Privileged Conversation

1: friday, june 30 — sunday, july 16

He has eight patients in all, evenly divided between those in analysis and those in therapy — the “Couches” and the “Chairs,” as he often refers to them in private to Helen. All told, he puts in a thirty-hour week at the office. Well, they’re only fifty-minute hours, of course, but still, he makes all his phone calls during the ten minutes between patients, so it really can be considered a full work hour. The rest of the week he teaches and supervises at Mount Sinai, just a few blocks up on Fifth Avenue.

On his lunch hour, he usually grabs a quick sandwich and coffee at the deli on Lex, and then goes for a walk in the park. The weather this June has been miserable thus far, the customary New York mix of heat and humidity broken by frequent thunderstorms; today is muggy and hot, as usual, the perfect finale to a perfectly ghastly month, not an ideal day for walking, but his little jaunts in the park are more for relaxation than for true exercise. Nor does he experience any feelings of guilt over these leisurely, peaceful strolls, his brief respites from the often tortured narratives unreeling all day long in his office.

The girl up ahead seems to appear out of a shimmering haze. Where a moment ago the path was empty, there is now a young girl on a bicycle, fifteen or sixteen years old, he guesses, sweaty and slender, wearing green nylon running shorts and an orange cotton tank top, tendrils of long reddish-gold hair drifting across her freckled face. Smiling as she pedals abreast of him, she calls, “Good morning, sir!” and is gone at once in a dazzle of sunlight — although it is already afternoon, and he will not be forty-six till the end of July, thank you.

A trifle perplexed, David wonders if his new glasses make him look older than he actually is (but Helen picked out the frames), wonders, too, if the girl who just whisked past on her bike was in fact much younger than he’d taken her for, not the fifteen or sixteen he’d originally supposed, but perhaps twelve or thirteen, in which case the “sir” is understandable, though barely.

He looks at his watch.

It is almost a quarter to one, time he started back. Arthur K is always on time. Never even a second late. Frowns scoldingly if David doesn’t open the door to his office precisely on the hour. Listening to Arthur K, listening to all of his patients, David tries to visualize the enormous cast of characters they conjure for him, the boiling events, real or imagined, around which their lives are structured. Listening, he tries to understand. Understanding, he tries to—

The scream is molten.

It hangs hot and liquid and viscous on the still summer air — and then abruptly ends.

David whirls at once, his heart suddenly racing. Standing stock-still in the center of the path, he keeps listening, hears only an insect-laden silence, and then scuffling noises around the curve up ahead, the rasp of feet scraping gravel. The same voice that not moments ago brightly chirped, “Good morning, sir!” now shrilly shouts, “Let go of it, you...!” and is cut off by the unmistakable sound of a slap, a smack, flesh against flesh, and then, immediately afterward, a duller, thicker sound — a punch? This is Central Park, David thinks, you can get killed here, he thinks. Strangers can kill you here. From around the bend in the path now, out of sight, he hears the sounds of earnest struggle, the scuffling, grunting, shouting noises of battle, and suddenly there is another scream as jangling as the sound of shattering glass, and just as suddenly he is in motion.

They are still locked in grim and sweaty confrontation on the gravel in the center of the empty path, the black boy repeatedly punching at her as he tries to wrest the bicycle from her grip, the slender girl with the reddish-gold hair clawing at him as she tries with all her might to stop the theft. “Hey!” David shouts, but neither of them seems to hear him, so intent are they on their fierce combat. The boy hits her again with his bunched right fist, his left hand still tugging at the handlebar as if in counterpoint. This time the blow sounds thuddingly sincere. The girl lets out a short sharp gasp of pain, releases the bicycle, and staggers backward, moaning, falling to the ground on her back. The boy yells “Yaaah!” in triumph, and instantly wheels the bike away, a sneakered foot already on one of the pedals, gathering speed, and then whipping his leg over the seat and sliding down onto it.

“Hey!” David yells again.

“Fuck you!” the boy yells back, and pedals away furiously, wheels tossing gravel, around the curve just ahead, out of sight.

The summer’s day goes still again.

Hot.

Hushed.

Insects rattling.

The girl lies motionless on the ground.

Kneeling beside her, David asks, “Are you all right, miss?” and then, for no reason he can properly understand — the last time he’d treated anyone for a physical disorder must have been twenty years ago or more, when he was still an intern at Mass General — he adds, “I’m a doctor.”

She says nothing.

Looking down at her, studying her closely now, he realizes she isn’t a girl at all, although these days he’s likely to consider anyone under thirty a girl, but is instead a woman of... what, twenty-five, twenty-six?... the lightly freckled face, the fine wispy red hair, gold hair, the long coltish legs in the loose green running shorts, the small high breasts in the damp orange tank top, all conspiring to lend her a much younger appearance.

She is very pretty.

Sunlight filters down through the leaves, dappling her face, the high pronounced cheekbones dusted with tiny freckles — he does not at first notice that one of her cheeks is bleeding — the slender elegant nose and full mouth, its upper lip tented to reveal even white teeth, except where one is chipped. He wonders if the black boy’s insistent blows to her face broke the tooth. Or anything else. That is when he notices the abrasion on her cheek, oozing a thin line of blood, bright red against her pale white face. Her eyes are still closed — is she unconscious?

“Miss,” he asks again, “are you all right?”

“I think so,” she says tentatively, and opens her eyes.

The eyes are as green as new leaves. Delicately flecked with yellow. A cat’s eyes. He and Helen once owned a cat with eyes like that. Before the children were born. Sheba. Killed by a neighborhood Doberman. Sheba the cat. Eyes like this girl has. This woman.

“Did he get my bike?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“The son of a bitch,” she says, and sits up. Green shorts hiking up a bit. Long long legs, freckled thighs. White socks and white athletic shoes. Green cat’s eyes.

“Your cheek is bleeding,” he says.

“What?” she says, and reaches immediately for her right cheek, and touches it, and looks at her hand, the palms up, the fingers together, and frowns, puzzled. She touches the other cheek at once and feels the oozing wetness there, and mutters, “Oh shit,” and looks at her fingertips and sees the blood now, and says again, “The son of a bitch.”

“Here,” David says, and offers her his handkerchief.

She hesitates, considering the pristine, meticulously ironed square of white cloth in his hand, her own hand covered with blood. “Are you sure?” she asks.

“Yes, go ahead.”

She takes the handkerchief, gingerly presses it to her cheek.

“Where else did he hit you?”

“Everywhere.”

“Anything feel broken?”

“How does something feel when it’s broken?”

“It hurts like hell.”

“I do hurt like hell, but I don’t think anything’s broken. That bike cost four hundred dollars.”

“Where?”

“A shop on Third and...”

“I meant where do you hurt?”

“Oh. My face mostly. He hit me a lot in the face. I’ll look just great tonight, won’t I?”

“Anywhere else?”

“My chest.”

She takes the handkerchief from her cheek, glances at the bloodstains on it, shakes her head, rolls her eyes in apology, and then asks, “Is it still bleeding?”

“Just a little.”

She puts the handkerchief to her cheek again. With her free hand she begins probing her chest, gently pressing her fingertips here and there, searching for pain.

“Hurts here,” she says.

“The sternum,” he says.

“Whatever.”

He notices the sharp outline of her nipples against the thin sweaty fabric of the orange top. He turns away.

“Maybe we ought to get you to a hospital,” he says.

“No, I’ll go see my own doctor. God, I hope this doesn’t keep me out. How’s it look now?” she asks, taking the handkerchief from her cheek again.

He turns back to her.

“I think it’s stopped.”

“Look what I did to your hankie.”

“That’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll wash it and send it back to you.”

“No, no, don’t be...”

“I want to,” she says, and tucks the bloodstained handkerchief into the elastic waistband of the green shorts. Still sitting on the ground, ankles crossed, she bends over from the waist, clasps her ankle in both hands, and carefully studies her left leg. She is wearing Nike running shoes with white cotton Peds, a little cotton ball at the back of each sock. “I hit the ground kind of funny,” she says, “I hope I didn’t hurt my leg.”

He is still kneeling beside her. Dappled sunlight turns her eyes to glinting emeralds. Strands of golden-red hair drift across her face like fine threads in a silken curtain. The side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposes a hint of white cotton panties beneath.

“It’s beginning to swell,” she says, probing the leg. “That’s just what I need.”

“We ought to report this, you know,” he says.

“I will. Soon as I get home.”

“You’d do better at a police station.”

“I want to see my doctor first.”

“You should go to the police.”

“Why? They won’t get it back, anyway,” she says, and shrugs. Narrow shoulders in the orange tank top shirt, delicate wings of her collarbone sheened with perspiration. “Four hundred bucks. I hope he enjoys it.”

“He’ll probably pawn it.”

“A junkie, right?”

“Maybe.”

“I prefer thinking he really wanted the damn bike. To ride, I mean. Could you help me up? I want to make sure I don’t fall right back down on my face.”

He gets to his feet and extends his hand to her. She takes it. Her palm is moist. Gently, he eases her off the ground, toward him. She lets go of his hand. Balances herself tentatively, testing.

“Everything feel all right?” he asks. “Nothing broken?”

“Are you an orthopedist?” she asks.

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Really? Do you know Dr. Hicks?”

“We’ve met.”

“I love her. Jacqueline Hicks.”

“She’s supposed to be very good.”

“Well, she really fixed my head.”

“Good.”

“What’s your name? In case I see her.”

“David Chapman,” he says.

“Dr. Chapman, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. David Chapman,” she says. “I’ll tell her you saved my life. If I see her.”

“Well, I think all he wanted was the bike, actually.”

“Thank God,” she says. “You have to give me your card. So I can mail you the handkerchief.”

“You really don’t have to...”

“Oh, but I do,” she says. “Your wife would kill me, otherwise.”

“She probably would,” he says, and reaches into his pocket for his wallet, and wonders how she knew... well, the wedding band, of course. “I always run out of them,” he says, “I hope I... yes, here we are.” He slips a card from its slot in his wallet and hands it to her.

“Right here on Ninety-sixth,” she says, studying the card, head bent, mottled sunlight setting her hair aglow again. “Your office.”

“Yes.”

“I live on Ninety-first,” she says.

“We’re neighbors,” he says.

“Practically.”

“Let me give you my home address, too,” he says, and retrieves the card and finds a pen in his jacket pocket and scribbles the Seventy-fourth Street address on the back of the card. He hands the card to her again. Caps the pen. Puts it back in his pocket. Looks at his watch. “Will you be all right?” he asks. “I’m sorry, but I have a...”

