Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

Let it come down, he thinks.

First Murderer. Macbeth.

He has done something like this... well, not really like this... only once before in all the time he’s been married, just that once in Boston... well, not anything like this, in fact nothing at all like this. In fact, he cannot recall ever having been this excited by any woman he’s ever known, not Helen, not any of the girls he’d known before he met Helen...

“Do I really excite you?”

“You know you do.”

“I want to excite you. Is that her name? Helen?”

“My wife, yes. Helen.”

Saying her name in this room. Saying it aloud where he has just made love to a passionate woman not his wife, whose arms are still around him.

“My mother almost named me Helen,” she says.

“You’re joking.”

“No, no. Helen was my grandmother’s name. She almost named me after her. Does your wife excite you the way I do? Does Helen excite you this way? Say.”

“No.”

Murderers, he thinks. We are both murderers here.

“Did this woman you met in Boston...?”

“No, certainly not her. No one. Ever.”

“That’s because I love you,” she says. “More than any woman you’ve ever known.”

“No, you don’t love me,” he says.

She can’t love me, he thinks.

“Wanna bet?” she asks, and kisses him again.

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 .

She breaks away breathlessly. They are lying on her bed, naked, and whereas they’d made love not ten minutes ago, he feels again the faint stirrings of renewed desire as she gently lifts her mouth from his, their lips clinging for an instant, stickily, the taste of his own semen on her lips, parting. She looks deep into his eyes, her face inches from his, and says, “Tell me all about your woman in Boston. What were you doing in Boston?”

“There was a convention up there. Of psychiatrists. The American Psychiatric Association.”

“Was she a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God, another shrink!”

“Yeah.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“Not very.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know, this was seven years ago.”

“Well, you must know how old you were.”

“I guess I turned thirty-nine that July.”

“Midlife Crisis,” she says at once.

“Maybe.”

“Fear of Forty,” she says.

“Maybe.”

“Incidentally, I have a great title for Erica Jong’s next book.”

“Tell me.”

“ Sex at Sixty . How old was she?”

“Who, Erica?”

“Sure, Erica. Your bimbo in Boston.”

“She wasn’t a bimbo. She was just this lonely woman...”

“This shrink , you mean. God, she wasn’t Jacqueline Hicks , was she?”

“No, no.”

“You almost gave me a heart attack. If she’d turned out to be Jacqueline... well, it couldn’t have been her because you said she wasn’t beautiful. I think Jacqueline is very beautiful, don’t you?”

“I never noticed.”

“Is that the truth?”

“That’s the truth.”

“I love Jacqueline. I was really crazy when I started going to her, you know. She really helped me a lot. I’m glad it wasn’t her you fucked in Boston.”

“No, it was just a woman who... found me attractive, I guess.”

“You are attractive.”

“Thank you, but I wasn’t fishing.”

“I love your looks.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you love my looks? And I am fishing.”

“I adore the way you look.”

“Do you like my being a redhead?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like my being red down here, too?”

“Yes.”

“I used to hate it. I was shocked to death the first time I saw a girl with red pubic hair.”

“When was that?”

“In the locker room at school. I was eleven, I had nothing down there at all. This was an upperclassman. Woman. Person. An eighteen-year-old girl . She had red hair, too, on her head, I mean, much redder than mine. Seeing her naked scared hell out of me. I thought, Jesus, is that what I’m going to look like when I grow up? Those great big tits and that flaming red hair down there, Jesus! I never did get the tits, as you can see, but I sure as hell got the rest. This is my summer trim. You should see it when it runs rampant. It’s like a forest fire. Tell me about your Boston shrink.”

“There’s not much to tell. We met at one of the seminars, and discovered we were both from New York...”

“Both married...”

“Yes, both married.”

“How did I know that?”

“Maybe because I told you she was lonely,” he says, and wonders why such an association would have come to mind. “Anyway...”

“Are you lonely?” she asks at once.

“I may have been back then.”

“How about now?”

“No.”

“Then why did you start up with me?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, we had dinner together, I forget who asked who to dinner...”

“ Whom . And I asked you to dinner, don’t forget,” she says. “And lunch , too. Don’t ever forget that. I was the one who wanted you, ” she says, and kisses him again.

Her kisses make him dizzy.

Her hand drops to his naked thigh, rests there, the fingers widespread.

She pulls her mouth from his.

Looks into his face again.

“Tell me,” she says.

“We ended up in her room,” he says, and shrugs. “She wanted to be in her own room, in case her husband called.”

“Did he call?”

“No.”

“Did your wife call? Helen? Did she call your room?”

“No.”

“Did you stay the whole night with her?”

“No.”

“Was it good?”

“Yes.”

“Better than me?”

“No one’s better than you.”

“Mmm, sweet,” she says, and her hand moves onto him. “Did you ever see her again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I felt too guilty.”

“Do you feel guilty now?”

“No.”

“Good,” she says, and gives him a friendly little squeeze.

“I almost told Helen about her,” he says. “When I got back home.”

“Don’t ever tell her about me, ” she says, and squeezes him again, hard this time, in warning.

“I was glad in the long run. If I’d told her, it would have meant the end of our marriage. We had just the one child then, Jenny. Annie wasn’t even on the horizon. If I’d told her...”

“You have two children, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Two little girls.”

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Six and nine.”

“Annie, you said?”

“And Jenny.”

“Jennyanydots,” she says at once. “Put the names together...”

“Yes, I guess they do, come to think of it.”

“Oh, no question. Jennyanydots. That’s one of the cats in the show.”

“I know.”

“So you’re how old? If you were thirty-nine...”

“I’ll be forty-six this month.”

“Oh? When?”

“The twenty-seventh.”

“We’ll have a party. Do you believe in fate?”

“No.”

“I think we were fated.”

“Then I believe in it.”

“I’m not Glenn Close, by the way.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“I mean, I’m not going to boil Annie’s pet rabbit or anything.”

“She doesn’t have a pet rabbit.”

“Or Jenny’s. Or anybody’s, anydots. This isn’t Hollywood, there isn’t just one plot in the entire world, you know. Oh, it’s Fatal Attraction , I get it! But with a psychiatrist and a dancer, right? Wroooong! This isn’t that at all. If you think that’s what this is...”