by Ed McBain
Looking directly into his eyes, Kate tells him that what she decided to do that summer was lose her virginity to her father’s best friend, a married man with three children, whose exact title she forgets but who came in every day to tally the box office receipts and balance the books and pay the salaries and all that in a little office he had down under the theater. “Do you know where the rest rooms are, have you ever been to Westport, to the theater there? Downstairs where the rest rooms are was where Charlie had his office, his name was Charlie. He had this little office with a desk and a chair in it, and some filing cabinets. I used to go down to the office when I’d finished doing whatever they told me to do, they give the apprentices all kinds of shit to do, and I’d sit on his desk and spread my legs for him. That was later.”
In the beginning, she used to find excuses to go down there to his office to complain about how badly they were treating her. He listened patiently, he was after all her father’s best friend, seemed happy in fact for any respite from the tedium of poring over figures and balancing books. She’d stop down there in cutoff blue jeans and T-shirt, nothing under the shirt, of course, she didn’t have anything much to put in a bra except those tiny breasts that were almost entirely nipples. She was beginning to develop pretty good nipples that summer, at least recognizable as such and discernible enough for him to comment one day in a very fatherly manner, “Katie, you ought to start wearing a bra,” which meant he’d noticed, which meant she was making some progress here. And, of course, her legs looked terrific in the cutoffs.
“I’ve always had great legs,” she tells David now, “even when I was just a little girl. But I’d been taking dance for quite a while by the time I was thirteen, and my legs were really quite long and shapely …”
“They still are,” he says, forgetting for the moment that he is neither her real psychiatrist nor her fake one, remembering all at once that they are here to make love, presumably, and the time she is a-flying, and he hasn’t had lunch, and his next patient will be here in forty minutes, and besides he’s not even sure he wants to hear this story of teenage …
“Thank you, Doctor,” she says. “Anyway, I guess he thought my legs were pretty spectacular …”
“They are,” he says, a psychiatrist’s ploy, a cheap trick, an unabashed prompt, hoping she will respond Yes, come put your hands on my creamy white thighs, Yes, come slide your hands under my schoolgirl skirt and onto my …
“Thank you, Doctor,” she says again, “because one day he said in a very fatherly manner, ‘Katie, some of the boys have been noticing your legs,’ which meant he’d been noticing them, which was further progress. By the way, seducing him wasn’t the main reason I was at the Playhouse, if that’s what you’re thinking. Actually, that was just something I decided to do because I got so bored. And maybe angry, too, because I didn’t get to dance in On the Town, which I knew they’d be doing that summer, and which was the main reason I was there to begin with—but that’s another story.”
Charlie was a man in his early fifties, she guesses now … well, her father was forty-three that summer and Charlie was older than he was, so yes, he was either in his very late forties or his early fifties. He had a bald head and he was sort of short and stout, and he wasn’t very attractive although he did have nice sensitive blue eyes, but she can’t imagine now why she was so intent on having him notice her to begin with, which he certainly did with more and more frequency, and then touch her, which he finally did one rainy day in August while on stage the actors, including two of them from Broadway, were rehearsing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and in the workshop the other apprentices were busy painting scenery.
She rises from the couch now, as if the memory of that steamy day in August is too much for her to bear sitting still and erect on a black leather couch, rises and begins pacing his office, the pleated skirt swirling about her long legs as she walks back and forth before his desk, turning at opposite ends of the short course her long strides define, the skirt swirling, swirling. She is a dancer, she was a dancer even back then, surely she realizes that her abrupt turns are causing the short skirt to billow about her legs, to expose above the taut black stockings a wider expanse of white thigh each time—and yes! There! A glimpse of the now world-famous bicycle-shop white panties, not the black ones she promised on the phone, but plain white panties instead, girlish cotton panties more appropriate to the schoolgirl uniform, similar to the panties she was wearing on that dripping wet day in August when she was thirteen and she slipped down the stairs to his office wearing, yes, white panties, yes, under her habitual cutoff jeans and a thin white cotton T-shirt that had the words WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE printed across its nipple-puckered front.
He is sitting at his desk, bald head bent over the ledger spread open before him. A narrow window is on the short wall opposite the door, and rain beats steadily in a widening street-level puddle just outside of it, droplets of water splashing up onto the glass. A lamp with a green shade illuminates the yellow ledger and his bald head bent over it. Suddenly a flash of lightning turns the horizontal window glaringly blue, and there is immediate thunder in the parking lot outside. He glances up toward the window, shaking his head in awe, and then turns back to his books again. He does not yet know she is in the office. They have never been alone together in this room with the door shut. She eases the door shut behind her. He looks up when he hears the click of the lock as she turns the bolt.
“Katie?” he says.
She goes to his desk, stands in front of him where he sits in his swivel chair with his books spread before him, and takes the hem of her T-shirt in both hands and lifts it above her tiny adolescent breasts and outrageously stiff nipples.
“Kiss them,” she whispers.
He says, “Katie, what …?”