“Oh, yes, fine.”

“...patient coming in at one.”

“I’m okay, go ahead, really.”

“Let me know if you need me to testify or anything.”

“Oh, they’ll never catch him,” she says airily.

“Well, if they do.”

“Sure. Meanwhile, I’ll send you the handkerchief.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she says, and extends her hand.

They shake hands awkwardly.

“I really have to go,” he says.

“So go,” she says, and shrugs, smiling.

As he walks off, he hears her call behind him, “Hey! My name is Kate.”

The conversation in this office is privileged; that is to say, disclosure of anything said in this room cannot be forced on the witness stand. State statutes, case law, and federal rules of evidence label it “privileged communication,” this private and exclusive conversation between patient and doctor. But the privilege extends beyond legalities.

David has been granted the privilege of trust.

He does not accept this privilege lightly. He understands the gravity of it, knows that what his patients confide in him goes to the very core of their beings. They may be “Chairs” and “Couches” when he is separating them anonymously for Helen, but here in this deliberately neutral office they are the incontestable stars of the wrenching memories and dreams they relate, episodes past and present, revelations, admissions, confessions, which David sorts and re-sorts in an attempt at comprehension.

He is no longer shocked by anything a patient tells him. His notes — which he makes during each session in a spiral notebook with lined yellow pages — are linked to informal storyboards he himself sketches, the way a director would before filming, except that David’s illustrations are made during the act of creation; he is hearing the dialogue — a monologue in most instances — and visualizing the scene, while at the same time recording it on paper. His little drawings frequently resemble sketches for an Edvard Munch painting. A small boxed rectangle showing a cartoonlike figure of a screaming woman running from a racing locomotive will immediately recall for David the key episode or scene in a dream or a memory. Coupled with his scrawled interpretive note beneath it, the picture will instantly bring back the session and its essential matter. His sketches are quite good, actually. For a psychiatrist, anyway.

Today Arthur K is telling him again about the time he taught his younger sister to kiss. He has got over his pique at David’s five-minute tardiness, has poutingly forgiven him, and is lying on the sofa perpendicular to David’s desk. Arthur K is one of David’s Couches, a neurotic who suffers from extreme bouts of anxiety bordering on panic disorder. Eyes owlish behind thicklensed glasses whose frames are almost as big and as bold as David’s own — but Helen chose them — Arthur K relates casually and with seeming indifference an episode David suspects is at the very heart of his problems. It is as if David is seeing the same movie for the fourth or fifth time.

In the movie, Arthur K is seventeen years old, a high school senior still living with his mother, his father, and his sister Veronica, who is two years younger than he is. Veronica is blond. Arthur K may have been blond at the time; his thinning hair can look somewhat blondish even now, when the light hits it a certain way, but this may simply be graying hair that is turning an unsightly yellow. Back then...

This was fifty years ago.

Arthur K is now sixty-seven years old, a white American neurotic male whose beloved sister Veronica died in a car crash twelve years back, exactly when all of Arthur K’s problems seem to have started. It did not take a Freud or a Jung to make an almost immediate diagnosis when the man first began relating his woes in David’s office this past January.

Now the movie is unreeling again.

Listening, David merely consults his previous sketches and notes. Arthur K’s movie is identical each time; there is no need for fresh illustration. Even the words are the same, Arthur K’s subdued monologue, the privileged conversation he shares with his analyst in this office he considers safe. David knows the man hates him, and is pleased by the knowledge; it means that transference has already taken place.

The opening shot is of Arthur K unlocking the door to an apartment and stepping directly into a kitchen. The family lives on the second floor of a two-story walk-up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, not yet Puerto Rican or black at the time, a neighborhood largely composed of Jewish and Italian families. Arthur K is Jewish. There is a smell in the kitchen that he will always associate with Jewish cuisine, such as it is, a heavy aroma David can well imagine, his own mother not being among the world’s greatest chefs.

No need to sketch Arthur K’s kitchen, David knows it intimately. No need to look at the clock on the wall; it is midnight. And there, sitting at the kitchen table, just as Arthur K has conjured her for him many times before, is a fifteen-year-old blond, blue-eyed girl wearing a pink angora sweater, a dark blue pleated skirt, a string of pearls, bobby sox and saddle shoes; this is fifty years ago, but Arthur K recalls everything in vivid Technicolor. The cup of dark brown chocolate pudding on the table. Topped with frothy white whipped cream and a red maraschino cherry. The glass of bone-white milk. Veronica’s ivory-white skin. The blue-white pearls around her neck.

As David listens, his mind begins to wander.

Another movie intrudes.

The girl seems to appear out of a shimmering haze. Where a moment ago the path was empty, there is now a young girl on a bicycle, fifteen or sixteen years old, sweaty and slender, wearing green nylon running shorts and an orange cotton tank top, tendrils of long reddish-gold hair drifting across her freckled face...

He yanks his attention back to the present, Arthur K’s movie that is already condensed here on the lined yellow pages in the notebook on his desk, recalled again as his patient recites it for perhaps the hundredth time. Well, not that often; the man has only been seeing him for the past six months. But certainly a dozen times, perhaps thirteen or fourteen times, and yet Arthur K seems unaware that he keeps remembering this same scene over and over again, perhaps fifty times, yes, a hundred times, bringing it back in identical detail each and every time. All you did was kiss your sister, David wants to scream. That isn’t such a terrible crime, it didn’t cause her death in an automobile!

But, no, he says nothing of the sort. For now, his task is to encourage Arthur K to talk about his problems — among which is an inordinate fear of driving his own car — to listen in a nonjudgmental manner, to support and to reassure. Later, when Arthur K has fully accepted David’s seeming unresponsiveness as an essential part of the therapeutic “coalition,” so to speak, then perhaps David can begin to offer tentative interpretations of why Arthur K (or any of his patients for that matter) experiences such feelings or why he acts or reacts in such and such a manner on such and such an occasion.

For now, Arthur K’s movie.

Again.

Arthur K sits at the table beside his sister. Veronica seems distracted as she pokes at the chocolate pudding with her spoon, red juice from the cherry staining the frothy whipped cream.

David’s earlier notation on the lined yellow page reads

Veronica the Virgin sips at her milk, white against her virginal white skin, blue-white pearls at her throat. Arthur K has taken a second chilled dark brown chocolate pudding from the refrigerator and he sits beside his sister now, both of them eating, he hungrily, she disinterestedly, almost listlessly. Their family is among the first on their block to own a “fridge” rather than an icebox, and his mother keeps it full of desserts like chocolate puddings, or rice pudding with raisins (over which they pour evaporated milk) or lemon meringue pies, or juicy apple tarts.

“She was a terrible cook,” Arthur K says now, “but she gave great sweets.”

David makes no comment.

This is the first time he has heard this particular reference. On his pad he sketches a woman’s lips descending on what is unmistakably a penis.

Beneath the drawing he scrawls in his tight, cramped hand:

Arthur K’s voice is still narrating , the big hit movie of 1945. David’s attention is asked to focus yet again on a two-shot of Arthur K and Veronica in close-up. Arthur K is asking his sister what’s troubling her, why does she seem so gloomy tonight? “Gloomy” is Arthur K’s exact word; David has surely heard it four hundred and ten times by now. Why is Veronica so gloomy tonight? And Veronica shakes her head and replies, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just... I don’t know.”

Arthur K covers her hand with his.

“What is it, Sis?” he asks.

“Howard told me I don’t know how to kiss!” she blurts, and suddenly she is sobbing.

Arthur K puts his arm around her, comfortingly.

She turns her head into his shoulder, sobbing.

In the other movie that intrudes again, unbidden, the girl with red hair, golden hair, in the sun more red than gold, is sitting on the ground, both hands holding her ankle, bent from the waist, studying her left leg.

“I hit the ground kind of funny,” she says, “I hope I didn’t hurt my leg.”

David is all at once a costar in this bottom half of the double feature, entering the shot, kneeling beside the girl.

Dappled sunlight turns her eyes to glinting emeralds. Strands of golden-red hair drift across her face like fine threads in a silken curtain. The side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposes a hint of white cotton panties beneath.

“It’s beginning to swell,” she says.

David looks at the penis he has drawn on the yellow lined pad, a woman’s lips parted above it.

His mind snaps back to:

Veronica is telling her brother for the eight hundred and thirty-second time about the young man who took her to the synagogue dance that night, the very same dance Arthur K had attended, but which he’d left early so he could “make out” — Arthur K’s language — with a brown-eyed, black-haired girl named Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac sedan. Shirley, coincidentally, is also Arthur K’s mother’s name. Should David’s notation be amended to read Tarts = Veronica + Mother + Shirley?

“My father was a car salesman,” he says now. “He sold Pontiacs. I always drove new Pontiacs.”

He never fails to interject these words at this point in the story, a voice-over narrator in a movie David knows by heart. Years later, Veronica will be killed driving a Chevy Camaro. Perhaps this is why Arthur K insistently mentions that he himself has always driven Pontiacs, would drive a Pontiac today, in fact, except that he is scared to death of getting behind the wheel of any car.

In Arthur K’s movie, his sister is saying “Howard Kaplan told me...”

No names, please, but the damage is already done. A thousand times over, in fact.

“...I don’t know how to kiss!”

And bursts into tears again.

“Come on, Sis, stop it,” Arthur K says. “You don’t have to cry over somebody like Howard Kaplan.”

There is a close shot of his face, solemn, sincere... pimply, too, as a matter of fact... his dark eyes intent behind the thick glasses he is wearing even as a youth.

“What the hell does he know about kissing, anyway?” Arthur K says soothingly, his arm around his sister, patting her shoulder, the blue robe slightly open to show...

Wait a minute, David thinks.

...her luminous pearls.

Wait a minute, what happened to the pink angora sweater and the pleated blue skirt? How’d she get in a blue robe all of a sudden? Did the costume designer...?

“Jackass could use a few kissing lessons himself,” Arthur K says.

“I wish somebody would give me lessons,” Veronica says, her eyes brimming with tears, which the camera catches rolling down her flushed cheeks in extreme close-up.

The key words in the movie.

I wish somebody would give me lessons.

The essential words in Arthur K’s retelling of a steamy Bronx interlude fifty years ago, almost missed this time around but for the fact that David has memorized every frame, every line, every word, every inflection in this saga of adolescent lust and desire.

I wish somebody would give me lessons.

In a blue robe this time around.

Slightly open, no less.

To show luminous pearls.

