Privileged Conversation

3: saturday, july 29 — monday, august 14

On Saturday evening, another dozen roses are delivered to the dressing room. Like the roses that arrived last night and again this afternoon before the matinee performance, they are long-stemmed and blood-red, nesting on a bosky glen of fern and baby’s breath, wrapped in green tissue paper in a long white box. The enclosed card again reads I love you, Kathryn. But each of the three bouquets — now arranged in vases that crowd virtually everything else off Kate’s makeup table — are from different florists, and the handwriting is different on each card. Which of course means that David called the orders in before he left and dictated the message for each card. I love you, Kathryn. Written in a different florist’s hand each time.

The only performers with private dressing rooms are the five principals in the show — what Actors Equity calls white contracts — and only one of these is a woman, Grizabella. The rest of the cast are all so-called pink contracts and share dressing rooms to a greater or lesser extent. Kate shares her dressing room with eight other dancers and two booth-singer swings. In a so-called dancing show like this one, most of the performers have at one time or another gone on for anyone who is sick or merely “indisposed,” as the expression has it, or responding to a “family obligation.” The dancers who share this room are interchangeable cogs in a choreographic machine; on stage, under all that heavy makeup and furry attire, they even look alike.

Now, as they paint on their cat faces and squeeze into their cat costumes, even their voices begin to sound alike, their conversation echoing a thousand backstage dialogues Kate has heard in dozens of other dressing rooms. Tonight — as is almost invariably the case — the talk is of men. Or, to be more exact, the talk is of a specific man, Kate’s “Secret Admirer” or — as she is surprised to hear him called by dancers even younger than she is — her “Stage Door Johnny” or “Sugar Daddy,” expressions that went out of fashion long before any of them were born.

“Roses don’t come cheap these days,” Rumpleteazer says.

“Marla Trump better watch out,” Sillabub says.

“Is this the guy who picked you up earlier this week?” Jennyanydots asks.

“When was that?” Demeter asks. “Wednesday?”

“The tall gangly guy with the glasses?”

Wait’ll he hears that description, Kate thinks. But she is secretly pleased that David’s extravagance has caused her to become the center of attention here in a room she shares with women she secretly believes are much better performers than she is. The other “kids.” All of whom can sing and dance rings around her.

“Oh, I get it,” one of the dancer-swings says. “Some girl named Kathryn is sending you flowers with I-love-you notes.”

“This is beginning to get ridiculous,” Bombalurina says.

“Yeah, who died?” one of the singer-swings asks.

“I hate the smell of roses.”

“I hate the smell of all flowers.”

“Some flowers have no scent at all,” Jellylorum says. “Did you know that?”

“Good.”

“How many does this make, four?”

“Three.”

“In sequence though.”

“Five dollars a rose, they get nowadays,” the other singer-swing says.

“Four.”

“Not in Grand Central.”

“Long-stemmed roses? Five dollars. Grand Central, wherever.”

“Who is this guy, anyway?”

“A friend,” Kate says shyly.

“Meaning he’s married.”

“Sounds possessed. Three performances in a row?”

Across the room, one of the dancers throws an ankle up onto her dressing table. Bending from the waist, leaning into the leg, stretching, she says, “I heard the kids in Oh! Calcutta! used to get all kinds of expensive gifts.”

“That was centuries ago.”

“Also, they were dancing nude.”

“That was during the days of the Holy Roman Empire.”

“The Pilobolus company still dances nude.”

“So does the Netherlands.”

“Maguy Marin, too.”

“It wasn’t just the nudity. Calcutta was a dirty show.”

“It was even dirtier when it first opened.”

“How would you know?”

“My mother told me. They had a scene where one of the girls goes down on a flashlight.”

“Your mother told you that?”

“Well, I think she put it a little differently.”

“My mother thinks fellatio is a little town in Italy.”

“That’s not how the joke goes.”

“How does it go?”

“I’m not sure, but that’s not it.”

“Does this guy come to every show?”

“No,” Kate says.

“Just sends flowers, huh?”

“Every performance of Calcutta, there used to be a dozen bald heads in the third row. Same guys every show.”

“It’s two Japanese towns. The joke.”

“I heard it with an Italian town.”

“Fucking and Sucking. The woman in the joke thinks they’re two Japanese cities, that’s it.”

“Used to send all kinds of expensive presents back.”

“Has he seen the show at all?”

“Oh yes.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

“How’d he like me?” Jennyanydots asks, and shakes her fanny and switches her tail.

“These bald guys. All kinds of expensive presents.”

“She’s a Jewish American Princess. The woman in the joke.”

“I like it better with an Italian town.”

“Does he live here in the city?”