“Kiss them.”
“Your father …”
“Yes, do it.”
He kisses her repeatedly all that rainy afternoon—well, at least for an hour on that rainy afternoon, his hands tight on her tight buttocks in the tight cutoffs, which she refuses to remove despite his constant pleadings—and he repeatedly kisses her nipples and blossoming breasts all through the next week, while proclaiming terrible feelings of guilt for betraying his wife, and the week after that while telling her he shouldn’t be doing this to his best friend’s teenage daughter, he feels so guilty doing this, and the week after that while telling her he himself has a daughter her age, how can he be doing this, is he crazy? He goes even crazier when one day at the beginning of September with russet leaves drifting onto the parking lot she unzips the cutoffs for him, and removes them, and lowers her white cotton panties, and sits on his desk before him and spreads her russet self wide to him, and allows him to bury his bald head between her legs and to lick her there until she experiences a thunderous orgasm for the very first time in her life.
Abruptly, she stops pacing.
Her eyes meet David’s again.
She nods knowingly, and walks to him where he sits in his chair behind his desk, and she unbuttons the white cotton blouse button by button until it is hanging open over her breasts. Standing between his spread legs, she moves into him, and pulls his head into her breasts, and says, “Kiss them.” And while he kisses her feverishly, she reaches under the short pleated skirt and pulls the white cotton panties down over her waist and her thighs, slides them down over her long legs in the tight black stockings, and then sits on the desk before him and spreads her legs to him as she did to Charlie long ago, and whispers, “Yes, do it.”
On Saturday morning, Helen drives Jenny into Vineyard Haven to shop for new sneakers, which Jenny says she desperately needs if she is not to become “a social outcast,” her exact words. It is a cloudy, windy day but David and Annie are walking the beach together nonetheless. He is wearing a green windbreaker; Annie is in a yellow rain slicker and sou’wester tied under her chin. Her cheeks are shiny red from the cold, and the wind is causing her eyes to water. She and David are both bar
efoot, although it is really too chilly for that, the sand clammy and cold to the touch. Still, they plod along hand in hand. The water looks gray today, streaked with angry white crests.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Annie says.
“What is it you don’t get?”
“How do astronauts pee?”
“Astro—?”
“I mean, where do they pee, actually? When they’re walking on the moon in those suits, I mean.”
“I guess they have a tube or something.”
“The girls, too?”
“I really don’t know, honey.”
“That really bothers me,” Annie says, and looks up at him. “Cause everybody’s always asking me do I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Anybody who comes to the house. Grown-ups. First they say How are you today, Annie? and I say I’m fine, thanks, and then they say Are you looking forward to going back to school in September? and I say Well, it’s still only July, you know, and they say Do you like school? and I say Oh yeah, tons, and that’s when they ask me what I want to be when I grow up.”
“I guess they’re just interested in you, Annie.”
“Why should they care what I want to be when I grow up? Suppose I don’t want to be anything when I grow up? I sure don’t want to be president of the United States, which is something else they always ask. Are your feet cold?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t we go back to the house and make a fire and roast marshmallows?” she says. “Before Jenny and Mom get back, okay?”
“Why don’t I just carry you back to the house,” he says, and scoops her up into his arms. “So your feet won’t get any colder, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, grinning. Her head against his shoulder, she asks, “Do I have to be an astronaut, Dad?”
“You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” he says.
“Cause I sure wouldn’t like peeing in a tube,” she says.
He hugs her closer, shielding her from the wind.
A woman at the dinner party that night is telling them it is the end of the criminal justice system as they’ve known it. “Never again will a black man in this country be convicted of a felony,” she says. “All the defense has to do is make sure there’s at least one person of color on the jury. That’s it. A hung jury each and every time. Check it out.”
She is a quite pretty brunette who looks too young to be an attorney, but apparently she is a litigator with a Wall Street firm. Harry Daitch, who is hosting the party with his wife, Danielle, is a lawyer himself and he debates the brunette furiously, but with a smile on his face, contending that justice has nothing to do with racial sympathies, and maintaining that recent verdicts were anomalies rather than true indicators. This is while they are all having cocktails on the deck, under a sky still surly and gray. A black maid is serving hors d’oeuvres. She pretends to be deaf, dumb and blind as the sun sinks below the horizon without a trace.
At dinner, Fred Coswell, who with his wife, Margaret is renting the house next door to Helen and David, mentions that David was in a situation not too long ago—“Do you remember telling us, David?”—where some black kid stole a bicycle from a girl in Central Park.
“Do you mean to say he’ll get off?” Fred asks the woman attorney, whose name is Grace Something, and who is now seated on Harry Daitch’s right, just across the table from David. All told, there are eight people at the party, including an investment broker from Manhattan who’s been invited as Grace’s dinner partner, and who is sitting alongside her on the same side of the table.
“I’m sure Grace meant major felonies,” Harry says, and pats her left hand where it rests alongside his.
