Privileged Conversation

2: tuesday, july 18 — friday, july 28

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

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

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

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

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Well...”

“I know you did. How are you?”

“Good.”

“Me, too. What are you doing?”

“My one o’clock patient just left.”

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

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

“But do you want to?”

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

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

The restaurant she’s chosen is a small Thai newcomer on Eighty-fifth Street, between First and Second Avenues, virtually equidistant from his office on Ninety-sixth and the apartment on Seventy-fourth. There are perhaps eight tables in the place, a bit too crowded for the comfort of a soon-to-be-forty-six-year-old married man sitting with a beautiful young redhead virtually half his age, who paints her fingernails and toenails in colors to complement her clothes, and who’s told him on the phone that the service here is very fast and they should be out in less than an hour, “which’ll give us plenty of time afterward.” But the place is dimly lighted and hung with beaded curtains that somewhat shield the tables one from another, and moreover he doubts that any of his friends or acquaintances would choose this pleasantly unimpressive spot for a seven o’clock Tuesday night dinner on the Upper East Side.

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

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

“What do you mean?”

“Your nails.”

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

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

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

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

Temporary insanity, he thinks.

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

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

“Eat Thai food? Every now and then.”

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

“No,” he said.

“Then why the Thai evasion?”

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

“There it is again,” she says.

“No, I do not fool around.”

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

“No.”

“Like AIDS, for example?”

“I do not have AIDS.”

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

“You and Ron?”

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

“I don’t know. Why do I?”

“You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

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

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

“Does Ron have AIDS?”

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

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

“That was eight months ago.”

“But you were serious enough to...”

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

“Yes.”

“And this is now.”

“Yes.”

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

“We don’t fool around.”

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

He looks across the table at her.

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

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

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

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

Let it come down, he thinks.

First Murderer. Macbeth.

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

“Do I really excite you?”

“You know you do.”

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

“My wife, yes. Helen.”

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

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

“You’re joking.”

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

“No.”

Murderers, he thinks. We are both murderers here.

“Did this woman you met in Boston...?”

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

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

“No, you don’t love me,” he says.

She can’t love me, he thinks.

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

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

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

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

“Was she a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God, another shrink!”

“Yeah.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“Not very.”

“How old were you?”

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

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

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

“Midlife Crisis,” she says at once.

“Maybe.”

“Fear of Forty,” she says.

“Maybe.”

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

“Tell me.”

“Sex at Sixty. How old was she?”

“Who, Erica?”

“Sure, Erica. Your bimbo in Boston.”

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

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

“No, no.”

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

“I never noticed.”

“Is that the truth?”

“That’s the truth.”

“I love Jacqueline. I was really crazy when I started going to her, you know. She really helped me a lot. I’m glad it wasn’t her you fucked in Boston.”

“No, it was just a woman who... found me attractive, I guess.”

“You are attractive.”

“Thank you, but I wasn’t fishing.”

“I love your looks.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you love my looks? And I am fishing.”

“I adore the way you look.”

“Do you like my being a redhead?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like my being red down here, too?”

“Yes.”

“I used to hate it. I was shocked to death the first time I saw a girl with red pubic hair.”

“When was that?”

“In the locker room at school. I was eleven, I had nothing down there at all. This was an upperclassman. Woman. Person. An eighteen-year-old girl. She had red hair, too, on her head, I mean, much redder than mine. Seeing her naked scared hell out of me. I thought, Jesus, is that what I’m going to look like when I grow up? Those great big tits and that flaming red hair down there, Jesus! I never did get the tits, as you can see, but I sure as hell got the rest. This is my summer trim. You should see it when it runs rampant. It’s like a forest fire. Tell me about your Boston shrink.”

“There’s not much to tell. We met at one of the seminars, and discovered we were both from New York...”

“Both married...”

“Yes, both married.”

“How did I know that?”

“Maybe because I told you she was lonely,” he says, and wonders why such an association would have come to mind. “Anyway...”

“Are you lonely?” she asks at once.

“I may have been back then.”

“How about now?”

“No.”

“Then why did you start up with me?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, we had dinner together, I forget who asked who to dinner...”

“Whom. And I asked you to dinner, don’t forget,” she says. “And lunch, too. Don’t ever forget that. I was the one who wanted you,” she says, and kisses him again.

Her kisses make him dizzy.

Her hand drops to his naked thigh, rests there, the fingers widespread.

She pulls her mouth from his.

Looks into his face again.

“Tell me,” she says.

“We ended up in her room,” he says, and shrugs. “She wanted to be in her own room, in case her husband called.”

“Did he call?”

“No.”

“Did your wife call? Helen? Did she call your room?”

“No.”

“Did you stay the whole night with her?”

“No.”

“Was it good?”

“Yes.”

“Better than me?”

“No one’s better than you.”

“Mmm, sweet,” she says, and her hand moves onto him. “Did you ever see her again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I felt too guilty.”

“Do you feel guilty now?”

“No.”

“Good,” she says, and gives him a friendly little squeeze.

“I almost told Helen about her,” he says. “When I got back home.”

“Don’t ever tell her about me,” she says, and squeezes him again, hard this time, in warning.

“I was glad in the long run. If I’d told her, it would have meant the end of our marriage. We had just the one child then, Jenny. Annie wasn’t even on the horizon. If I’d told her...”

“You have two children, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Two little girls.”

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Six and nine.”

“Annie, you said?”

“And Jenny.”

“Jennyanydots,” she says at once. “Put the names together...”

“Yes, I guess they do, come to think of it.”

“Oh, no question. Jennyanydots. That’s one of the cats in the show.”

“I know.”

“So you’re how old? If you were thirty-nine...”

“I’ll be forty-six this month.”

“Oh? When?”

“The twenty-seventh.”

“We’ll have a party. Do you believe in fate?”

“No.”

“I think we were fated.”

“Then I believe in it.”

“I’m not Glenn Close, by the way.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“I mean, I’m not going to boil Annie’s pet rabbit or anything.”

“She doesn’t have a pet rabbit.”

“Or Jenny’s. Or anybody’s, anydots. This isn’t Hollywood, there isn’t just one plot in the entire world, you know. Oh, it’s Fatal Attraction, I get it! But with a psychiatrist and a dancer, right? Wroooong! This isn’t that at all. If you think that’s what this is...”

“I don’t.”

“Good. Because you don’t have to worry about me, I know you’re married. In fact, I’m glad you didn’t tell her about that shrink in Boston. Because then she’d be suspicious, and I don’t want her ever finding out about us.”

“I’m glad, too. She’d have left in a minute. And for what? A meaningless one-night...”

“Am I a meaningless one-night stand?”

“This is our second night,” he says.

“I’d better not be meaningless,” she says, and kisses him fiercely, biting his lip, and then pulls her face back, and stares into his eyes again as unblinkingly as a cat, and bares her teeth an instant before biting him again. She is straddling him an instant after that, sliding onto him warm and wet and demanding, and an instant later he comes inside her.

I was intoxicated, delirious, crazed, depraved, call it whatever you like.

I don’t care what you call it.

His nine o’clock patient has just left the office.

David dials the number at the Menemsha cottage and listens to it ringing, four, five, six times, and is about to hang up, relieved, when Annie picks up the phone.

“Chapman residence,” she says in her piping little voice, “good morning.”

“Yes, may I please speak to Miss Anne Chapman?” he says, disguising his voice so that he sounds like a rather pompous British barrister.

“This is Miss Chapman,” Annie says solemnly.

“Miss Chapman, you have just inherited a million pounds from your aunt in Devonshire.”

“A million pounds of what?” Annie asks.

David bursts out laughing.

“Is that you, Dad?” she asks.

“That’s me,” he says, still laughing.

“A million pounds of what?” she insists.

“Feathers,” he says.

“I’m busy eating,” she says. “Did you want Mom? She’s still in bed.”

“Wake her up, it’s five to ten.”

“When are you coming up here?”

“I told you. Friday night.”

“We’ll have lobster,” Annie says, and abruptly puts down the phone.

When Helen picks up the extension upstairs, she sounds fuzzy with sleep.

“Hullo?” she says.

“What are you doing in bed?” he asks.

“I know what I wish I was doing in bed.”

“Late night?”

“Oh sure, a drunken brawl. I was in bed by ten, but I just couldn’t fall asleep. When are you coming up here?”

“Must be an echo in this place.”

“Everybody misses you.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Me,” she says.

“I have to lay out my clothes in advance, or I’d never get dressed,” Susan M is saying. “You know that, I’ve told you that a hundred times already.”

She is one of David’s so-called Couches, a twenty-four-year-old “obsessive-compulsive,” or “obsessional neurotic” — you pays your money and you takes your choice unless you happen to suffer from a disorder where choice seems obstinately denied.

Susan M has been suffering from her disorder for the past three years now. Her disorder was what forced her to drop out of college. Her disorder is what brings her here twice a week, to discuss over and over again the ritual that keeps at bay her personal hounds of hell.

What Susan M does, compulsively, is lay out in advance the clothing she will be wearing for the next two weeks. Every flat surface in her apartment — tables, chairs, countertops, floors — is covered with the neatly folded garments she will wear on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on, this week and next week, each careful little stack labeled with a note naming the day and date. Two weeks ago today, Susan M knew what she would be wearing to this ten o’clock session on Wednesday morning, the nineteenth day of July. She knows, too, what she will be wearing on Wednesday of next week. She has told David she will be wearing the blue shirtdress with a red leather belt and red French-heeled shoes. Her bra and panties will be white. That is the uniform of the day for the twenty-sixth of July, a day before David’s forty-sixth birthday.

Susan M doesn’t know this. She knows scarcely anything about David, except that he listens patiently behind her while she details her lists, frequently planning her wardrobe aloud, well in advance of actually laying it out in her apartment. Counting the hours she spends talking it over with David — “I don’t really need blue underwear with the blue dress, do I? I mean, it’s still summertime” — she will often have her wardrobe planned three weeks in advance of when she actually will be wearing it.

“You lay out your clothes, don’t you? Everybody I know decides in advance what he or she is going to wear to work tomorrow, or to school tomorrow, or to a party that night, or even to bed that night. My mother always made sure I wore clean panties to school because a person never could tell when she’d get run over by a car and have to be taken to the hospital. A clean bra, too, when I got old enough to wear one. I was very big for my age... well, that’s obvious, I guess... I started developing at the age of twelve, very early on, I had to watch what I wore, the boys could be so cruel, you know. What bothers me is why I should be so concerned about performing a simple act everyone else in the world performs. Why should I worry so much that if I don’t get it right, something terrible will happen?”

Silence.

She has said this before.

She knows she has said it before.

“Look,” she says, “I know this is all in my head, why the hell else am I here? I know my mother’s not really going to die if my shoes don’t match my bag next Friday or whenever the hell. She’s in Omaha, how’s she going to die if I don’t have everything laid out? What is this, voodoo or something? Which thank God I do know — what I’m going to wear next Friday, I mean — because I wouldn’t want that on my conscience, believe me. The white sandals with the white leather sling bag I bought at Barneys and the white mini and white tube, a regular virgin bride, right? That’s next Friday, I’m pretty sure it is, anyway. I have the list here if you don’t mind my checking it, I’d like to check it if you don’t mind.”

She sits up immediately, not turning to look at him, embarrassed by this behavior she knows to be irrational but is unable to control, digging into her handbag, green to match the green slippers she’s wearing, and locating her Month-At-A-Glance calendar into which she relentlessly lists all her wardrobe schedules. Still not looking at him, she says, “Yes, here it is, Friday the twenty-first, white bag, white sandals, yep, all of it’s right here, I guess you won’t get hit by a bus, Mom,” and laughs in embarrassment at her own absurdity and then lies back down again and sighs in such helpless despair that she almost breaks David’s heart.

She falls silent for the remainder of the hour.

When at last he mentions quietly that their time is up, she rises, nods, and says, “I know I’ve got to get over this.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and nods, and sighs heavily again. “So we’re back to the regular schedule now, right? Until August first, anyway.”

“Right,” he says.

“So I’ll see you on Friday, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Same time, right?”

“Yes, same time.”

She seems more anxious when she leaves his office than she did when she came in this morning.

He is not at all sure that she will get over this.

He tries Kate’s number several times that day.

The voice on her answering machine chirps, “Hi. At the beep, please.”

The third time he hears it, he wants to strangle the machine.

He knows she had a performance this afternoon, and further knows she has to be at the theater again by six-thirty tonight, she has explained all this to him. Kate’s makeup isn’t as intricate as what some of the other cats wear, but it nonetheless takes her a full half hour to do her face and another twenty minutes to get into costume. She spends the rest of the time before curtain stretching and warming up; a dancer can really hurt herself, she’s told him, if she goes on cold. Half-hour is at seven-thirty. Fifteen is at a quarter to eight. Five is five minutes before curtain, and then it’s show time, folks. He tries her apartment again at ten to six, immediately after his last patient leaves the office, and again at six sharp, on the walk home from his office, from a pay phone on Lex. He gets the same damn brief chirpy message each time. To get to the theater by six-thirty, Kate will have to leave her apartment by six-ten at the very latest. He calls from another pay phone at five past, and gets the same infuriating message again. Frustrated, he realizes he will not be able to talk to her until she gets home later tonight.

If she gets home.

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” Stanley is telling him, even though he is the one who called David to say he simply had to talk to him. The two men have eaten dinner in a Turkish restaurant on Second Avenue, and now they are strolling along like two old men in the park, a bit flat-footed, their hands behind their backs, though they are not in any park, and David certainly doesn’t think of himself as old, either. Not now, anyway. Not anymore.

Kate has promised him a party on his forty-sixth birthday.

It occurs to him that she doesn’t yet know he’ll be leaving for Martha’s Vineyard the day after that.

Or that he’ll be gone the entire month of August.

The night is sticky and hot.