“Or is he some big Texas oilman?”

“He lives here,” Kate says.

She is enjoying all this talk about David. Well, not really about David because he is, after all, married and she must be careful. But almost about him. Just talking almost about him is somehow exciting. And somehow, it adds permanance to their... affair, she supposes you could call it.

A knock sounds on the door.

“Half-hour,” the stage manager calls.

When her phone rings at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, she thinks it’s David calling from the Vineyard, and immediately snatches the receiver from its cradle.

“Hello?” she says.

“Katie?”

Her mother.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Has he called you yet?”

For a moment, Kate believes her mother is prescient.

How else could she know about David? How else could dear Fiona McIntyre, who’s been using her maiden name ever since the divorce nine years ago...

“Has he?” she asks again.

Fiona’s voice, as always, is a subtle cross between an ambulance siren and marmalade. Kate cannot understand how she manages to sound both strident and plaintive at one and the same time, an acquired skill she envies not in the slightest.

“Who do you mean?” she asks cautiously.

“Your father,” Fiona says.

This is the man who used to be “Dad” or “Daddy” until he left his wife and family when Kate was eighteen and Bess was sixteen, running off to Dallas, Texas, from Westport, Connecticut, at which time he became in Fiona’s lexicon “your father,” the unspoken words “the bastard” or “the son of a bitch” tacitly implied by the sneer in her alarmingly honeyed voice.

“Why should he call me?” Kate asks.

“He’s in New York,” Fiona says.

Oh shit, Kate thinks.

“How do you know?” she asks.

Fiona knows because her closest friend on earth, a woman named Jill Harrington who lives at the Lombardy on East Sixty-first Street and who visits Fiona whenever she goes to La Costa, called last night to say she’d run into him at Le Cirque...

“Of course Le Cirque,” Fiona sneers in her jellyhorn voice...

...with a blonde who was definitely not the horse-faced bitch he ran off to Texas with, lo those many moons ago, gone but not forgotten, as the saying goes.

“My guess is he’ll be contacting his darling little girl...”

His darling little girl, Kate thinks.

“...the moment he gets a few drinks in him. You always were his favorite,” Fiona says thoughtfully, as if she hasn’t said this a hundred times before, always thoughtfully, always as if in discovery.

Most often in the presence of poor dear Bess.

Your sister was always your father’s favorite, you know.

Thoughtfully.

“I just thought I’d warn you,” Fiona says now.

“Thanks,” Kate says.

“How’s everything otherwise?”

“Fine.”

“Are you still in that show?”

She’s been in Cats, on and off, for the past ten years now, but her mother still calls it “that show.” Well, this is understandable. Difficult title like Cats. Be different if it were something simpler. Then you could blame her for not taking the trouble to learn the fucking name of the show her daughter is dancing in. Or for having known it and forgotten it.

“Yes, I’m still in it.”

Cats, she thinks. It’s called Cats, Mom. C-A...

“What time is it out there, anyway?” she asks.

“Seven.”

“Isn’t that early for you?”

“I had a bad night.”

I don’t want to hear it, Kate thinks.

“Whenever I remember what that son of a bitch did to us,” Fiona starts, and the recitation begins yet another time, a conversation Fiona believes is privileged and therefore welcomed, a conversation Kate knows to be hurtful and therefore loathsome. It took Kate six years in analysis with Dr. Jacqueline Hicks, her dear Jacqueline, to stop hating her father for what he did, though it’s not what her mother thinks he did. Six years to stop hating her mother as well, for constantly reminding Kate of what he did — though, again, it’s not what she thinks he did. But each time Fiona hops on the goddamn treadmill again, Kate starts hating both of them all over again, something she is supposed to have stopped doing a year ago come October.

One would think that her mother’s so-called friends would refrain from telling her they just ran into Neil Duggan at Le Cirque or McDonald’s or wherever the hell, but no, they keep feeding her rumors like Romans tossing Christians to the lions, delighting in her initial inquisitive reaction and her subsequent tearful tirades — though it is most often Kate who gets the waterworks, as she is getting them now on a Sunday morning when David might be trying to call her collect, as they’d agreed he should do whenever a phone booth presented an opportunity. Why don’t you go cry in church? she thinks. Don’t they have any churches in San Diego? Doesn’t the very name of the town suggest Spanish missions all over the place? Why cry all over me, Mom?

But lest the world forget that she is the only woman in history whose husband left her for another woman, Fiona is relating yet again how Kate’s “father” (the son of a bitch) ruined her life, which makes Kate desperately hungry for a cigarette, as seems always to be the case whenever her mother traps her in one of these labyrinthine monologues. Before Kate started going to Jacqueline, she smoked incessantly, a suicidal habit for anyone, never mind a dancer. Now, listening to her mother, she wants a cigarette again. She wants a whole pack of cigarettes. She wants a whole pack of Camels. She wants to eat a whole pack of Camels.

