Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “I thought you’d be asleep,” he says. “I didn’t get home till eleven-twenty.”

  Which was the God’s honest truth.

  “Actually, I was still awake,” she says.

  “I didn’t want to risk …”

  “I was worried. I hadn’t heard from you all day.”

  “Honey, I spoke to you …”

  “I meant after that.”

  “I’m sorry, I was just on the go all …”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry, really.”

  “Did you call Stanley to thank him for the evening?” she asks, abruptly changing the subject.

  “Do you think I should? He let me pay for dinner, you know. Even though he said we’d be going Dutch.”

  “Yes, but the tickets came to more than that, didn’t they?”

  “Honey, the tickets were free. A patient gave him the tickets.”

  “Even so.”

  “Well, I’ll see. I really don’t like to get into conversations with him, Helen. I really don’t like the man.”

  “Well …” she says, and lets the rest of the sentence trail.

  “How’re the kids?” he asks.

  “Fine. Well, I’m not sure. Annie may be coming down with something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She has the sniffles. I kept her out of the water yesterday, and she got very cranky. Well, you know Annie.”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  “Tell her yourself,” Helen says, and shouts, “Annie! Jenny! It’s Dad!”

  Annie is the first one to come on the line.

  “Mom wouldn’t let me go in the water yesterday,” she says.

  “That’s cause your nose is running.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not now, it isn’t.”

  “That’s because Mom wouldn’t let you go in the water.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you got all better.”

  “Sure, Dad. When are you coming up here?”

  “Friday.”

  “Jenny has a boyfriend.”

  “I do not!” Jenny screams in the background, and snatches the phone away from her. “Dad? I do not have a boyfriend. Don’t listen to her.”

  “How are you, sweetie?”

  “I’m fine, but I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m going to kill you, I swear to God!” she shouts.

  “You can plead temporary insanity,” David says. “I’ll testify on your behalf.”

  Jenny begins giggling.

  Annie grabs the phone from her.

  “Why is she laughing?”

  “She’s temporarily insane,” David says.

  “Permanently,” Annie says, and bursts out laughing at her own sophisticated joke.

  “Let me talk to Mom.”

  “Bye, Dad, I love you, see you Friday!” Annie shouts.

  Jenny grabs the phone from her.

  “Bye, Dad, I love you,” she echoes. “See you Friday!”

  “Love you, too, honey. Put Mom back on.”

  “What was all that about?” Helen asks.

  “Temporary insanity,” he says. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Why, you want to take me out?”

  “I wish.”

  “I’m going to dinner at the McNeills’.”

  “Who’s baby-sitting?”

  “Hilda.”

  “She’s not the one with the wooden leg, is she?”

  “Oh, come on, David, we haven’t used her in years!” she says, laughing.

  “Remember the time she lifted her skirt to show the kids that leg?” he asks, laughing with her.

  “Oh dear,” she says.

  Their laughter trails.

  “What time will you be home tonight?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Ten, ten-thirty.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow morning then,” he says.

  “Not too early, please.”

  “After my nine o’clock, okay?”

  “Yes, good.”

  “Give my love.”

  “I will. I miss you, David.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “I love you, darling.”

  “I love you, too.”

  The week drags by in sullen torpor.

  Kate does not call him that Monday or on Tuesday or Wednesday, and he does not try to reach her. He endures the sweltering city like a penitent monk wearing a hair shirt, relieved when the entire week passes without a word from her. On Friday, he goes up to the Vineyard again, and somehow manages to look Helen in the eye, turning aside the dual knowledge of having betrayed her and lied to her afterward. By the time he flies back to the city on Sunday night, whatever happened between him and Kate seems to have happened in a past as distant as the one Arthur K continuously relates, its details already fuzzy, its parameters defined by a vague memory of impetuous madness.

  2: Tuesday, July 18–Friday, July 28

  “… like a dream,” Arthur K is telling him. “I don’t know where I am in the dream, I don’t know who it is I’m with, there’s just this beautiful girl whose tongue is in my mouth, I don’t know who she is, her kisses are driving me crazy.”

  It is almost one-thirty on this hot Tuesday afternoon. After his disclosures early last week, Arthur K has been unwilling to touch with a ten-foot pole—so to speak—his memory of what happened on his sister’s bed that night long ago. His reluctance has persisted until today. Today, he is entrusting David with the true memory of what happened, never mind the drawn curtains, never mind the screens. Arthur K is at last facing the truth.

  “I know she’s my sister, of course,” Arthur K says, “I mean I’m not a fool, I know she’s my sister—or at least I know it now. What I’m saying is I didn’t know it then, when I was feeling her up. I mean, this was just a girl there on the bed with me, not my sister, does that make any sense to you? I’m not trying to make excuses here, I’m just trying to explain that I was seventeen years old and this was a very beautiful girl here whose breast I was touching, and she was suddenly reaching for my cock, and right then I didn’t care if she was my sister or my aunt or my mother or my grandmother or whoever the hell. I was intoxicated, delirious, crazed, depraved, call it whatever you like. I don’t care what you call it. I almost came in my pants when she reached over to turn off the light, my hands were all over her by then, inside her robe, under her nightgown, oh God I was crazy with wanting her. And all at once it was dark, and in the dark she could have been anyone, in the dark she was opening her robe and spreading her legs, warm and wet and pulling me into her. If you ask me did I know she was my sister, I would have to say yes. At some point in time, I realized I was fucking my own sister.”