The heat has driven everyone outdoors, and the avenue is thronged with pedestrians. Somehow, the city seems softer and safer tonight. At sidewalk tables outside colorfully lighted restaurants, diners seem engaged in spirited conversation, and there is laughter and a sense of gaiety and old world sophistication here on the privileged Upper East Side where for a little while the entire world is strung with Japanese lanterns and everyone is sipping French champagne and dipping Russian caviar and Vienna waltzes float dizzily on the still summer night.

He supposes he’s in love with her.

“I think I’m in love with her, hmm?” Stanley says. “This is ridiculous, I know. For Christ’s sake, Dave, she’s only nineteen years old, if she were a little younger I’d go to jail. I’m a doctor! I’m her psychiatrist!”

Although I don’t even know her, David thinks.

How can I love someone I don’t even know?

“I couldn’t believe we were doing it right on the office couch,” Stanley says. “I’m so ashamed of myself.”

He does not, in all truth, appear terribly ashamed of himself. He is, in fact, beaming from ear to ear as he makes this admission, wearing tonight the same beachcomber outfit he wore to Cats, but perhaps it’s the only good beachcomber outfit he owns. The same khaki slacks, and rumpled plaid sports jacket, the same brown loafers without socks again, the same white button-down shirt open at the throat, no tie. David is positive it’s the same shirt because there are still stains on it from the duckling à l’orange Stanley ordered that night. His beard has grown several thousandths of an inch since then, but it is still an unsightly tangle of hairs of another color. His grin appears in these incipient whiskers like a flasher opening a raincoat; Stanley is proud of the fact that he seduced a nineteen-year-old patient on his office couch.

“I leave for Hatteras on the twenty-ninth,” he says now, the smile vanishing to be replaced by what he supposes is a look of abject sorrow but which comes across as a clown’s painted-on mask of tragedy, the mouth downturned, the eyes grief-stricken. “I haven’t told her yet. I don’t think she knows that psychiatrists take the month of August off, I don’t think she’s read the Judith Rossner novel.”

Has Kate read the Rossner novel? David wonders.

“I don’t know how to tell her,” Stanley says.

But haven’t you already told all your patients? David wonders. Haven’t you been preparing them all along for the traumatic month-long separation to come, more than a month, actually, since sessions won’t begin again till the day after Labor Day, the fifth of September?

I have to tell Kate, he thinks.

“I don’t want to go,” Stanley says. “If I can find some excuse to stay in the city, I’d do it in a minute, hmm? Can you imagine being on my own here for an entire month, no patients to worry about, Gerry way the hell down there in North Carolina, just me and Cindy Harris...”

Might as well break all the rules of the profession while you’re at it, Stan.

“...rollicking in the hay up here? Oh God, I’d give my life for that. A whole month with her? More than a month? I’d give my left testicle.”

The men fall silent for several moments. The swirl of pedestrian traffic engulfs them. A buzz of conversation hovers on the thick summer air, snatches of words and phrases floating past as they move silently through the crowd. David is wondering whether it would, in fact, be possible to find some reason to stay in the city during the month of August... well, certainly not the entire month, but perhaps part of the month... no patients to worry about, just him and...

And realizes that Stanley is undoubtedly wondering the same thing.

And wonders how there’s any difference, really, between the two of them.

“Would you be willing to alibi me?” Stanley asks.

“Alibi you? What do you mean?”

“If I said, for example, that I had to come down for a conference or something. A seminar, for example. Whatever.”

“I don’t think I could...”

“Because I know I can’t stay here the whole damn month, Dave. I’m just looking for an excuse to come up for a week or so, hmm? Even two, three days.”

“Stanley, there are no conferences in August.”

“We could invent one. Or a seminar. Something.”

“I don’t think...”

“A series of lectures. Anything.”

“Stanley...”

“Somebody visiting from England or wherever the hell. Australia. Some big psychiatrist taking advantage of his summer vacation.”

“It’s winter in Australia.”

“Wherever. He’s here by invitation, France, wherever. They take August off in France, don’t they?”

“Well, yes, but...”

“Italy maybe. He’s from Italy. They take August off there, too, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“There are psychiatrists in Italy, maybe this one is a big shot who’s been invited here to speak to a select group of people, hmm? You, me, a handful of other shrinks Gerry doesn’t know. Helen, either, I guess. If it’s going to work. I mean, if you’re willing to alibi me, that is. It would have to be people neither of them know. The lecturer could be giving...”

“Stanley, really, I couldn’t possibly...”

“...a series of lectures, who the hell knows where?” Stanley says, stroking his scraggly beard and narrowing his eyes like Fagin about to send his little gangsters out to pick pockets. “Let’s say they start in the middle of the week, hmm, the lectures, a Wednesday night, let’s say, and they continue through Friday night, three lectures in all, I’ve seen plenty of programs like that, I don’t think something like that would sound too far-fetched. That would make it reasonable to come up on the Tuesday before and stay till Saturday morning. Four full days and nights with her, Jesus, I’d take a suite at the Plaza, I swear to God, fuck her every hour on the hour, go back down to Hatteras on Saturday morning. I think that would work, you know? I honestly think it would work, Dave. But only if...”

“I couldn’t lie to Helen that way,” David says.

“You’re my best friend, Dave.”

Sure, David thinks.

“At least think about it, will you?” Stanley says.

“Well, I’ll think about it.”

“Will you promise to think about it?”

“I promise, yes.”

“You don’t know how much it would mean to me, Dave.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Please.”

“I will.”

But he already knows it would work.

Curtain is at eight o’clock. The show lets out at ten-thirty. He tries her again at eleven and then again at eleven-thirty. When she does not call by midnight, he begins to believe he will never see her again.

He falls asleep wondering if Especially Ron, the Herpes King, has resurfaced.

The telephone rings at one o’clock in the morning.

He fumbles for the ringing phone in the dark, thinking at once that something has happened to Helen or the kids, a terrible accident, someone has drowned, knocking the receiver off the cradle, finding it again in the dark, picking it up, “Hello?”

“Hi.”

He does not know whether to feel irate or relieved. He does not turn on the light. He does not want to know what time it is, but he asks immediately, “What time is it?” and she says, “One, a little after one, am I waking you?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Oooo,” she says, “angry.”

He wonders if she’s been drinking.

“I’ve been calling you,” he says.

“All those hangups,” she says, “and no messages.”

“I didn’t know who might be listening with you.”

“Who do you think might be listening with me?”

There is a silence on the line.

He waits, hoping she will be the first one to speak again. The silence becomes unbearable. He wonders if she will hang up.

“Where were you?” he asks.

“When?”

“Well, for starters, how about all day long?”

“Oooo, angry, angry,” she says.

There is another silence, longer this time, broken at last by an exaggeratedly tragic sigh and then the sound of her voice again. “First, I went to see my agent,” she says. “That was at ten o’clock, but I slept late and had to rush out, which is why I couldn’t call you before I left the apartment. Anyway, I left at twenty to, and my window of opportunity wouldn’t have been till ten to, correct, Doctor? After my agent... he thinks he may have a movie for me, by the way, not that I guess it matters to you in your present frame of mind. Anyway, after my meeting with him, I went to my Wednesday morning dance class, I have dance three times a week. Then I went to the theater for the matinee performance, and had a sandwich and did a little shopping with a girlfriend afterwards, and went back to the apartment to drop off the things I’d bought, and then I took a nap, and let me see, I went out for a carrot shake, alone, at that health food deli on Fifty-seventh, and walked to the theater to get ready for the evening performance. Then I did the show, naturally, and went out for a bite with some of the kids afterwards, and then I came home. And here I am.”

“No phones any of those places, huh?”

“None at precisely ten minutes to the hour.”

“How about before you went to the theater?”

“I tried your office but you were already gone.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“I didn’t know who might be listening with you,” she says.

Touché, he thinks, and almost smiles.

“Did you try the apartment?”

“Yes. There was no answer. You were probably on the way there.”

“What time was that?”

“Around six. And I called again from the theater at seven-thirty, after I was in costume and doing my warm-ups.”

Which was when he’d gone down to dinner.

“I’m sorry we kept missing each other,” she says.

“Was Ron with you?”

“Ron?”

“When you went out for a bite with the kids?”

“Ron’s in Australia. Ron?”

“So who were these kids?”

Her calling them “kids” makes him feel like Methuselah. On the twenty-seventh of the month, he will be forty-six years old. His grandfather was forty-six when he died of lung cancer. Now he is forty-six. Well, almost forty-six. And Kate is twenty-seven and she goes out for a bite with “kids” from the show.

“The girl who plays Demeter,” she says, “and the girl who plays Bombalurina and the guy who plays Munkustrap. He’s gay, if you’re wondering. You have nothing to worry about,” she says. “I love you to death. I thought of you all day long.”

“I thought of you, too.”

“There are two pay phones backstage,” she says. “I can let you have both numbers. So something like today won’t happen again. Our missing each other.”

“I guess I should have them,” he says.

But he wonders how he can possibly use either number. Call backstage and have someone other than Kate answer the phone? Risk that? Who shall I say is calling, please? Whom? Who. Whoever, it definitely ain’t me, mister. A married man named David Chapman calling a showgirl in a cat costume, are you kidding?

“I’m sorry I woke you,” she says. “But I just got home.”

He’s wondering why she didn’t call before she left the theater. From one of the pay phones backstage. But he imagines they’re all ravenously hungry after a performance, all those cats leaping around for two and a half hours, well, not quite that long when you count intermission, but even so. They must all be eager to change into their street clothes and get the hell out of there, put some food in their bellies. He wonders what she wears when she goes to and from the theater. Blue jeans? He wonders if anyone recognizes her when she’s walking in the street— Hey, look, Maude, there goes that girl from Cats. He supposes not. He himself didn’t recognize her in makeup, and he’d already known her before he saw the show.

“...shooting it in New York,” she is telling him, “or I wouldn’t even think of considering it. Leave you to go on location? No way. It’s a costume drama, where I’d be playing the confidante of the female lead who’s having an affair with a Russian diplomat. She’s British. So am I, if I get the part. What it is, they’ve taken Ninotchka and changed the Russian girl to a Brit and the American guy to a Russian diplomat, and they’ve set it all back in the eighteenth century. At least, that’s the way the producer described it to me. In Hollywood, they can only think of movies in terms of other movies. Tunnel vision, it’s called. Which, by the way, was a movie, wasn’t it? Tunnel Vision? Or a book? Or something? I’d have to learn a British accent again, I had a pretty good one when we did Lady Windermere’s Fan in high school. British accents are easier to learn than almost...”

He tries to imagine what she’s wearing now. What color are her fingernails today? Has she already undressed for bed? But no, she just got home after a bite with the kids. He visualizes her bed. Visualizes her in her bed. Does she wear a nightgown when he’s not there making love to her? Is she wearing a nightgown now?

“...why you never ask me about myself,” she is saying now. “Don’t you want to know how I became a dancer, how I happened to land in Cats when I was only seventeen? Don’t you want to know if my parents are still living together, or if they’re divorced, or if I have any sisters or brothers... well, you know I have a sister, you read that in the program notes. But don’t you want to know anything at all about me, David? You’re supposed to love me so much...”

But he’s never told her that.

“...and yet you never ask me anything about myself. Why is that?” she asks.

Why is that? he wonders. He also wonders if she expects him to ask her about herself at one, one-thirty in the morning, whatever time it is now. Are your parents divorced? If so, are they remarried? Where does your sister live, or did you tell me? What is Ron doing in Australia, and does he send you an occasional postcard? Maybe I don’t want to know about you, he thinks. Maybe the less I know about you...

“...never even said you love me, when I know you do,” she says.

There is a silence.

“Don’t you?” she asks. “Love me?”

He hesitates.

“Yes,” he says, “I love you.”

“Of course you do,” she says.

His first patient is scheduled to arrive at nine this morning. He likes to get to the office at eight-thirty or so, check his notes from the patient’s previous session, generally prepare himself for the long day ahead. The mail is delivered at nine, nine-thirty. He usually goes out to the lobby mailboxes after his first session, leafs through it during the ten minutes before his next appointment. His office routine is rigid and proscribed. In that sense, he is a well-organized man, dedicated — he likes to believe — to the arduous task of helping these people in dire need.

He has set his alarm, as usual, for seven forty-five.

When the telephone rings, he is in deep sleep and he thinks at first it is the alarm going off. He reaches for the clock, fumbles with the lever on the back, but it is still ringing, and he realizes belatedly that it is the telephone. The luminous face of the clock reads six forty-five A.M. He grabs for the phone receiver.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hi.”

Her voice signals a violent pounding of his heart each time he hears it.

“Are you awake?” she asks.

“I am now.”

“Come make love to me,” she says.

The uniformed doorman outside her building is with another man in a short-sleeved striped shirt and dark blue polyester slacks. This is now seven-thirty in the morning, and they are standing in bright sunlight, idly chatting, watching the passersby hurrying along on this busy street. They interrupt their conversation and turn to him as he approaches.

“Miss Duggan,” he tells the doorman.

“Your name, sir?”

“Mr. Adler,” he says.

This is the name he and Kate agreed to on the telephone, though she truly couldn’t see any reason for him to use a false name. Adler. After the famous Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s friends and colleagues who left the psychiatric movement rather early on.

The doorman buzzes her apartment. “Mr. Adler to see you,” he says. David cannot hear her answer. The doorman replaces the phone on the switchboard hook and says, “Go right up, sir, it’s apartment 3B.”

A woman and a dog are already in the waiting elevator. David steps inside, hits the button for the third floor, and then smiles briefly in greeting. The woman does not smile back. Neither does the dog. The woman is wearing a quilted pink robe over a long flowered nightgown and pink bedroom slippers. The dog is a longhaired dachshund who sniffs curiously, or perhaps affectionately, at David’s black loafers. This morning, David is wearing a dark blue tropical-weight suit — the forecasters have said it will be another scorcher today — with a white button-down shirt and a striped red and blue silk rep tie. He looks quite professional. He does not look like someone going up to the third floor of this building to make love to a girl who is waiting in apartment 3B for him. He cannot stop thinking of Kate as a girl. He guesses this is something he should examine. Why he keeps thinking of this passionate twenty-seven-year-old woman as a girl.