“...destroyed all our lives,” Fiona is saying, which of course her father didn’t do. He didn’t destroy her mother’s life, and he didn’t destroy Kate’s, either — even though Kate was his favorite, as if anybody cared who his favorite was, as if anybody now cares who his goddamn favorite is! The promise of him calling, the threat of him calling is enough to cause Kate to break out in a cold sweat, her mother’s earlier words hovering like a swinging scimitar over her head, My guess is he’ll be contacting his darling little girl the moment he gets a few drinks in him. You always were his favorite, her mother’s monologue grinding relentlessly onward...

“...humiliated me in front of the entire town, Westport was practically a village nine years ago, everyone knew everyone else, especially in our circle, running off with a woman every man in town had known before him, your wonderful father, did he have to pick her, the town slut? Forgive me, Katie, I know you adored him, but what’s right is right, as God is my witness he didn’t have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly, I’ve always tried to be a kind and thoughtful person, he didn’t have to be so mean to us, he didn’t have to abandon us...”

Her mother goes on for at least half an hour.

By the end of that time, Kate is ready to jump out the window.

“Mom,” she says, “I have to pee. Can we finish this some other time?”

“Sure, some other time,” her mother says, weeping.

“I’ll call you soon.”

“Sure,” her mother says.

“G’bye, Mom. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.”

“Sure.”

Kate hangs up.

Her heart is beating very fast.

He’s in New York, she thinks.

And goes into the bathroom to wash her face.

The phone rings again at a quarter past eleven, just as she’s about to leave the apartment. Her mother consistently tells her she dresses too provocatively, but she doesn’t care what her mother says, she dresses for comfort and she dresses to look attractive, yes, and sexy, yes. She’s an American girl, right? A dancer! Today, because she doesn’t have to be at the theater till one-thirty for the three o’clock show, she plans to check out some of the galleries in SoHo, and is wearing for her outing a short white cotton crochet-knit dress and laced white leather Docksiders. Her immediate thought is that it’s her mother calling back to weep a little more. Her next thought is that it’s her father, God forbid. A minute more and I’d have been out of here, she thinks. Safe, she thinks. But the phone is still ringing. Get out anyway, she thinks. She picks up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“You have a collect call...” a recorded voice says.

“Yes,” she says at once.

“From...”

And then his recorded voice, announcing his name, “David...”

“Yes,” she says.

“Will you accept charges?”

“I will. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“Thank you for using AT&T,” the recorded voice persists, seemingly unwilling to get off the line.

“David?”

“Yes, hi, how are you?”

“Why don’t you come make love to me?” she asks.

“I wish I could.”

“Where are you?”

“In a drugstore. I tried to get you earlier...”

Damn her, Kate thinks.

“...but the line was busy. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I’m counting the days.”

“Me, too.”

“Seventeen, counting today.”

“I know.”

“I’m marking them on my calendar. You are coming, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. I can’t wait. Is there any chance you can come down on the fourteenth instead? Because...”

“I really don’t...”

“...we’re dark on Tuesdays, you know...”

“Yes, but...”

“...and that would give us the whole day together.”

“Well, the way Stanley and I have it worked out...”

“I wish you...”

“...we’ll have the whole day, anyway. Because we’re saying the lectures start that Tuesday night, you see...”

“Wonderful!”

“So I’ll be taking a plane down that morning...”

“I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“That would be great.”

“With a limo again, if you like.”

She hears a sharp intake of breath. There is a sudden silence on the line.

“Kate,” he says abruptly, “I have to...”

“No, please, not yet.”

“I see the kids coming. Really, I have to...”

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” she shouts.

“I love you, too. I’ll call again. I really have to...”

“Wait! Thanks for all the flowers! They’re beautiful!”

“What flowers?” he asks.

Before the evening performance on Monday night, the last day of July, a long white box is delivered initially to the Seventh Avenue stage door of the Winter Garden and then to the dressing room two and a half floors above street level. The night-shift doorman breezily walks into a roomful of women in various stages of undress, but he has worked many a Broadway show, m’little darlings, and has seen it all and heard it all. He scarcely bats an eyelash when Kate — in the midst of applying white makeup, a towel over her shoulders, her leotard top lowered to the waist — accepts the box and begins opening it.

They are roses, of course.

But instead of the now-familiar card, there is a sealed envelope in the box. The stock is heavy, it feels expensive, like something she’d find at Tiffany’s or Bergdorf’s. A cream-colored envelope, her name handwritten in purple ink across the face of it.