David is drawing a pair of breasts on a fresh page in his notebook when Arthur K suddenly stops his narrative.

Perhaps he, too, has recognized that he’s changed his sister’s long-ago attire, has put her in a robe instead of a pink angora sweater and a pleated blue skirt. Perhaps he is realizing that a slightly open robe lends sexual intensity to the kiss that inevitably follows in this well-remembered story, the kiss he teaches her at her request. Perhaps he is discovering that what they have here is a young girl ardently kissing her brother at midnight while wearing what now turns out to have been a robe, slightly open to show the luminous pearls around her neck. “Just part your lips, Veronica,” he has repeated in previous retellings of the tale, after which he proceeds innocently to teach her — like the dutiful older brother he is — how to kiss, a calling for which she demonstrates tremendous natural aptitude, by the way. At midnight. In a merely slightly open robe.

But the film has stopped.

The projectionist has gone home.

“Isn’t it time?” Arthur K asks.

“We have a few more minutes.”

“Well,” Arthur K says and falls silent.

He remains silent as the minutes tick away.

And finally David says, “I think our time is up now.”

They both rise simultaneously, David from his black leather chair behind the desk, Arthur K from the black leather sofa at right angles to it. Before he leaves the office, Arthur K hurls a glare of pure hatred at him.

David leafs back through his lined yellow pages.

Sure enough, the first time he ever heard of Veronica eating chocolate pudding, he drew a picture of a girl with long straight hair, wearing a shaggy sweater and a pleated skirt, pearls around her neck.

Now she’s in an open robe that shows those luminous pearls.

We’re making progress, he thinks, and is almost sorry he will be flying up to Martha’s Vineyard tonight, and will not see Arthur K again until after the long Fourth of July weekend. He glances again at the breasts he’d started to draw in his notebook. Two smallish globes, a dot in the center of each.

All at once, he remembers the sharp outline of the girl’s nipples...

Hey! My name is Kate.

...Kate’s nipples against the thin sweaty fabric of the orange top.

Remembers, too, the way he turned away.

And closes the spiral notebook.

Helen and the children are all wearing white T-shirts, the two girls in matching white cutoff shorts, Helen in a long wraparound skirt in a printed blue fabric. He spots them the instant he begins crossing the tarmac to the terminal building, such as it is. They all look even browner than they did last weekend, each the butternut color of the sandals they’re wearing, each grinning, their teeth seeming too glisteningly white against their faces.

The kids have inherited Helen’s ash-blond hair, thank God, and not his “drab” brown, he guesses you might call it, although “mousy” brown seems to be the pejorative adjective of choice for women’s hair of that color. The girls’ hair is cut short and somewhat ragged for the summer months. Helen wears hers falling sleek and straight to the shoulders, bangs on her forehead ending just a touch above the eyebrows. She is an extravagantly beautiful woman, and he is stunned each time he discovers this anew. David is the only one in the family who doesn’t have blue eyes. His are brown to match the drab hair. Helen insists her eyes are gray, even though no one has gray eyes except in novels. David calls the kids the Blue-Eyed Monsters. They burst into giggles whenever he quavers the words and backs away from them in mock fright; it is easy to delight daughters of their age.

Annie, the six-year-old, begins telling him at once and excitedly all about the shark they’d seen off Chilmark, and Jenny, her elder by three years, immediately puts her down, telling David it was only a sand shark and a small one at that.

“Yeah, but it was a shark, anyway,” Annie says, “wasn’t it, Mommy?”

“Oh, it most certainly was,” Helen says, and squeezes David’s hand.

“I nicknamed him Jaws,” Annie says.

“How original,” her sister says.

Chattering, hopping from foot to foot in front of him, walking backward, squeezing in to hug him every now and then, they make their disorderly way toward where Helen has parked the station wagon. A sharp wind blows in suddenly off the field, puffing up under the wraparound skirt, opening it at the slit to reveal long slender legs splendidly tanned by the sun. So damn beautiful, David thinks, and she catches his glance, and seemingly his inner observation as well, for she smiles over the heads of the little girls and winks in wicked promise as she flattens the skirt with the palm of her left hand, her golden wedding band bright against her tan.

The summertime rate for a direct flight from Newark to the airport near Edgartown is two-seventy-five round-trip, and the flight takes an hour and twelve minutes, to which he has to figure another hour to the airport from the city — all told a journey well worth it. He left his office at two-thirty this afternoon, and it is now only twenty past five. They have been renting here on the island for the past seven years now, from when Helen was pregnant with Annie. And even though the place is overrun with writers, movie stars, and politicians, among them — God help us — even a president of the United States, David still finds in their Menemsha cottage a haven truly distant from the stresses of the city and the incessant turmoil of his patients. Here among the pines and the inland marshes and the soaring skies and sheltering dunes, he feels honestly at peace with his family and himself.

Lobster dinners are a tradition every Friday night. Then again, anything the Chapman family does more than once becomes an instant tradition with Annie. Sucking meat from a claw, she listens wide-eyed as David relates the tale of this afternoon’s bicycle theft in Central Park.

“You should have minded your own business, Dad,” Jenny says. “What you did was extremely dangerous.”

“It was,” Helen agrees.

Each of them looks so gravely concerned that he feels like leaning across the table and kissing them both. On the other hand, Annie wants to hear more.

“Did he kill her?” she asks.

“No, honey. Just hit her a lot.”

“Urgh,” Annie says, and pulls a face, and then asks, “Mommy, can you crack this for me, please?”

Helen takes the claw Annie hands across the table.

“Who was she, do you know?”

“Kate something.”

“There’s a girl named Kate in my class,” Annie says.

“This isn’t the same Kate,” Jenny informs her.

“Duhhhhh, no kidding?” Annie says, and twists her forefinger into her cheek, a repeated gesture David has never understood.

“Kate what?” Helen asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, didn’t you ask?”

“No.”

“Suppose she needs you?”

“For what, Mom?”

“Suppose they catch the guy?”

“They won’t,” David says.

“They won’t,” the girls echo simultaneously.

“Won’t you have to testify?”

“I doubt they’ll pay much attention to a stolen bike.”

“They better not steal my bike!” Annie says, and makes a threatening gesture with the lobster claw.

“Still, Dad,” Jenny says, “you could have just called the cops or something. You didn’t have to rush in like a hero.”

“I am a hero,” he says, and flexes his muscles like a weight lifter.

“Some hero,” Helen says. “The guy got the bike, anyway.”

“Ah yes, but I yelled at him,” David says. “At the top of my lungs.”

“Daddy is a hero,” Annie says.

“He is, darling,” Helen agrees. “But he should have been more careful.”

“Suppose he had a gun or something?” Jenny asks, frowning now.

“Daddy would’ve yanked it away from him.”

“Pow!” David says, and swings his fist at an imaginary assailant.

“One out of every two teenagers in New York has a gun,” Jenny says.

“Where’d you hear that?” Helen asks. “Who wants more corn?”

“Me.”

“Me.”

“In the Times. It’s a fact. Me, too.”

“This one didn’t have a gun,” David says.

“How do you know?”

“Because I didn’t get shot, did I?”

“Daddy didn’t get shot, did he?” Annie says, nodding, buttering her corn.

“Or a knife,” Jenny persists. “He could’ve had a knife.”

“Daddy would have grabbed it like Crocodile Dundee.”

“Is she going to report it to the police?” Helen asks.

“She said she would.”

“She should.”

“I told her.”

“I’d be afraid,” Jenny says.

“No, something like that should be reported.”

“I’d be afraid,” Jenny says again.

“Not me,” Annie says. “Could I have the salt, please? If I’d’ve been with Daddy, I’d’ve broken his head.”

“You’d have broken my head?” David says in mock alarm.

“Not yours,” Annie says, and begins giggling.

“Who’s for dessert?” Helen asks, and begins clearing.

“Me!” Annie says, raising her hand at once.

“Me!” Jenny says, raising hers a beat later.

“Let me help you, hon,” David says, pushing back his chair.

“I’ve got it,” Helen says.

A look passes between them.

Private, almost secret.

“Sit,” she says, and smiles and goes out into the kitchen.

There is a spectacular sunset that night.

Annie calls each night’s sunset a tradition.

The house they are renting affords lavish views of both Menemsha Pond and the Bight. They stand on the deck overlooking both, the pond in the near distance, the bight and Vineyard Sound further to the northwest. The pond has already turned pink. The waters of the sound are still a fiery red. As they watch, the sky turns first a dusky purple and then a dark blue that becomes yet deeper and darker and eventually black and finally...

“Boop!” Annie says.

They put the children to bed and then sit on the screened porch, listening to the clatter of the summer insects and the murmur of the distant surf. Whispering in the stillness of the star-drenched night, they hold hands as they had when they were young lovers in Boston, discovering that city together, and themselves as well, discovering themselves through each other in that city. She was thinner when he’d met her, perhaps too thin, in fact, with incongruently abundant breasts — well, 34C, she told him, the first time he’d fumbled with her bra — and hips made for childbearing, she also told him. She is still slender, what he considers slender, although she constantly complains that she can stand to lose a few pounds. As they whisper in the hush and the dark, he keeps remembering the wind blowing her long skirt back over her lovely bare legs.

In bed later, the little black hook-latch fastened on the white, planked, wooden bedroom door, she spreads her legs for him, the sleek smooth legs he loves to touch, the feel of them under his searching hands, the children asleep down the hall, stroking her legs, his hands gliding up to the secret flesh high on her inner thighs, the soft hollows hidden on either side of her pubic mound. As she did the very first time they’d made love in a rented room on Cape Cod, she gasps sharply when his fingers part her nether lips, and raises her hips to accept his gently questing fingers, touching, finding her, moist and ready.

If Annie knew — and perhaps she does — what transpires each Friday night in this bedroom with its salt-dampened sheets and its windows open to the ocean winds, she would most certainly call it a tradition. For here in Helen’s fiercely welcoming embrace, David finds again the young girl he once knew, and the desirable woman she’s become, and is replenished by both. Overwhelmed by her beauty, stunned by her passion, moved almost to tears by her generosity, he whispers as he does each time, “I love you, Helen.”

And she whispers against his lips, “Oh, and I love you, David, so very very much.”

He has already forgotten the golden-haired redhead whose bike was stolen in Central Park.