The woman in the elevator — and she is most definitely a woman, some fifty-three years old with a puffed scowling face and suspicious blue eyes — yanks on the dog’s leash and says, “Stop that, Schatzi!” The dog, properly chastised, quits his, or her, exploratory sniffing. The woman stares straight ahead, feigning indifference to David as the elevator begins a slow, labored climb, but he knows she thinks he’s a rapist or an ax murderer who is only dressed like a respectable physician making a house call at the crack of dawn, sans stethoscope or satchel. He hopes she will not be getting off at the third floor. He hopes she does not live in apartment 3A or 3C. He hopes Schatzi will not begin barking when he or she catches the scent of Hannah the cat in apartment 3B. Or the scent of Kate waiting in apartment 3B. The elevator doors slide open. David steps out without looking back at either the woman or her hound. The doors slide shut behind him.

He checks out the hallway like a sneak thief about to commit a burglary. His wristwatch reads seven-forty A.M. Sunlight slants through a window at the far end of the hall, dust motes swarming. There is the smell of bacon wafting from one of the apartments, coffee from yet another. From behind the door to 3C, he can hear the drone of broadcast voices. He visualizes television anchors announcing the early morning news. He visualizes people sitting down to quick breakfasts before rushing off to work. This is not a time for making love, but his heart is beating frantically as he presses the bell button set in her doorjamb. There is the sound of chimes within, and then the sound of heels clicking on a hardwood floor. The peephole flap snaps back. The chain instantly rattles off its hook. There is the small oiled click of tumblers falling as first one bolt and then another is unlocked. The door opens just a crack. He virtually slides into the apartment.

She is wearing high-heeled red leather pumps and nothing else. She moves into his arms at once, slamming the door shut behind him, pressing him against the door, her left hand reaching for the bolt as she grinds herself into him, the lock clicking behind him, her mouth demanding, her teeth nipping at him hungrily, his lips, his chin, his cheeks, biting, kissing, her murmured words entangled on their tongues. She smells of powder and soap. He knows her dusted body will turn his dark suit to white, but he ignores this danger and pulls her closer instead, his hands covering her breasts slippery smooth with talcum, a young girl’s breasts, this girl’s breasts, this girl, this girl. He lowers his head, finds her nipples, “Don’t bite!” she warns sharply, though he isn’t biting her, kisses her, licks her nipples, “Yes,” dropping to his knees in his proper blue suit and smart silk tie, parting with his fingers the crisp red hair in its summer trim, parting her nether lips, kissing her there, “Yes,” licking her there, “Yes,” savoring her there as if her swollen cleft is a smooth wet nourishing stone.

Before he leaves the apartment, she tells him if he must use a fake name whenever he comes here, she’s thought of a more appropriate psychiatrist than Adler.

“Who?” he asks.

“Horney,” she says.

He figures Stanley must know, as does any psychiatrist, that during the course of therapy a patient will recover feelings for significant people in his past and unconsciously apply them to his shrink. Stanley has read Freud. Every psychiatrist in the world has read Freud:

“We overcome the transference by pointing out to the patient that his feelings do not arise from the present situation and do not apply to the person of the doctor, but that they are repeating something that happened to him earlier. In this way we oblige him to transform his repetition into a memory.”

Which, unquestionably, was the technique Stanley — who, like David, is a Freudian — followed with the patient he’s identified as Cindy Harris, the better to lead her to mental health, m’dear.

But Stanley? Are you in there, Stanley? Do you remember?

“It is not a patient’s crudely sensual desires which constitute the temptation. It is, rather, perhaps, a woman’s subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.”

Stanley seems to have forgotten, if not his technique, then certainly his medical task. By “doing it” with Cindy “right on the office couch,” he has rather, perhaps, also broken the mental health profession’s absolute and explicitly stated prohibition on sexual contact or sexual intimacy between patient and therapist.

Why then, David wonders, am I seriously considering whether or not I will alibi the son of a bitch sometime this August?

For however abhorrent he finds Stanley’s behavior, he cannot ignore the fact that if he does become his accomplice, so to speak, he will also be serving his own interests. All day Thursday, this continues to trouble him, to the extent that he begins feeling in imminent danger himself of forgetting his technique and his medical task. His technique is to coax a patient’s memories into the present, so that they can be dealt with more effectively than they had in the past. His technique is to keep his own personal anxieties, hopes, aspirations, fears, cravings or lusts out of this office and out of the therapy. In this office, he is a neutral and objective listener, an indefatigable, nonjudgmental interpreter. Here in this office, his medical task is to guide back to mental wellness eight severely troubled people.

But.

His patients’ disturbing memories are most often sexual in content. As a result, much of his working day is spent listening to Arthur K or Susan M or Brian L or Josie D or any of the others as they reveal — or try to avoid revealing — that the symptoms of their illnesses can be traced back “with really surprising regularity to impressions from their erotic life,” thank you again, Dr. Freud. David accepts this basic premise as an absolute truth. It is, in fact, the very foundation of the medicine he practices here five days a week, save for the month of August.

But.

On this Thursday morning after Stanley has made an August offer he may not be able to refuse...

On this Thursday morning after he has raced to Kate’s apartment at seven-thirty to be with her for even just a little while before going to work...

On this relentlessly hot and sluggish Thursday morning toward the end of July, David listens apathetically to his patients’ tales of sexual abuse or neglect or indulgence or addiction or identity or dysfunction, relating them only to his own passionate sexual entanglement and finding them by comparison merely dull and inane.

She calls him at ten minutes to eleven to say that the insurance company has sent her a check, and she’ll be going out today to buy a new bicycle, would he like to go with her? The bicycle shop she’s chosen is on Seventy-ninth, between First and York. He tells her he will meet her there at twelve noon.

To commemorate the occasion of the Buying of the Bike, as he will later refer to it, she is wearing what she wore in the park on the day they met. The green nylon shorts, the orange tank top shirt, the Nike running shoes and white cotton socks with the little cotton balls at the back of each. The salesman in the shop, a young man who introduces himself as Rickie, is similarly dressed; perhaps there is a bicycle race somewhere in the city today.

In any event, he is wearing red nylon shorts that do little to conceal muscular young legs, and a blue nylon tank top of a lighter shade and with the numeral 69 in white on the front of it. Hmm. The top exposes pectorals, biceps and triceps that have all had higher educations, either at the local gym or in a state penitentiary. This association comes to mind because he is sporting, on the bulging biceps of his left arm, the tattooed head of an Indian chief in full feathered headdress, and this further prompts the notion that perhaps he himself is an Indian, forgive me, David thinks, a Native American, of course. His skin fortifies the assumption, a rather dusky color that could be a suntan. But his hair is a shiny black, pulled to the back of his head in a ponytail and held there with a little beaded band that further confirms the idea that he may be a Sioux or a Cherokee or, more appropriate considering the fact that he’s twenty-two or — three years old, a mere Ute. He and Kate seem splendidly matched in age and costume. Here in the bicycle shop, David begins feeling like a decrepit fifth wheel.

Rickie the Callow Ute starts selling her a bike, making sure to flex his marvelous muscles each time he lifts down another one from the rack. He asks where she will be doing most of her riding, and she tells him in Central Park, and then immediately informs him that all she’s got to spend is four hundred dollars, so please don’t start showing her bikes that cost two, three thousand dollars, which she knows some of them do.

“I think I have some good models to show you in that price range,” Rickie says.

“Not in that range,” Kate tells him. “I’m talking four hundred dollars, not a penny more, not a penny less.”

“Including tax?” he asks, and flashes a mouthful of glistening white teeth which David would like to punch off his face.

“Well, I guess I can spring for the tax,” Kate says and smiles back.

“Phew,” Rickie says, and flicks imaginary sweat from his noble brow.

It occurs to David that they might be flirting.

Rickie displays a beautiful little number painted in a color he describes as “Wild Orchid with Blue Pearl Hyper-Highlight” and identifies as “a Cannondale aluminum bike in the 3.8 Mixte series with your hybrid frame and your TIG-welded all-chrome-moly fork,” Kate listening wide-eyed, David standing by with his thumb up his ass, “and your GripShift SRT 300 shifters with Shimano Altus C-90 Hyperglide 7-speed rear derailleur and cogset,” speaking a language known only to the Plains Indians and young Kate Duggan, who seems to know exactly whereof he speaks. But the bike costs four hundred and seventy-nine dollars, and Kate has already told him...

“Sorry, I thought I’d sneak it past you,” Rickie says, and grins his boyish all-American grin again.

“You almost did,” she says, and bats her lashes at him.

She climbs onto the next bike he lifts from the rack. As she settles onto a black leather seat Rickie describes as “a Vetta comfort saddle, made in Italy,” the side-slit in the very short green nylon shorts exposes the now-traditional hint of white cotton panties beneath. “You keep in good shape,” Rickie says, interrupting his shpiel — or at least his bike shpiel.

“Thanks,” she says. “How much is this one?”

“About the same as the other one. Where do you work out?”

“I don’t. I’m a dancer.”

“Really? What kind of dancing.”

“I’m in Cats,” she says.

“No shit!” he says.

David wonders if Rickie thinks this older person here might perchance be Kate’s brother, standing and watching this blatant little flirtation and making no comment. Or mayhap her father? Whatever his relation to this lithe slender dancer slipping so easily from saddle to saddle, David seems to have achieved an invisibility only Claude Rains or Vincent Price or Nicholson Baker could have aspired to.

“This Tassajara in the Gary Fisher line is a bit cheaper,” Rickie says, “but it’s got every feature you’d...”

“How much cheaper?”

“Four forty-nine. But it’s got your TIG-welded double-butted cro-moly frame and your Weinmann rims and Tioga Psycho tires...”

“I really can’t spend that much.”

“In that case, I’ve got just the bike for you,” Rickie says and pulls down a sporty number in the Raleigh line, which he describes as “Your sweet little M60 with a chrome-moly frame and STX Rapid Fire Plus shifters and Shimano Parallax alloy hubs. Comes in the metallic anthracite you see here.”

“How much is it?”

“Three ninety-nine, how’s that for on the nose?”

“What else have you got?” she asks.

He spends another twenty minutes showing her bikes, at the end of which time Kate settles on a purple fade, multitrack cro-moly sport with your basic high-tensile steel stays and steel fork and your Araya alloy 36-hole rims and your white decals for a mere three hundred and forty-nine dollars.

David leaves her in the shop with her credit card and Chief Running Mouth while he rushes back up to Ninety-sixth Street where he buys a hot dog with your basic mustard and sauerkraut on Lexington Avenue and gets to his office in time to greet his next patient, Alex J, who tells him that just when he thought he was making real progress, he’s started rubbing up against girls in the subway again.

When Kate phones the apartment at twenty to seven that night, she seems to have completely forgotten the Buying of the Bike. Or perhaps he’s the one who’s exaggerated it out of all proportion. He asks her to wait a minute because he’s just put his dinner in the microwave and if they’re going to talk, he wants to run into the kitchen to turn it off. He takes his good sweet time doing so, letting her cool her heels even though he knows she’s calling from the backstage phone, punishing her for her behavior earlier today. When at last he returns to the study and picks up the receiver, he says, “Okay, I’m back,” and hopes his inflection properly conveys a sense of distance. She seems not to notice.

“We’re dark tonight, you know,” she says, “but I made dinner plans a long time ago. With one of the girls.”

“Too bad,” he says.

“Can you come over later?”

“No, I have to get up early tomorrow.”

“What time does your plane leave?” she asks.

“Four o’clock.”

“Will you be going from your apartment or the office?”

“The office. I quit early on Fridays.”

“So you can go up there.”

“Yes. Right after my last patient leaves.”

“What time will that be?”

“Ten to two.”

“Can I see you before you go to the airport?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Are you coming to my place tomorrow morning?”

“No, I can’t. I have a patient coming in at eight. On Fridays...”

“Sure, a short day.”

“Yes.”

“How long is the flight?”

“An hour and twelve minutes.”

“So you’ll be up there at twelve past five.”

“Well, five-seventeen. It leaves at four-oh-five, actually.”

“Will Helen be waiting at the airport?”

“Yes. And the kids.”

There is a long silence. In the background, he can hear voices moving in and out of focus. He visualizes dancers in cat costumes rushing past the phone, dancers stretching. He can hear someone running a voice exercise, phmmmm-ahhhh, phmmmm-eeeee, phmmmm-ohhhh, over and over again.

“Is something wrong?” she asks.

“Nope.”

“Is it Rickie?”

“Who’s Rickie?”

“The guy from the bike shop. You know who Rickie is.”

“Was that his name?”

“He asked me out,” she says.

David says nothing.

“I told him I’d think about it.”

“Fine.”

“We’re not married, you know.”

“I know that.”

“You have a life that doesn’t include me, you know.”

“That’s right.”

“So you can’t get angry if somebody...”

“I’m not angry.”

“Anyway, I didn’t say yes. I just said I’d think about it.”

“Did you give him your number?”

“No.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You’re angry, right?”

“No, I told you I’m not.”

“Good. Then why don’t I come to your office tomorrow?”

“I have patients all...”

“On your lunch hour, I mean. So I can see you before you go up to the Vineyard.”

“Well...”

“Do you have to go up to the Vineyard?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you stay in the city instead?”

“I can’t.”

“Why don’t you marry me?”

“I’m already married.”

“Divorce her and marry me. Then we can make love all day and all night. And you won’t have to worry about Rickie. Or anybody else. Not that you have to, anyway. What time do you have lunch? Twelve?”