  She calls at exactly ten minutes to two. Arthur K is barely out of the office when the phone rings. David’s heart begins beating faster the instant he hears her voice.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Well …”

  “I know you did. How are you?”

  “Good.”

  “Me, too. What are you doing?”

  “My one o’clock patient just left.”

  “That’s what I figured. The show’s dark tonight. Can you meet me? For dinner or whatever? My treat, I owe you one.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that,” he says.

  “But do you want to?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” he says at once.

  “I’ll pick a nice quiet place,” she says. “I realize you’re married.”

  The restaurant she’s chosen is a small Thai newcomer on Eighty-fifth Street, between First and Second Avenues, virtually equidistant from his office on Ninety-sixth and the apartment on Seventy-fourth. There are perhaps eight tables in the place, a bit too crowded for the comfort of a soon-to-be-forty-six-year-old married man sitting with a beautiful young redhead virtually half his age, who paints her fingernails and toenails in colors to complement her clothes, and who’s told him on t
he phone that the service here is very fast and they should be out in less than an hour, “which’ll give us plenty of time afterward.” But the place is dimly lighted and hung with beaded curtains that somewhat shield the tables one from another, and moreover he doubts that any of his friends or acquaintances would choose this pleasantly unimpressive spot for a seven o’clock Tuesday night dinner on the Upper East Side.

  The restaurant does not serve liquor. They have both ordered white wine and they sit now, sipping it, waiting for their food to arrive. The pale gold of the chardonnay echoes the outfit she is wearing this evening, a wheat-colored mesh linen vest with a sort of sarong skirt in crinkled silk with a sheer leaf print that matches the color of her nail polish.

  “What color are they in the show?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your nails.”

  “Oh. A sort of pearly white. But they’re fake, I put them on before each performance. Because they have to look very long and curvy, like claws, you know. We unsheathe our claws and bare our teeth a lot in that show. And hiss like cats, you may have noticed. Such bullshit,” she says, and sips at the wine.

  He is beginning to feel his first real sense of remorse for what he’s done and is about to do, and yet he knows he will go ahead with it, anyway, knows without question that he and Kate will make love again tonight. This restaurant, the food which now comes steaming on heaped platters, the idle chatter they make, all of this is really just vamping till ready, a social exercise that denies the true purpose of why they are meeting again.

  He tries to assuage the guilt by telling himself it was she who initiated this evening—just as she’d initiated their Sunday afternoon encounter, by the way—that it was she who called today, nine days later, to invite him to dinner or whatever, “My treat, I owe you one,” which certainly seems to indicate that she’s feeling some of the same things he himself is feeling right this moment, though he can’t imagine why she should be interested in him, this young and beautiful girl, this far too beautiful woman.

  But she does indeed seem interested in mild-mannered, bespectacled Clark Kent sitting here all suntanned, wearing a casual blue blazer and gray slacks, white shirt open at the throat, blue socks and loafers. Perhaps she knows he has a Superman erection in his pants, caused by the knowledge of what they are going to do the moment they get out of this opium den—“The service there is very fast. We should be out in less than an hour, which’ll give us plenty of time afterward,” his heart leaping when she’d said those words.

  Temporary insanity, he thinks.

  Oh, yes, he can understand Arthur K quite well, he has been trained to understand people like Arthur K. But presumably, he’s been trained to understand his own feelings as well—how many goddamn years of analysis?—and he cannot now fathom why he is jeopardizing so much, lying to Helen, putting himself at risk by perhaps one day having to defend the lie, thereby escalating the deception and, yes, putting the marriage at risk, yes, jeopardizing the marriage. And for what? What he felt two Sundays ago, what he feels now, has nothing to do with love, he is not so foolish or naive as to believe he is in love with this girl. This woman. Two Sundays ago, that was not lovemaking, that was plain and simple fucking, and not so simple at that, pretty fancy at times, in fact. And that is what it will be tonight. And that is what he wants. He is here because that is what he wants. That is all he wants. As the incestuous Arthur K put it this afternoon before leaving the office, “A stiff prick has no conscience, Doc.” Unless later on your sister gets killed in a car crash and you can’t enter an automobile anymore.

  “So do you do this a lot?” she asks out of the blue.

  “Eat Thai food? Every now and then.”