But, of course, at parties all during that long weekend of the Fourth, Helen keeps urging him to tell the story of what happened in Central Park. And with each retelling of the story, even though David reports the facts essentially the same way each time, the story assumes mythic proportions in his own mind, the movie playing there differing from the actual script as much as if a director had arrogantly tampered with a writer’s original creation to make it indifferently his own. At a cocktail party in Edgartown that Saturday, as David retells the basic story as it happened, he visualizes something quite other in his imagination, and is surprised to hear himself relating a tale that is, by comparison, fundamentally mundane.

In his fantasy, the bicycle thief (good title for a movie, he thinks, thank you, Mr. De Sica), in The Bicycle Thief, then — David’s movie and not De Sica’s — the robber is no longer a scrawny sixteen-year-old black kid struggling almost unsuccessfully to wrench a bike from a slip of a girl who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, but is instead a brawny tattooed (Mom in a heart) black ex-con wearing a tiny gold earring in his left ear, sweaty T-shirt bulging with impossible muscles courtesy of Weight Lifting 101 at Ossining, New York. The girl, too, whereas not the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old he’d first thought she was yesterday in the park, becomes in the Never Never Land of his unconscious a girl of nineteen, technically a teenager but precariously poised on the cusp of womanhood, certainly a more appropriate victim for the brute assaulting her in this neorealistic black-and-white remake of Beauty and the Beast, a far far better prey, unquestionably more innocent, and therefore more defenseless than a woman of twenty-five would have been (if, in fact, that was her age).

As David tells the story to an interested circle of listeners on the deck of a house larger than the one they are renting in Menemsha, yet another glorious sunset provoking ooohs and ahhhs of appreciation, he does not exaggerate in the slightest his behavior yesterday in the park. He carefully explains that he did not run to the rescue until he’d examined the possible risk of such intervention...

“Well, of course,” his host says, raising an understanding eyebrow. “You were in Central Park.”

“Exactly,” David replies.

...and even then, all he did was yell “Hey!” which had no effect at all on the struggle, and then “Hey!” again when the boy was already pedaling off. This being Edgartown, he does not mention that the boy yelled “Fuck you!” in exuberant farewell. This being Edgartown, someone immediately begins talking about the absurdity of the Black Rage defense, and someone else suggests that if they catch this little monster he should be chained to a bicycle and forced to ride up and down the streets of New York with a sign on his back reading BICYCLE THIEF.

“Good title for a movie,” someone says with a sly wink, as if David hasn’t already thought of it.

“Thank you, Mr. De Sica,” someone else says.

That, too, David thinks.

But...

In retelling the tale that evening, and again at a Bring-the-Kiddies outdoor barbecue in Chilmark that Sunday, where — it being Chilmark — a heated discussion ensues regarding therapy programs for underprivileged minorities, and yet again at a West Chop picnic on Monday (“Of course, bring the kids!”) and yet again for the last time...

Or at least what he hopes will be the last time, if only Helen would quit urging him to tell about The Mugging in Central Park, her title for the episode, which in truth is beginning to bore him even in the extravagantly distorted version inside his head. Yet retell it he does, for what actually does turn out to be the last time, at yet another cocktail party on the deck of a house overlooking Vineyard Haven Harbor and affording a splendid view of the fireworks display that starts as darkness falls and the world grows hushed in expectation.

But...

In all of these retellings, the fantastic story unfolding in his mind has him not only rushing to the adolescent girl’s side, not only struggling with the brawny animal trying to steal her bike and rape her in the bargain — her costume torn, one breast showing where he’s ripped the orange tank top from her shoulder, the adolescent nipple erect in terror — not only struggling with this weight-lifting specimen twice his size, but actually exchanging blows with him, the girl standing by breathlessly, her hand to her mouth, the green eyes wide in fear and concern, the freckled face flushed, until at last her attacker hits David a good one upside the head, in his mind, anyway, and knocks him to the ground, in his mind, and kicks him while he’s down, in his mind, and races off shouting the words David had not thought wise to repeat in Edgartown, nor even here in Vineyard Haven, for that matter.

Over the harbor, fireworks burst into the sky, trailing glowing shivering sparks toward the dark waters below.

Arthur K’s sister is once again wearing her pink angora sweater, dark blue pleated skirt, string of pearls, bobby sox and saddle shoes. This is now the fifth of July, a hot and sultry Wednesday morning. It has been five days since Arthur K’s Friday afternoon session; apparently the long Fourth of July weekend has blown all memories of the open blue robe from his mind. He revisits the scene in the kitchen again and again, tiptoeing around it like one of the ballerina hippopotami in Fantasia, but they are already thirty minutes into the hour and the blue robe has remained adamantly closed over Veronica’s luminous pearls.

Arthur K is now telling David that he really had a lousy time at the synagogue dance that night long ago, and that, in fact, he hadn’t made out with Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac, or anywhere else, for that matter.

“I guess that was some sort of fantasy I made up,” he says. “I guess that was what I wished would happen, but it didn’t.”

David says nothing.

“Does that make you angry?” Arthur K asks.

“No, no.”

“My lying to you?”

“Do you feel you were lying to me?”

“No. I told you it was just a fantasy, didn’t I? How is that lying? I was only sixteen at the time. It was just a fantasy.”

In his notebook, David writes , and then waits, his pen poised over the lined yellow page.

“Nothing wrong with fantasies,” Arthur K says. “I’m sure you have fantasies, don’t you?”

They are perpendicular to each other, Arthur K on his back on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, David sitting in the chair behind his desk.

“By the way, how do you determine what’s important and what’s not?” Arthur K asks. “How do you know what to write down?”

David does not reply.

“I guess Shirley’s important, hm?” Arthur K says. “You always make a little note when I mention her, I can hear your little pen going, zip, zip, zip. Is that because she had the same name as my mother? Has, for all I know. She may still be alive. She’d be an old woman by now, of course... well, sixty-five, sixty-six, for a woman that’s old. She was very beautiful back then, it was easy to fantasize about her, you can’t blame me for fantasizing about her. I realize that what I told you... about the car and about her and me on the backseat... isn’t something I fantasized back then when I was sixteen, of course, but something I made up now... well, not now, not this very minute, but whenever it was I first mentioned it to you. What I’m saying is I know I was telling you something I made up, I know I was lying to you, if that’s what you choose to call it, telling you a lie about making out with Shirley when actually all I did was drive her home and say goodnight to her. Didn’t even kiss her, in fact. Just said goodnight. I don’t think we even shook hands. Just G’night, Shirley, G’night, Arthur, and I went home. I think I had a hard-on, I’m not sure. She was so fucking beautiful, it was impossible to go anywhere near her without getting a hard-on. I’m sure I must’ve had a hard-on.”

This is the first David is hearing of Arthur K’s hardon. In previous tellings of that steamy adolescent night long ago, gawky Arthur K and sultry, dark-haired, dark-eyed Shirley were necking in the backseat of the Pontiac and suddenly Shirley’s blouse was unbuttoned and her skirt was up above her waist. Until now David had naturally assumed there’d been an erection, else how could Arthur K have “made out”? He’d also assumed that Arthur K had gone home sated and sans erection, there to discover his sister Veronica sitting at the kitchen table weeping and spooning chocolate pudding into her mouth.

But now, all at once, a hard-on.

Ta-ra.

“I think she had that same effect on everyone,” Arthur K says. “Shirley. Well, she was so fucking beautiful, you know. Blond hair and blue eyes, Jesus, she looked like a shiksa, I swear to God, you’d never know...”

You’d never know, David thinks with shocking clarity, that in every version he’s heard of Arthur K’s story so far, Shirley has had long black hair and brown eyes, and — in at least one telling — crisp black pubic hair. But now she is a blonde, and David forges an immediate connection which he scribbles into his notebook as Arthur K doesn’t hear him writing this time around because he is too busy staring up at the ceiling in David’s office, where apparently he is visualizing his blond, blue-eyed Shirley-Veronica shiksa...

“... half sitting, half lying back against the pillows, crying her eyes out. Her room was on the way to mine,” he says, “this was a railroad flat, you had to walk through one room to get to the next one, there was like a corridor running straight through the apartment from one end of it to the other, with the rooms strung out along the way. Her light was on, she used to have this little lamp with a shade on it, on the table beside her bed. The door was open. I could see her lying back against the pillows, sitting there sobbing, her legs stretched out, she was barefoot. Wearing this little skimpy blue robe she always wore, a pink nightgown under it, I could see her pink nightgown, there was lace on the bottom of it, the hem. I said, ‘Sis?’ Whispered it, actually, because my parents were sleeping right down the hall, there was Veronica’s room first, and then mine, and then the big bedroom where my parents slept. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her. ‘Sis? What’s wrong?’ And I went inside and sat beside her on the bed.”

Arthur K falls silent.

David waits, scarcely daring to breathe.

“A lot of guys felt the same way I did about her,” Arthur K says at last. “Shirley. She was the class cock-tease, in fact.”

And the moment is gone.

And soon the hour is over.

On Wednesday morning, just as his second session that day is ending, the telephone rings. His patient, an obsessive-compulsive named Susan M, asks as she does after each session, changing only the day each time, “So I’ll see you on Friday, right?” and when he says, “Yes, of course,” she says, “Same time, right?” and he says, “Yes, same time,” and the telephone rings. He is picking up the receiver as Susan M, waggling her fingers in farewell, closes the door behind her.

“Dr. Chapman,” he says.

“Hi, it’s Kate.”

“Kate?” he says.

“Duggan. Rhymes with huggin’.”

“Duggan?”

“Or, come to think of it, muggin’ might be more appropriate.”

“I’m sorry, I...”

“Kate. From the park. The victim, remember?”

“Oh. Oh, yes. How are you, Miss Duggan?”

“Kate. I’m fine. They caught him,” she says. “At least, they think it’s him. Guess where they got him?”

“Where?”

“In the park. Trying to steal somebody else’s bike.”

“Did they find yours?”

“No, he’d already sold it. He’s a junkie, we were right.”

We, he thinks.

“What happens now?”

“I have to go to the precinct later, identify him. That’s why I’m calling. Do you think you could come with me?” she asks at once, and somewhat breathlessly, as if knowing in advance he will say no. “I told the police there was a witness, and they said it would help if they could get a positive ID from someone other than the victim. That’s me. The victim.”

“Well...”

“I know you must be busy...”

“Well, as a matter of fact I’ve been away, and...”

“...but this won’t be till six tonight. The lineup. I work, too, they know that. The cops. I told them that’s the earliest I could get there. They’ve already got him on the attempted robbery, the one in the park yesterday, but they really want to nail him if it turns out he’s the one who stole my bike, too. So if you could come to the precinct, it really would help. If you want to, that is. As a public service, that is.”