“Yes.”

“That’s when we met in the park.”

“I know.”

“Twenty minutes after twelve. On the last day of June. I’ll never forget it. Do you have a couch?”

“Of course I do.”

“Of course, a shrink. Is it leather?”

“Yes.”

“Good, we’ll do it on your couch.”

I couldn’t believe we were doing it right on the office couch.

“What color is it?”

“Black.”

“I’ll wear black panties to match.”

“Fine.”

“And a black garter belt.”

“Fine.”

“With black seamed stockings and a black leather skirt.”

“Okay.”

I was so ashamed of myself.

“Don’t be angry, David. Please.”

“I’m not.”

“The doorman’ll think I’m one of your nymphomaniac patients.”

“Probably.”

“Do you have any nymphomaniac patients?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“That means yes.”

“No, it means I can’t tell you.”

“Well, you’ll have one tomorrow. Does that excite you?”

“Yes.”

“Shall I call you when I get home tonight?”

“No, I want to get some sleep.”

“Right, you have to leave for the Vineyard.”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll see you at twelve tomorrow. Who shall I say I am? If the doorman asks me.”

“You don’t have to give him a name. Just say you’re there for Dr. Chapman.”

“Oh, yes, I will most certainly be there for Dr. Chapman.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“You’re supposed to say you love me,” she says.

“I love you,” he says.

“Of course you do,” she says, and hangs up.

She arrives at the stroke of noon Friday.

He comes out of his private office when he hears the outside bell ringing, and finds her standing in the waiting room, studying the deliberately neutral prints on the wall. She is wearing a short-sleeved white cotton blouse and a pleated watch-plaid miniskirt with black thigh-high stockings and laced black shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, fastened with a ribbon that picks up the blue in the blue-green skirt. He wonders if she’s wearing the black panties she promised. She does not look at all like the nymphomaniac she advertised on the telephone last night. Instead, she looks like a preppie in a school uniform.

“Hi,” she says.

“Come in,” he says.

She prowls his office like a cat, studying his framed diplomas, running her palm over the smooth polished top of his desk, looking up at the curlicued tin ceiling painted a neutral off-white, circling the desk again, running her forefinger over the slats of the Venetian blinds behind it, studying the finger for dust, pursing her lips in disapproval as she swipes it clean on the short pleated skirt, and then at last going to the black leather couch, and sitting erect on it, her black-stockinged knees pressed together, her hands on her thighs, the palms flat.

“Would you like to know why I’m here, Doctor?” she asks in a quavering little voice, and it is obvious at once that she is about to play the role of a troubled adolescent girl here to consult an understanding shrink. He wonders again if she is wearing black panties under the skirt.

“I’ve already told all this to Jacqueline,” she says, “Dr. Hicks, but I feel it’s something you should know, too, don’t you think, Doctor?”

Shyly lowering her eyes. Staring at her hands flat on her white thighs above the black stockings. Sitting quite erect. Like a frightened little schoolgirl.

“Oh yes, I certainly do,” he says, and smiles, and joins the game. Sitting in the chair behind his desk, he tents his hands and pretends he’s this troubled little schoolgirl’s psychiatrist, a not altogether difficult role to play in that he really is a psychiatrist, although she’s no schoolgirl, Senator, black panties or not — is she wearing black panties? Is she, in fact, wearing any panties at all, her knees pressed so tightly together that way, Sits there like Sharon Stone, legs wide open, no panties. What looks good to you?

What looks good to David is Kathryn Duggan, sitting on his office couch, here to make love to him. He has already forgotten the way she batted her eyes at the Callow Ute in the tank top yesterday afternoon. This is today, and she is here, and she is pretending to be a schoolgirl and he is pretending to be a psychiatrist. He doesn’t have to pretend too strenuously, of course, since listening is what he does all day long. But pretending nonetheless, he listens as she raises her eyes to look straight at him where he sits, those startling green eyes peering unblinkingly at him, her hands never moving from her thighs, her knees tight together, a little virgin girl sitting erect on his couch, beginning her make-believe little tale of woe.

It is Westport, Connecticut, and little Katie Duggan — “That’s what my parents used to call me, Katie” — is thirteen years old and working for the summer as an apprentice at the Westport Country Playhouse, a job she got through her father’s best friend, who that summer was the theater’s accountant or something, “I forget what his exact title was,” she says, “but he was there in some sort of financial capacity, he wasn’t the artistic director or anything,” sounding very genuine in her little schoolgirl role, relating that she was just beginning to develop at the advanced age of thirteen the teeniest budding little breasts, “Well, look at me now, nothing’s changed much,” she says and lowers her eyes in mock shyness again. He does, in fact, look at her now, looks at the front of the pristine cotton blouse, and discovers that as usual she’s not wearing a bra, and discovers, too, that her nipples as usual are erect against the cotton fabric, puckering the fabric, and wonders again if she’s wearing panties, “although I already had pubic hair,” she says, “it started coming in red when I was twelve.”

“How interesting,” he says. “Are you wearing panties now, miss?”

“Yes, I am, Doctor,” she says, and smiles briefly, and then resumes the pose of serious little girl relating something she’s already told Jacqueline Hicks, but which she feels is something he should know, too, don’t you think, Doctor? As she begins talking again, she seems to immerse herself more deeply in the role so that he now finds himself truly listening intently, just as any real psychiatrist might, just as Dr. Hicks might have if such a story had actually been related to her, just as — he realizes with a start — Dr. Hicks must have when Kate first told her about that summer when she was thirteen. This is real, he is too skilled a listener to believe any longer that it is playacting. Not three minutes into the story he knows that this is what really happened and that she has chosen this method of revealing to him what she has already told Dr. Hicks, whom she was seeing when she was “really crazy.”

Looking directly into his eyes, Kate tells him that what she decided to do that summer was lose her virginity to her father’s best friend, a married man with three children, whose exact title she forgets but who came in every day to tally the box office receipts and balance the books and pay the salaries and all that in a little office he had down under the theater. “Do you know where the rest rooms are, have you ever been to Westport, to the theater there? Downstairs where the rest rooms are was where Charlie had his office, his name was Charlie. He had this little office with a desk and a chair in it, and some filing cabinets. I used to go down to the office when I’d finished doing whatever they told me to do, they give the apprentices all kinds of shit to do, and I’d sit on his desk and spread my legs for him. That was later.”

In the beginning, she used to find excuses to go down there to his office to complain about how badly they were treating her. He listened patiently, he was after all her father’s best friend, seemed happy in fact for any respite from the tedium of poring over figures and balancing books. She’d stop down there in cutoff blue jeans and T-shirt, nothing under the shirt, of course, she didn’t have anything much to put in a bra except those tiny breasts that were almost entirely nipples. She was beginning to develop pretty good nipples that summer, at least recognizable as such and discernible enough for him to comment one day in a very fatherly manner, “Katie, you ought to start wearing a bra,” which meant he’d noticed, which meant she was making some progress here. And, of course, her legs looked terrific in the cutoffs.

“I’ve always had great legs,” she tells David now, “even when I was just a little girl. But I’d been taking dance for quite a while by the time I was thirteen, and my legs were really quite long and shapely...”

“They still are,” he says, forgetting for the moment that he is neither her real psychiatrist nor her fake one, remembering all at once that they are here to make love, presumably, and the time she is a-flying, and he hasn’t had lunch, and his next patient will be here in forty minutes, and besides he’s not even sure he wants to hear this story of teenage...

“Thank you, Doctor,” she says. “Anyway, I guess he thought my legs were pretty spectacular...”

“They are,” he says, a psychiatrist’s ploy, a cheap trick, an unabashed prompt, hoping she will respond Yes, come put your hands on my creamy white thighs, Yes, come slide your hands under my schoolgirl skirt and onto my...

“Thank you, Doctor,” she says again, “because one day he said in a very fatherly manner, ‘Katie, some of the boys have been noticing your legs,’ which meant he’d been noticing them, which was further progress. By the way, seducing him wasn’t the main reason I was at the Playhouse, if that’s what you’re thinking. Actually, that was just something I decided to do because I got so bored. And maybe angry, too, because I didn’t get to dance in On the Town, which I knew they’d be doing that summer, and which was the main reason I was there to begin with — but that’s another story.”

Charlie was a man in his early fifties, she guesses now... well, her father was forty-three that summer and Charlie was older than he was, so yes, he was either in his very late forties or his early fifties. He had a bald head and he was sort of short and stout, and he wasn’t very attractive although he did have nice sensitive blue eyes, but she can’t imagine now why she was so intent on having him notice her to begin with, which he certainly did with more and more frequency, and then touch her, which he finally did one rainy day in August while on stage the actors, including two of them from Broadway, were rehearsing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and in the workshop the other apprentices were busy painting scenery.

She rises from the couch now, as if the memory of that steamy day in August is too much for her to bear sitting still and erect on a black leather couch, rises and begins pacing his office, the pleated skirt swirling about her long legs as she walks back and forth before his desk, turning at opposite ends of the short course her long strides define, the skirt swirling, swirling. She is a dancer, she was a dancer even back then, surely she realizes that her abrupt turns are causing the short skirt to billow about her legs, to expose above the taut black stockings a wider expanse of white thigh each time — and yes! There! A glimpse of the now world-famous bicycle-shop white panties, not the black ones she promised on the phone, but plain white panties instead, girlish cotton panties more appropriate to the schoolgirl uniform, similar to the panties she was wearing on that dripping wet day in August when she was thirteen and she slipped down the stairs to his office wearing, yes, white panties, yes, under her habitual cutoff jeans and a thin white cotton T-shirt that had the words WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE printed across its nipple-puckered front.

He is sitting at his desk, bald head bent over the ledger spread open before him. A narrow window is on the short wall opposite the door, and rain beats steadily in a widening street-level puddle just outside of it, droplets of water splashing up onto the glass. A lamp with a green shade illuminates the yellow ledger and his bald head bent over it. Suddenly a flash of lightning turns the horizontal window glaringly blue, and there is immediate thunder in the parking lot outside. He glances up toward the window, shaking his head in awe, and then turns back to his books again. He does not yet know she is in the office. They have never been alone together in this room with the door shut. She eases the door shut behind her. He looks up when he hears the click of the lock as she turns the bolt.

“Katie?” he says.

She goes to his desk, stands in front of him where he sits in his swivel chair with his books spread before him, and takes the hem of her T-shirt in both hands and lifts it above her tiny adolescent breasts and outrageously stiff nipples.

“Kiss them,” she whispers.

He says, “Katie, what...?”

“Kiss them.”

“Your father...”

“Yes, do it.”

He kisses her repeatedly all that rainy afternoon — well, at least for an hour on that rainy afternoon, his hands tight on her tight buttocks in the tight cutoffs, which she refuses to remove despite his constant pleadings — and he repeatedly kisses her nipples and blossoming breasts all through the next week, while proclaiming terrible feelings of guilt for betraying his wife, and the week after that while telling her he shouldn’t be doing this to his best friend’s teenage daughter, he feels so guilty doing this, and the week after that while telling her he himself has a daughter her age, how can he be doing this, is he crazy? He goes even crazier when one day at the beginning of September with russet leaves drifting onto the parking lot she unzips the cutoffs for him, and removes them, and lowers her white cotton panties, and sits on his desk before him and spreads her russet self wide to him, and allows him to bury his bald head between her legs and to lick her there until she experiences a thunderous orgasm for the very first time in her life.

Abruptly, she stops pacing.

Her eyes meet David’s again.

She nods knowingly, and walks to him where he sits in his chair behind his desk, and she unbuttons the white cotton blouse button by button until it is hanging open over her breasts. Standing between his spread legs, she moves into him, and pulls his head into her breasts, and says, “Kiss them.” And while he kisses her feverishly, she reaches under the short pleated skirt and pulls the white cotton panties down over her waist and her thighs, slides them down over her long legs in the tight black stockings, and then sits on the desk before him and spreads her legs to him as she did to Charlie long ago, and whispers, “Yes, do it.”

On Saturday morning, Helen drives Jenny into Vineyard Haven to shop for new sneakers, which Jenny says she desperately needs if she is not to become “a social outcast,” her exact words. It is a cloudy, windy day but David and Annie are walking the beach together nonetheless. He is wearing a green windbreaker; Annie is in a yellow rain slicker and sou’wester tied under her chin. Her cheeks are shiny red from the cold, and the wind is causing her eyes to water. She and David are both barefoot, although it is really too chilly for that, the sand clammy and cold to the touch. Still, they plod along hand in hand. The water looks gray today, streaked with angry white crests.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Annie says.

“What is it you don’t get?”

“How do astronauts pee?”

“Astro—?”

“I mean, where do they pee, actually? When they’re walking on the moon in those suits, I mean.”

“I guess they have a tube or something.”

“The girls, too?”

“I really don’t know, honey.”

“That really bothers me,” Annie says, and looks up at him. “Cause everybody’s always asking me do I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Anybody who comes to the house. Grown-ups. First they say How are you today, Annie? and I say I’m fine, thanks, and then they say Are you looking forward to going back to school in September? and I say Well, it’s still only July, you know, and they say Do you like school? and I say Oh yeah, tons, and that’s when they ask me what I want to be when I grow up.”

“I guess they’re just interested in you, Annie.”

“Why should they care what I want to be when I grow up? Suppose I don’t want to be anything when I grow up? I sure don’t want to be president of the United States, which is something else they always ask. Are your feet cold?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we go back to the house and make a fire and roast marshmallows?” she says. “Before Jenny and Mom get back, okay?”

“Why don’t I just carry you back to the house,” he says, and scoops her up into his arms. “So your feet won’t get any colder, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, grinning. Her head against his shoulder, she asks, “Do I have to be an astronaut, Dad?”

“You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” he says.

“Cause I sure wouldn’t like peeing in a tube,” she says.

He hugs her closer, shielding her from the wind.