She had thought at first, when David told her he hadn’t sent the flowers, that perhaps her father was the secret admirer the kids were speculating about. But the handwriting doesn’t appear to be his. She tears open the flap of the envelope. The page inside is of the same color. The same thick stock. The same handwriting in the same purple ink.

Well, not dear Daddy, that’s for sure.

The flowers have stopped.

Now there are the letters.

Three of them are waiting for her at the theater when she gets there on Wednesday night. The same cream-colored stationery. The same purple ink. The same hand.

The postmarks all read New York, New York, August 1.

Today is the second day of August.

The envelopes are marked sequentially, the handwritten numerals on their separate faces. She feels an odd sense of dread as she starts opening the first envelope. Someone across the room — Kate’s head is bent as she tears open the flap of the envelope, and she can’t be sure who it is — someone calls, “No flowers today, Kate?”

The letter reads:

She resists the urge to crumple both letter and envelope, understanding at once and with a sharp clarity that this letter, these letters must be saved. These letters are evidence. Evidence? she thinks. And her hand starts shaking as she opens the second envelope.

She does not want to open the third envelope, but she does. Sitting at the dressing table covered with brushes and liners and jars of makeup, she reads it silently:

There are more letters waiting before Friday night’s performance. Four more letters delivered in the mail that afternoon. Each marked sequentially with the handwritten numerals The postmarks all read New York, New York, August 3. Which means they were mailed yesterday sometime. She stuffs them into her handbag and does not open them until she gets home that night.

Sitting at her kitchen table, sipping a glass of milk, eating a ham sandwich she bought in the all-night deli on Second Avenue, she cold-bloodedly slits open the first of them with a sharp paring knife.

It reads:

She puts the note on the table alongside the first one, and then slits open the next envelope. The letter inside reads:

How come the quantum leap? she wonders. How’d my adoring supplicant all at once turn into my one true lord and master? Is there something transitional in this letter, something that bridges the gap between the letter preceding it and the one I haven’t yet opened? There must be. Otherwise, why has he bothered to number them? If there isn’t a continuity, a sequence, then why the orderly progression? Tell me that, my lord and master.

Calmly, she slits the envelope marked with the number six. Calmly, she unfolds the thick sheet of cream-colored stationery. Calmly, she reads the next note:

Still oddly calm, she picks up the last of that day’s envelopes. Looks at the handwritten words spelling out her name and the address of the theater. Looks at the numeral Studies her name again. The purple ink lends urgency. The handwriting seems suddenly frantic, almost frenzied. She is tearing open the flap when the telephone rings.

It is one of those odd coincidental occurrences, two separate unlinked events happening simultaneously, as if one has triggered the other, the tearing of the flap seeming to activate the ringing of the phone and causing her to drop the envelope at once, as if it has just burst into flames. The phone is still ringing. She looks at the clock on the kitchen wall. It is almost one A.M. The phone persists. She goes to the window and draws the shade, as if suddenly certain she is being observed, as if knowing without question that her one true lord and master is watching her as she moves to the counter and snatches the receiver from the wall phone.

“Hullo?” she says.

Cautiously.

“Katie?”

She is almost relieved.

But not quite.

“Hi, Dad,” she says.

“Hello, darlin,” he says. “How are you?”

Enter Neil Duggan. Yet another time, folks. A curtain call for the very same charmer who ran off with a blond, lanky (horse-faced, her mother insists) woman thirteen years his junior nine years ago, but who’s counting? His sweet lilting voice a bit mellow at a little past one in the morning and a little past six or seven drinks, she guesses. But that’s the only time he ever calls, really. In the middle of the night when he’s had too much to drink. To tell his darlin little girl how much he loves her. Let’s hear it for him, folks.

“How’ve you been doin, Katie?”

“Fine, Dad,” she says.

She does not ask him why he’s in New York, does not ask him how long he’s been here, does not inquire after his health because frankly, my dear, she does not give a damn. She waits for him to speak next. She stands beside the counter with the phone to her ear, waiting.

“Are you still dancin, Katie?”

“Yes, Dad.”

And waits.

On the kitchen table, the last envelope is also waiting. She dreads opening it, but she would rather do that — would rather walk on a bed of coals in Bombay, for that matter — than spend another minute on the phone with Neil Duggan, her wonderful father. Another second, for that matter.

The silence lengthens.

“I just thought I’d see how you were doing,” he says.

“I’m doing fine, Dad.”

“Well, I’m happy to hear that.”

Silence again.

“Have you seen your sister lately?”

“I visit her every month,” Kate says.

Her voice catches. There are sudden tears in her eyes, sharp, burning.

“How is she? How is my dear Bessie?”

