Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

But lest the world forget that she is the only woman in history whose husband left her for another woman, Fiona is relating yet again how Kate’s “father” (the son of a bitch) ruined her life, which makes Kate desperately hungry for a cigarette, as seems always to be the case whenever her mother traps her in one of these labyrinthine monologues. Before Kate started going to Jacqueline, she smoked incessantly, a suicidal habit for anyone , never mind a dancer. Now, listening to her mother, she wants a cigarette again. She wants a whole pack of cigarettes. She wants a whole pack of Camels . She wants to eat a whole pack of Camels.

“...destroyed all our lives,” Fiona is saying, which of course her father didn’t do. He didn’t destroy her mother’s life, and he didn’t destroy Kate’s, either — even though Kate was his favorite, as if anybody cared who his favorite was, as if anybody now cares who his goddamn favorite is! The promise of him calling, the threat of him calling is enough to cause Kate to break out in a cold sweat, her mother’s earlier words hovering like a swinging scimitar over her head, My guess is he’ll be contacting his darling little girl the moment he gets a few drinks in him. You always were his favorite , her mother’s monologue grinding relentlessly onward...

“...humiliated me in front of the entire town, Westport was practically a village nine years ago, everyone knew everyone else, especially in our circle, running off with a woman every man in town had known before him, your wonderful father, did he have to pick her , the town slut? Forgive me, Katie, I know you adored him, but what’s right is right, as God is my witness he didn’t have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly, I’ve always tried to be a kind and thoughtful person, he didn’t have to be so mean to us, he didn’t have to abandon us...”

Her mother goes on for at least half an hour.

By the end of that time, Kate is ready to jump out the window.

“Mom,” she says, “I have to pee. Can we finish this some other time?”

“Sure, some other time,” her mother says, weeping.

“I’ll call you soon.”

“Sure,” her mother says.

“G’bye, Mom. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.”

“Sure.”

Kate hangs up.

Her heart is beating very fast.

He’s in New York, she thinks.

And goes into the bathroom to wash her face.

The phone rings again at a quarter past eleven, just as she’s about to leave the apartment. Her mother consistently tells her she dresses too provocatively, but she doesn’t care what her mother says, she dresses for comfort and she dresses to look attractive, yes, and sexy, yes. She’s an American girl, right? A dancer! Today, because she doesn’t have to be at the theater till one-thirty for the three o’clock show, she plans to check out some of the galleries in SoHo, and is wearing for her outing a short white cotton crochet-knit dress and laced white leather Docksiders. Her immediate thought is that it’s her mother calling back to weep a little more. Her next thought is that it’s her father, God forbid. A minute more and I’d have been out of here, she thinks. Safe, she thinks. But the phone is still ringing. Get out anyway, she thinks. She picks up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“You have a collect call...” a recorded voice says.

“Yes,” she says at once.

“From...”

And then his recorded voice, announcing his name, “David...”

“Yes,” she says.

“Will you accept charges?”

“I will. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“Thank you for using AT&T,” the recorded voice persists, seemingly unwilling to get off the line.

“David?”

“Yes, hi, how are you?”

“Why don’t you come make love to me?” she asks.

“I wish I could.”

“Where are you?”

“In a drugstore. I tried to get you earlier...”

Damn her, Kate thinks.

“...but the line was busy. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I’m counting the days.”

“Me, too.”

“Seventeen, counting today.”

“I know.”

“I’m marking them on my calendar. You are coming, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. I can’t wait. Is there any chance you can come down on the fourteenth instead? Because...”

“I really don’t...”

“...we’re dark on Tuesdays, you know...”

“Yes, but...”

“...and that would give us the whole day together.”

“Well, the way Stanley and I have it worked out...”

“I wish you...”

“...we’ll have the whole day, anyway. Because we’re saying the lectures start that Tuesday night, you see...”

“Wonderful!”

“So I’ll be taking a plane down that morning...”

“I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“That would be great.”

“With a limo again, if you like.”

She hears a sharp intake of breath. There is a sudden silence on the line.

“Kate,” he says abruptly, “I have to...”

“No, please, not yet.”

“I see the kids coming. Really, I have to...”

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” she shouts.

“I love you, too. I’ll call again. I really have to...”

“ Wait! Thanks for all the flowers! They’re beautiful! ”

“What flowers?” he asks.

Before the evening performance on Monday night, the last day of July, a long white box is delivered initially to the Seventh Avenue stage door of the Winter Garden and then to the dressing room two and a half floors above street level. The night-shift doorman breezily walks into a roomful of women in various stages of undress, but he has worked many a Broadway show, m’little darlings, and has seen it all and heard it all. He scarcely bats an eyelash when Kate — in the midst of applying white makeup, a towel over her shoulders, her leotard top lowered to the waist — accepts the box and begins opening it.

They are roses, of course.

But instead of the now-familiar card, there is a sealed envelope in the box. The stock is heavy, it feels expensive, like something she’d find at Tiffany’s or Bergdorf’s. A cream-colored envelope, her name handwritten in purple ink across the face of it.

She had thought at first, when David told her he hadn’t sent the flowers, that perhaps her father was the secret admirer the kids were speculating about. But the handwriting doesn’t appear to be his. She tears open the flap of the envelope. The page inside is of the same color. The same thick stock. The same handwriting in the same purple ink.

Well, not dear Daddy, that’s for sure.

The flowers have stopped.

Now there are the letters.

Three of them are waiting for her at the theater when she gets there on Wednesday night. The same cream-colored stationery. The same purple ink. The same hand.

The postmarks all read New York, New York, August 1 .

Today is the second day of August.

The envelopes are marked sequentially, the handwritten numerals on their separate faces. She feels an odd sense of dread as she starts opening the first envelope. Someone across the room — Kate’s head is bent as she tears open the flap of the envelope, and she can’t be sure who it is — someone calls, “No flowers today, Kate?”