A woman at the dinner party that night is telling them it is the end of the criminal justice system as they’ve known it. “Never again will a black man in this country be convicted of a felony,” she says. “All the defense has to do is make sure there’s at least one person of color on the jury. That’s it. A hung jury each and every time. Check it out.”

She is a quite pretty brunette who looks too young to be an attorney, but apparently she is a litigator with a Wall Street firm. Harry Daitch, who is hosting the party with his wife, Danielle, is a lawyer himself and he debates the brunette furiously, but with a smile on his face, contending that justice has nothing to do with racial sympathies, and maintaining that recent verdicts were anomalies rather than true indicators. This is while they are all having cocktails on the deck, under a sky still surly and gray. A black maid is serving hors d’oeuvres. She pretends to be deaf, dumb and blind as the sun sinks below the horizon without a trace.

At dinner, Fred Coswell, who with his wife, Margaret is renting the house next door to Helen and David, mentions that David was in a situation not too long ago — “Do you remember telling us, David?” — where some black kid stole a bicycle from a girl in Central Park.

“Do you mean to say he’ll get off?” Fred asks the woman attorney, whose name is Grace Something, and who is now seated on Harry Daitch’s right, just across the table from David. All told, there are eight people at the party, including an investment broker from Manhattan who’s been invited as Grace’s dinner partner, and who is sitting alongside her on the same side of the table.

“I’m sure Grace meant major felonies,” Harry says, and pats her left hand where it rests alongside his.

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Grace says, laughing. “I’m not sure it won’t apply to lesser crimes as well. Black kid steals a bike, that’s petit larceny, a class-A mis, the most he can get in jail is a year. Even if he gets the max, which he won’t, he’ll be out again stealing another bike four months later. But if he hires himself a smart lawyer...”

“Like you,” Harry says, and pats her hand again.

“Like me, thank you — white like me, anyway, so it won’t look like a slave uprising — the defense’ll play the ‘Underprivileged Black’ card, and then the ‘Black Rage’ card, and any person of color sitting on that jury’ll go, ‘Mmmm, mmmm, tell it, brother, amen,’” she says, doing a fair imitation of a call-and-response routine in a black Baptist church. David wonders all at once if Grace is a closet bigot, but the black maid who is now serving them at table seems to find the takeoff amusing. At least, she’s smiling. “And he’ll walk,” Grace says in conclusion and dismissal, and picks up her knife and fork.

“Did that case ever come to trial, by the way?” Fred asks.

“I have no idea,” David says.

“Ever hear anything more about it?”

“Well, I had to go identify him.”

“You mean they got him?” Margaret says.

“Well, yes.”

“I didn’t know that,” Helen says, surprised.

“I guess I forgot to tell you,” he says.

“When was this?”

“I don’t remember. Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend. When I got back to the city.”

“Well, what happened?” Danielle asks.

As hostess, she is sitting at the opposite end of the table, facing her husband at this end. Helen, on her left in this not-quite-boy-girl-boy-girl seating arrangement, is leaning forward now, her head turned to the left, looking across the table, waiting for David’s response. In fact, all attention seems to have turned from the defense to the prosecution, so to speak, everyone suddenly curious about what happened when David went to identify the young bicycle thief, an event he somehow neglected to mention to Helen in the press of further developments, small wonder. She is still staring at him, waiting.

“The police called and asked if I’d come over after work,” he says. “So I did,” he says, and shrugs.

“How’d they know who you were?” Fred asks.

“I guess the girl told them.”

“Was it the guy?” Danielle asks.

“Oh, yes.”

“So they got him,” Margaret says, almost to herself, nodding. “Good.”

“You didn’t tell me this,” Helen says, still looking surprised.

“I meant to,” he says.

“Annie keeps asking me every day did they catch him.”

“I’m sorry, I guess it just slipped my...”

“But it hasn’t come to trial yet,” Fred says.

“That’s the last I heard of it.”

Helen is still looking at him.

“Will you have to testify?” Margaret asks.

“I really...”

“If it comes to trial?”

“I don’t...”

“How old is he?” Grace asks.

“Sixteen, seventeen.”

“First offense?”

“I don’t know.”

“The case may even be dismissed,” she says. “You know what a class-A mis is?”

“No, what?” her dinner companion asks. This is the first time he’s opened his mouth all night long. He has flaxen hair and dark brown eyes and he is wearing a heavy gold chain over a purple Tommy Hilfiger sweater. David wonders if he’s gay.

“Writing graffiti is a class-A mis. Unauthorized use of a computer is a class-A mis. Hazing is a class-A mis. Are you beginning to catch the drift?”

“She means it’s a bullshit crime,” Harry says.

“Well, he also hit her,” David says, and thinks Shut up. End it. Let it die. “Kicked her. Knocked her down.”

“That’s assault,” Grace says.

“That’s a horse of another color,” Harry says.

“Which is why he’ll walk,” Grace says knowingly.

Coming out of the bathroom, Helen says, “I can’t believe Danielle can be so blind.” She is slipping a nightgown over her head as she walks, the blue nylon cascading over her tanned body, blond hair surfacing as her head clears the laced bodice. She shakes her disheveled hair loose, a habit he loves, and then goes to the dresser. Sitting before the mirror, she begins brushing her hair. He does not know how she can brush and count and talk at the same time, but it is a feat she performs effortlessly every night. Fifty strokes before bedtime every night. Meanwhile talking a mile a minute.

“He invites her to every party, seats her on his right at every party, feels her up at every...”

“He was patting her hand,” David says.

“Why do men feel compelled to defend other men who they know are fucking around?” Helen asks incredulously. “He was patting her hand on the table. Under the table he was feeling her up.”

“How do you know what he was doing under the table?”

“I know when a man has his hand on a woman’s thigh. Or closer to home. Something comes over her face.”

“I didn’t see anything coming over her face.”

“Her eyes glazed over.”

“I didn’t notice that. I was sitting directly across from her, and I didn’t...”

“Right, defend him.”

“I just don’t think anything’s going on between Harry and Grace whatever her name is.”

“Humphrey. Which I feel is appropriate.”

David thinks about that for a moment.

“Oh,” he says.

“Oh,” Helen says, and winks at him in the mirror.

He is stretched out on the bed, his elbow bent, his head propped on his open hand, watching her. He loves to watch her perform simple female tasks. Putting on lipstick. Polishing her nails. Clasping a bra behind her back. Slipping on a high-heeled shoe. Brushing her hair.

“How does he know her, anyway?” he asks.

“Biblically,” Helen says.

“I mean...”

“They work in the same office.”

“And she’s up here for the summer?”

“No, she’s a houseguest. Every weekend,” Helen says, and raises her eyebrows. “Hmm?”

“Well...”

“Mmm,” Helen says.

“Do you think Danielle invites her?”

“I have no idea. Maybe Danielle has a boyfriend of her own. Maybe Danielle doesn’t care what Harry does under the table or behind the barn. Danielle is French, my dear.”

“Oh, come on, Hel. She’s been in America for twenty years. In fact, they’ve been married that long.”

“So have we,” Helen says. “I can’t believe you forgot to tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“About going to identify that boy.”

“Well, it was a busy week. Everybody just back from the long weekend...”

“I’ll bet they were rattling their cages.”

“Anxiety levels were high, let’s put it that way.”

“Was this a lineup?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“The precinct. They have a room.”

“Was the girl there, too? The one he hit?”

“Yes.”

“What was her name again?”

“I forget.”

“She identified him, too, huh?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So they’ve really got him then.”

“Oh yes.”

“Kate,” she says. “It was Kate.”

“Right. Kate.”

“Done,” she says, and puts down the brush.

“How do you do that?”

“I’m a fucking phenomenon,” she says. “Speaking of which,” she adds, and swivels toward him on the bench.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he says.

Making love to her tonight, he remembers the way she looked that autumn day when first he laid eyes on her, sitting on a riverbank bench, head bent, totally absorbed in the book she was reading. On the Charles, a sculling team from Harvard was tirelessly rowing, he can still hear the megaphoned voice of the coxswain calling the stroke, still recall everything that happened that day as if it is playing back now in wide screen and stereophonic sound.

Leaves are falling like golden coins everywhere around her. Her straight blond hair cascades down her back, well past her shoulders, she wears it longer back then, she is still a college undergraduate, though he only suspects that as he stands rooted to the river path, staring. Woolen skirt and moss-green sweater, string of tiny pearls. A shower of leaves twists in the gentle breeze, silently floating, drifting, seeming to fall out of sunlight as golden as her hair. He has never seen anyone quite so beautiful in his life. And to think he’s here only to pick up a book at the Coop.

Making love to her tonight on ocean-damp sheets, he recalls all this. Sees it clearly in his mind’s eye. Remembers.

“Hello?” he says. “May I join you?”

She turns to look up at him.

Eyes as blue as a searing flash of lightning.

He is twenty-six years old, a recent graduate of Harvard’s medical school, and he is sporting a mustache because he thinks it makes him look older and therefore, he hopes, more authoritative in the Emergency Room at Mass General, where he is interning. He has already decided he will become a psychiatrist, but he won’t begin specializing till next year, Mom, and meanwhile he’s treating people who are bleeding, biting, babbling, bawling or merely broken in a hundred pieces, all flowing through the E.R. doors in a constant stream designed to instruct him in the basic truths of medicine, fundamental among which is the knowledge that any mistake he makes can prove fatal. He guesses this gorgeous blond goddess sitting here with her legs crossed and an open book in her lap doesn’t know much about life and death, the way he does. He guesses she is four or five years younger than he is — actually, it turns out to be six — and he hopes as he sits beside her that the mustache doesn’t make him look too much older or wiser, although the way her blue laser glare seems to focus in on the mustache leads him to believe she doesn’t much care for “an hairy man,” Esau notwithstanding.

“I’m David Chapman,” he says.

He resists adding “Dr. David Chapman” because the title still seems strange to him, even though he is now officially a doctor, more or less, otherwise why is he allowed to treat all those maimed and wounded people who swarm into the E.R. day and night?

The way she keeps looking at him also leads him to believe she’s unaccustomed to strange mustachioed men sitting beside her uninvited on a public bench. Out on the river, the scullers keep rowing past tirelessly. Here on the bank of the Charles, the leaves fall softly, gently, even romantically, an appropriate backdrop, he feels, for this first momentous encounter, though she doesn’t seem to be sharing the same keen sense of History in the Making.

“I don’t want to intrude on your privacy,” he says.

Then why are you? her look asks.

“But... I’d like to know you,” he says.

“Why?” she asks.

“Because... you’re so beautiful,” he says.

Lamely.

“That I know,” she says.

The scullers are out of sight now. Pedestrians are idling across the Longfellow Bridge to Alston. On the other side of the river, he can see automobiles rumbling along Storrow Drive, and beyond that the big Coca-Cola sign near the entrance to the Mass Pike. The leaves continue falling silently. She has returned to her book again.

“So what do you think?” he asks.

“About what?” she says without looking up.

“About let’s walk over to the Square and have a cup of coffee.”

“I have a class in twenty minutes,” she says, without even glancing at her watch.

“Then I guess we’ll have to sit here and talk,” he says.

She looks at him again. His daughter Annie will one day inherit her mother’s intent gaze and direct manner, but he doesn’t know that as yet, of course, he isn’t thinking that far ahead, he isn’t even thinking past her scented proximity on the bench (Tea Rose, she will later tell him) or the bee-stung temptation of her lips, pursed now in seeming displeasure, he can’t imagine why. He wonders if she’s noticed the stethoscope sticking out of the right-hand pocket of his jacket. If so, does she think it has perhaps been stolen from an attending physician on a psychiatric ward someplace? The reason he wonders this is because her look somehow implies he may be an escaped lunatic.

“I have a test in twenty minutes,” she says in dismissal. “I don’t wish to appear rude, Mr. Chapman...”

His opportunity.

“Dr. Chapman,” he says.

“Dr. Chapman, do forgive me. But I have to...”

“A test in what?”

“Irrelevant,” she says. “I have to study. Please.”

“Can I call you sometime?”

“Why?” she asks again.

“So I can get to know your mind?” he suggests, and grins so broadly that she bursts out laughing.

The first time they go out together, Helen advises him to “lose the mustache” because together with the eyeglasses they make him look as if he’s wearing one of those trick disguises you put on with the big nose and the shaggy brows and the glasses and mustache, though he doesn’t have a big nose at all and his brows aren’t shaggy. It’s just that she can’t imagine ever kissing anyone with a mustache, which, if not exactly an open invitation, does seem an opportunity he shouldn’t ignore, so he kisses her for the first time and stars fall on Alabama — for him, at least. She says this sort of thing has got to stop. He shaves his mustache that very night.

The reason this sort of thing has got to stop is that Helen Barrister — her name, and an appropriate one in that both her parents are lawyers and both are of English ancestry — is engaged to someone named Wallace Ames who happens to be going to school in California, which technically makes him a GUG, shorthand for a Geographically Undesirable Girl or Guy (a Guy, in this instance), but Helen doesn’t yet realize this. At the moment, she is a straight 4.0 student at Radcliffe, concentrating in journalism and hoping one day to become editor in chief of The New Yorker, her favorite magazine, although he suspects she reads Vogue as well, witness the dandy outfits she wears during this blazing Massachusetts autumn while he diligently pursues her, stealing a kiss here or there, hither or yon, when not busy stanching wounds or delivering babies, three of them by Christmas alone.

David feels certain his mother would be a solid Wallace Ames supporter if she knew of his existence, or even of Helen’s existence, for that matter, since he hasn’t yet told her about the radiant blue-eyed beauty he stumbled upon one bright October day. Knows without question that his mother would agree Wallace is really the man this nice young girl should marry, why don’t you concentrate on your work, David, on becoming a good doctor, David, instead of sniffing around a blond, blue-eyed beauty already engaged to a surfer?