“Your dear Bessie is just fine,” she says, unable to keep the caustic edge out of her voice.

“Now, now,” he says.

“Dad...” she says.

And catches herself.

What good is the anger?

What does the anger accomplish?

“Dad, it was nice of you to call,” she says. “But I’ve got two performances tomorrow, and I really need to get some sleep. So if you don’t mind...”

“I’ll let you go then,” he says.

The words seem peculiar, all things considered.

“Thank you,” she says. “Goodnight, Dad.”

“Goodnight, Katie.”

There is a click on the line. She replaces the receiver on its cradle, hesitates a moment, and then goes back to the table and the envelope with her name on it. Boldly, she tears open the flap. This time, the phone doesn’t ring. Calmly, she unfolds the note. It reads:

“Oh sure, master,” she says aloud.

But her hand is trembling again as she slides the letter back into its envelope. She scoops up all four envelopes and carries them into the bedroom. The letters she received on Wednesday are in the top drawer of her dresser, on a stack of leg warmers. She adds these to the pile. Closing the drawer, she goes immediately to the windows and pulls the blinds shut.

Tomorrow will be almost a week since last she heard from David.

He could be anyone in this Saturday matinee audience.

Where before now her concentration has always been entirely on her performance — focusing on how to move like a cat, look like a cat, think like a cat, become a cat — she now scans the spectators in their seats, wondering which of the men is the one who sent her the roses and is now sending her the letters.

Her part requires her to go into the audience.

She wonders where he is sitting.

Who out there is waiting for her to smile at him, wink at him, glance at him?

Who out there might misinterpret any innocent move she makes?

Any innocent look that crosses her face.

She is happy for the white makeup.

It hides her from him.

She feels naked in the tight white costume.

Who out there will try to touch her?

Who out there is the one who thinks he owns her?

You know that you are mine, I hope...

Who out there is waiting for her to crouch at his feet?

Kneel beside me and let me touch your fur.

There is a moment in the show when she comes down off the stage — during the “Macavity” number — comes swiftly down the side ramp on the right of the theater, crawls through the wide space in front of row K, and then crouches alongside the aisle seat, sits up, seemingly detecting a human presence, seemingly startled, jerks her head around and looks directly into the face of whoever is sitting in that seat, her green eyes wide. The moment is literally that. An actor’s moment, but an actual moment as well. She is off again at once, scampering onto the stage again, gray-white tail twitching.

But today she glimpses from the corner of her eye the face of the man sitting in that aisle seat. It is a thin pale face, the deep-set eyes a dark glowering black.

After the show, she asks the dance captain if it would be okay for her to stay out of the audience for a while.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Not go down in the audience.”

“Why?”

“Somebody’s bothering me out there,” she says.

“What do you mean, bothering you?”

“Some creep.”

“Bothering you? How?”

“I’ve been getting letters,” she says. “Can’t we just work around it? Nobody’ll miss me out there, believe me.”

“Change the choreography? How can I...?”

“Please,” she says. “I’m asking you. Please.”

The dance captain looks deep into her eyes.

“Sure,” he says.

That night, from where she is standing stage left, waiting for a music cue, she locates the aisle seat.

A fat woman in a bright purple dress is sitting in it.

The letter is delivered on Tuesday morning.

The letter is delivered to her home address.

She desperately wishes she could talk to David.

But it is nine days since he last called, and he won’t be back in New York till next week — if he’ll be back in New York — and a lunatic now has her home address.

She wishes next that she could talk to Jacqueline Hicks, but of course this is the month of August and every fucking psychiatrist in the city of New York is away at the beach or in the mountains.

This is Lost Weekend.

This is Ray Milland in the reruns she’s seen on television, frantically trying to find an open pawnshop on Yom Kippur.

She goes to an open bike shop instead.

Rickie Diaz is changing a tire when she gets there, wearing much the same outfit he had on when she bought the bike. Red nylon shorts with a white nylon tank top this time, the same numeral 69 on the front of it. In blue this time. Same bulging pectorals, biceps and triceps, same tattooed head of an Indian chief in full feathered headdress on the biceps of his left arm. Plus ça change, Kate thinks, perhaps because she, too, is wearing the same outfit she’d worn that day David came here with her to help pick out the bike. Green shorts and orange shirt, white socks and Nikes, plus c’est la même chose. Rickie’s shiny black hair is pulled to the back of his head in a ponytail and held there with the same little beaded band he was wearing the last time she saw him, and took his number, and told him she might give him a call someday. Because a girl seeing a married man never knows how long it might last, right, David? Where the hell are you, David?

“Well, well, well,” Rickie says, “look who’s here,” and rises from his squatting position to shake hands with her.