“Well, actually, I won’t be free till almost six. So...”

“That’s okay, you could meet me at the precinct, it’s not far from your office. And I don’t think it’ll matter if you’re a few minutes late.”

“Well, you see, Miss Duggan...”

“Kate,” she says.

“Kate,” he says. “I’m not sure I...”

“Please?”

He does not know why the image of her sitting on the ground, ankles crossed, flashes suddenly into his mind, the side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts, the hint of white cotton panties beneath.

“Say yes,” she says.

The stage is behind a thick plate-glass window which the detective running the lineup assures them is a one-way mirror, or a two-way mirror as it is sometimes called in some precincts, he says, go figure. What it is, they can see into the next room where there’s the stage with height markers on the wall behind it, and a microphone hanging over it because the detective plans to ask all the people they parade to repeat the words the suspect said in the park last Friday — “First to you, Miss Duggan, and then to you, Dr. Chapman” — but nobody in the next room could see them where they were sitting here in the dark. None of the people in the other room would be able to hear any of the conversation in here, either, the conversation in here would be private and confidential.

The detective goes on to explain that all of the people they’ll be looking at will be black men of about the same age as the suspect. This was so no smart-ass lawyer could come in later and say the identification process had been rigged, like say they put six Vietnamese fishermen and the one black kid on the stage there, some choice that would be, huh? The detective wants them to take their time, look everybody over carefully, nobody can see them or hear them out here in the dark, there’s no danger of anybody coming after them and trying to do them harm later on. Just take your time, he tells them, see if you recognize anybody on the stage there, see if anybody’s voice sounds familiar, okay?

Sitting in the dark here in the small room equipped with several folding chairs facing the glass, David has the feeling he’s already read this scene, or viewed this scene, and by extension has been an integral part of this scene a hundred times over — except for the fact that Kate Duggan is sitting beside him here in the dark.

She is wearing for this earnestly official occasion a flimsy pale green garment he is sure he’s seen at the dentist’s office in the pages of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, a costume he usually associates with very young women, gossamer enough to show long slender legs through the long skirt, a darker green shirt rescuing modesty beneath the dress’s sheer bodice but failing to disguise the fact that Kate isn’t wearing a bra, something all of the precinct detectives seemed to notice the moment she walked in — ten minutes late, by the way.

Her feet are in sandals strapped part of the way up the leg. Her legs are crossed. She is jiggling one foot. Her toenails are polished a green to match the dress; he wonders if she paints them a new color each time she puts on a different outfit. Her perfume conjures visions of tall pale skinny girls rushing across fields of heather and crushing themselves against the chests of extraordinarily tanned and muscular young men. He is sure he has smelled Kate’s perfume on television. He thinks suddenly of Arthur K’s blond, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old sister lying back against the pillows on her bed, skimpy blue robe parted over her short pink nightgown, bare legs showing, and all at once he feels intensely and uncomfortably aware of Kate sitting beside him in the dark as if they are here alone together to watch a pornographic movie.

Fortunately, they are spared the ordeal of having to sit too long through this police cliché, he and Kate both identifying her assailant virtually at once, by sight and also by the sound of his voice when he repeats first the words he’d spoken to her by way of introduction, “Give me the fuckin bike, bitch!” and then the words he’d hurled at David in farewell, “Fuck you!” his vocabulary and his repertoire being somewhat limited. They are out on the street again by a quarter to seven.

“I really appreciate your doing this,” she says.

“I was happy to help.”

“Well, most people wouldn’t have bothered. Thank you. Really.”

“Don’t be silly.”

He feels oddly removed from her all at once.

Last Friday, they shared a traumatic event that forged some sort of tentative bond between them. Today, they shared yet another experience, but now that justice has triumphed, the matter is over and done with, and they are once again strangers in a city of strangers, walking side by side in silence as the hot and humid evening closes in upon them.

“I haven’t got around to your handkerchief yet,” she says.

“Oh, don’t worry about...”

“But I will,” she says, and shrugs. There is something very girlish, almost childlike about the shrug and the small moue that accompanies it, her narrow shoulders rising, her tented mouth pulling into a grimace. There is no lipstick on that mouth. Her green eyes are shadowed with a blue that makes them appear even more green. Her breasts are tiny in the sheer dress. A girl’s breasts. A girl’s tentative nipples puckering the fabric. “I’ll mail it to you as soon as...”

“That isn’t necessary. Really.”

“You saved my life,” she says simply.

“What do you think’ll happen to him?” he asks, and realizes he is merely making conversation; the episode is over, the tentative bond was broken the moment after they made positive identification.

“They’re pretty sure he’ll plead to a lesser offense.”

“Like what?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she says, and shrugs again. “Stealing roller skates?”

David smiles.

“Well, Miss Duggan...” he says.

“Kate,” she says.

They both seem to realize at exactly the same moment that, really, there is nothing more to say.

“Well, Dr. Chapman...” she says.

“David,” he says.

“David,” she says.

There is a very long silence.

“See you around the pool hall,” she says, and walks off.

He doesn’t expect he will ever see her again.

But on Saturday morning, Stanley Beckerman calls.

“I understand we’re both bachelors this weekend,” he says.

“I’ve been meaning to call you...”

David has not, in fact, been meaning to call him, even though Helen has mentioned that Stanley will be alone in the city all this week and next and has suggested it might be “nice” if they had dinner together one night. David doesn’t particularly enjoy Stanley’s company, and Helen knows this. But Stanley’s wife is in Helen’s aerobics class, and the two of them are constantly hatching misbegotten dinner dates far too often, even though Helen knows how David feels about his colleague, such as he is.

Like David, Stanley is a psychiatrist. In fact, he is one of many in the profession who cause David to feel that most psychiatrists are attracted to the practice only because they themselves are crazy. All oblivious to his own nuttiness — “Well, he is a bit eccentric,” Helen concedes — Stanley casually refers to his patients as the “Crazies” or, alternately, the “Loonies,” descriptions David finds appalling. Stanley is about David’s age, perhaps a year or so older, forty-seven or — eight, David guesses, but this is all they have in common, the practice of psychiatry notwithstanding. And whereas David would be content to have the relationship end with their few chance encounters at this or that seminar, Helen and her pal Gerry, bouncing around at Rhoda’s Body-works on East Eighty-sixth and Lex, simply will not be deterred. So here is Dr. Stanley Beckerman now, on a hot Saturday morning in July, calling to say that one of his Loonies has given him two tickets to Cats for tonight’s performance...

“I only saved him from committing suicide,” Stanley says, “the cheap bastard...”

...and would David like to go with him to dinner and the show afterward?

“Dinner will be Dutch, of course,” Stanley says. “The tickets are on me.”

Or on your Loony, actually, David thinks.

He does not know why he accepts the offer.

Perhaps because it is easier to do so than to have to listen to Helen later wondering aloud how he could have been so rude as to turn it down.

Stanley is growing a beard while his wife and kids are in North Carolina for the summer. It is coming in scruffy and patchy, an uneven mix of mostly white, red, and gray hairs, with only a scattering of dark brown hairs that match the thinning, straight hair on his head. He is a short man, overweight to some extent, who wears rimless eyeglasses and a perpetual sneer, as if he knows secrets of the universe he would not reveal upon pain of torture or death. Tonight he is wearing khaki slacks, an altogether rumpled plaid sports jacket, brown loafers without socks, and a white button-down shirt open at the throat, no tie.

By contrast, David, wearing a neatly pressed tropical-weight suit with a pale blue shirt and a striped summer tie, feels absurdly overdressed. But he believes that dressing for the theater still warrants something more elegant than a bowling shirt and blue jeans. Then again, he supposes Stanley thinks he does look elegant. Or, more likely, Stanley doesn’t give a shit how he looks.

What he looks like, in fact, is a beachcomber who’s been washed ashore in far Bombay. Sneering instead like a British regimental commander entering a leper colony, he leads the way into the French restaurant he has chosen without consulting David, even though he has already informed him that they will be splitting the check, perhaps hoping David will insist on paying for both dinners, since, after all, the tickets are on Stanley, hmm?

Stanley has a habit of saying “Hmm?”

The mild query threads his conversation like a bee buzzing in clover, hmm?

Like Jackie Mason, Stanley has imperiously refused the first table offered to them — “Is this a table for a man like me?” — which seemed perfectly okay to David. As they accept another table, David again wonders why in hell he’s here tonight, about to have dinner with a totally obnoxious human being, about to see a musical everybody else in New York has already seen, a show he didn’t even want to see when it first opened because he has no particular affection for human beings pretending to be cats. He has read the Eliot book of poems, of course; he tries to keep up with everything, a hopeless task, in the expectation that a patient’s dream might one day obliquely refer to something, anything, in the common realm. Movies, novels, essays, plays — even a musical like Cats, he supposes — are all grist for his analytic mill, the interpretation of dreams often hinging on obscure references like...

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.

It does not take long for David to realize that this is a show essentially without a book. This is a show, in fact, that merely sets these fundamentally second-rate Eliot poems to music, with no attempt to tie them together into any dramatic semblance of beginning, middle and end. At its basic worst, this is a show about people trying to look like cats and behave like cats. Accept that silly premise or go home. David cannot accept that anyone on this stage — well, maybe the female cat in the white costume — moves like any cat he has ever known. He cannot go home, however, because Stanley seems inordinately and childishly engrossed, tapping him lightly on the arm each time a chorus girl in sleek leotard and tights slinks across the stage.

The girl in the white costume seems to be performing in a world of her own. She seems to believe she really is a cat. There are many choreographed cat moves in the show, actions that the cast performs simultaneously in response to music cues, but David feels certain the little personal bits of cat motions were improvised by the individual members of the cast during rehearsal and have now become mannerisms indigenous to performances set in concrete. The girl in white, however...

He squints through the program during a well-lighted song-and-dance number that spills some illumination to where he is sitting, trying to identify her in the jumble of cats with names that are non-names, all of them leaping about the stage, often hissing, sometimes baring fake claws. He cannot for the life of him determine which character the girl in white is portraying.

But she continues to hold his interest.

She seems truly in a world apart, obviously having owned a cat at one time, or perhaps having devoted hours to the study of cat behavior, now translated to subtle dance poses, or perhaps indeed having been a cat in some previous life long ago, perhaps even Sheba the cat, although Sheba was a great big fat tabby, all gray and black with a fluffy white tummy, and not this slender pristine white cat who really seems to be one.