To the surfer’s credit — and anyway he isn’t a surfer, but is instead seriously studying film at UCLA — it is he who decides to end this long-distance engagement to a girl he “hardly knows,” as he puts it in a Dear Helen letter which she receives on New Year’s Eve, great timing, Wally. Two weeks later, this still being the lewd, lascivious, obscene and pornographic seventies, David and Helen consummate their budding romance on a single bed in a rented room on the Cape. To his mother’s credit, she accepts Helen without a backward sigh.

There is a history here.

It is a record as complex as the computer banks of their separate minds, storing and recalling memories solitary or shared, before or since. It is as pervasive as the waves gently lapping the shore beyond the sliding screen doors in this room where they make quiet love lest they wake the children, reckless love in that they cannot quite muffle their ardor.

He has shared with this woman a thousand hopes and aspirations, small triumphs, bitter disappointments. He has laughed with her and cried with her, fought with her, hated her, loved her again, abjured her, adored her again. When Jenny was born... oh dear God... and the obstetrician told him Helen had gone into shock... no, dear God... and he might... he might... he might lose her, he prayed long into the night to a deity he had not acknowledged since he was eighteen. He knows every facet of this woman’s mind, every nuance of her body. He has savored each forever, and has never tired of either. He still believes she is the most beautiful woman he has ever known.

Then why, he wonders.

Why?

It is raining on Sunday morning.

Annie wants to go to a movie.

“That’s what you do when it rains,” she says and shrugs in perfect logic.

Together, she and Helen go into the kitchen to call the movie houses in Vineyard Haven. David is playing chess with Jenny in the living room. She is a whiz at the game he taught her when she was Annie’s age, and she plays with intense concentration, forcing him into moves that enforce and encourage her master plan, all the while keeping up a running conversation, much as her mother does when administering her fifty magic strokes each night.

“Check,” she says. “If I tell you a secret, will you promise not to tell Mom or Annie?”

“I promise.”

“Especially Annie.”

“Yes, darling, I promise.”

Jenny lowers her voice. On her sweet solemn face, there is a look of such trust that he wants to hug her close and tell her he would never betray a secret of hers as long as he can draw breath. Blue eyes wide, she leans over the chessboard and whispers, “Brucie loves me.”

“Who’s Brucie?” he whispers back.

“Di Angelo. Next door.”

She gestures with her head.

“How do you know?”

“He gave me a ring,” she whispers, and pulls from under her T-shirt a tiny gold band on a golden chain. “You know what else?” she whispers, quickly sliding the ring out of sight again.

“What else?” he whispers.

“I love him, too.”

“That’s nice,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and nods happily. “Your move, Dad.”

The sun is shining when they come out of the theater at a quarter past three. His plane will be leaving at six-fifteen this evening, and will get into LaGuardia at seven twenty-nine.

“Why don’t you go back tomorrow morning instead?” Jenny asks.

“Cause that would be a hardship,” Annie says. “Besides, Dad’ll be here forever next weekend.”

They are taking a last long walk up the beach before it’s time to head to the airport. He and Helen are holding hands. The girls are running up the beach ahead of them, circling back occasionally to hug them both around the legs, skipping off again, skirting like sandpipers the waves that gently rush the shore.

“Right, Dad?” Annie says, turning to look back at him.

“Right, honey,” he says, and squeezes Helen’s hand.

“Forever, right?”

“Forever,” he says.

Annie leaps over someone’s abandoned sand castle, lands flat-footed and crouched on the other side of it.

“Boop!” she says.

And in that moment, he decides to end whatever this thing with Kate might be.

He is in the study reading when the doorman buzzes upstairs at five minutes to nine that night. Puzzled, he pads barefoot through the apartment to the receiver hanging just inside the front door.

“Hello?” he says.

“Dr. Chapman?”

“Yes?”

“Pizza delivery.”

“I didn’t order any pizza,” he says.

“Young lady says thees pizza for you.”

“Oh. Yes, I... yes, send it right up.”

She is wearing black shorts, a red T-shirt, a red beret, red socks and black high-topped thick-soled shoes that look like combat boots. She does indeed look like someone who could be delivering a pizza, which she is in fact doing. From the looks of the carton, it is a good-sized one.

“I got half cheese and half pepperoni,” she says, “I hope that’s okay. Are you hungry?”

“No, I ate a little while ago.”

“I’m starved,” she says. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“The plane was late.”

“I’m glad you’re here. Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“Kate...” he starts.

“Before I die?” she says and moves into his arms.

He kisses her, and then breaks away gently but almost at once, fearful that somehow Helen, all the way up there in Massachusetts, will know there’s another woman in their apartment, will know he has just kissed a woman who’s brought him a pizza at nine o’clock at night, will know this is the woman, the girl, he’s been sleeping with, talk about euphemisms, and that she is here in their apartment right this very minute, now, dressed like a delivery person in a red beret and combat boots. As he takes the pizza carton from her and carries it into the kitchen he fully expects the phone will ring and Helen will yell, “Who’s that with you, you bastard?”

But, of course, the phone doesn’t ring.

“Nice,” she says, looking around.

“Thank you,” he says.

He is still very nervous. More than nervous. Apprehensive. Frightened that Luis... was it Luis at the door when he got back from dinner tonight? If it was Luis who passed her in, will he remember that this is the same girl who left a washed and ironed handkerchief downstairs two weeks ago, have they been sleeping together for only two weeks? But, of course, the handkerchief was in an envelope, so he wouldn’t have known it was a handkerchief, as if that makes any difference, sly Luis with his big macho Hispanic grin and virtual wink, clever Luis who accepted the “leetle” package from a beautiful redheaded girl at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning two weeks ago, but this is now nine o’clock this Sunday night, and Mrs. Chapman is enjoying the seashore up there in Massachusetts, verdad, señor? Will Luis remember? If it is Luis downstairs? Will Luis remember — and destroy him even after he has ended it? But, of course, he hasn’t ended it yet. Not quite yet. He has only decided to end it.

“We should put it in the oven,” Kate says.

She seems blithely, and somehow infuriatingly, unaware of his discomfort. Doesn’t she know that Helen has a nose like a beagle and that the perfume she’s wearing, while admittedly seductive though inappropriate to the delivery boy guise, is the sort that will permeate upholstery and drapes and be sniffed in an instant when Helen and the children walk through the front door on the fifteenth of September, which is when the lease on the Vineyard house runs out? Bending from the waist like the dancer she is, she slips the pizza carton into the oven, turns to smile at him, and blows a kiss on the air.

“Kate,” he says, “we have to talk.”

“Sure,” she says, and familiarly adjusts the dial on the oven, as if she has warmed pizzas in this oven in this kitchen forever, as if this is her kitchen, in fact. “But aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

“Of course,” he says, but he is thinking he wants to get this over with, talk to her, tell her it’s over, eat the goddamn pizza, get rid of the carton, end it. As he leads her into the living room, she looks around appraisingly, studying the paintings on the wall, and the silk flower arrangement on the hall table, and the furniture, and the small piece of sculpture he and Helen brought back from their trip to India three years ago, her green eyes roaming, “Nice,” she says again, and sits on the couch facing the bar unit, crossing her long legs in the short black shorts and the incongruous combat boots. She knows her legs are gorgeous...

I’ve always had great legs, even when I was just a little girl. But I’d been taking dance for quite a while by the time I was thirteen, and my legs were really quite long and shapely...

...knows she can take outrageous liberties with them, probably figures as well that the shorts and the boots are an exaggerated echo of the green nylon running shorts and Nike running shoes she was wearing on the day they met.

“Could you make a martini for me?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says.

“Thank you,” she says. “Vodka? With a twist?”

“Sure.”

He was hoping she’d prefer something simpler, Scotch on the rocks, bourbon and soda, anything but a drink that will require time-consuming preparation, because truly he wants to get this over with before...

Before what?

Well, before the telephone really rings and it’ll be Helen calling from Menemsha.

He doesn’t know what he can possibly say if Helen calls.

Pouring the Absolut, adding a dollop of vermouth, skimming a bit of lemon peel from the big yellow lemon he takes from the refrigerator, the phone hanging on the wall behind the counter, fearful the phone will ring, Oh, hi, Helen, I was just making myself a martini, but the phone doesn’t ring. He carries the drink back into the living room, where Kate has taken off the combat boots and now sits on the couch with her legs tucked under her and one arm draped across the back of the couch. She has also taken off the beret. Her red hair shines under the glow of the ceiling spot that illuminates the abstract painting behind her. He carries the drink to her...

“Aren’t you having something?”

...pours himself a little Scotch over ice, goes to the couch to clink glasses...

“To us,” she says, and smiles up at him.

“Kate,” he says, “we...”

“Mmm,” she says, sipping at the drink.

He sits beside her. The couch is blue. He hopes she hasn’t powdered herself after showering, hopes she won’t leave traces of her powder, her perfume, her scent in this apartment for Helen to discover after Luis casually mentions this little nocturnal visit from a redhead.

“So what is it?” she asks, and turns her head and her eyes to him. He takes a long swallow of Scotch.

“Kate,” he says, “I think you should know I’ll be leaving for the Vineyard as usual this Friday night...”

“Yes?”

“...but this time I’ll be gone the entire month of August.”

“Yes, I know.”

He looks at her.

“You’re a shrink, you’ll be gone all of August, I realize that. We still have the rest of the week. Anyway, why don’t you just marry me? Then you won’t have to go to the Vineyard at all.”

“Kate...”

“Or at the very least, why don’t you go up there on Saturday instead? Or even Sunday. Why do you have to rush up there on Friday? Friday’s only the twenty-eighth. Do your patients know you’ll be leaving so early?”

“Effectively, Friday’s the end of the month.”

“No, the end of the month is next Monday. The end of the month is the thirty-first, that’s when the end of the month is.”

“I know, but...”

“I’m glad you’re not my shrink, David, I have to tell you. Ducking out before the month even ends. By the way, I’ve planned a big surprise for your birthday, so I hope you’re not planning to run up to the Vineyard even earlier than you...”

“No, I won’t be going up till...”

“Good. My place at eight then. We’re dark on Thursday nights, so I won’t have to worry about getting to the theater, will I?”

“Kate, I think we...”

“Wait’ll you see what I got you.”

“I hope you didn’t spe—”

“You’ll love it. Will you have another birthday party when you go up to the Vineyard?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Friday night.”

“Is that why you’re going up so early?”

“I’m not going up early. My patients...”

“Ducking out three days before the month ends,” she says, and turns fully toward him now, swinging around in a dancer’s position or perhaps a yoga position, he doesn’t know which, bringing the soles of her feet together, holding them together with her hands, sitting quite erect, her knees wide, the black shorts rising higher on her thighs so that he can now see the edge of her panties beneath them, white like the ones she was wearing in the park that day long ago, the side-slit in the very short green nylon running shorts exposing a hint of white cotton panties beneath, strengthening the image of youth, white like the ones she was wearing yet longer ago when one day at the beginning of September with russet leaves drifting onto the parking lot she unzipped her cutoffs for him and removed them and lowered her panties and sat on his desk and spread herself wide to him.

“My patients know when I’m leaving,” he says. “We’ve talked about nothing else for the past three weeks.”

But this isn’t quite true.

They’ve talked about other things as well.

And all at once it was dark, and in the dark she could have been anyone, in the dark she was opening her robe and spreading her legs, warm and wet and pulling me into her.

“Kate,” he says, “what I think we should do...”

“What I think we should do is get a bit more comfortable here, don’t you think?” she says, and rises suddenly from whatever odd position it was, dance, yoga, exercise, whatever, rises with arms extended for balance, rises slowly like a swimmer coming up out of icy blue water, stands barefoot on the cushioned blue couch for only a moment, and then springs to the white-carpeted floor with a single catlike leap, yanking shorts and panties down over her knees at once. Delicately, she steps out of them, lifting one long dancer’s leg, and then the other, and then tosses them over her shoulder. Smiling, she takes a step toward him, and then another, dancer’s steps, knee coming up high, toes pointed, foot slowly descending flat to the carpet, slow-motion steps, moving closer and closer, like a cat stalking its prey, but there’s a smile on her face.

“Would you like to fuck me now?” she asks, and falls to her knees in a dancer’s soft collapse. “Say,” she says, and unzips his fly, and whips him free of his trousers and his underwear, gripping him tightly in her fist. She looks up into his face. Her eyes hold his in an innocent green gaze. Her eyebrows are raised. Well? her expression is saying. “Or would you rather stick this big beautiful thing in my mouth?” she asks, and smiles radiantly.

He throws his head back and stares up into the blinding light above the painting, lost in the glare of the light and the insistence of her relentless hand, the light radiating spikes of rapture, losing all resolve within seconds, lost within seconds in her youth, lost beyond recall in her incandescent passion, utterly bewilderingly ecstatically lost.

“Which?” she demands. “Say!”

On Monday morning, he calls Stanley Beckerman to say he’ll go along with the August deception.

Everything in his life has a title now.

The August Deception.

As is usual at this time of the year, each of his patients comes up with different but not entirely original ways of coping with what they consider David’s wanton neglect and lack of consideration. How dare he leave them for the entire month of August? More than that. Five weeks and four days if you count the days he’ll be gone at the end of July and the days he’ll be gone in September before he returns on the fifth. Five weeks and four days, never mind any goddamn month, who’s kidding who here?

Arthur K’s way of dealing with this abominable situation is to try to wrap up the analysis before the end of the month. Not merely put it on hold until after Labor Day, but wrap it up forever. End it. Which David knows from experience is not always a simple thing to do. But Arthur K — who’s been telling him that the night on his sister’s bed after the dance was the one and only time he’d ever touched her — seems eager to confess this Tuesday that he and his sister had been making love on and off, every now and then, ever since that night, even after they were both married...

“To other people, of course. She’s my sister, marrying her would be incest.”