Well, well, well.

I see little Kathryn is trying to avoid me.

“Can I take you to lunch?” she asks.

“Let me lock up,” he says at once.

He reads the letters silently and thoughtfully.

“Your lord and master, huh?” he says.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Where’d he get that idea?”

“A weirdo,” she says, and shrugs.

“Must be,” Rickie says, and continues reading. “Who’s Victoria, anyway?”

“That’s my name in the show. The character I play.”

“Darling Victoria Puss,” Rickie says, and nods.

“No, just Victoria.”

“I mean, that’s what he calls you here.”

“Yeah.”

“And Sweet Victoria Puss.”

“Yeah.”

“Whose coat is so warm.”

“Yes.”

“Miss Open Pussy.”

Kate nods.

“I guess he likes that word, huh?” Rickie says.

“Well, it’s... Cats, you know. The show.”

“Oh, sure, I realize.”

He keeps reading through the letters.

“This guy ought to have his mouth washed out with soap.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Cock-tease, wow.”

“Well, he’s nuts, you know.”

“Sure sounds that way.”

“Well, obviously.”

“This kind of thing ever happen to you before?”

“Never.”

“Boy.”

“What scares me...”

“Sure, he knows where you live.”

“Exactly.”

“Must’ve followed you home or something.”

“That’s what I figure.”

“Have you gone to the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one, I don’t know who he is.”

“But that’s their job, isn’t it? Finding out who he is?”

“I guess so.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I just don’t know if they’d even bother with something like this. It isn’t as if he’s threatening me or anything.”

“It isn’t as if he’s exactly stable, either.”

“He does sound a little nuts, doesn’t he?”

“A little?”

“I guess I will call them. If he doesn’t quit.”

“What makes you think he’ll quit?”

“Well... I have this idea.”

“Yeah?”

Rickie Diaz has been cleared with the night-shift doorman and when he asks for Kate Duggan after the Wednesday night show, he is immediately allowed entrance to the theater and told where her dressing room is. He stands looking somewhat embarrassed and awed as she introduces him to the other kids, all in various stages of feline undress, using his full proud Puerto Rican name, Ricardo Alvaredo Diaz, as she learned it yesterday while outlining her brilliant plan to him. Rickie has now seen the show from a house seat provided and paid for by Kate, from which sixth-row-center vantage point he alternately watched the prowling cats on stage and checked the house for any male who seemed too interested in the particular cat in the white costume. As they come out of the Seventh Avenue stage door at ten-fifty that Wednesday night, hand in hand and trying to look very lovey-dovey, Kate scans the men waiting on the sidewalk for the performers to come out. Most of them are holding autograph books. One of them is carrying a flash camera.

Rickie is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt detailed with an embroidered parrot in red, yellow, orange, and green, a gift from his uncle in Mayagüez, he tells her later. Kate has asked him to look casual tonight because she herself is wearing what she customarily wears to and from the theater in the summertime, just jeans and a T-shirt, sometimes with a sweater if it’s cool, which this summer shows no sign of becoming. So she’s pleased that Rickie looks not like a theatergoer but like someone who might just possibly be her big, tattooed, longhaired, bulging-muscled boyfriend, which is just what he’s supposed to look like. To reinforce this notion, she reaches up to touch his cheek the moment they step out onto the sidewalk, kisses him quickly, says, “I’m starved, honey,” and loops her arm through his as they begin walking uptown.

She hopes they are being followed.

She hopes he is watching.

The idea is to have him think she’s truly involved with this powerful-looking stud. Get him to believe this is not some defenseless little girl dancing her heart out on the stage of the Winter Garden, but is instead a grown woman clever enough to have chosen Arnold Schwarzenegger as her boyfriend. So watch your fuckin onions, my one true lord and master. Hang up your expensive stationery or Arnie here will break you into tiny little pieces.

The choice for a crowded delicatessen where he will be able to see them holding hands across their hot pastrami sandwiches and ostentatiously billing and cooing is the Carnegie on Fifty-fifth and Seventh or the Stage between Fifty-third and — fourth. They choose the Carnegie because it allows a slightly longer walk from the theater, with him in close pursuit, they hope. Neither of them appears particularly nervous or suspicious or watchful as they wander hand in hand up Seventh Avenue. The idea is to make this seem entirely natural and unplanned, something that happens all the time, no matter who’s watching them. This isn’t a show here, this is two people madly in love with each other and one of them happens to be six feet two inches tall and by the way tips the scales at two-twenty, get the message?

