Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

She rises from the couch now, as if the memory of that steamy day in August is too much for her to bear sitting still and erect on a black leather couch, rises and begins pacing his office, the pleated skirt swirling about her long legs as she walks back and forth before his desk, turning at opposite ends of the short course her long strides define, the skirt swirling, swirling. She is a dancer, she was a dancer even back then, surely she realizes that her abrupt turns are causing the short skirt to billow about her legs, to expose above the taut black stockings a wider expanse of white thigh each time — and yes! There! A glimpse of the now world-famous bicycle-shop white panties, not the black ones she promised on the phone, but plain white panties instead, girlish cotton panties more appropriate to the schoolgirl uniform, similar to the panties she was wearing on that dripping wet day in August when she was thirteen and she slipped down the stairs to his office wearing, yes, white panties, yes, under her habitual cutoff jeans and a thin white cotton T-shirt that had the words WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE printed across its nipple-puckered front.

He is sitting at his desk, bald head bent over the ledger spread open before him. A narrow window is on the short wall opposite the door, and rain beats steadily in a widening street-level puddle just outside of it, droplets of water splashing up onto the glass. A lamp with a green shade illuminates the yellow ledger and his bald head bent over it. Suddenly a flash of lightning turns the horizontal window glaringly blue, and there is immediate thunder in the parking lot outside. He glances up toward the window, shaking his head in awe, and then turns back to his books again. He does not yet know she is in the office. They have never been alone together in this room with the door shut. She eases the door shut behind her. He looks up when he hears the click of the lock as she turns the bolt.

“Katie?” he says.

She goes to his desk, stands in front of him where he sits in his swivel chair with his books spread before him, and takes the hem of her T-shirt in both hands and lifts it above her tiny adolescent breasts and outrageously stiff nipples.

“Kiss them,” she whispers.

He says, “Katie, what...?”

“Kiss them.”

“Your father...”

“Yes, do it.”

He kisses her repeatedly all that rainy afternoon — well, at least for an hour on that rainy afternoon, his hands tight on her tight buttocks in the tight cutoffs, which she refuses to remove despite his constant pleadings — and he repeatedly kisses her nipples and blossoming breasts all through the next week, while proclaiming terrible feelings of guilt for betraying his wife, and the week after that while telling her he shouldn’t be doing this to his best friend’s teenage daughter, he feels so guilty doing this, and the week after that while telling her he himself has a daughter her age, how can he be doing this, is he crazy? He goes even crazier when one day at the beginning of September with russet leaves drifting onto the parking lot she unzips the cutoffs for him, and removes them, and lowers her white cotton panties, and sits on his desk before him and spreads her russet self wide to him, and allows him to bury his bald head between her legs and to lick her there until she experiences a thunderous orgasm for the very first time in her life.

Abruptly, she stops pacing.

Her eyes meet David’s again.

She nods knowingly, and walks to him where he sits in his chair behind his desk, and she unbuttons the white cotton blouse button by button until it is hanging open over her breasts. Standing between his spread legs, she moves into him, and pulls his head into her breasts, and says, “Kiss them.” And while he kisses her feverishly, she reaches under the short pleated skirt and pulls the white cotton panties down over her waist and her thighs, slides them down over her long legs in the tight black stockings, and then sits on the desk before him and spreads her legs to him as she did to Charlie long ago, and whispers, “Yes, do it.”

On Saturday morning, Helen drives Jenny into Vineyard Haven to shop for new sneakers, which Jenny says she desperately needs if she is not to become “a social outcast,” her exact words. It is a cloudy, windy day but David and Annie are walking the beach together nonetheless. He is wearing a green windbreaker; Annie is in a yellow rain slicker and sou’wester tied under her chin. Her cheeks are shiny red from the cold, and the wind is causing her eyes to water. She and David are both barefoot, although it is really too chilly for that, the sand clammy and cold to the touch. Still, they plod along hand in hand. The water looks gray today, streaked with angry white crests.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Annie says.

“What is it you don’t get?”

“How do astronauts pee?”

“Astro—?”

“I mean, where do they pee, actually? When they’re walking on the moon in those suits, I mean.”

“I guess they have a tube or something.”

“The girls, too?”

“I really don’t know, honey.”

“That really bothers me,” Annie says, and looks up at him. “Cause everybody’s always asking me do I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Anybody who comes to the house. Grown-ups. First they say How are you today, Annie? and I say I’m fine, thanks, and then they say Are you looking forward to going back to school in September? and I say Well, it’s still only July , you know, and they say Do you like school? and I say Oh yeah, tons, and that’s when they ask me what I want to be when I grow up.”

“I guess they’re just interested in you, Annie.”

“Why should they care what I want to be when I grow up? Suppose I don’t want to be anything when I grow up? I sure don’t want to be president of the United States , which is something else they always ask. Are your feet cold?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we go back to the house and make a fire and roast marshmallows?” she says. “Before Jenny and Mom get back, okay?”

“Why don’t I just carry you back to the house,” he says, and scoops her up into his arms. “So your feet won’t get any colder, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, grinning. Her head against his shoulder, she asks, “Do I have to be an astronaut, Dad?”

“You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” he says.

“Cause I sure wouldn’t like peeing in a tube,” she says.

He hugs her closer, shielding her from the wind.

A woman at the dinner party that night is telling them it is the end of the criminal justice system as they’ve known it. “Never again will a black man in this country be convicted of a felony,” she says. “All the defense has to do is make sure there’s at least one person of color on the jury. That’s it. A hung jury each and every time. Check it out.”

She is a quite pretty brunette who looks too young to be an attorney, but apparently she is a litigator with a Wall Street firm. Harry Daitch, who is hosting the party with his wife, Danielle, is a lawyer himself and he debates the brunette furiously, but with a smile on his face, contending that justice has nothing to do with racial sympathies, and maintaining that recent verdicts were anomalies rather than true indicators. This is while they are all having cocktails on the deck, under a sky still surly and gray. A black maid is serving hors d’oeuvres. She pretends to be deaf, dumb and blind as the sun sinks below the horizon without a trace.

At dinner, Fred Coswell, who with his wife, Margaret is renting the house next door to Helen and David, mentions that David was in a situation not too long ago — “Do you remember telling us, David?” — where some black kid stole a bicycle from a girl in Central Park.