by Ed McBain
And wonders how there’s any difference, really, between the two of them.
“Would you be willing to alibi me?” Stanley asks.
“Alibi you? What do you mean?”
“If I said, for example, that I had to come down for a conference or something. A seminar, for example. Whatever.”
“I don’t think I could …”
“Because I know I can’t stay here the whole damn month, Dave. I’m just looking for an excuse to come up for a week or so, hmm? Even two, three days.”
“Stanley, there are no conferences in August.”
“We could invent one. Or a seminar. Something.”
“I don’t think …”
“A series of lectures. Anything.”
“Stanley …”
“Somebody visiting from England or wherever the hell. Australia. Some big psychiatrist taking advantage of his summer vacation.”
“It’s winter in Australia.”
“Wherever. He’s here by invitation, France, wherever. They take August off in France, don’t they?”
“Well, yes, but …”
“Italy maybe. He’s from Italy. They take August off there, too, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“There are psychiatrists in Italy, maybe this one is a big shot who’s been invited here to speak to a select group of people, hmm? You, me, a handful of other shrinks Gerry doesn’t know. Helen, either, I guess. If it’s going to work. I mean, if you’re willing to alibi me, that is. It would have to be people neither of them know. The lecturer could be giving …”
“Stanley, really, I couldn’t possibly …”
“… a series of lectures, who the hell knows where?” Stanley says, stroking his scraggly beard and narrowing his eyes like Fagin about to send his little gangsters out to pick pockets. “Let’s say they start in the middle of the week, hmm, the lectures, a Wednesday night, let’s say, and they continue through Friday night, three lectures in all, I’ve seen plenty of programs like that, I don’t think something like that would sound too far-fetched. That would make it reasonable to come up on the Tuesday before and stay till Saturday morning. Four full days and nights with her, Jesus, I’d take a suite at the Plaza, I swear to God, fuck her every hour on the hour, go back down to Hatteras on Saturday morning. I think that would work, you know? I honestly think it would work, Dave. But only if …”
“I couldn’t lie to Helen that way,” David says.
“You’re my best friend, Dave.”
Sure, David thinks.
“At least think about it, will you?” Stanley says.
“Well, I’ll think about it.”
“Will you promise to think about it?”
“I promise, yes.”
“You don’t know how much it would mean to me, Dave.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Please.”
“I will.”
But he already knows it would work.
Curtain is at eight o’clock. The show lets out at ten-thirty. He tries her again at eleven and then again at eleven-thirty. When she does not call by midnight, he begins to believe he will never see her again.
He falls asleep wondering if Especially Ron, the Herpes King, has resurfaced.
The telephone rings at one o’clock in the morning.
He fumbles for the ringing phone in the dark, thinking at once that something has happened to Helen or the kids, a terrible accident, someone has drowned, knocking the receiver off the cradle, finding it again in the dark, picking it up, “Hello?”
“Hi.”
He does not know whether to feel irate or relieved. He does not turn on the light. He does not want to know what time it is, but he asks immediately, “What time is it?” and she says, “One, a little after one, am I waking you?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Oooo,” she says, “angry.”
He wonders if she’s been drinking.
“I’ve been calling you,” he says.
“All those hangups,” she says, “and no messages.”
“I didn’t know who might be listening with you.”
“Who do you think might be listening with me?”
There is a silence on the line.
He waits, hoping she will be the first one to speak again. The silence becomes unbearable. He wonders if she will hang up.
“Where were you?” he asks.
“When?”
“Well, for starters, how about all day long?”
“Oooo, angry, angry,” she says.
There is another silence, longer this time, broken at last by an exaggeratedly tragic sigh and then the sound of her voice again. “First, I went to see my agent,” she says. “That was at ten o’clock, but I slept late and had to rush out, which is why I couldn’t call you before I left the apartment. Anyway, I left at twenty to, and my window of opportunity wouldn’t have been till ten to, correct, Doctor? After my agent … he thinks he may have a movie for me, by the way, not that I guess it matters to you in your present frame of mind. Anyway, after my meeting with him, I went to my Wednesday morning dance class, I have dance three times a week. Then I went to the theater for the matinee performance, and had a sandwich and did a little shopping with a girlfriend afterwards, and went back to the apartment to drop off the things I’d bought, and then I took a nap, and let me see, I went out for a carrot shake, alone, at that health food deli on Fifty-seventh, and walked to the theater to get ready for the evening performance. Then I did the show, naturally, and went out for a bite with some of the kids afterwards, and then I came home. And here I am.”
“No phones any of those places, huh?”
“None at precisely ten minutes to the hour.”
“How about before you went to the theater?”
“I tried your office but you were already gone.”
“Did you leave a message?”
“I didn’t know who might be listening with you,” she says.
Touché, he thinks, and almost smiles.
“Did you try the apartment?”
“Yes. There was no answer. You were probably on the way there.”
“What time was that?”
“Around six. And I called again from the theater at seven-thirty, after I was in costume and doing my warm-ups.”
Which was when he’d gone down to dinner.
“I’m sorry we kept missing each other,” she says.