...had been doing it regularly, in fact incessantly right up to the time of her death twelve years ago, when Arthur’s phobic reaction to automobiles started. If David would like to know, in fact — and then perhaps they can put this thing to rest once and for all and bring this so-called analysis to its long-awaited conclusion — if David would like to know what really happened that day...

Veronica’s husband, Manny, is off at work as usual, he owns a ladies’ ready-to-wear store on Fourteenth Street, he sells mostly to Spanish people, yellow dresses, red dresses, the cheap gaudy shit they like to wear. His sister and Manny live up in Larchmont, which is where Arthur goes to see her at ten o’clock that Wednesday morning. Wednesday is when he goes to his chiropractor and then drives up afterward to see his sister. He does this every Wednesday. He does not think he can get through a week without seeing his sister, without doing to his sister what they started doing together all those years ago. He loves his sister more than anyone on earth.

“I was never ashamed of my love for her. I still love her, if you want to know.”

On that fateful day that will mark the end of her life, she is wearing for him what she wears each and every time they make love, a blue robe not unlike the one she’d worn when she was fifteen and a virgin, and a laced pink nightgown, though shorter than the one back then.

“Veronica never had any children,” Arthur K says. “She always kept her body nice. Same body she had when she was fifteen. Firm belly, breasts, everything, even though she was... what... fifty-three when she got killed in the accident?”

His voice catches.

David waits.

“I really want to end this fucking thing,” he says.

Should David risk a prompt?

End what? he wonders. The belief that their transgression is what caused his sister’s death?

Or the analysis?

He waits.

“She told me... she said she...”

David waits.

“She said she told Manny.”

There is a long, shattering silence.

“I said... I... I was flabbergasted. I said What? You told Manny? I told Manny, she said. About us? I said. About us, she said. She said this would have to be the last time we ever, what we did, what we just finished doing. She said Manny never wanted to see me again, never wanted to talk to me again, never wanted to hear about me again, fucking my own sister, the shame, the shame. This is what Manny told her. Said I was fucking my own sister. We had just finished... she was sitting on the edge of the bed naked when she told me all this. This was afterwards. We always had a cigarette afterwards. We were sitting there smoking when she told me this. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, I was in this little easy chair she had with the gold fabric. We were both smoking. I said Veronica, how could you tell him this, are you crazy? She said she couldn’t bear the guilt any longer, she had to tell him. I said What guilt, what are you talking about, guilt? We love each other, what guilt? How could you do this? She said I’m sorry, Arthur, I couldn’t bear it anymore, the lying.

“I... I got on my knees in front of her, I took her hands in mine, her cigarette was in the ashtray, smoke was coming up. I said Veronica, you’ve got to tell him you were kidding, and she said Kidding? How can I tell him I was kidding? Who would kid about something like this, Arthur? I kissed her hands, I kept kissing her hands, I kept saying Please, Veronica, over and over again, and she said Arthur, you have to go now, I have a manicure appointment, I have to drive over to my manicurist, and I said Please, Veronica, I was crying now, I said Please don’t leave me, and she said I have to, and I said Please please, Veronica, and she said Go now, Arthur, please, he’ll kill me if he knows you were here, and I said I hope he does. She was crying when I left. Her Camaro was parked in the driveway outside the house.”

She comes to his office on his lunch hour that Tuesday afternoon. She brings bagels and Nova and they make love on his couch afterward. She tastes of onions when he kisses her.

On Tuesdays, the show is dark.

He goes to her apartment again that night.

But he makes sure he is home again by ten so that he can call Helen before she goes to sleep.

He calls Menemsha again at seven the next morning, and tells Helen he’ll be leaving for the office early, lots to do before he comes up there on Friday. She asks him what he’ll be doing on his birthday tomorrow. He tells her he may go to a movie. She says he ought to go celebrate with Stanley Beckerman. He tells her he’ll think about it.

“Anyway, we’ll be talking again before then,” he says.

Today is Wednesday.

Matinee day.

But not in his office. No matinee on the black leather couch today because Kate must be at the theater by twelve-thirty for a real matinee at two. The moment he puts the receiver back on the cradle he runs downstairs and catches a cab to her apartment.

At ten that night, he calls Massachusetts again and tells Helen he’s going down for a walk and a cup of cappuccino at that place on Seventieth Street. She advises him to be careful, and he tells her he’ll call again in the morning. As soon as he hangs up, he heads for the theater. The stage door is on Seventh Avenue. He gets there just as the cast is coming out. She takes him by the arm.

“Hi,” she says and reaches up to kiss him on the cheek.

“Goodnight, Kate,” one of the girls calls.

“Goodnight!” another one calls, waving.

They have cappuccino together in a place on Sixth Avenue. He kisses her frequently and openly as they sit holding hands at a corner table. Later, they go to her apartment where they make love frantically and hastily. He does not get home until midnight, and is relieved to see that there are no messages from Helen on the answering machine.

Alex J has his own way of dealing with the imminent month-long hiatus. Month and more, don’t forget. Alex J clams up. He has been silent all this week. Today is Thursday, and the hour is ticking away, and he is still silent. This is his way of punishing David. You want to go to wherever you’re going and leave me flat? Okay, I’ll pretend you’re already gone, how’s that? And if you’re already gone, I don’t have to talk to you. I can just lie here and look up at the ceiling, okay?

“Yes?” David asks, as if reading his mind.

“What?” Alex J says with a start.

“I thought you were about to say something.”

“Why would I be about to say anything?” Alex J says curtly.

“Sorry. I thought you were.”

There is another long silence. David wonders what sort of a surprise Kate has cooked up for his birthday tonight. She keeps calling it a “party,” but he hopes she hasn’t been foolish enough to have planned a real party, with guests other than themselves. He recognizes that over the past week he’s become if not entirely reckless then certainly somewhat less than cautious. He hopes she hasn’t taken this as a signal to...

“...weather will be hottest,” Alex J is saying.

“Yes?”

“Were you asleep?” he asks.

“No, no.”

“Then what did I just say?”

“You said the weather will be hottest,” David says, and takes a wild guess. “While I’m away. In August.”

“Yes. How often do you fall asleep when I’m talking?”

“Never.”

“I’ll just bet.”

“You’d lose.”

“When the dresses are thinnest,” Alex J says. “These flimsy little dresses they wear.”

David says nothing.

He waits.

“When the weather is hot, I mean,” Alex J says. “Did you ever read that story by Irwin Shaw?”

“Which one is that?”

“‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’?”

“Yes?”

“That’s what it is, you know. The way they dress in the summertime. I wouldn’t be doing this if it was the winter. Following them home, I mean. It’s just because it’s...”

What? David thinks.

“...the summer. These skimpy little dresses they wear.”

Following them home? David thinks.

Alex J is a thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker who commutes all the way from West Ninety-third to Wall Street by subway every weekday and sometimes on weekends as well. He is married and has three children, and the reason he’s been coming to see David for the past year now is that a month before he sought help a woman he was rubbing himself against on the subway suddenly jabbed her elbow into his gut and yelled, “Get the hell away from me!” To Alex J, this was the equivalent of finding snakes in his bed. Fearful he would be arrested the next time he rubbed up against someone, or inadvertently touched someone, God forbid, Alex J came to David to confess his irresistible urges.

Alex J is what is known in the trade as a frotteur, from the French word for “a rubber,” he who rubs. In Alex’s case, “he who rubs” does so against thinly clad women in the subway, a crime defined as submitting another person to sexual contact without the latter’s consent, or — as David had reason to look up seven years ago when he was treating another such patient — “any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person not married to the actor for the purpose of gratifying the sexual desire of either party, whether directly or through clothing.” In other words, if Alex J gets caught doing what he’s been doing (for the past six years, it turns out, and not for just the six months prior to his subway epiphany a year ago this July) he is in danger of spending anywhere from three months to a year in jail — small potatoes unless you happen to have a wife and three kiddies at home, hmm, dollink?

David is not here to keep Alex J out of jail, though this in itself is not a minor consideration. He is here to lead Alex J to a discovery of the root causes underlying his behavior, so that he may better understand it, and control it. But now...

And perhaps this is simply a ruse, perhaps Alex J is merely telling him all this as a way of making sure David is really listening. Think you can go away for the whole month of August, huh? Okay, now hear this, Doctor!

What David now hears is that Alex J, in addition to deliberately seeking out on train platforms any woman or girl of any age who seems clothed in what he calls “a flimsy provocative dress,” and following her from the platform onto the rush-hour train, and allowing himself to be pushed against her by the rush-hour crowd, positioning himself strategically behind her, and rubbing himself against her until he achieves erection and on at least one occasion orgasm...

What David now hears is that Alex J has in recent weeks developed an alarming new symptom that could land him behind bars for a very long time. Perhaps because he is afraid that his antisocial underground behavior will indeed lead to arrest and incarceration should he one day mistakenly rub up against a female detective third grade in a gossamer summer frock, he has taken to following women he feels certain are not cops and who, he feels equally certain, will not resist his advances when he makes his desires known. In short, he is on the edge of committing rape.

This is what he begins talking about ten minutes before his hour ends on this Thursday before David leaves for the entire month of August. This is how he has captured David’s full and complete attention. He is no longer talking about subterranean ladies in flimsy provocative dresses. With the clock ticking rapidly to meltdown, he is talking about the provocative aboveground ladies he’s been following home from work, one of them all the way to a Spanish section of Queens.

“She knows I’ve got my eye on her. She knows I’ll make my move soon. She wants me to,” he says, and nods contentedly.

David carefully advises him not to do anything stupid — he actually uses that word — until they have a chance to discuss this more fully in September.

“Oh, sure, Doc,” Alex J says cheerfully. “Have a nice summer.”

That night, when David rings the bell outside her apartment, she opens the door a crack, stands out of sight behind it, and whispers, “Close your eyes.”

He hopes she hasn’t assembled a cast of characters who will yell “Surprise!” the moment he steps into the apartment. Dutifully, but feeling utterly foolish, he closes his eyes.

“Are they closed?” she whispers from behind the door.

“They’re closed,” he whispers back.

He hears the door opening.

“Come in,” she says.

He steps inside, and smells at once the pungent scent of incense burning, mingled with the scent of her own heady perfume, subtler than the incense, underscoring it like a leitmotif. His eyes are still closed. He hears the sound of the door easing shut behind him, the familiar oiled click of tumblers falling as she bolts both locks. There is music coming from across the room where he knows her audio equipment is stacked against the wall. The music sounds vaguely familiar, a symphonic swelling of strings and woodwinds, surely he knows what it is, surely he has heard this poignant melody before. Something lush and sensual, it oozes softly from the speakers, an insinuating strain that murmurs of distant exotic places, faraway caravans, shifting sands...

“You can open your eyes now,” she says.

She is standing some four feet back from him, entirely naked under sheer black harem pants that flare to her ankles, where she is wearing thick golden bands that look like restraining cuffs. An ornately brocaded red silk vest threaded with gold is open over her naked breasts. She is wearing red high-heeled pumps that match the vest and add at least two inches to her height. She stands before him shyly, her gaze averted, her wrists and neck festooned with golden bangles and chains, the fingers of both hands encircled with thick heavy rings set with bright colored stones. Her hair is piled upon her head in shimmering copper masses held by a metallic gold ribbon that glimmers in the pale light. She is an Occidental slave girl transported here to the sybaritic East — for now he sees what she has done to the apartment and recognizes the motif.

The lamps have been dimmed but they are also draped with gossamer silken scarves, black and red and gold to complement her costume. Thick candles in the same colors flicker in brass holders everywhere around the room, and scrolled brass pots of incense smolder on the coffee table. The door to the bedroom is open just a crack. Red light suffuses the wedge and spills like blood onto the living room carpet. The music swells. It is Rimsky-Korsakov, and she is his birthday Scheherazade, here to tell him rapturous tales of perfumed ecstasy.

“Do you like it?” she asks.

“Very much.”

“Give me your glasses. I’m going to blindfold you.”

She takes his glasses, steps behind him, loops over his head a black silk strip of fabric — a scarf, a piece of lingerie? He cannot tell because he is instantly sightless. With his eyes closed, and the blindfold knotted at the back of his head, what had earlier been merely semidarkness now assumes the magnitude of utter blackness.

“Give me your hand,” she says.

He feels her hand taking his, her ringed fingers closing gently around his. He cannot recall her ever wearing a ring before.

“Can you see anything?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

Not a suggestion of light filters around the blindfold. She leads him in absolute darkness around obstacles he knows are there, the coffee table in front of the couch, an ottoman, remembered pieces of furniture she avoids as she guides him across the room to what he surmises is the bedroom door now spilling unseen red light. He hears the door swinging gently open before them. She leads him into the room.

“Stand right here,” she says.

There is the smell of incense burning here, too.

He hears the door closing behind him.

The sound of Scheherazade is gone.

There is only silence now.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” she whispers. “Keep your hands at your sides, I don’t want you to touch me.”

He feels her moving closer to him, leaning into him. Her lips find his. She kisses him openmouthed, her tongue searching. In the dark, her mouth is wet and demanding, her lips thick with lust. He feels himself responding at once. She removes her mouth from his instantly, takes a quick step back. Her voice whispers out of the darkness again.

“Did you like that?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to kiss you again?”

“Yes.”

“Bet you’d like to touch me, too, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, but you can’t.”

Her voice retreats. Her lips suddenly find his again. Her hand glides lightly over the front of his trousers, lingers there, begins stroking him through the fabric while her tongue insistently probes. He feels his zipper being lowered. She slides her lips from his, and steps back again, out of reach.

“What would you like me to do?” she whispers. “Say.”

“Whatever you want to do.”

“Kiss you again?”

“Yes.”

“Oh yes. Take that thing out of your pants?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I’ll bet.”

