Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“In what I’ve never told anyone else in the world.”

“Yes... certainly.”

“I love my work,” Lipscombe said.

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s what I’ve never told anyone else in the world.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Love it,” Lipscombe said. “Do you love yours?”

“Yes. I do. Yes.”

“I knew you would.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Because our work is similar, you see.”

“Similar? Photography and psychiatry?”

“Voyeurs,” Lipscombe said.

“Ah.”

“We’re both voyeurs.”

“Ah.”

“You look in a viewfinder, I look into somebody’s mind. All day long they tell me stories, Jamie. I sit in my big leather chair, with my hands folded over my belly, and they lie on the couch looking up at the ceiling and they tell me stories. It’s like going to the movies every day but Sunday. My job is like going to the movies, can you beat a job like that? I close my eyes and listen to their voices, and I see the motion pictures they’ve produced for me, all these wonderful movies they’ve written and directed and are starring in for me. What’s even better, most of the movies are pornographic.

“I sit there with my hands on my belly, and a patient tells me how she’s cheating on her husband by running downstairs every morning the minute he’s gone, to apartment 3C on the floor below, where a bachelor is living, she runs down every morning the minute her husband leaves for work and she sucks this guy off while he’s eating his cornflakes, can you believe it? She tells me this, and I see the movie in my mind. I hear the cornflakes crunching, I hear the zipper as she pulls it down, I hear her slurping around on his cock, a movie.”

In the tiny movie that appeared in the rear-view mirror, Jamie saw Joanna step out through the door of Mandelbaum’s building, hesitate for a moment under the awning, look up the street and down the street, first toward Madison, and then toward Park where she spotted the Corvette and began moving swiftly toward it. She was wearing purple that clashed violently with the overhead green of the awning as she stepped out like a filly breaking from the gate, long legs flashing, trotting rather close to the brick wall of the building as though wanting to stay on the inside rail, and then sidestepping toward the curb in a quick glide, thirty seconds away from the car, twenty seconds, ten seconds, in an instant she would open the door and trip over Lipscombe.

He lost her in the rear-view mirror.

He caught his breath, jerked his head sharply to the right, and saw her gliding past the automobile, high heels clicking on the pavement, purple slacks and short purple coat, blond hair caught in a streaming purple scarf, not so much a glance at the car she knew so well — she had spotted Lipscombe.

Jamie let out his breath.

“Or sometimes,” Lipscombe said, “they’ll tell me dreams or fantasies that are even more marvelous than the true stories, the work of a Fellini or a Bergman, for example, as compared to the shlock shit of a Brooks or an Altman — passions exploding in colors unimaginable, described to me in Technicolor brilliance, the senses heightened. I can smell the musk, I can taste the juices, I can hear the pounding of a heart in the stillness of the theater of my mind.”

Silence.

Lazily, Lipscombe looked at his watch.

“I’d better get upstairs,” he said. “I have a patient at two.”

“They should charge you,” Jamie said, and smiled.

“Hmh?”

“Admission.”

“Oh. Yes,” Lipscombe said and, chuckling, opened the car door. “But don’t suggest it to them.”

“I won’t,” Jamie said, chuckling himself. He looked toward Park Avenue. Joanna in full purple sail was crossing the street against the light, glancing toward the Corvette to see if Jamie’s visitor was still in it. A Cadillac honked its horn at her and then almost ran her down, the son of a bitch!

“... saw you on Ninety-sixth Street,” Lipscombe said.

“What?” Jamie said.

“I won’t tell Connie I saw you on Ninety-sixth Street.”

Jamie looked at him.

“She may think you’re seeing a shrink on the sly,” Lipscombe said, and winked, and slammed the door shut.

Jamie’s heart was pounding.

He watched Lipscombe go into his building, tempted to follow him, make sure he got on the goddamn elevator. Instead, he alternated his attention from the doorway to the steady progress of Joanna approaching on the opposite side of the street. She stopped just across from his car, looked to make sure the visitor was truly gone, and then crossed against traffic again, dodging cars until she reached the safety of the curb. Yanking open the door, she said at once, “Who was that?”

“Lipscombe.”

“Who?”

“The Rutledge shrink.”

“Oh, my God!” Joanna said.

At a party that Friday night, in the center of a circle of men and women, Frank Lipscombe began holding forth on adultery and its effects on marriages of long-standing. It was the doctor’s learned opinion that middle age was a particularly dangerous time for the survival of marriages that had until then “weathered the storms of conviviality,” especially during this very confusing epoch when the young people of America were setting examples that seemed to encourage every fantasy entertained by any male beyond the age of forty.

“Who among the men here,” Lipscombe asked, “has not been tempted by the sight of nubile nipples puckering naked beneath paper-thin T-shirts? Who among us...?”

“Oh, Frank, be serious,” his wife said.

“I wish I were being less serious,” Lipscombe said, a faintly offended look on his bearded face. “Who among us has not considered the thought of flight to a commune, no more catching of the commuter train at eight-oh-seven, no more mortgages to worry about, or tax bills or fuel bills, or kids to send through college...”

“Well, there’s the crux of it,” Jeff Landers said, clearing his throat. “Once the kids are gone, the tendency is to relax a little, loosen the restraints of the moral code, consider entertaining the fantasies that...”

“Precisely my point,” Lipscombe said.

“Well, maybe that’s the way men begin feeling when their children go off to school,” Diana Blair said, “but I don’t think women get the urge to wander, or even begin to consider entertaining...”

“Yes, their fantasies,” Lipscombe said.

“I just don’t think so,” Diana said, and smiled.

“Well, perhaps the inclination toward straying is strongest in the male,” Lipscombe conceded, and here he glanced at Jamie with what seemed more than casual interest. “And in the case of the middle-aged man who’s been married half his lifetime and who can hardly be considered a novice in the field of connubial stress, we’ve got to assume that before embarking on a philandering course he has taken into consideration the risks involved and the possibility that a marriage of considerable duration may be severely undermined should the relationship with the intruder force—”

“The what?” Diana asked.

“The intruder force.”

“Oh.”

“Should the relationship with the intruder force become something more than casual and in fact assume dimensions that might eventually destroy the existing marriage.”

“Oh,” Diana said again.

“In short, the middle-aged man can be forgiven for ogling the pair of teeny-bopper tits thrust at him by every highway hitchhiker he passes — and excuse me, ladies, if you have teenage daughters, as I know some of you have — and can be forgiven further for assuming these young ladies are not entirely blameless for arousing...”