Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

On and oh the titles come, relentlessly rolling upward on the screen of his mind, flashback and fast-forward combined, each successive photograph and remembered word fortifying the knowledge that the relationship was almost entirely a product of her own making, a reconstruction, a restaging, as she’d put it, of an unresolved childhood trauma.

But as he reviews, in effect, the story line of this film, as he plays the end titles over and over again in his mind, he realizes at last that perhaps he was the true victim here, that any red-blooded American male, for example, would have succumbed to the temptation of a young and beautiful redheaded dancer who supplied him with yet another eager young girl, woman, in her twenties...

Gloria is black and Gloria is long and supple and Gloria has sloe eyes and a voluptuous mouth and Gloria is wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and a gold chain that is wrapped around her waist several times...

...and promised him in the bargain even more opulently erotic adventures, perhaps even with countless other twentysomething Asian girls from Miss Saigon...

So who in this star-studded cast can cast the first stone, truly?

He did send those letters off, didn’t he? A happily married man taking an enormous risk. Did in fact take the letters to the FedEx office on Eighty-sixth Street...

In one of the few end-title photographs of David alone, he is seen at the branch office counter, addressing the package and paying for its delivery in cash. Over the photograph of him looking intent and deliberate, the dialogue reads:

The last photograph shows Kate and David sitting on a green park bench as mist rolls in off a narrow path. Her head is bent, she is weeping. He is sitting beside her attentively, the very image of a concerned physician. The superimposed dialogue reads:

The music swells. The mist rises to envelop the bench and the figures sitting frozen in time upon it, obliterating them at last until the entire frame is a shifting swirl of pure, innocent, blameless white.

Take me...

Make me...

Yours.

And the movie ends.

And so does the summer.

Arthur K has bought a new automobile. He proudly describes it to David, even shows him pictures of it from the catalog. It is a Camaro like the one his sister was driving when she got killed, though not in the same color. He plans to go to the Motor Vehicle Bureau to apply for a new driver’s license. He tells David that he has begun dating a young girl who looks a lot the way Veronica did when she was sixteen.

Susan M no longer needs to plan her wardrobe weeks in advance. She now limits her scheduling to a mere three days, the first three days of the week, and she does her planning for those days over the weekend. This leaves Thursday and Friday free of any compulsive activity. Over Christmas, she plans to visit her mother in Omaha. By then, she hopes she will not have to plan her wardrobe ahead at all.

Today is the sixteenth day of October.

David hopes she will make it.

Alex J has fallen in love with the Puerto Rican girl he followed home from the subway again last Tuesday night. He has actually made contact with her. He has approached her on the street, and introduced himself, and told her he found her quite extraordinarily beautiful. And despite the wife and three children he adores, he has asked if she would like to go to a movie with him one night. Tonight is that night.

As Alex describes her, his face is rapturous.

Moreover, he feels quite proud of himself, having approached this gorgeous “Latina,” as she prefers calling herself, in a neighborhood where everyone looked like a dope dealer who would slit his throat for a nickel, and there he was talking to one of their women for Christ’s sake, “Don’t you think that took balls?” he asks David.

David remains noncommittal.

“Well, fuck you,” Alex J says. “ I think it did.”

The kids have already watched their Disney fare and are upstairs asleep. The rented movie David and Helen are watching is about a couple going through a very stormy divorce.

“Do you want to watch the rest of this?” she asks.

“Not particularly,” he says, and hits the STOP button on the remote control unit. He turns off the television set. The room is suddenly very still.

“Do you believe people really fall in love that way?” Helen asks.

“What way?”

“The way the man and woman in the movie do?”

“I suppose.”

“I mean, meeting cute that way. In a rainstorm. Sharing an umbrella.”

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter how people meet,” he says. “ You were sitting on a park bench when I met you.”

“Yes,” she says thoughtfully. “But in movies, they’re always strangers , did you notice? Why don’t people who know each other ever fall in love?”

“Well, they do, I guess.”

“In movies, I mean.”

“In movies, too.”

“No, in movies it’s always strangers.”

“Well, I guess strangers are more interesting.”

“I think two people who know each other could be interesting, too. Finding out more about each other, you know? Learning things they didn’t know about each other.”

“Well, nobody says movies have to be true to life.”

“Only life has to be true to life,” she says.

He turns to look at her.

She takes a deep breath.

“David,” she says, “I’m in love with Harry Daitch.”

He keeps looking at her.

“And he’s in love with me,” she says.

“I see.”

“Yes.”

“When... ah... did all this happen?” he hears himself saying.

This is a movie, he thinks.

“Well...” she says. “I guess you know that Harry and Danielle were having trouble for a long time... well, you’ve seen him at parties with his hands all over women...”

I haven’t seen him with his hands all over you , David thinks, but that’s yet another movie.

“...which, of course, was a clear signal that he wasn’t too terribly happy with her, otherwise he wouldn’t have been fooling around, would he?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Well, men don’t fool around with other women unless they’re unhappy at home. That’s a basic fact of marriage, David.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. I’m sure you know that, a psychiatrist. In any event, we got to talking one night on the deck of his house, and I began to realize... I’d always considered him nothing but a womanizer, you see...”

Gee, I wonder why, David thinks.

“...but that night... this was in July sometime, there was a full moon, I remember. You were in the city, David, this was during the week sometime. Anyway, I discovered that night that Harry was truly a very sad person with depth and sensitivity... he writes poetry, you know...”

To you? David wonders.

“...which is unusual for a lawyer, whom one usually expects to be rather stiff...”

Great word, David thinks.

“...and unyielding, rather than... well... romantic and adventurous. In any event, one thing led to another...”

To make a long story short, David thinks.

“...and by the time you went into the city for your August seminar, I guess it was, we... well... we realized we were in love.”