He waits in the expectant dark. There is movement. She is kneeling before him, her hands seeking, and suddenly he is free, and her mouth claims him, wet and determined. Each time he tries to touch her face, her hair, she pulls away, only to return inexorably a moment later. And then, as if sensing he is dangerously close, she vanishes entirely. Her voice floats from somewhere out of the darkness.

“Did you like that?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like more?”

“Yes.”

“Of course,” she says and her voice fades, and all at once she is upon him again, ravenously drawing him into her mouth. His hands reach for her face, but she quickly moves away from his touch, and he hears her voice hanging disembodied someplace, “No, baby, not yet,” and in the silence that follows, there is only the rustle of silk and the faint metallic clink of bracelets and chains and the mixed aroma of incense and a thousand perfumes. He stands waiting, trembling. Where is she?

“Would you like me to take off the blindfold now?” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“Maybe I will. Let you see what I’m doing to you.”

“Yes.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I would.”

“I’ll bet you would,” she says, and steps behind him.

He feels her fingers at the back of his head, struggling with the knot. The black silk falls free. He opens his eyes.

“This is Gloria,” Kate says.

Gloria is black and Gloria is long and supple and Gloria has sloe eyes and a voluptuous mouth and Gloria is wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and a gold chain that is wrapped around her waist several times.

“Happy birthday,” she says, and smiles.

“She’s your present,” Kate says.

He remembers all at once the soft thick lips that possessed him while he was blindfolded. A red lamp is burning on the bedside table. It tints the room red. It tints Gloria’s full-breasted body red. It tints Kate’s nipples red in the open red vest.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asks.

David is trembling again.

“Say.”

“Yes,” he says. “I enjoyed it.”

“Then come to me, baby,” Gloria says, and extends her hands to him.

He takes them.

In the hallucinatory movie that plays that night — for surely this is a waking dream, this scene can’t really be unreeling here in Kate’s bedroom on Kate’s familiar bed — he learns that the long-legged black woman with the sloe eyes and voluptuous mouth is a dancer like Kate...

“We met during Les Miz...”

...although this is the first time they’ve ever done anything like this together.

“Right, Gloria?”

“Umm,” Gloria murmurs, her mouth tirelessly working, Kate simultaneously smothering David’s lips with kisses and whispering words of encouragement to her dear old friend.

This is surely a film he saw on Times Square, a film he is starring in on Times Square, for without question he is the leading man in this vehicle titled , the object of all this rampant, sweaty passion here on Kate’s bed in Kate’s room, where now Gloria’s lips are on his, claiming his mouth again, tongue flicking his tongue while Kate’s own tongue teases and tempts below, refusing to let go of him, the red light beside the bed casting tall dark shadows on the ceiling and walls.

Gloria swings one long leg over his face, and lowers herself onto him. Amazingly, he accepts her without hesitation, this woman he has met for the first time tonight, albeit intimately, this passionate creature with whom he is now starring in a multimillion-dollar production titled while below Kate is starring in her own intensely intimate and private film tentatively titled , ad-libbing lines the screenwriter never wrote but which the director, herself, likes to encourage among her actors and actresses. David and Gloria, the only other performers in this double feature — or perhaps triple feature, it is difficult to know who is in charge here anymore — seem to have had their earlier speaking roles reduced to a series of sighs, cries, moans and groans while Kate, speaking directly from either the heart or the id, keeps murmuring an incessant litany of cocks and cunts and gutter fucking, and then suddenly abandons both improvisational dialogue and glistening anticipatory flute to slide up onto the pillows, roll over on her back, and open herself wide to Gloria, red light washing with a redder glow her crisp pubic hair and pink interior. Long naked legs spread, she says “Do me now, Glo,” which gentle suggestion Gloria obeys with amazing alacrity, demonstrating a versatility that had not been immediately apparent in the rushes.

It is as if they have been doing this forever, the three of them. It is as if the movie formerly titled has been given an expanded budget and cast and retitled , starring the inimitable threesome that brought you...

But, no, the stars here are neither the Andrews Sisters nor the Three Stooges nor the Nairobi Trio nor even Athos, Portos and Aramis, however dexterous and accomplished they may seem, however well they work together in triplicate. For despite the fact that Gloria has her head buried between Kate’s spread legs, and despite the fact that David has mounted Gloria and is plunging repeatedly into her from behind, it is Kate who is the conduit here, Kate through whom their separate energies and passions flow. The true star here, the only star here, the ringmaster who urges and cajoles this inverted Oreo performance is Kate alone, encouraging, commanding, and finally deciding upon the exact moment of their concerted release, screaming “Oh Jesus, I’m coming!” just as Gloria shouts, “Oh Jesus, me too!” and David closes his eyes and silently, seemingly, empties himself into both women quaking beneath him.

As they lie side by side afterward, sweaty and spent on tangled sheets and sodden pillows stained red by the bedside lamp, David between them, Gloria and Kate holding hands across his wet belly, Kate sighs contentedly and whispers, “When you marry me, we can do this all the time.”

“Let’s do it again now,” Gloria suggests.

He has set the alarm for seven A.M.

He showers and shaves and then goes back to where the two women are sleeping side by side in each other’s arms. He gently nudges Gloria awake.

“What time is it?” she asks at once.

“Seven-thirty.”

“Okay,” she says, and swings her long legs over the side of the bed and rushes into the bathroom. He hears her showering as he dresses in the early morning light sifting around the edges of the blinds. Kate is still dead asleep.

Gloria comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel.

“What time is your plane?” she whispers.

“I don’t go till this afternoon. But I have patients to see first.”

“Where do you fly from?”

“Newark this time.”

She goes to the dresser, picks up her watch, squints at it in the light spilling through the open bathroom door.

“Malik’s supposed to be here at eight,” she says, and straps on the watch.

David does not know who Malik is. Nor does he ask. He does not know where Gloria and this man might be going at seven in the morning. He does not ask that, either. He recognizes all at once that he knows virtually nothing about her. She stubs her toe on something in the dim light. “Shit,” she says. She sits on the edge of the bed, pulls on a pair of panties, stands, leans into a bra, cups herself, clasps herself. He watches her dress. Skirt and blouse. Sandals. She is beginning to look like a person. I don’t even know her, he thinks. She goes back into the bathroom, begins applying lipstick. He watches her, fascinated. He doesn’t even know her. She catches him in the mirror, winks.

“That was good last night, wasn’t it?” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“When are you coming down again?”

“On the fifteenth.”

This is the Tuesday night he and Stanley have chosen for the start of the imaginary lectures.

“Will I see you?” Gloria asks.

“Oh sure.”

“Good,” she says.

He is wondering if he will ever see her again.

“Would you like some orange juice?” he asks.

“Mmm, yes,” she says, and turns from the mirror. “How do I look?”

“Good,” he says.

“Only good?”

“Beautiful,” he says.

“Better,” she says, and snaps out the bathroom light.

In the kitchen, they stand at the kitchen counter together, drinking orange juice. The sun is up. Light spills around the drawn shade over the air-shaft window.

“Malik drives a Jag,” Gloria says, “he’ll be downstairs at eight sharp.” She looks at her watch again. “What time will you be leaving?”

“Little after that.”

“For your office?”

“Yes.”

“I’d better get out of here,” she says, and goes into the bedroom for her bag. When she comes back, she says, “I kissed her goodbye, but she’s asleep.” She raises one eyebrow. “How about you?” she asks. “You asleep, baby?”

She steps up close to him. Tilts her crotch gently into him. Touches her glossy lips to his, lightly.

“Again later,” she says, and moves away from him.

He hears the apartment door opening and then closing behind her. The apartment is utterly still.

He looks at his watch.

Three minutes to eight.

In the bedroom, Kate is still asleep. He touches her shoulder. She stirs beneath his hand.

“Kate?” he says.

“Mmmm?”

“Kate, I have to go now.”

“Are you leaving?”

“In a few minutes. Sleep, honey.”

“Honey, yes,” she says.

She closes her eyes. He sits on the edge of the bed, watching her.

Her eyes open again.

She looks up into his face.

“You know, don’t you?” she says.

“Know what?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

“A shrink,” she says, “you probably know,” and closes her eyes again. She is silent for a moment. Then, in a very small voice, she asks, “Are you leaving me?”

“Yes, I...”

“I mean leaving me,” she says.

“No. I’m not leaving you.”

“Come back, David.”

“I will.”

“Do you love me, David?”

“I love you, Kate.”

“I know you do.”

“Goodbye, Kate,” he says, and kisses her.

“I’ll see you on the fifteenth,” she says.

He kisses her again.

Her mouth is so goddamn sweet.

Susan M has come to her last session with a list of clothing changes that will take her through Labor Day. As she explains to David in great detail, the problem is she doesn’t have enough clothes to accommodate a change every day for thirty-nine days, which is exactly how many days it will be between today and September fifth when she’ll see him again.

“That is when I’ll see you again, right?” she asks. “September fifth?”

“Yes,” David says.

“Same time, right?”

“Same time,” he says.

“Let me tell you how I’ve figured this out,” she says, and takes from her tote bag her Month-At-A-Glance calendar. “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she says, flipping rapidly to the facing pages for July, “so I’ll be wearing something simple but sexy, you remember we went over that two weeks ago. The white A-line mini and a cropped mesh top, but I’ll be wearing it with a white bra, the top, because otherwise hoo boy! Strapless, though. And white sandals and panties, of course. On Sunday, I’m having brunch with my friend from Omaha when I used to live out there, she’s here in town and we’ll be going to the Plaza, so I thought I’d wear... I know I told you I’d be wearing the boxy wheat jacket and cream-colored pants with the white suspenders, remember? But that was before I knew Marcy was flying in, so I thought for the Plaza the shaped jacket and pleated skirt in the windowpane plaid, with the white tank and black shoes and that little black hat with the gray feather. White panties and bra. Then on Monday...”

The scheme she’s worked out is one that takes into account laundering and dry-cleaning time, which makes it virtually impossible to simply begin a recycling process two weeks from tomorrow but which requires instead a complicated balanced pattern of substitution and duplication. Not only does Susan M display her charts and lists, but she also details the number of days it will take to have a silk blouse dry-cleaned, for example, or a man’s tailored shirt laundered so that she’ll be able to wear one or the other of them in the rotating wheel she’s designed.

As she explains all this to him, displaying the charts and the lists and the days on her calendar, she constantly checks her watch, fearful that her hour will run out before she completes the recitation and demonstration, thereby placing her mother in Omaha in extreme danger of decapitation or defenestration or any of a hundred other dire possibilities. It is with enormous relief — which David incidentally shares, so high is the level of anxiety in this office — that she is able to tell him in the remaining few minutes what she’ll be wearing to her session on the day after Labor Day. “The man-tailored pinstriped suit,” she says, “with black heels, black shirt and white-scarf tie, and black undies and panty hose, phew!” Before she leaves the office, she ascertains once again the date and time of their next session, and then holds out her hand like an embarrassed little girl, smiles shyly, and says, “Have a nice summer, Dr. Chapman.”

He shakes her hand.

“You, too, Susan,” he says.

When he steps out of his office building at ten minutes to two, a long black limo is waiting at the curb. The rear window instantly rolls down, and Kate’s head appears. She says nothing, merely smiles. He walks immediately to the car.

“Hi,” she says. “Want a lift?”

He looks at her in wonder, slowly shaking his head from side to side in pleased amazement. “Where’d you get this?” he asks.

“I ordered it, where do you think I got it? Get in.”

He gets into the car. It smells of rich black leather and polished walnut panels. A bottle of iced champagne sits in a silver bucket on the side console. The driver turns to her.

“Is it Newark, miss?” he asks.

“It’s Newark,” she says.

She is wearing what looks like a tennis skirt, short and white and flirty, topped with a sheer pink tank and a white cotton jacket. On her feet, she wears white strappy heels and shocking-pink anklets to match the top. Her fingernails are painted the same outrageous pink. Her legs are bare.

“Why don’t you open the champagne?” she suggests.

He fiddles with the wire, unwraps the foil, pops the cork. Foam overspills the slender dark neck of the bottle. He pours into two glasses from the side console, hands one to her, replaces the bottle, and then lifts his own glass in a toast.

“To the fifteenth,” he says.

“To us,” she corrects.

“To us and the fifteenth.”

“Four whole nights together,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I’ll invite Gloria,” she whispers, and turns her head toward him. Her eyes meet his.

“Just for one of the nights,” he says.

“Whatever you want.”

“I want you.”

“You’d better,” she says. “But I know you liked Gloria, too, didn’t you?”

They are still whispering. He glances at the rearview mirror on the windshield above the driver’s head. The driver’s eyes seem fastened to the road.

“Yes, of course I liked her, but...”

“I’ll get her again, she’s very sexy. Didn’t you think she was sexy?”

“Very,” he says, and glances into the rearview mirror again. The driver’s eyes are still on the road.

“Very, yes, right,” Kate whispers. “Or I can find someone else, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

“I told you, all I want...”

“Yes, but you’re lying. Last night you wanted Gloria, too. I’ll get her for you again. Maybe before you go back up again. On your last night here maybe. Like this time.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“It’s what you want,” she whispers sharply, and begins furiously jiggling one sandaled foot.

The big car rolls steadily downtown toward the tunnel. Holding hands, they sip champagne. She keeps jiggling her foot. He glances at her bare legs. Without looking at him, she tosses the switch that rolls up the glass privacy panel, and stretches one leg onto the folding seat in front of her.

By the time they reach the airport, his lips are raw, his trousers stained. She gets out of the car after him, and throws her arms around his neck, and kisses him stickily, fiercely, in plain view of the passengers moving in and out of the terminal. Looking directly into his face, her eyes locked on his, her lips not inches from his mouth, she says, “You’d better not forget me.”

“I won’t.”

“You’d better not,” she warns.

That evening before curtain time, a dozen red roses are delivered to her dressing room.

The enclosed handwritten card reads:

“Of course you do,” she says aloud.