  “Sure,” she says, and picks up the long-stemmed glass and sips at the wine again, a faint amber glow reflecting from the glass to touch her chin. She looks more catlike tonight than she did on the stage of the Winter Garden, the reddish-blond hair swept back from her face and caught with a ribbon that matches her eyes, the green looking deeper than it had before, the eyes burning with an intense inner glow, the yellow flecks complementing the bright umber gloss of her fingernails and the earth colors of her gossamer costume. She is wearing sandals. Her toenails are painted in the same subtle brownish-yellow color. She puts down her glass and says, “Which means you fool around, right?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then why the Thai evasion?”

  “Good title,” he says. “The Thai Evasion.”

  “There it is again,” she says.

  “No, I do not fool around.”

  “I don’t care except that I’m not eager to catch some dread disease. You don’t have any dread disease, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Like AIDS, for example?”

  “I do not have AIDS.”

  “Ron had herpes. I didn’t catch it because I was very careful. But we didn’t use any protection last week …”

  “You and Ron?”

  “Sure, me and Ron. Why do you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Why do I?”

  “You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

  “I guess I’m a little embarrassed by this conversation.”

  “You shouldn’t be. I know too many people in the business who died of AIDS.”

  “Does Ron have AIDS?”

  “No, just herpes. We both tested HIV negative in Detroit.”

  “You were that serious about each other, huh?”

  “That was eight months ago.”

  “But you were serious enough to …”

  “I guess we were serious. But that was eight months ago, I just told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is now.”

  “Yes.”

  “So if either you or your wife fool around …”

  “We don’t fool around.”

  “Then why the Thai Evasion? Which is a very good title, you’re right, but it’s still ducking the question. If you haven’t done this a lot, have you done it a little?”

  He looks across the table at her.

  “Thank you, I have my answer,” she says.

  “No, you haven’t. But I don’t feel like discussing it in a room this size, where everyone …”

  “My apartment isn’t much bigger,” she says. “But let’s go, you’re right. If I don’t kiss you soon, I’ll die.”

  Her air conditioner is going full blast, but the sheets beneath them are wet from their earlier passionate thrashing on what has turned into another sodden summer night. The apartment is on the third floor of a doorman building, and he can hear the traffic moving below on First Avenue, horns honking in this city where noise pollution is illegal, but who cares, ambulances shrieking in this city where murder is as inevitable as sunset, but who cares? Who cares, he wonders, that we ourselves are murderers of a sort in this bedroom with its drawn blinds and its noisy air conditioner, who cares that we are together nullifying and rendering void a sacred covenant, while Helen—sworn second party to the same pact—sleeps peacefully in Menemsha?

  Let it come down, he thinks.

  First Murderer. Macbeth.

  He has done something like this … well, not really like this … only once before in all the time he’s been married, just that once in Boston … well, not anything like this, in fact nothing at all like this. In fact, he cannot recall ever having been this excited by any woman he’s ever known, not Helen, not any of the girls he’d known before he met Helen …

  “Do I really excite you?”

  “You know you do.”

  “I want to excite you. Is that her name? Helen?”

  “My wife, yes. Helen.”

  Saying her name in this room. Saying it aloud where he has just made love to a passionate woman not his wife, whose arms are still around him.

  “My mother almost named me Helen,” she says.

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, no. Helen was my grandmother’s name. She almost named me after her.
Does your wife excite you the way I do? Does Helen excite you this way? Say.”

  “No.”

  Murderers, he thinks. We are both murderers here.

  “Did this woman you met in Boston …?”

  “No, certainly not her. No one. Ever.”

  “That’s because I love you,” she says. “More than any woman you’ve ever known.”

  “No, you don’t love me,” he says.

  She can’t love me, he thinks.

  “Wanna bet?” she asks, and kisses him again.

  There’s just this beautiful girl whose tongue is in my mouth, I don’t know who she is, her kisses are driving me crazy.

  She breaks away breathlessly. They are lying on her bed, naked, and whereas they’d made love not ten minutes ago, he feels again the faint stirrings of renewed desire as she gently lifts her mouth from his, their lips clinging for an instant, stickily, the taste of his own semen on her lips, parting. She looks deep into his eyes, her face inches from his, and says, “Tell me all about your woman in Boston. What were you doing in Boston?”

  “There was a convention up there. Of psychiatrists. The American Psychiatric Association.”

  “Was she a psychiatrist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh God, another shrink!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was she beautiful?”

  “Not very.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I don’t know, this was seven years ago.”

  “Well, you must know how old you were.”

  “I guess I turned thirty-nine that July.”

  “Midlife Crisis,” she says at once.

  “Maybe.”

  “Fear of Forty,” she says.

  “Maybe.”

  “Incidentally, I have a great title for Erica Jong’s next book.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Sex at Sixty. How old was she?”

  “Who, Erica?”

  “Sure, Erica. Your bimbo in Boston.”

  “She wasn’t a bimbo. She was just this lonely woman …”

  “This shrink, you mean. God, she wasn’t Jacqueline Hicks, was she?”

  “No, no.”

  “You almost gave me a heart attack. If she’d turned out to be Jacqueline … well, it couldn’t have been her because you said she wasn’t beautiful. I think Jacqueline is very beautiful, don’t you?”