Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

The third time he hears it, he wants to strangle the machine.

He knows she had a performance this afternoon, and further knows she has to be at the theater again by six-thirty tonight, she has explained all this to him. Kate’s makeup isn’t as intricate as what some of the other cats wear, but it nonetheless takes her a full half hour to do her face and another twenty minutes to get into costume. She spends the rest of the time before curtain stretching and warming up; a dancer can really hurt herself, she’s told him, if she goes on cold. Half-hour is at seven-thirty. Fifteen is at a quarter to eight. Five is five minutes before curtain, and then it’s show time, folks. He tries her apartment again at ten to six, immediately after his last patient leaves the office, and again at six sharp, on the walk home from his office, from a pay phone on Lex. He gets the same damn brief chirpy message each time. To get to the theater by six-thirty, Kate will have to leave her apartment by six-ten at the very latest. He calls from another pay phone at five past, and gets the same infuriating message again. Frustrated, he realizes he will not be able to talk to her until she gets home later tonight.

If she gets home.

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” Stanley is telling him, even though he is the one who called David to say he simply had to talk to him. The two men have eaten dinner in a Turkish restaurant on Second Avenue, and now they are strolling along like two old men in the park, a bit flat-footed, their hands behind their backs, though they are not in any park, and David certainly doesn’t think of himself as old, either. Not now, anyway. Not anymore.

Kate has promised him a party on his forty-sixth birthday.

It occurs to him that she doesn’t yet know he’ll be leaving for Martha’s Vineyard the day after that.

Or that he’ll be gone the entire month of August.

The night is sticky and hot.

The heat has driven everyone outdoors, and the avenue is thronged with pedestrians. Somehow, the city seems softer and safer tonight. At sidewalk tables outside colorfully lighted restaurants, diners seem engaged in spirited conversation, and there is laughter and a sense of gaiety and old world sophistication here on the privileged Upper East Side where for a little while the entire world is strung with Japanese lanterns and everyone is sipping French champagne and dipping Russian caviar and Vienna waltzes float dizzily on the still summer night.

He supposes he’s in love with her.

“I think I’m in love with her, hmm?” Stanley says. “This is ridiculous, I know. For Christ’s sake, Dave, she’s only nineteen years old, if she were a little younger I’d go to jail. I’m a doctor! I’m her psychiatrist! ”

Although I don’t even know her, David thinks.

How can I love someone I don’t even know?

“I couldn’t believe we were doing it right on the office couch,” Stanley says. “I’m so ashamed of myself.”

He does not, in all truth, appear terribly ashamed of himself. He is, in fact, beaming from ear to ear as he makes this admission, wearing tonight the same beachcomber outfit he wore to Cats , but perhaps it’s the only good beachcomber outfit he owns. The same khaki slacks, and rumpled plaid sports jacket, the same brown loafers without socks again, the same white button-down shirt open at the throat, no tie. David is positive it’s the same shirt because there are still stains on it from the duckling à l’orange Stanley ordered that night. His beard has grown several thousandths of an inch since then, but it is still an unsightly tangle of hairs of another color. His grin appears in these incipient whiskers like a flasher opening a raincoat; Stanley is proud of the fact that he seduced a nineteen-year-old patient on his office couch.

“I leave for Hatteras on the twenty-ninth,” he says now, the smile vanishing to be replaced by what he supposes is a look of abject sorrow but which comes across as a clown’s painted-on mask of tragedy, the mouth downturned, the eyes grief-stricken. “I haven’t told her yet. I don’t think she knows that psychiatrists take the month of August off, I don’t think she’s read the Judith Rossner novel.”

Has Kate read the Rossner novel? David wonders.

“I don’t know how to tell her,” Stanley says.

But haven’t you already told all your patients? David wonders. Haven’t you been preparing them all along for the traumatic month-long separation to come, more than a month, actually, since sessions won’t begin again till the day after Labor Day, the fifth of September?

I have to tell Kate, he thinks.

“I don’t want to go,” Stanley says. “If I can find some excuse to stay in the city, I’d do it in a minute, hmm? Can you imagine being on my own here for an entire month, no patients to worry about, Gerry way the hell down there in North Carolina, just me and Cindy Harris...”

Might as well break all the rules of the profession while you’re at it, Stan.

“...rollicking in the hay up here? Oh God, I’d give my life for that. A whole month with her? More than a month? I’d give my left testicle .”

The men fall silent for several moments. The swirl of pedestrian traffic engulfs them. A buzz of conversation hovers on the thick summer air, snatches of words and phrases floating past as they move silently through the crowd. David is wondering whether it would, in fact, be possible to find some reason to stay in the city during the month of August... well, certainly not the entire month, but perhaps part of the month... no patients to worry about, just him and...

And realizes that Stanley is undoubtedly wondering the same thing.

And wonders how there’s any difference, really, between the two of them.

“Would you be willing to alibi me?” Stanley asks.

“Alibi you? What do you mean?”

“If I said, for example, that I had to come down for a conference or something. A seminar, for example. Whatever.”

“I don’t think I could...”

“Because I know I can’t stay here the whole damn month, Dave. I’m just looking for an excuse to come up for a week or so, hmm? Even two, three days.”

“Stanley, there are no conferences in August.”

“We could invent one. Or a seminar. Something.”

“I don’t think...”

“A series of lectures. Anything.”

“Stanley...”

“Somebody visiting from England or wherever the hell. Australia. Some big psychiatrist taking advantage of his summer vacation.”

“It’s winter in Australia.”

“Wherever. He’s here by invitation, France, wherever. They take August off in France, don’t they?”

“Well, yes, but...”

“Italy maybe. He’s from Italy. They take August off there, too, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“There are psychiatrists in Italy, maybe this one is a big shot who’s been invited here to speak to a select group of people, hmm? You, me, a handful of other shrinks Gerry doesn’t know. Helen, either, I guess. If it’s going to work. I mean, if you’re willing to alibi me, that is. It would have to be people neither of them know. The lecturer could be giving...”

“Stanley, really, I couldn’t possibly...”

“...a series of lectures, who the hell knows where?” Stanley says, stroking his scraggly beard and narrowing his eyes like Fagin about to send his little gangsters out to pick pockets. “Let’s say they start in the middle of the week, hmm, the lectures, a Wednesday night, let’s say, and they continue through Friday night, three lectures in all, I’ve seen plenty of programs like that, I don’t think something like that would sound too far-fetched. That would make it reasonable to come up on the Tuesday before and stay till Saturday morning. Four full days and nights with her, Jesus, I’d take a suite at the Plaza, I swear to God, fuck her every hour on the hour, go back down to Hatteras on Saturday morning. I think that would work , you know? I honestly think it would work , Dave. But only if...”