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Grace says, laughing. “I’m not sure it won’t apply to lesser crimes as well. Black kid steals a bike, that’s petit larceny, a class-A mis, the most he can get in jail is a year. Even if he gets the max, which he won’t, he’ll be out again stealing another bike four months later. But if he hires himself a smart lawyer …”
“Like you,” Harry says, and pats her hand again.
“Like me, thank you—white like me, anyway, so it won’t look like a slave uprising—the defense’ll play the ‘Underprivileged Black’ card, and then the ‘Black Rage’ card, and any person of color sitting on that jury’ll go, ‘Mmmm, mmmm, tell it, brother, amen,’” she says, doing a fair imitation of a call-and-response routine in a black Baptist church. David wonders all at once if Grace is a closet bigot, but the black maid who is now serving them at table seems to find the takeoff amusing. At least, she’s smiling. “And he’ll walk,” Grace says in conclusion and dismissal, and picks up her knife and fork.
“Did that case ever come to trial, by the way?” Fred asks.
“I have no idea,” David says.
“Ever hear anything more about it?”
“Well, I had to go identify him.”
“You mean they got him?” Margaret says.
“Well, yes.”
“I didn’t know that,” Helen says, surprised.
“I guess I forgot to tell you,” he says.
“When was this?”
“I don’t remember. Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend. When I got back to the city.”
“Well, what happened?” Danielle asks.
As hostess, she is sitting at the opposite end of the table, facing her husband at this end. Helen, on her left in this not-quite-boy-girl-boy-girl seating arrangement, is leaning forward now, her head turned to the left, looking across the table, waiting for David’s response. In fact, all attention seems to have turned from the defense to the prosecution, so to speak, everyone suddenly curious about what happened when David went to identify the young bicycle thief, an event he somehow neglected to mention to Helen in the press of further developments, small wonder. She is still staring at him, waiting.
“The police called and asked if I’d come over after work,” he says. “So I did,” he says, and shrugs.
“How’d they know who you were?” Fred asks.
“I guess the girl told them.”
“Was it the guy?” Danielle asks.
“Oh, yes.”
“So they got him,” Margaret says, almost to herself, nodding. “Good.”
“You didn’t tell me this,” Helen says, still looking surprised.
“I meant to,” he says.
“Annie keeps asking me every day did they catch him.”
“I’m sorry, I guess it just slipped my …”
“But it hasn’t come to trial yet,” Fred says.
“That’s the last I heard of it.”
Helen is still looking at him.
“Will you have to testify?” Margaret asks.
“I really …”
“If it comes to trial?”
“I don’t …”
“How old is he?” Grace asks.
“Sixteen, seventeen.”
“First offense?”
“I don’t know.”
“The case may even be dismissed,” she says. “You know what a class-A mis is?”
“No, what?” her dinner companion asks. This is the first time he’s opened his mouth all night long. He has flaxen hair and dark brown eyes and he is wearing a heavy gold chain over a purple Tommy Hilfiger sweater. David wonders if he’s gay.
“Writing graffiti is a class-A mis. Unauthorized use of a computer is a class-A mis. Hazing is a class-A mis. Are you beginning to catch the drift?”
“She means it’s a bullshit crime,” Harry says.
“Well, he also hit her,” David says, and thinks Shut up. End it. Let it die. “Kicked her. Knocked her down.”
“That’s assault,” Grace says.
“That’s a horse of another color,” Harry says.
“Which is why he’ll walk,” Grace says knowingly.
Coming out of the bathroom, Helen says, “I can’t believe Danielle can be so blind.”
She is slipping a nightgown over her head as she walks, the blue nylon cascading over her tanned body, blond hair surfacing as her head clears the laced bodice. She shakes her disheveled hair loose, a habit he loves, and then goes to the dresser. Sitting before the mirror, she begins brushing her hair. He does not know how she can brush and count and talk at the same time, but it is a feat she performs effortlessly every night. Fifty strokes before bedtime every night. Meanwhile talking a mile a minute.
“He invites her to every party, seats her on his right at every party, feels her up at every …”
“He was patting her hand,” David says.
“Why do men feel compelled to defend other men who they know are fucking around?” Helen asks incredulously. “He was patting her hand on the table. Under the table he was feeling her up.”
“How do you know what he was doing under the table?”
“I know when a man has his hand on a woman’s thigh. Or closer to home. Something comes over her face.”
“I didn’t see anything coming over her face.”
“Her eyes glazed over.”
“I didn’t notice that. I was sitting directly across from her, and I didn’t …”
“Right, defend him.”
“I just don’t think anything’s going on between Harry and Grace whatever her name is.”
“Humphrey. Which I feel is appropriate.”
David thinks about that for a moment.
“Oh,” he says.
“Oh,” Helen says, and winks at him in the mirror.
He is stretched out on the bed, his elbow bent, his head propped on his open hand, watching her. He loves to watch her perform simple female tasks. Putting on lipstick. Polishing her nails. Clasping a bra behind her back. Slipping on a high-heeled shoe. Brushing her hair.