Rickie turns out to be a pretty good actor, leaning over the table toward her and taking both her hands in his while they’re waiting for their orders to come, talking earnestly — and somewhat touchingly — of his early youth in a South Bronx barrio where he spent most of his time trying to avoid recruitment by a gang called Los Hermanos Locos, “which means ‘The Crazy Brothers,’ I guess you know.” Steadfastly refusing their admonitions, exhortations, and eventual daily beatings designed to encourage and persuade, he took up bodybuilding as a means of self-defense, hoping to cope effectively with these jackasses unless one day they decided to shoot him, which they didn’t do after he’d gained fifty pounds of muscle and busted a few heads and they lost interest. He tells her all this with a proud look on his fiercely handsome Conquistador face with its high cheekbones and aristocratic nose, tossing his ponytail in utter disdain. Kate is thinking This is someone who can really break someone in half if he so chooses.

The Indian tattoo, he tells her, has nothing at all to do with his Latino heritage — “My family doesn’t go back to any Indian tribe or anything, though there used to be some tribes in Puerto Rico,” rolling the name of the island on his tongue, Pware-toe Ree-coe — the tattoo was just something he decided to have done one night when he was a little drunk.

“The feathers in the headband ripple when I flex,” he tells her, “I’ll show you later,” which means, she realizes with something of a start, that he later plans to take off the long-sleeved shirt and flex his biceps for her, let the feathers ripple for her, a performance above and beyond the call of duty. But she does nothing at the moment to correct his mistaken assumption, satisfied that whoever may be watching in this noisy, crowded place should be utterly convinced that they are indeed girl-and-boy. She allows herself a few discreet glances around the room, green eyes sidling from patron to patron, idly seeking the pale thin man with the dark brooding eyes, but she sees no one who even vaguely fits that description.

They have ordered not the pastrami but the hot roast beef sandwiches instead, served with creamy mounds of mashed potatoes and brown gravy and a bucket of sour pickles and cream soda the likes of which she hasn’t tasted since the time some boy, she forgets who, took her to Coney Island shortly after she joined the cast of Cats the first time around. The show has been such an integral part of her life that what’s happening with this lunatic seems almost ironic. The idea that he saw her in the show, knew how to get to her because of the show, knew where to send the flowers and the notes, knew when she’d be coming out of the theater after each performance, knew that all he had to do was follow her to find out where she lived, all of this is very frightening, hey, no kidding?

But it’s also somewhat eerie, you know? As if everything was somehow preordained. Everything that happened to her before she got into Cats was leading up to the actual moment she first stepped on the stage of the Winter Garden as part of the two-boy, two-girl, so-called “Cats Chorus.” But more than that, she now has the creepy feeling that everything since then has been leading up to now, this very instant, sitting here in a restaurant with a handsome twenty-year-old Puerto Rican who’s here to protect her because her lover — who hasn’t called her in more than a week — is up there in Massachusetts making love to his goddamn wife.

The idea galls.

She eats voraciously, as she does after each performance, her hands obligingly freed by her make-believe lover who is telling her about his ambition to own his own fitness studio one day. Working in the bicycle shop is just one of three jobs he has, how about that! He also drives a limo part-time for a company in Queens, and he works weekends in the produce department at Gristede’s. Meanwhile, he’s going to NYU at night to study business administration so he’ll know what he’s doing when he opens his own place after he’s saved enough money to do it. “Start with a small studio uptown someplace, expand to a whole chain of them, I have big ideas, Kate. Lots of the guys in Los Hermanos are either dead or in jail now, can you imagine what I could’ve turned into if I let them talk me into mugging people, or selling dope or whatever the hell?” Listening to him, Kate is secretly hoping the lunatic out there will actually make his move so Rickie can stomp him into the pavement and end his career. In fact, she’s beginning to wonder if maybe they shouldn’t walk home after they get out of here, but it’s a long way to Tipperary and also to Ninety-first and First. So when at last they’ve finished their coffee and Rickie has paid the bill...

She whispers, “I’ll settle with you later,” but he pulls a macho face and says, “Hey, come on, willya?”

...they step out onto Seventh Avenue on a night so torrid they could just as easily be in Mayagüez, and then walk up to Fifty-seventh, again hoping he’s following. In any case, he knows where she lives. If he wants to take a cab and be waiting for them there, that’s fine with Kate. All she wants is for him to get the message. The message is blazing in lights a mile high:

The crosstown bus runs over to First, where they transfer to a bus running uptown. They get off at Ninety-first Street and begin walking toward her apartment on streets rather dark and deserted at this hour of the night. They get there at a little before midnight, and she is surprised to find the doorman actually there at his post instead of out buying himself a hamburger or catching forty winks in the storeroom near the switchboard. He greets her with a cheery “Evening, Miss Duggan,” and she says, “Hi, Domingo,” at which point Rickie bursts into a stream of rapid-fire Spanish, which Domingo answers and they machine-gun it back and forth as if reciting in tandem the history of Queen Isabella and the Spanish Armada while Kate debates whether she should simply shake hands with Rickie or kiss him on the cheek in case he’s someplace watching.

