Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

“Yeah, who died?” one of the singer-swings asks.

“I hate the smell of roses.”

“I hate the smell of all flowers.”

“Some flowers have no scent at all, ” Jellylorum says. “Did you know that?”

“Good.”

“How many does this make, four?”

“Three.”

“In sequence though.”

“Five dollars a rose, they get nowadays,” the other singer-swing says.

“Four.”

“Not in Grand Central.”

“Long-stemmed roses? Five dollars. Grand Central, wherever.”

“Who is this guy, anyway?”

“A friend,” Kate says shyly.

“Meaning he’s married.”

“Sounds possessed. Three performances in a row? ”

Across the room, one of the dancers throws an ankle up onto her dressing table. Bending from the waist, leaning into the leg, stretching, she says, “I heard the kids in Oh! Calcutta! used to get all kinds of expensive gifts.”

“That was centuries ago.”

“Also, they were dancing nude.”

“That was during the days of the Holy Roman Empire.”

“The Pilobolus company still dances nude.”

“So does the Netherlands.”

“Maguy Marin, too.”

“It wasn’t just the nudity. Calcutta was a dirty show.”

“It was even dirtier when it first opened.”

“How would you know?”

“My mother told me. They had a scene where one of the girls goes down on a flashlight.”

“Your mother told you that?”

“Well, I think she put it a little differently.”

“ My mother thinks fellatio is a little town in Italy.”

“That’s not how the joke goes.”

“How does it go?”

“I’m not sure, but that’s not it.”

“Does this guy come to every show?”

“No,” Kate says.

“Just sends flowers, huh?”

“Every performance of Calcutta , there used to be a dozen bald heads in the third row. Same guys every show.”

“It’s two Japanese towns. The joke.”

“I heard it with an Italian town.”

“Fucking and Sucking. The woman in the joke thinks they’re two Japanese cities , that’s it.”

“Used to send all kinds of expensive presents back.”

“Has he seen the show at all? ”

“Oh yes.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

“How’d he like me? ” Jennyanydots asks, and shakes her fanny and switches her tail.

“These bald guys. All kinds of expensive presents.”

“She’s a Jewish American Princess. The woman in the joke.”

“I like it better with an Italian town.”

“Does he live here in the city?”

“Or is he some big Texas oilman?”

“He lives here,” Kate says.

She is enjoying all this talk about David. Well, not really about David because he is, after all, married and she must be careful. But almost about him. Just talking almost about him is somehow exciting. And somehow, it adds permanance to their... affair, she supposes you could call it.

A knock sounds on the door.

“Half-hour,” the stage manager calls.

When her phone rings at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, she thinks it’s David calling from the Vineyard, and immediately snatches the receiver from its cradle.

“Hello?” she says.

“Katie?”

Her mother.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Has he called you yet?”

For a moment, Kate believes her mother is prescient.

How else could she know about David? How else could dear Fiona McIntyre, who’s been using her maiden name ever since the divorce nine years ago...

“Has he?” she asks again.

Fiona’s voice, as always, is a subtle cross between an ambulance siren and marmalade. Kate cannot understand how she manages to sound both strident and plaintive at one and the same time, an acquired skill she envies not in the slightest.

“Who do you mean?” she asks cautiously.

“Your father,” Fiona says.

This is the man who used to be “Dad” or “Daddy” until he left his wife and family when Kate was eighteen and Bess was sixteen, running off to Dallas, Texas, from Westport, Connecticut, at which time he became in Fiona’s lexicon “your father,” the unspoken words “the bastard” or “the son of a bitch” tacitly implied by the sneer in her alarmingly honeyed voice.

“Why should he call me?” Kate asks.

“He’s in New York,” Fiona says.

Oh shit, Kate thinks.

“How do you know?” she asks.

Fiona knows because her closest friend on earth, a woman named Jill Harrington who lives at the Lombardy on East Sixty-first Street and who visits Fiona whenever she goes to La Costa, called last night to say she’d run into him at Le Cirque...

“Of course Le Cirque,” Fiona sneers in her jellyhorn voice...

...with a blonde who was definitely not the horse-faced bitch he ran off to Texas with, lo those many moons ago, gone but not forgotten, as the saying goes.

“My guess is he’ll be contacting his darling little girl...”

His darling little girl, Kate thinks.

“...the moment he gets a few drinks in him. You always were his favorite,” Fiona says thoughtfully, as if she hasn’t said this a hundred times before, always thoughtfully, always as if in discovery.

Most often in the presence of poor dear Bess.

Your sister was always your father’s favorite, you know .

Thoughtfully.

“I just thought I’d warn you,” Fiona says now.

“Thanks,” Kate says.

“How’s everything otherwise?”

“Fine.”

“Are you still in that show?”

She’s been in Cats , on and off, for the past ten years now, but her mother still calls it “that show.” Well, this is understandable. Difficult title like Cats . Be different if it were something simpler. Then you could blame her for not taking the trouble to learn the fucking name of the show her daughter is dancing in. Or for having known it and forgotten it.

“Yes, I’m still in it.”

Cats , she thinks. It’s called Cats , Mom. C-A...

“What time is it out there, anyway?” she asks.

“Seven.”

“Isn’t that early for you?”

“I had a bad night.”

I don’t want to hear it, Kate thinks.

“Whenever I remember what that son of a bitch did to us,” Fiona starts, and the recitation begins yet another time, a conversation Fiona believes is privileged and therefore welcomed, a conversation Kate knows to be hurtful and therefore loathsome. It took Kate six years in analysis with Dr. Jacqueline Hicks, her dear Jacqueline, to stop hating her father for what he did, though it’s not what her mother thinks he did. Six years to stop hating her mother as well, for constantly reminding Kate of what he did — though, again, it’s not what she thinks he did. But each time Fiona hops on the goddamn treadmill again, Kate starts hating both of them all over again, something she is supposed to have stopped doing a year ago come October.

One would think that her mother’s so-called friends would refrain from telling her they just ran into Neil Duggan at Le Cirque or McDonald’s or wher ever the hell, but no, they keep feeding her rumors like Romans tossing Christians to the lions, delighting in her initial inquisitive reaction and her subsequent tearful tirades — though it is most often Kate who gets the waterworks, as she is getting them now on a Sunday morning when David might be trying to call her collect, as they’d agreed he should do whenever a phone booth presented an opportunity. Why don’t you go cry in church? she thinks. Don’t they have any churches in San Diego? Doesn’t the very name of the town suggest Spanish missions all over the place? Why cry all over me , Mom?