She is dressed entirely in white, white leotard and tights with snippets of fake white fur fastened in tatters to the shoulders and bosom of the costume. A white fur hat covers her hair, hiding it completely, fastening under her chin, topping the costume and capping her head, little peaked ears poking up out of it. The makeup on her face is a chalky white, highlighted with black liner that emphasizes cat eyebrows and a cat nose and cat whiskers.

She is wearing low, flat-heeled shoes undoubtedly rubberized to grip what appears to be a polymered stage floor across which she and the other cats frequently body-slide as if on ice. Over the tights and partially flopping onto the dancing shoes are leg warmers a shade darker than the stark white of the costume, more a pearly gray by contrast. She wears on her arms, from her wrists virtually to her elbows, coverings of the same type, what appear to be long knitted wristlets or the upper parts of graying white dinner gloves. Real gloves, cut off at the fingers and thumbs, grayer than the wristlets, lend her hands, or rather her paws, a grubby alley-cat look, in contrast to her otherwise sleek appearance. A narrow belt around her waist holds a long tail of the same grayish color as the leg warmers.

She is every inch a cat.

Moreover, she seems to be a cat who is only intermittently caught up in the inanity of this plodding musical, going about her own catlike business, licking her paws, or snapping her tail, or cocking her head to watch this or that bit of action, or swatting at an invisible insect, or rolling over on her back, only to sit upright an instant later when some further piece of business or song erupts nearby, sometimes startled by what she sees, sometimes merely bemused by the fact that she is here at all.

Since she is the only white cat on a stage full of varicolored cats often indistinguishable one from the other, it is easy to follow her every movement. She seems to have captured Stanley’s attention as well; he lightly taps David’s arm in the “Jellicle Ball” scene near the end of the first act, alerting David to her form as she is lifted over the head of a male dancer, her long legs gracefully dangling. When the grizzled cat — of course named Grizabella — sings “Memory,” the show’s one and only memorable song, the white cat is lying on her side stage left, utterly still, as rapt as the audience, completely absorbed in lyrics that truly evoke the emotions of Eliot’s real poetry. For the first time since the show began, David takes his eyes off the white cat, and finds himself moved beyond comprehension when the aging glamour cat sings of her lost, irretrievable youth.

While Stanley goes outside to enjoy an intermission smoke, David leafs through the program, trying to zero in on the name of the dancer playing the white cat. There is no White Cat, as such, listed anywhere. He tries to imagine whether Eliot would have named this cat Jellylorum or Rumpleteazer or Demeter or... wait a minute. Here are four cats, two male, two female, listed simply as “The Cats Chorus,” but he has no idea whether the white cat is one of them. He looks up their bios in the Who’s Who In The Cast section of his Playbill, but finds no clues there, either. He seems to remember, but perhaps he’s wrong, that one of the cats singing right up front and center in the Ball-Invitation number at the top of the show was the white cat... wasn’t she? He checks back to the listing of scenes, and finds three cats credited by name for that particular song, two of them male cats respectively called Munkustrap and Mistoffelees — boy oh boy — and the third a female cat named Victoria. Victoria? How’d such a sensible name sneak in here? He looks across the page to see who is playing this oddly named creature. The line reads:

He looks at the name again.

Kathryn Duggan.

Hey! My name is Kate!

Kate.

Duggan. Rhymes with huggin’.

But no. It can’t be.

But yes, right there, Kathryn Duggan.

Well, wait a minute. He flips forward again to the biographical listings of the cast. A loudspeakered voice announces that the curtain will be going up in three minutes. The cast is listed alphabetically. He hastily reads:

“Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Stanley asks, and slips into the seat beside him just as the lights come up again.

And now David cannot possibly take his eyes from her. Whenever she disappears from the stage, as frequently she does, he wonders where she has gone, and renews his scrutiny when suddenly she reappears. He keeps hoping she will come down into the audience as some of the other dancers do every now and then, crawling up and down the aisles on all fours, but either she is hidden behind a Siamese cat mask in the “Growltiger’s Last Stand” number — at least he thinks it’s Kathryn and therefore perhaps Kate because he spots the grayish-white leg warmers under the Oriental garb — or else she’s paying homage to the cat named Deuteronomy, sitting on his lap and stroking his aged face, or else she’s pretending to be part of a locomotive’s piston assembly in yet another number, stroking the huge piston back and forth as if it is the head of a penis, nice association, Dr. Chapman. But none of this brings her close enough for him to get a good look at the face disguised by that dead-white makeup, until — as if some cat-God high up in cat-Heaven is granting a secret wish — she comes down off the stage in the “Macavity” number, comes off from the side ramp on the right of the theater, surprising him when she crawls through the wide space in front of row K, and then in her catlike way, sits up, seemingly detecting a human presence, seemingly startled, jerking her head around and looking directly into his face, her green eyes wide.

She shows not the slightest sign of recognition.

She is a cat, thoroughly immersed in her own cat existence, and she is off again in an instant, scampering away, gray-white tail twitching.

Toward the end of the show, when Grizabella sings the searing words “Touch me,” David’s eyes fill with tears.

At eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, shortly after he’s called Helen on the Vineyard, the intercom buzzer sounds, and Luis the doorman tells David there’s a delivery for him.

“Some young lady leaves a package,” he says.

“A package?”

“Sí. But a leetle one.”

“Can someone bring it up?” David asks.

“This is Sunday. I’m here only myself.”

David is still in his pajamas. The Sunday Times is spread all over the dining alcove table. He tells Luis he’ll be down for the package later and then realizes this has to be his handkerchief, and that the young lady who delivered it was surely Kate Duggan, who last night had prowled all over the stage of the Winter Garden Theater in rather good imitation of a predatory feline. He has already decided he’ll go out for brunch in an hour or so, and he figures he can pick up the handkerchief then. Surely there’s no urgency. But nonetheless he throws on undershorts, jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of loafers, and, unshaven and unshowered, takes the elevator down to the lobby.

The package is a small clasp envelope with his name hand-printed on it in thick red Magic Marker letters. . Luis gives him a big macho Hispanic grin and all but winks at him as he hands over the envelope. The grin suggests that not everyone in the building has “leetle” packages delivered by beautiful redheaded girls at eleven o’clock in the morning. David ignores complicity with what the rows of glistening white teeth imply. He thanks Luis for the package, answers politely when Luis asks how Mrs. Chapman is enjoying the seashore (slight raising of a Puerto Rican eyebrow, faint suggestion again of the male-bonding grin under the black mustache) and then walks across the lobby to the elevator bank. He feels certain Luis’s dark eyes are on his back, and feels suddenly guilty of whatever crime Luis is imagining. In the elevator, he resists the temptation to open the envelope. It seems to take forever for the elevator to crawl up the shaft to the tenth floor. It seems to take forever for him to unlock the door. The keys feel suddenly thick in his hands.

He carries the envelope to the table in the dining alcove off the kitchen, and sets it down on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section. The red letters spelling out his name are ablaze in bright morning sunshine. He sits at the table. Picks up the envelope again. Turns it over. Lifts the wings of the clasp. Opens the envelope.

The handkerchief has been laundered and ironed, folded once upon itself, and then once again to form a perfect white square. He is disappointed when he realizes there is no note attached to the handkerchief. He peers into the envelope, spots a small white business card in it, and shakes it free onto the table. The card is imprinted with her name, her address on East Ninety-first, and two telephone numbers, one below the other. He turns the card over. Handwritten in blue ink scrawled across its back are the words:

He smiles.

He does not go immediately to the telephone, but he knows he will call her sometime later this morning, before he goes down for brunch — what time is it now, anyway, eleven-fifteen, eleven-thirty? He looks at his watch. It is twenty past eleven. He’ll call her later, as a courtesy, thank her for her kindness, her thoughtfulness, mention how much he enjoyed her performance last night.

He goes back to reading the Times.

His eyes keep flicking to the card lying on the table beside the freshly laundered handkerchief.

He looks at his watch again.

Eleven twenty-five.

He rises abruptly, decisively, walks into the bathroom, undresses, glances at himself briefly in the mirror, and then steps into the shower. He studies his face carefully as he shaves. His eyes meet his own eyes often. He realizes he is rehearsing what he will say to her when he calls. Naked, he pads into the bedroom and puts on a black silk robe with blue piping at the cuffs, a gift from Helen last Christmas. Wearing only the robe belted at his waist, the silk slippery against his skin, he sits propped against the pillows on the unmade bed, and dials the first of the numbers on her card. A recorded voice tells him he has reached the Phillip Knowles Agency, and that business hours are Monday to Friday from nine A.M. to six P.M. He puts the phone back on its cradle.

Oddly, he thinks of Arthur K’s sister in her blue robe, propped against the pillows in her midnight bed.

Arthur K’s arm around her.

He takes a deep breath and dials the second number.

“Hello?”

Her voice.

“Kate?”

“Yes?”

Somewhat breathless.

“This is Dr. Chapman. David.”

“Oh, hi. I just came in the door. Did you get the...?”

“Yes, that’s why I’m...”

“I washed and ironed it myself, you know. I didn’t take it to a laundry or anything.”

“Well, thank you. That was very thoughtful. Truly.”

“Considering what a lousy ironer I am...”

“On the contrary...”

“...I think I did a pretty good job.”

“Very professional, in fact.”

There is a silence on the line.

“I saw you last night,” he says.

“Saw me?”

“Your performance. In Cats.”

“You did?”

“Yes. You were very good.”

“Well, thank you. But...”

A slight pause.

“How’d you even know I was in it? Did I mention...?”

“Actually, I...”

“Because I don’t remember tell—”

“It was just an accident. My being there.”

“Gee.”

“I enjoyed... seeing you. Your performance. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

“Gee,” she says again.

He visualizes her shaking her head in wonder. The golden-red hair. The hair so effectively hidden by the white fur cap last night.

“Everybody else saw me in it ages ago,” she says. “Everybody I know, anyway.” She pauses again. “How was I?” she asks. “I don’t even know anymore.”

“Terrific.”

“Did I look like a cat?”

“More so than anyone else on stage.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Tell me more,” she says, and he can imagine a wide girlish grin on her freckled face. “Tell me I should be the star of the show...”

“You were really very...”

“Tell me how beautifully I dance...”

“You do.”

“And sing...”

“Yes.”

“Take me to lunch and flatter me.”

He hesitates only an instant.

“I’d be happy to,” he says.

He is surprised to learn that she’s actually twenty-seven.

“Which is old for a dancer, right?” she says.

“Well, no, I don’t...”

