Эд Макбейн - Privileged Conversation

Well, for example, the one that had come up during a session with Alice L, who’d related a terrifying dream of water rushing through a sluice, totally mystifying until David recalled that such a gate was called a penstock, and lo and behold, one association led to another until the penstock became Guess What, and the rush of water became her husband’s premature Guess What, live and learn, my oh my.

If David’s three o’clock patient — a man named Harold G, who’s been complaining about his itchy balls for the past three sessions, and who, David guesses, is afraid he may have caught some dread disease from the black prostitutes David suspects he’s been frequenting — were to come in next Monday afternoon to disclose a dream about Jellicle Cats and Jellicle Balls, would this not in some way relate to his thus far unrevealed fears? David doesn’t expect this will really happen — Harold G may be the only other person in New York who hasn’t yet seen Cats — but if it did, wouldn’t he be justified in surmising a reference to Eliot’s descriptions of Jellicle Cats as white and black, black and white, and didn’t Jellicle cross-rhyme with testicle, after all, and isn’t a jig mentioned in the poem... well, a gavotte, too... but jig is certainly slang for...

“...skirt up to here,” Stanley is saying. “Sits across from me with half her ass showing, how am I supposed to take that , hmm? If I were a less principled man, Dave...”

No one ever calls David “Dave.”

“...I would most certainly take advantage of the situation. I’m only human, after all...”

A matter for debate, David thinks.

“...mere flesh and blood, hmm? What would you do in a similar circumstance?”

“I would remind myself that I’m supposed to be a doctor,” David says, sounding prim even to himself.

“You haven’t seen this girl,” Stanley says.

“Her appearance has...”

“ Or her pussy,” Stanley says.

Which comment, David hopes, will serve as a segue to the subject matter of the musical they’re about to see together.

“Sits there like Sharon Stone,” Stanley says relentlessly, “legs wide open, no panties. What looks good to you?” he asks, and picks up the menu.

David is happy for the respite.

But Stanley seems determined to pursue the matter further. Standing on Broadway outside the Winter Garden Theater with its banners proclaiming in black and white CATS NOW AND FOREVER, as if anything but cockroaches can be forever, and its three-sheets with the big yellow cat eyes in which the pupils are formed by dancing figures, David finds his mind wandering again as Stanley begins describing in detail the patient he is certain is trying to seduce him.

This is a particularly unattractive location for a theater, lacking all of the showbiz hubbub of the marquee-lined side streets west of Broadway. Instead, the theater is adjacent to a Japanese restaurant whose austere front looks singularly uninviting. Furthermore, it stands directly opposite a tall black featureless office building across the avenue, and faces diagonally to the northwest a similarly unattractive red brick Novatel Hotel with a Beefsteak Charlie’s restaurant on its street level. The sidewalk outside the theater is packed with an inelegant crowd all dressed up for Saturday night, probably bussed in from New Jersey. Most of them are smoking. David always takes this as a sign of lower-class ignorance, although Stanley himself is smoking and he is a man with many years of education and training who was raised in a home with a geneticist mother and a college-professor father.

Smoking his brains out, he tells David — while assorted New Jersey theater-partygoers crane ears in their direction — that Cindy, for this now turns out to be her name, has been dressing more and more provocatively for each of their sessions, coming in just yesterday...

“I swear to God this is the truth, Dave, I wouldn’t be telling you this if you weren’t my closest friend...”

...wearing the short mini Stanley has earlier described, no panties under it, and a flimsy little top that shows everything God gave her...

“And believe me, Dave, God gave her plenty. She is overabundantly endowed, I would give my soul to rest my weary head between those voluptuous jugs...”

And here a man smoking a vile cigar turns toward Stanley in open interest.

“...if only I weren’t such a dedicated healer,” he says, and smiles like a shark surfacing to devour a hapless swimmer. “What do you think I should do, Dave?”

“See a shrink,” David says.

“Just between us...” Stanley says.

Privileged conversation, David supposes.

“...I think I’ll fuck her.”

And the man from New Jersey almost drops his cigar.

The show starts with pairs of white lights blinking in the onstage dark and spilling over to enwrap the audience beyond the proscenium arch. It takes David a moment or two to realize that all those blinking white lights are supposed to be the eyes of cats shining in the dark. The lights, or the cat eyes, all suddenly wink out, to be replaced by strings of red lights that only faintly illuminate the garbage-dump stage. These resemble the lights strung on a Christmas tree. David wonders why Christmas-tree lights are strung all over a garbage dump and why they are all red. While he is trying to figure this out, someone in the audience lets out a gasp and then begins laughing. David realizes it is because human beings dressed as cats are now crawling on all fours down the aisles and through a two- or three-row gap deliberately left between the row ahead and the row in which he and Stanley are seated.

These are very good seats, even though Stanley has labeled as a “cheap bastard” the suicidal patient who gave them to him. They are, in fact, house seats, Stanley’s patient being not only a cheap bastard, but also a friend of one of the show’s wardrobe supervisors, a job that has to be monumental judging from the elaborate costumes on the twenty or thirty feline humans now gathering in midnight conclave on the stage. The seats are so good, in fact, that one of the marauding cats prowls to within a foot of where David is sitting in seat K102, directly at the intersection of the center aisle and the gap between the rows, and peers directly and somewhat unnervingly into his face before crawling away again to scamper onto the stage.

On the stage now, something cylindrical in shape and lighted all over its underside begins rising from the floor like the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind , to what purpose David, clever analyst that he is, cannot immediately discern. The assembled cats — for David realizes at once that he must begin thinking of these crawling, creeping, back-arching, furry, fake-tailed humans as cats if the show is to have any credibility at all — begin singing an introductory number titled “The Naming of Cats,” which seems taken entirely from the Eliot poem of the same title, but which is an ill-conceived notion since the names spilling from the stage in full choral unison are cutesy-poo names like Mungojerrie and Skimbleshanks and Jennyanydots and Bombalurina, names no cat-lover in the universe would ever foist upon any self-respecting feline. The cat he and Helen had owned was named simply Sheba, an honorable name harking back to King Solomon’s time, ultimately killed by a Doberman appropriately named Max, the Nazi bastard.

All of these preposterous cat names seemed okay, if undeniably cute, on the printed page. But here, being belted by twenty-four, twenty-five people in cat makeup and cat costumes, they are virtually incomprehensible, followed as they are by a number titled “The Invitation to the Jellicle Ball,” which repeats the word jellicle over and over again, to the utter mystification of anyone unfamiliar with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats , a rather cutesy-poo title in itself, Eliot should have stuck to Prufrock.