Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

“I don’t.”

“Good. Because you don’t have to worry about me, I know you’re married. In fact, I’m glad you didn’t tell her about that shrink in Boston. Because then she’d be suspicious, and I don’t want her ever finding out about us.”

“I’m glad, too. She’d have left in a minute. And for what? A meaningless one-night...”

“Am I a meaningless one-night stand?”

“This is our second night,” he says.

“I’d better not be meaningless,” she says, and kisses him fiercely, biting his lip, and then pulls her face back, and stares into his eyes again as unblinkingly as a cat, and bares her teeth an instant before biting him again. She is straddling him an instant after that, sliding onto him warm and wet and demanding, and an instant later he comes inside her.

I was intoxicated, delirious, crazed, depraved, call it whatever you like .

I don’t care what you call it .

His nine o’clock patient has just left the office.

David dials the number at the Menemsha cottage and listens to it ringing, four, five, six times, and is about to hang up, relieved, when Annie picks up the phone.

“Chapman residence,” she says in her piping little voice, “good morning.”

“Yes, may I please speak to Miss Anne Chapman?” he says, disguising his voice so that he sounds like a rather pompous British barrister.

“This is Miss Chapman,” Annie says solemnly.

“Miss Chapman, you have just inherited a million pounds from your aunt in Devonshire.”

“A million pounds of what?” Annie asks.

David bursts out laughing.

“Is that you , Dad?” she asks.

“That’s me,” he says, still laughing.

“A million pounds of what? ” she insists.

“Feathers,” he says.

“I’m busy eating,” she says. “Did you want Mom? She’s still in bed.”

“Wake her up, it’s five to ten.”

“When are you coming up here?”

“I told you. Friday night.”

“We’ll have lobster,” Annie says, and abruptly puts down the phone.

When Helen picks up the extension upstairs, she sounds fuzzy with sleep.

“Hullo?” she says.

“What are you doing in bed?” he asks.

“I know what I wish I was doing in bed.”

“Late night?”

“Oh sure, a drunken brawl. I was in bed by ten, but I just couldn’t fall asleep. When are you coming up here?”

“Must be an echo in this place.”

“Everybody misses you.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Me,” she says.

“I have to lay out my clothes in advance, or I’d never get dressed,” Susan M is saying. “You know that, I’ve told you that a hundred times already.”

She is one of David’s so-called Couches, a twenty-four-year-old “obsessive-compulsive,” or “obsessional neurotic” — you pays your money and you takes your choice unless you happen to suffer from a disorder where choice seems obstinately denied.

Susan M has been suffering from her disorder for the past three years now. Her disorder was what forced her to drop out of college. Her disorder is what brings her here twice a week, to discuss over and over again the ritual that keeps at bay her personal hounds of hell.

What Susan M does, compulsively, is lay out in advance the clothing she will be wearing for the next two weeks. Every flat surface in her apartment — tables, chairs, countertops, floors — is covered with the neatly folded garments she will wear on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on, this week and next week, each careful little stack labeled with a note naming the day and date. Two weeks ago today, Susan M knew what she would be wearing to this ten o’clock session on Wednesday morning, the nineteenth day of July. She knows, too, what she will be wearing on Wednesday of next week. She has told David she will be wearing the blue shirtdress with a red leather belt and red French-heeled shoes. Her bra and panties will be white. That is the uniform of the day for the twenty-sixth of July, a day before David’s forty-sixth birthday.

Susan M doesn’t know this. She knows scarcely anything about David, except that he listens patiently behind her while she details her lists, frequently planning her wardrobe aloud, well in advance of actually laying it out in her apartment. Counting the hours she spends talking it over with David — “I don’t really need blue underwear with the blue dress, do I? I mean, it’s still summertime” — she will often have her wardrobe planned three weeks in advance of when she actually will be wearing it.

“You lay out your clothes, don’t you? Everybody I know decides in advance what he or she is going to wear to work tomorrow, or to school tomorrow, or to a party that night, or even to bed that night. My mother always made sure I wore clean panties to school because a person never could tell when she’d get run over by a car and have to be taken to the hospital. A clean bra, too, when I got old enough to wear one. I was very big for my age... well, that’s obvious, I guess... I started developing at the age of twelve, very early on, I had to watch what I wore, the boys could be so cruel, you know. What bothers me is why I should be so concerned about performing a simple act everyone else in the world performs. Why should I worry so much that if I don’t get it right , something terrible will happen?”

Silence.

She has said this before.

She knows she has said it before.

“Look,” she says, “I know this is all in my head , why the hell else am I here? I know my mother’s not really going to die if my shoes don’t match my bag next Friday or whenever the hell. She’s in Omaha, how’s she going to die if I don’t have everything laid out? What is this, voodoo or something? Which thank God I do know — what I’m going to wear next Friday, I mean — because I wouldn’t want that on my conscience, believe me. The white sandals with the white leather sling bag I bought at Barneys and the white mini and white tube, a regular virgin bride, right? That’s next Friday, I’m pretty sure it is, anyway. I have the list here if you don’t mind my checking it, I’d like to check it if you don’t mind.”

She sits up immediately, not turning to look at him, embarrassed by this behavior she knows to be irrational but is unable to control, digging into her handbag, green to match the green slippers she’s wearing, and locating her Month-At-A-Glance calendar into which she relentlessly lists all her wardrobe schedules. Still not looking at him, she says, “Yes, here it is, Friday the twenty-first, white bag, white sandals, yep, all of it’s right here, I guess you won’t get hit by a bus, Mom,” and laughs in embarrassment at her own absurdity and then lies back down again and sighs in such helpless despair that she almost breaks David’s heart.

She falls silent for the remainder of the hour.

When at last he mentions quietly that their time is up, she rises, nods, and says, “I know I’ve got to get over this.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and nods, and sighs heavily again. “So we’re back to the regular schedule now, right? Until August first, anyway.”

“Right,” he says.

“So I’ll see you on Friday, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Same time, right?”

“Yes, same time.”

She seems more anxious when she leaves his office than she did when she came in this morning.

He is not at all sure that she will get over this.

He tries Kate’s number several times that day.

The voice on her answering machine chirps, “Hi. At the beep, please.”