“Was Ron with you?”
“Ron?”
“When you went out for a bite with the kids?”
“Ron’s in Australia. Ron?”
“So who were these kids?”
Her calling them “kids” makes him feel like Methuselah. On the twenty-seventh of the month, he will be forty-six years old. His grandfather was forty-six when he died of lung cancer. Now he is forty-six. Well, almost forty-six. And Kate is twenty-seven and she goes out for a bite with “kids” from the show.
“The girl who plays Demeter,” she says, “and the girl who plays Bombalurina and the guy who plays Munkustrap. He’s gay, if you’re wondering. You have nothing to worry about,” she says. “I love you to death. I thought of you all day long.”
“I thought of you, too.”
“There are two pay phones backstage,” she says. “I can let you have both numbers. So something like today won’t happen again. Our missing each other.”
“I guess I should have them,” he says.
But he wonders how he can possibly use either number. Call backstage and have someone other than Kate answer the phone? Risk that? Who shall I say is calling, please? Whom? Who. Whoever, it definitely ain’t me, mister. A married man named David Chapman calling a showgirl in a cat costume, are you kidding?
“I’m sorry I woke you,” she says. “But I just got home.”
He’s wondering why she didn’t call before she left the theater. From one of the pay phones backstage. But he imagines they’re all ravenously hungry after a performance, all those cats leaping ar
ound for two and a half hours, well, not quite that long when you count intermission, but even so. They must all be eager to change into their street clothes and get the hell out of there, put some food in their bellies. He wonders what she wears when she goes to and from the theater. Blue jeans? He wonders if anyone recognizes her when she’s walking in the street—Hey, look, Maude, there goes that girl from Cats. He supposes not. He himself didn’t recognize her in makeup, and he’d already known her before he saw the show.
“… shooting it in New York,” she is telling him, “or I wouldn’t even think of considering it. Leave you to go on location? No way. It’s a costume drama, where I’d be playing the confidante of the female lead who’s having an affair with a Russian diplomat. She’s British. So am I, if I get the part. What it is, they’ve taken Ninotchka and changed the Russian girl to a Brit and the American guy to a Russian diplomat, and they’ve set it all back in the eighteenth century. At least, that’s the way the producer described it to me. In Hollywood, they can only think of movies in terms of other movies. Tunnel vision, it’s called. Which, by the way, was a movie, wasn’t it? Tunnel Vision? Or a book? Or something? I’d have to learn a British accent again, I had a pretty good one when we did Lady Windermere’s Fan in high school. British accents are easier to learn than almost …”
He tries to imagine what she’s wearing now. What color are her fingernails today? Has she already undressed for bed? But no, she just got home after a bite with the kids. He visualizes her bed. Visualizes her in her bed. Does she wear a nightgown when he’s not there making love to her? Is she wearing a nightgown now?
“… why you never ask me about myself,” she is saying now. “Don’t you want to know how I became a dancer, how I happened to land in Cats when I was only seventeen? Don’t you want to know if my parents are still living together, or if they’re divorced, or if I have any sisters or brothers … well, you know I have a sister, you read that in the program notes. But don’t you want to know anything at all about me, David? You’re supposed to love me so much …”
But he’s never told her that.
“… and yet you never ask me anything about myself. Why is that?” she asks.
Why is that? he wonders. He also wonders if she expects him to ask her about herself at one, one-thirty in the morning, whatever time it is now. Are your parents divorced? If so, are they remarried? Where does your sister live, or did you tell me? What is Ron doing in Australia, and does he send you an occasional postcard? Maybe I don’t want to know about you, he thinks. Maybe the less I know about you …
“… never even said you love me, when I know you do,” she says.
There is a silence.
“Don’t you?” she asks. “Love me?”
He hesitates.
“Yes,” he says, “I love you.”
“Of course you do,” she says.
His first patient is scheduled to arrive at nine this morning. He likes to get to the office at eight-thirty or so, check his notes from the patient’s previous session, generally prepare himself for the long day ahead. The mail is delivered at nine, nine-thirty. He usually goes out to the lobby mailboxes after his first session, leafs through it during the ten minutes before his next appointment. His office routine is rigid and proscribed. In that sense, he is a well-organized man, dedicated—he likes to believe—to the arduous task of helping these people in dire need.
He has set his alarm, as usual, for seven forty-five.
When the telephone rings, he is in deep sleep and he thinks at first it is the alarm going off. He reaches for the clock, fumbles with the lever on the back, but it is still ringing, and he realizes belatedly that it is the telephone. The luminous face of the clock reads six forty-five A.M. He grabs for the phone receiver.
“Hello?” he says.
“Hi.”
Her voice signals a violent pounding of his heart each time he hears it.
“Are you awake?” she asks.
“I am now.”
“Come make love to me,” she says.
The uniformed doorman outside her building is with another man in a short-sleeved striped shirt and dark blue polyester slacks. This is now seven-thirty in the morning, and they are standing in bright sunlight, idly chatting, watching the passersby hurrying along on this busy street. They interrupt their conversation and turn to him as he approaches.
“Miss Duggan,” he tells the doorman.