“Oh, sure,” she says. “Especially a dancer who’s been in Cats forever,” she says and rolls her eyes. Green flecked with yellow. Sitting in slanting sunlight at a table just inside the window of the restaurant she’s chosen on the West Side. Eyes glowing with sunlight. “Now and forever, right?” she says. “That’s the show’s slogan, the headline, whatever you call it. Cats, Now and Forever. That’s me. I’ll probably be in that damn show when I’m sixty-five. Every time I go for an audition, they ask me what I’ve done, I say Cats. That’s what I’ve done. Well, that’s not all I’ve done. I was in Les Miz in London, the Brits call it The Glums, did you know that? And last year I toured Miss Saigon. But Cats is the big one, Cats is Broadway. I’ve been in that damn show practically since it opened, seventeen years old, little Dorothy in her pretty red shoes, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto. That’s right, we’re in a goddamn show called Cats!”

He realizes he is nervously checking out the restaurant as she talks, trying to remember how many people he and Helen know here on the West Side, preparing a cover story in advance to explain why he is here with a young and beautiful girl while his wife is up there in the wilds of Massachusetts. He remembers all at once what Kate said that first day in the park, referring to the handkerchief she’d bloodied and offered to launder — Your wife would kill me — and wonders if she’d been fishing that day, trying to learn if he was available. Well, he’s flattering himself, for Christ’s sake. Why would anyone as beautiful as she is, as young as she is — well, twenty-seven, he’s just learned — why would anyone like Kate wonder whether a forty-six-year-old man, a man about to be forty-six, was married or single or divorced or whatever the hell? Besides, he’d been wearing the wedding band, just as he’s wearing it now, plain to see on the ring finger of his left hand — see, folks, I’m married, nothing fishy going on here, nobody trying to hide anything, I’m married, okay? So of course, she’d already known. She’d seen the ring, and she’d known he was married. Still, he wonders why that particular remark if it wasn’t a fishing expedition. Or maybe a warning. I know you’re married, mister, so no funny moves, okay?

“Where in Kansas?” he asks.

“What?”

“You said...”

“Oh, that was just an expression. Don’t you know the line from Wizard of...?”

“Yes, of course. But I thought...”

“No, I’m not. From Kansas.”

“Then where are you from? You said...”

“Westport, Connecticut. But I’ve been living in New York since I was seventeen. Ten years last month, in fact. That’s when I got the job in Cats. Before then, I was studying dance in Connecticut. No wonder I’m still in that damn show. Where are you from?”

“Boston.”

“I thought you sounded a little like a Kennedy.”

“Do I?”

“A little.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It’s good, actually. It’s a nice sound, that Massachusetts accent. Or dialect. Whatever you call it. Regional dialect, I guess. Anyway, I like it.”

“Thank you.”

“You promised to flatter me. Tell me about last night.”

He tells her how he’d been invited to see the show with a man he despised, someone whose wife is in his wife’s aerobics class, venturing to mention his wife, watching her eyes to see if anything shows there, but nothing does, and anyway, why should it? This is simply a Sunday brunch in broad daylight, a married man wearing his wedding band for all to see, two people who’d happened to share an unusual experience together, now sitting and chatting in the innocent light of the sun, nothing going on here, folks, see the ring, wanting to waggle the fingers of his left hand so the ring would catch the light of the sun and flash like a beacon to anyone entertaining suspicious thoughts.

He tells her all about how she’d captured his attention because she was so very good...

“Tell me, tell me,” she says, and grins again.

...perfectly capturing a cat’s, well, essence, he supposes one might call it, in a show that was otherwise, well, he hates to say this...

“Say it,” she says. “It sucks.”

“Well, there were things about it...”

“Name one,” she says. “Besides ‘Memory.’”

“‘Memory’ was very moving.”

“I played Sillabub in Hamburg. I got to do the other version of the song. The younger, more innocent version than the one Grizabella sings. In a sort of high, piping voice, you know? For contrast.”

“Yes.”

“But aside from ‘Memory,’ what else is there? It isn’t even a dancer’s show, you know, like Chorus Line or any of the Fosse shows when he was alive, which is odd because you’d think the very notion of cats dancing would inspire all sorts of inventive choreography. None of the dances seem to me like anything a cat would dance, do they to you? Do you have a cat?”

“Not now.”

“I have a cat, well, you’ll meet her, and believe me, if they allowed her to get up on that stage and dance, it wouldn’t be like anything we’re doing up there. It’s a shame when you think of it, the opportunities squandered...”

He is thinking about what she said not ten seconds ago, I have a cat, well, you’ll meet her, and misses much of her dissertation, or what sounds like one, sounds like something she’s said many times before to many other people, about the way cats naturally seem to be dancing whenever they move, the glides, the leaps, the turns, “Even in repose,” she says, “a cat looks like a dancer resting,” but he is thinking I have a cat, well, you’ll meet her, her green eyes unwavering as she leans across the table toward him, fervently intent on making her point, the reddish-gold hair falling loose about her face, he wonders why they didn’t make her a tawny cat, didn’t use her own hair and a rust-colored costume instead of dressing her in white like a virgin, and why the name Victoria, he doesn’t recall any Victoria in the Eliot...

“Was there a cat named Victoria in the poems?” he asks suddenly. “Excuse me, I didn’t mean...”

“That’s okay, I was just rattling on, anyway. When he talks about the names families give their cats, he gives Victor as an example, but not Victoria. And also, he mentions that Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer live in Victoria Grove, which is an actual section in London, have you ever been to London?”

“Yes, many times.”

With my wife, he thinks, but does not say.

“But what’s interesting is that Victoria is the only straight name in the show,” she says. “All the other cats are given what Eliot calls their particular names. Which he rhymes with perpendicular, by the way. Have you read the poems?”

“Yes.”

“Mediocre, right? Like the show. God knows why it’s a hit. Dress people up like cats, and you’ve got a hit, go figure, no matter how boring it is. Would you like to go to the crafts fair? When we’re finished here. Or do you have other plans?”

“No,” he says. “I have no other plans. Who’s Ron?”

“Ron? I don’t know. Who’s Ron?”

“In the program, you thanked...”

“Oh. That Ron.”

“You thanked your sister...”

“Bess, yes. Well, Elizabeth, actually.”

“...and especially Ron...”

“My God, did you memorize that dumb thing?”

“...for their support and encouragement.”

“Ron was someone I used to know.” Her eyes meet his. “Why?” she asks.

“I just wondered. I’ve never understood why performers thank people in the program notes...”

“It’s stupid, I know.”

“...sometimes even dedicate their performances to this or that person...”

“Absolutely idiotic. How can you dedicate a performance? Mom, Dad, I dedicate this next pas de deux to you. Unless my partner objects. In which case, I dedicate the entrechat.”

“And yet...”

“I know, I know, you surrender to the stupidity. Everyone else is thanking everyone in sight, you figure the people you know and love will be hurt or offended if you don’t thank them. They put that in the program when I rejoined the show in January. After the Miss Saigon tour ended in Detroit. If you liked me in a white fur hat, you should’ve seen me in a black wig and slanty eyes.”

“Was Ron in Miss Saigon?”

“Well, yes, actually. He played the Engineer.” Her eyes meet his again. The Green Lantern’s eyes. Flashing across the table at him like a laser beam. “Why?” she asks again.

“Just wondered.”

“Mm,” she says. Eyes refusing to let go of his. “I had a dream about you,” she says. “Last night, when I washed and ironed your handkerchief, isn’t that odd? The very night you saw the show. That’s very peculiar, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“I washed and ironed it when I got home. It must’ve been two in the morning by then, some of us had gone out for Chinese after the show, we’re always starving after the show. Anyway, I washed and ironed it last night because I planned to drop it off either today or on Tuesday. There’s a three o’clock matinee today, but I pulled something in my leg last night, so I’m off, aren’t we lucky? We’re dark on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have a very abnormal Broadway schedule. Anyway, it was on my mind, you see. That I hadn’t yet returned it to you. Which is probably why I dreamt about you last night.”

“What’d you dream?”

“I dreamt you and I were making love in front of my mother’s house in Westport.”

David says nothing.

“On the lawn,” she says.

He still says nothing.

“Naked,” she says. “Well, in the dream, I’m wearing a white blouse, but that’s all. You’re entirely nude. And we’re making passionate love. Which is odd, since I hardly know you.”

David nods. He feels suddenly as if he is taking unfair advantage of her. He is a skilled analyst, a person trained to interpret dreams. He should not be listening to...

“My mother comes out with a huge pail of cold water and throws it on us. The way they do with dogs who get stuck, you know? But we keep right on going. I guess we were enjoying it.”

He nods again, says nothing.

“So how do you interpret that?”

“How do you interpret it?”

“Oh-ho, here comes the shrink.”

“Force of habit,” he says, and smiles unconvincingly.

He is feeling suddenly very threatened.

And guilty.

He is feeling that he’d better get the hell out of here fast because his wife and two adorable daughters are too far away on Martha’s Vineyard and he has no right sitting here with this beautiful dancer, never mind the wedding band on his left hand, never mind the purity of eggs over easy on an English muffin, side of bangers, please, sitting here openly and innocently in the noonday sun for all the world to see, but with a faint tumescence in his pants nonetheless, hidden under the table, a dangerous and guilt-ridden hard-on covertly ripening in his pants because this girl, this woman, this delicate and desirable creature sitting opposite him has dreamt of them making love together, making passionate love, as she’d put it, in fact enjoying it so much that not even a huge pail of cold water could break them apart.

Oh yes he knows, of course he knows that the forty-six-year-old man in her dream could easily stand for her father, and he knows yes of course that the intercourse on her mother’s lawn, naked on her mother’s lawn, could stand for a flaunting of whatever unresolved Electral feelings she may still nurture. And he knows, yes yes quit it already, that her mother throwing water on them, trying to stop them, most likely stands for society’s taboos against incest, he knows all of this, he realizes all this, but the developing hard-on in his pants keeps reminding him that the person she chose to be Daddy’s stand-in and stuntman is none other than David himself.

Moreover, she has confessed it to him, she has revealed her unconscious choice... well, not confessed it, surely. She has only mentioned it to him, actually, rather matter-of-factly, as if she’d dreamt of the two of them merely having tea at the Plaza — but mentioned it nonetheless. Which means, the way he interprets it to his now insistent hard-on, that she’d wanted him to know, wanted him to understand that the person she’d chosen for her fantasy, albeit unconsciously, the person with whom she elected to fuck her brains out on her mother’s lawn was none other than David Chapman, M.D., P.C.

