Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

According to Kate, her mother was — and is — a demanding, ungiving, unforgiving bitch who would rather kick a cripple than light a candle in church. “We used to call her Fee the Fair, ” she says, virtually grinding the words out through essentially clenched teeth...

...not only because she was an extravagantly beautiful woman, but also because she was so fucking un fair with the girls, and even with their father (Neil still skulks in the shadows, a figure reluctant to take his proper place on the stage of Kate’s mind), accusing them of plots to thwart her will or topple her carefully organized plans. Bess was the true beauty in the family — with their mother’s red hair and green eyes, of course, which both of them had inherited — but also with a rare sort of radiant inner beauty that shone on her face like something beatific. Maybe this was why Fiona tended to pick on her more often than she did Kate, who, to tell the truth, was a scrawny, skinny kid who looked more like a boy than the girl she was supposed to be... well, he knows that, she’s already told him what she looked like at thirteen. Even so, Kate really was her father’s favorite, as her mother never failed to point out to poor Bess (Neil taking a step closer, into the spotlight, and then retreating swiftly into the shadows again).

“Here, I’ve got it,” David says, and hands her the change for the toll.

Kate rolls down the window, hands the coins over to the collector, and quickly rolls it up again before they both drown. The brief interruption serves as an end to the first act. But when the curtain goes up again after intermission, it is on another scene entirely, perhaps another play entirely.

David wishes they were someplace else, anywhere else, anywhere but inside this claustrophobic car hurtling through the rain. He longs to hold her, kiss the drying tears from her face, comfort her and console her, tell her how much he loves her, promise he will be here to take care of her, she has nothing to worry about, he’s here now. Somehow they make it over the bridge and are heading downtown on the Harlem River Drive. Out on the river tugboats move listlessly through the shifting mist on the water. As Kate sifts sobbingly through the tattered tissue of her memory, the windshield wipers swipe ceaselessly and ineffectively at the rain. He is truly afraid she will crash the car into any one of the vehicles everywhere around them, certain tomorrow’s headline in the Daily News will read LOVERS PERISH IN FLAMES.

Flames.

Flames have suddenly become the thesis of this large-screen, full-color extravaganza. Flames are what now envelop Kate’s sister on a night in August long ago, everything seems to happen to Kate in August, wasn’t it a wet and steamy day in August when she was just thirteen — yes, the theater’s business manager, or accountant, or whatever the hell he was, his small office, yes, her blatant, brazen seduction of her father’s best friend. But the fire is... what? Three years later? And flames are consuming her fourteen-year-old sister as she runs out of the burning house she herself has set on fire. Flames are everywhere, the house, Bess’s gown, her hair, red as fire anyway, redder now with flames that lick and bite at curling crackling strands. Flames are the theme, flames are the plot, flames are the horror. In hot and almost comic pursuit, like a small band of inept Keystone Kops chasing a human torch, Fiona and a shrieking Kate come running across the lawn after her. Bess is yelling, “Let me die, let me burn in hell!” Kate can hardly breathe. Her father suddenly rushes out of the house with a wet sheet trailing from his hand. He chases his younger daughter, tackles her, brings her to the ground, her nightgown in flames, her hair on fire , Jesus, oh Jesus , holds her pinned to the ground as Kate screams “Leave her alone , you son of a bitch!” and Fiona, all wide-eyed and shocked, stands by appalled as Bess repeats over and over again, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned... bless me, Father, for I have sinned... bless me...” He wraps her in the cool wet sheets, the sheets beginning to steam around her, the smell of her scorched and smoldering hair stinking up the August night, the sheets steaming on the humid August night, everything happens in August, August is the cruelest month.

“I almost told Rickie last Wednesday,” she says.

“Told him what?”

“All of it.”

And now young Ricardo Alvaredo Diaz boldly takes the stage, suddenly stepping out to tumultuous applause, grinning at the audience and flexing his muscles, the feathers rippling on the tattooed Indian’s headdress as Kate steers the car off the drive and onto East Ninety-sixth Street.

“Where were you , David?” she asks, turning sharply from the wheel. “Where the hell were you last Wednesday? Doing it to Julia up there on the Vineyard? When you should have been doing it to me? ”

How did this get to be this? he wonders.

All I wanted to do was kiss you.

And who the hell is Julia?

“If you’d been here,” she says, “I wouldn’t have let him,” and suddenly yanks the car over to the curb and throws her arms on the steering wheel, and lowers her head onto them, and begins sobbing uncontrollably.

It is now almost ten A.M. Across the room, Kate is on the couch, the little girl on the Les Miz poster staring sorrowfully into the room from the wall behind her. She has stopped crying. She has taken off the black raincoat and the yellow rain boots, and she is sitting cross-legged in jeans, a white cotton T-shirt, and white socks, the man’s gray fedora still pulled down over her hair. It occurs to him that she covered her hair so that it wouldn’t signal blatantly to the man stalking her. But they are now in her apartment, where she is safe, so why is she still wearing the dumb hat?

He is inordinately, and unprofessionally, angry with her. He is supposed to be a psychiatrist, trained and caring and concerned, but instead he is reacting like a jealous schoolboy. After all she told him in the car, and knowing now the very real trouble this son of a bitch letter-writer has been causing, all he can think of is that last Wednesday she let that kid from the bike shop... the very word infuriates him. Let him. Like kids on a goddamn rooftop. Will you let me, Katie? Sure, Rickie, just let me take off my panties, dear. The Miss Saigon helicopter is waiting to take him out of here, perhaps back to the Vineyard. The cats in the apartment — the real one nuzzling his leg, and the yellow-eyed one in the poster above the sofa, and the green-eyed one sitting on the sofa opposite him, still wearing the goddamn hat — are all waiting for his next move. He’s thinking if she doesn’t give him the right answers, he just might...

The problem is he wants to hold her.

Touch her.

Kiss her.

The problem is he has missed her desperately.

“All right,” he says, “tell me what happened last Wednesday.”

“I don’t wish to discuss it further,” she says.

Then go to hell, he thinks.

“Then why’d you bring it up?” he says.

“Because I wanted to get it out in the open.”

“It’s not in the open yet. Not until I know what happened.”

“What do you think happened?” she asks.

“Just tell me, okay? Was Gloria here, too?”

“No. How’d Gloria get into this?”

“How’d Rickie get into it, is what I want to know.”

“Then why’d you mention Gloria? Can’t you wait to get at her again?”

“Look, Kate, don’t try to shift the goddamn guilt here...”