and he does not try to reach her. He endures the sweltering city like a penitent monk wearing a hair shirt, relieved when the entire week passes without a word from her. On Friday, he goes up to the Vineyard again, and somehow manages to look Helen in the eye, turning aside the dual knowledge of having betrayed her and lied to her afterward. By the time he flies back to the city on Sunday night, whatever happened between him and Kate seems to have happened in a past as distant as the one Arthur K continuously relates, its details already fuzzy, its parameters defined by a vague memory of impetuous madness.

“...like a dream,” Arthur K is telling him. “I don’t know where I am in the dream, I don’t know who it is I’m with, there’s just this beautiful girl whose tongue is in my mouth, I don’t know who she is, her kisses are driving me crazy.”

It is almost one-thirty on this hot Tuesday afternoon. After his disclosures early last week, Arthur K has been unwilling to touch with a ten-foot pole — so to speak — his memory of what happened on his sister’s bed that night long ago. His reluctance has persisted until today. Today, he is entrusting David with the true memory of what happened, never mind the drawn curtains, never mind the screens. Arthur K is at last facing the truth.

“I know she’s my sister, of course,” Arthur K says, “I mean I’m not a fool, I know she’s my sister — or at least I know it now . What I’m saying is I didn’t know it then , when I was feeling her up. I mean, this was just a girl there on the bed with me, not my sister, does that make any sense to you? I’m not trying to make excuses here, I’m just trying to explain that I was seventeen years old and this was a very beautiful girl here whose breast I was touching, and she was suddenly reaching for my cock, and right then I didn’t care if she was my sister or my aunt or my mother or my grandmother or who ever the hell. I was intoxicated, delirious, crazed, depraved, call it whatever you like. I don’t care what you call it. I almost came in my pants when she reached over to turn off the light, my hands were all over her by then, inside her robe, under her nightgown, oh God I was crazy with wanting her. 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. If you ask me did I know she was my sister, I would have to say yes. At some point in time, I realized I was fucking my own sister.”