“You come all over the blouse,” she says. “In the dream. Your semen stains my blouse. I guess that refers to the handkerchief, don’t you think? My getting blood on your handkerchief?”

“I... would imagine,” he says.

“In the dream, I have to wash my blouse to get the stain out. Your semen. In the dream, I’m standing topless, washing my blouse and then ironing it.”

They are staring at each other across the table.

“Do you really want to go to the crafts fair?” she asks.

Her cat is named simply and sensibly Hannah.

She is a great fat tubby thing that Eliot might have called a Gumbie Cat, her coat “of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.” She sidles up to Kate the moment she enters the apartment, rubbing against her, and then looking up at David as if knowing in her infinite cat wisdom that he will soon be making love to her mistress. David knows this, and Kate knows it, and the cat knows it, too.

Her apartment on East Ninety-first is a one-bedroom, for which Kate — she tells him as she opens a can of food for the cat — paid a hundred and ten thousand dollars four years ago, and which she is now trying to sell for seventy-nine thousand, if she can get it, so she can move to the West Side and be closer to the theater section. The cat keeps rubbing against her as Kate uses the can opener. Kate keeps saying, “Yes, darling, yes, baby,” tossing the lid of the can into the garbage pail under the sink, and then spooning its contents into a red plastic bowl, “Yes, baby,” all the while telling David that the closest offer she’s had so far is forty-five thousand, which means she’d be losing thirty-four thousand non-tax-deductible dollars, “Yes, baby, here you are,” she says and sets the bowl down on the floor near the refrigerator and comes immediately to David and drapes her arms over his shoulders and leans into him and kisses him.

Sitting beside her on her bed, his arm around her, Arthur K hears his sister’s plaintive cry for help, I wish someone would give me lessons, and the words break his heart. She is so very beautiful and innocent and vulnerable that he is enraged by just the notion of someone like Howard Kaplan kissing her and telling her later that she doesn’t even know how. Sitting beside her on her bed, his arm around her, her head on his shoulder, the bedside lamp bathing them in a soft indulgent glow, he keeps patting her shoulder and saying, “No, no, Sis, don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about,” all at once afraid her crying will awaken their parents down the hall, though surely there is nothing wrong going on here in her room, a brother comforting his sister is all, there is nothing wrong with that. So why is he worried about them waking up?

“I can teach you in a minute,” he hears himself say.

And she answers, “Then do it.”

“Yes, do it,” Kate says, her mouth under his, her lips murmuring against his lips, “Do it, do it.” They have kissed their way to the sofa against one wall of the living room, awkwardly moving in embrace toward the sofa heaped with pillows against the wall. The wall itself is hung with three sheets of the shows in which she’s performed, the Cats poster in the center with its big yellow eyes pupiled with dancers in black, and the Miss Saigon poster with its rising helicopter that looks like Asian calligraphy, falling blindly onto the pillows, their lips entangled, “Yes, do it,” she keeps saying, though he scarcely knows what he is doing anymore, his hands all over her, his lips on hers, do it, do it, and the Les Misérables poster with its French waif and her dark soulful eyes.

Her blue eyes are wide in expectation. Her long blond hair frames her face, delicate strands electrifying the back of his hand when he brushes her hair away to reveal the pale oval of her face. From the corner of his eye, below, he can see the flimsy pink nightgown with its intricately laced hem where the blue robe has parted over it, her long white legs. He catches a fleeting glimpse of her left breast as she turns to him, the robe gapping slightly, and is suddenly enraged by what Howard Kaplan did to her, or tried to do to her, hurting her that way, the anger coursing through his veins, causing his temples to throb, causing his cock to swell suddenly inside his pants.

“Part your lips, Veronica,” he says like the good older brother he is, and she lifts her face to his and does exactly as he says.

Her kiss is surprisingly adept. He wonders, but merely for an instant, if she was lying to him about Howard telling her she didn’t know how to kiss. Then again, what the hell does Howard know, the jackass? His sister — he remembers that she is his sister and that he is merely performing a brotherly service that will enable her to cope more effectively in any future boy-girl relationship — his sister immediately and expertly draws in her breath in the same instant that he does, their simultaneous inhalations creating a tight seal that fiercely joins their lips and causes him to remember, yet again, that she is, after all, his sister, although the insistently clamoring erection in his pants seems determined to prove otherwise.

Nonetheless, he is here to teach her, sister or no, and so he gently inserts his tongue into her mouth, meaning to pull away an instant later — but the seal is so tight — to explain that tongues play as important a role as lips in this serious business of kissing, fully intending to explain the procedure step by step, but suddenly her own tongue is alive in his mouth, actively seeking his tongue, coiling around his tongue like a serpent, even though she said she didn’t know how to kiss. Or, more accurately, all she said was that Howard told her she didn’t know how to kiss, she didn’t say that she herself believed she didn’t know how to kiss.

In fact, she now seems ferociously determined to demonstrate that Howard was wrong, that for all her tender years — but she’s fifteen, after all, and so was Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac who dug her fingernails into the back of his hand the moment he cupped her chin preparatory to kissing her and ordered him to take her home right that very minute. His sister Veronica, his little sister Veronica, his blue-eyed blond and beautiful baby sister Veronica is the same age as big-titted Shirley Fein who’d sent him home all desolate and forlorn, a condition his sister with her questing mouth and writhing tongue is rapidly reversing. The hard-on he’d had in the Pontiac, subsequently shriveled by Shirley’s rejection, surprisingly revived when his sister leaned in to accept his kiss and the robe momentarily opened to show that single small white breast with its little pink nipple — she is his sister, he keeps reminding himself, she is his goddamn sister.

Which is perhaps why his indecorous and inappropriate hard-on causes a sudden wave of terror to sweep over him, almost nauseating — suppose his parents wake up? Because now, you see, this isn’t just a dutiful brother comforting a distraught sister, patting her shoulder and trying to still her fears of inadequate osculatory technique. This is a seventeen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl kissing passionately, their arms wrapped around each other — yes, but don’t forget we’re just sitting here, we’re not lying on the bed, we’re not pressed against each other or anything, no matter how it may look, the robe somehow having ridden up over the lace-hemmed nightgown, the nightgown itself having somehow ridden up over Veronica’s long white naked legs. Suppose his mother, God forbid, comes down the hall and finds them, well, kissing this way, suppose his mother sees the hard-on straining in his pants, a hard-on provoked by the sight of his own sister’s girlish breast and nipple, a hard-on bulging not inches from where Veronica’s hand rests upon his leg, her robe somehow slipping off her left shoulder now to fully expose this time the breast and nipple he merely glimpsed earlier.

In that instant he becomes utterly confused.

“It was like a dream,” he will later tell David. “I don’t know where I am in the dream, I don’t know who it is I’m with, there is just...”

...this beautiful girl whose mouth is insistently, whose tongue is demandingly, forgets in that instant, but only for an instant, that she truly is his sister, her hard pink nipple erect under his grasping fingers, fearful she will reach up at once to remove his hand as forcefully as Shirley had when he, but she doesn’t. Instead, her own hand drops to where his cock is seething inside his pants, and suddenly he doesn’t care if she’s his sister or his aunt or his mother or his grandmother, suddenly his hands are inside the robe and under the gown and she reaches past him and over him, turning slightly, lifting herself slightly, her right hand still tight on his cock inside his pants, and turns out the light with her free hand, and then lies beside him in the dark and opens her robe to him and opens herself to him.

There is a frenzy to their joining.

It is as if they have been waiting all their lives, each and separately, for this moment to arrive, and now that it is here, they must cling to it desperately and drain it of every last passionate drop. They writhe on her pillows in shafts of light slanting through open blinds across the room, glide in silvery sunlight as if through something wet and viscous, yellow cat eyes watching from the wall behind them, helicopter rising against a yellow moon on the wall behind them, little French-girl eyes peering curiously from the wall behind them. And Hannah. Hannah the cat. Watching indifferently.

Only once does his wife cross his mind, briefly, her name, his wife’s name, Helen, and then her face, her blue eyes, Helen’s face and eyes, but he banishes her at once, excluding her from all he has already done to this woman in this room, all that he is doing now to this woman in this room, all that he will continue doing to this woman, in this room, in frenzy, forever — or at least until the afternoon shadows start to lengthen and all at once it is dark and time to go home.

“Stay the night,” she says.

“I can’t.”

They are standing just inside her door. He is fully dressed. She has put on a man’s white tailored shirt, which she wears unbuttoned and hanging loose, the sleeves rolled up. He wonders whose shirt it was, or perhaps whose shirt it still is. Does the shirt belong to Ron? Is it Ron’s shirt she wears after sex on a Sunday afternoon? Old “Especially Ron,” who together with sister Bess offered such support and encouragement?

“When will I see you again?” she asks.

“When do you want to see me?”

“Tomorrow morning. The minute the sun comes up.”

Standing barefoot inside the doorway, looking up at him, green eyes and blue fingernails, wearing only Ron’s or whoever’s white shirt open over her breasts, the nipples still erect and looking angry and raw, the tangled patch of red pubic hair showing at the joining of her long naked legs.

In the dream, I’m wearing a white blouse, but that’s all. You come all over the blouse. In the dream. Your semen stains my blouse.

He pulls her fiercely to him.

He does not leave her apartment until eleven that night.

By the time he gets home, it is too late to call Helen.

On the phone early Monday morning, he tells Helen that shortly after he’d spoken to her yesterday he’d gone over to the crafts fair on Amsterdam Avenue, where he’d eaten his way serendipitously from food stand to food stand.

“I didn’t see anything I wanted to buy,” he says, “not even for the kids. I went over to the office afterward, to study some notes I’d made, and then I went back to the apartment and took a nap before dinner.”

“Did you eat in?”

“No, I went to a place over on the West Side,” he says, and names the restaurant where he and Kate had brunch.

“The West Side again?” Helen asks, surprised. “How come?”

“There was a movie I wanted to see over there.”

“Oh? What movie?”

The Arts & Leisure section of yesterday’s Times is open before him on the desk in what they both laughingly call “the study,” a room that had been a butler’s pantry at one time, but which they converted into a windowless office when they bought the apartment. He has circled with a felt-tipped pen a foreign movie playing at the Angelika 57, and has underlined the time of the screening that would have got him home sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty, which was when he had got home, eleven-twenty to be exact, he’d looked at the kitchen clock when he walked in. He reels off the name of the movie casually now, tells her it wasn’t all that good, and is starting to ask how the kids are, when Helen says, “I was wondering why you didn’t call.”

“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.