Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

Her feet are in sandals strapped part of the way up the leg. Her legs are crossed. She is jiggling one foot. Her toenails are polished a green to match the dress; he wonders if she paints them a new color each time she puts on a different outfit. Her perfume conjures visions of tall pale skinny girls rushing across fields of heather and crushing themselves against the chests of extraordinarily tanned and muscular young men. He is sure he has smelled Kate’s perfume on television. He thinks suddenly of Arthur K’s blond, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old sister lying back against the pillows on her bed, skimpy blue robe parted over her short pink nightgown, bare legs showing, and all at once he feels intensely and uncomfortably aware of Kate sitting beside him in the dark as if they are here alone together to watch a pornographic movie.

Fortunately, they are spared the ordeal of having to sit too long through this police cliché, he and Kate both identifying her assailant virtually at once, by sight and also by the sound of his voice when he repeats first the words he’d spoken to her by way of introduction, “Give me the fuckin bike, bitch!” and then the words he’d hurled at David in farewell, “Fuck you!” his vocabulary and his repertoire being somewhat limited. They are out on the street again by a quarter to seven.

“I really appreciate your doing this,” she says.

“I was happy to help.”

“Well, most people wouldn’t have bothered. Thank you. Really.”

“Don’t be silly.”

He feels oddly removed from her all at once.

Last Friday, they shared a traumatic event that forged some sort of tentative bond between them. Today, they shared yet another experience, but now that justice has triumphed, the matter is over and done with, and they are once again strangers in a city of strangers, walking side by side in silence as the hot and humid evening closes in upon them.

“I haven’t got around to your handkerchief yet,” she says.

“Oh, don’t worry about...”

“But I will,” she says, and shrugs. There is something very girlish, almost childlike about the shrug and the small moue that accompanies it, her narrow shoulders rising, her tented mouth pulling into a grimace. There is no lipstick on that mouth. Her green eyes are shadowed with a blue that makes them appear even more green. Her breasts are tiny in the sheer dress. A girl’s breasts. A girl’s tentative nipples puckering the fabric. “I’ll mail it to you as soon as...”

“That isn’t necessary. Really.”

“You saved my life,” she says simply.

“What do you think’ll happen to him?” he asks, and realizes he is merely making conversation; the episode is over, the tentative bond was broken the moment after they made positive identification.

“They’re pretty sure he’ll plead to a lesser offense.”

“Like what?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she says, and shrugs again. “Stealing roller skates?”

David smiles.

“Well, Miss Duggan...” he says.

“Kate,” she says.

They both seem to realize at exactly the same moment that, really, there is nothing more to say.

“Well, Dr. Chapman...” she says.

“David,” he says.

“David,” she says.

There is a very long silence.

“See you around the pool hall,” she says, and walks off.

He doesn’t expect he will ever see her again.

But on Saturday morning, Stanley Beckerman calls.

“I understand we’re both bachelors this weekend,” he says.

“I’ve been meaning to call you...”

David has not , in fact, been meaning to call him, even though Helen has mentioned that Stanley will be alone in the city all this week and next and has suggested it might be “nice” if they had dinner together one night. David doesn’t particularly enjoy Stanley’s company, and Helen knows this. But Stanley’s wife is in Helen’s aerobics class, and the two of them are constantly hatching misbegotten dinner dates far too often, even though Helen knows how David feels about his colleague, such as he is.

Like David, Stanley is a psychiatrist. In fact, he is one of many in the profession who cause David to feel that most psychiatrists are attracted to the practice only because they themselves are crazy. All oblivious to his own nuttiness — “Well, he is a bit eccentric,” Helen concedes — Stanley casually refers to his patients as the “Crazies” or, alternately, the “Loonies,” descriptions David finds appalling. Stanley is about David’s age, perhaps a year or so older, forty-seven or — eight, David guesses, but this is all they have in common, the practice of psychiatry notwithstanding. And whereas David would be content to have the relationship end with their few chance encounters at this or that seminar, Helen and her pal Gerry, bouncing around at Rhoda’s Body-works on East Eighty-sixth and Lex, simply will not be deterred. So here is Dr. Stanley Beckerman now, on a hot Saturday morning in July, calling to say that one of his Loonies has given him two tickets to Cats for tonight’s performance...

“I only saved him from committing suicide,” Stanley says, “the cheap bastard...”

...and would David like to go with him to dinner and the show afterward?

“Dinner will be Dutch, of course,” Stanley says. “The tickets are on me.”

Or on your Loony, actually, David thinks.

He does not know why he accepts the offer.

Perhaps because it is easier to do so than to have to listen to Helen later wondering aloud how he could have been so rude as to turn it down.

Stanley is growing a beard while his wife and kids are in North Carolina for the summer. It is coming in scruffy and patchy, an uneven mix of mostly white, red, and gray hairs, with only a scattering of dark brown hairs that match the thinning, straight hair on his head. He is a short man, overweight to some extent, who wears rimless eyeglasses and a perpetual sneer, as if he knows secrets of the universe he would not reveal upon pain of torture or death. Tonight he is wearing khaki slacks, an altogether rumpled plaid sports jacket, brown loafers without socks, and a white button-down shirt open at the throat, no tie.

By contrast, David, wearing a neatly pressed tropical-weight suit with a pale blue shirt and a striped summer tie, feels absurdly overdressed. But he believes that dressing for the theater still warrants something more elegant than a bowling shirt and blue jeans. Then again, he supposes Stanley thinks he does look elegant. Or, more likely, Stanley doesn’t give a shit how he looks.

What he looks like, in fact, is a beachcomber who’s been washed ashore in far Bombay. Sneering instead like a British regimental commander entering a leper colony, he leads the way into the French restaurant he has chosen without consulting David, even though he has already informed him that they will be splitting the check, perhaps hoping David will insist on paying for both dinners, since, after all, the tickets are on Stanley, hmm?

Stanley has a habit of saying “Hmm?”

The mild query threads his conversation like a bee buzzing in clover, hmm?

Like Jackie Mason, Stanley has imperiously refused the first table offered to them — “Is this a table for a man like me?” — which seemed perfectly okay to David. As they accept another table, David again wonders why in hell he’s here tonight, about to have dinner with a totally obnoxious human being, about to see a musical everybody else in New York has already seen, a show he didn’t even want to see when it first opened because he has no particular affection for human beings pretending to be cats. He has read the Eliot book of poems, of course; he tries to keep up with everything , a hopeless task, in the expectation that a patient’s dream might one day obliquely refer to something, anything, in the common realm. Movies, novels, essays, plays — even a musical like Cats , he supposes — are all grist for his analytic mill, the interpretation of dreams often hinging on obscure references like...