“Your name, sir?”
“Mr. Adler,” he says.
This is the name he and Kate agreed to on the telephone, though she truly couldn’t see any reason for him to use a false name. Adler. After the famous Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s friends and colleagues who left the psychiatric movement rather early on.
The doorman buzzes her apartment. “Mr. Adler to see you,” he says. David cannot hear her answer. The doorman replaces the phone on the switchboard hook and says, “Go right up, sir, it’s apartment 3B.”
A woman and a dog are already in the waiting elevator. David steps inside, hits the button for the third floor, and then smiles briefly in greeting. The woman does not smile back. Neither does the dog. The woman is wearing a quilted pink robe over a long flowered nightgown and pink bedroom slippers. The dog is a longhaired dachshund who sniffs curiously, or perhaps affectionately, at David’s black loafers. This morning, David is wearing a dark blue tropical-weight suit—the forecasters have said it will be another scorcher today—with a white button-down shirt and a striped red and blue silk rep tie. He looks quite professional. He does not look like someone going up to the third floor of this building to make love to a girl who is waiting in apartment 3B for him. He cannot stop thinking of Kate as a girl. He guesses this is something he should examine. Why he keeps thinking of this passionate twenty-seven-year-old woman as a girl.
The woman in the elevator—and she is most definitely a woman, some fifty-three years old with a puffed scowling face and suspicious blue eyes—yanks on the dog’s leash and says, “Stop that, Schatzi!” The dog, properly chastised, quits his, or her, exploratory sniffing. The woman stares straight ahead, feigning indifference to David as the elevator begins a slow, labored climb, but he knows she thinks he’s a rapist or an ax murderer who is only dressed like a respectable physician making a house call at the crack of dawn, sans stethoscope or satchel. He hopes she will not be getting off at the third floor. He hopes she does not live in apartment 3A or 3C. He hopes Schatzi will not begin barking when he or she catches the scent of Hannah the cat in apartment 3B. Or the scent of Kate waiting in apartment 3B. The elevator doors slide open. David steps out without looking back at either the woman or her hound. The doors slide shut behind him.
He checks out the hallway like a sneak thief about to commit a burglary. His wristwatch reads seven-forty A.M. Sunlight slants through a window at the far end of the hall, dust motes swarming. There is the smell of bacon wafting from one of the apartments, coffee from yet another. From behind the door to 3C, he can hear the drone of broadcast voices. He visualizes television anchors announcing the early morning news. He visualizes people sitting down to quick breakfasts before rushing off to work. This is not a time for making love, but his heart is beating frantically as he presses the bell button set in her doorjamb. There is the sound of chimes within, and then the sound of heels clicking on a hardwood floor. The peephole flap snaps back. The chain instantly rattles off its hook. There is the small oiled click of tumblers falling as first one bolt and then another is unlocked. The door opens just a crack. He virtually slides into the apartment.
She is wearing high-heeled red leather pumps and nothing else. She moves into his arms at once, slamming the door shut behind him, pressing him against the door, her left hand reaching for the bolt as she grinds herself into him, the lock clicking behind him, her mouth demanding, her teeth nipping at him hungrily, his lips, his chin, his cheeks, biting, kissing, her murmured words entangled on their tongues. She smells of powder and soap. He knows her dusted body will turn
his dark suit to white, but he ignores this danger and pulls her closer instead, his hands covering her breasts slippery smooth with talcum, a young girl’s breasts, this girl’s breasts, this girl, this girl. He lowers his head, finds her nipples, “Don’t bite!” she warns sharply, though he isn’t biting her, kisses her, licks her nipples, “Yes,” dropping to his knees in his proper blue suit and smart silk tie, parting with his fingers the crisp red hair in its summer trim, parting her nether lips, kissing her there, “Yes,” licking her there, “Yes,” savoring her there as if her swollen cleft is a smooth wet nourishing stone.
Before he leaves the apartment, she tells him if he must use a fake name whenever he comes here, she’s thought of a more appropriate psychiatrist than Adler.
“Who?” he asks.
“Horney,” she says.
He figures Stanley must know, as does any psychiatrist, that during the course of therapy a patient will recover feelings for significant people in his past and unconsciously apply them to his shrink. Stanley has read Freud. Every psychiatrist in the world has read Freud:
“We overcome the transference by pointing out to the patient that his feelings do not arise from the present situation and do not apply to the person of the doctor, but that they are repeating something that happened to him earlier. In this way we oblige him to transform his repetition into a memory.”
Which, unquestionably, was the technique Stanley—who, like David, is a Freudian—followed with the patient he’s identified as Cindy Harris, the better to lead her to mental health, m’dear.
But Stanley? Are you in there, Stanley? Do you remember?
“It is not a patient’s crudely sensual desires which constitute the temptation. It is, rather, perhaps, a woman’s subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.”
Stanley seems to have forgotten, if not his technique, then certainly his medical task. By “doing it” with Cindy “right on the office couch,” he has rather, perhaps, also broken the mental health profession’s absolute and explicitly stated prohibition on sexual contact or sexual intimacy between patient and therapist.