“Goodnight, Rickie,” she says at last, and reaches up to kiss him, but he turns his head slightly at the very last moment, either by accident or design, and their lips meet. His tongue is in her mouth in an instant, a hot Latin tongue that sends sparks clear down to where she doesn’t want to be feeling anything of the sort. She draws away, and looks at him in surprise, and then says, “Goodnight” again, and goes into the building. He stands on the sidewalk watching her for a moment, and then he shrugs and walks away. Domingo looks a little puzzled, too.

She has lived in New York long enough to know that a spring latch is worthless on the door to an apartment. Her top lock is a Medeco and the one under that is a dead bolt. She double-locks the door, and then draws all the blinds, the ones on the windows facing the street, and the ones covering the single window opening on the air shaft. “Yes, Hannah,” she says, “hello, sweetie, how are you?” and then goes into the bedroom and slips out of her jeans and T-shirt. She leaves her panties on like an old maid afraid to look under the bed, and takes from the closet a silk kimono Ron bought for her in Fort Lauderdale when they were touring Miss Saigon. The kimono is very long, with a sash that belts at the waist. Its predominant color is a sort of saffron, printed with these huge olive-colored tendrils. It feels soft and smooth and slippery against her skin.

Barefoot, she starts back into the living room, and, as she invariably does, stops to look at the corridor wall hung with framed photographs. The picture of the Palace Theatre in London, where she played in Les Miz, shows the big marquee on Shaftesbury Avenue, and hanging under that a photo of the stage door around the corner with its stone lintel and chiseled words shamelessly proclaiming:

Artistes, she thinks and smiles.

There’s a framed photo of the Operettenhaus in Hamburg, where she played in, guess what, Cats, and all around that are pictures of the various theaters in Denver, Minneapolis, Fort Lauderdale, Washington, and Detroit, from when she was touring Miss Saigon with Ron. The biggest picture on the wall is a framed color photograph of Bess. Her sister is nine in the picture, and she looks happy and beautiful in a yellow sundress, but of course that was before she got so terribly sick.

She stares at the photo for a long time, and then she sighs heavily and goes into the living room and over to the wall where her stereo equipment is stacked. From one of the metal shelves there, she takes down a bottle of Beefeater’s gin that was a gift from the stage manager last Christmas, and she pours a hefty two fingers into a fat solid-feeling glass she bought at Pottery Barn.

She carries the glass into the kitchen, cracks a tray of cubes, and drops two of them into the drink. “Cheers,” she says aloud to no one, and takes a good swallow. “Mm, good,” she says, and goes back into the living room and searches through her CDs till she finds Handel’s Water Music, to which she once danced in a recital in Miss Davenport’s dance class in Westport, Connecticut. But that was when you and I were young, Bessie. That was before the Incident, as Jacqueline and I took to calling it after hours of skirting it, and circling it, and finally dealing with it and putting it to rest.

Maybe.

Or alternately, the Bathroom Incident, delicately avoiding the more emotionally laden term Trauma.

The Handel is soft and soothing and suited to the hour, which she knows is late. She lowers the volume. Drains her glass. While she’s standing there, she pours herself another one. Standing there with the drink in her hand, she visualizes herself as a skinny twelve-year-old in leotard and tights, drifting across the large open room that was Miss Davenport’s second-floor studio, mirrors lining one entire wall, windows on the other, flowing, floating to the sound of Handel’s violins, richly romantic when she was twelve, but sounding somewhat stout and stately now. She sips at her fresh drink. Twelve years old. A spring recital. Faint breezes wafting through the open windows. Sweaty little girls drifting. Everything so beautiful at the ballet, “Thank you, Chorus Line,” she says, and raises her glass in a toast, and sips at it again. Everything so beautiful. But that was before the summer of our discontent, wasn’t it?

The telephone rings.

Don’t be my fucking father, she thinks.

She goes into the bedroom and picks up the phone on the bedside table.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Rickie,” she says, relieved, “hi.”

“I just got home. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, fine.”

“No trouble from the nut?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe we scared him off, huh?”

“I hope so,” she says, and sits on the edge of the bed, and takes another sip of the gin. “That was very kind of you,” she says. “What you did tonight.”

“I just hope it worked.”

“We’ll find out, I guess.”

“Oh sure. By the way,” he says, “we were so busy trying to fool him, I never got to tell you how much I liked the show.”

“Thank you.”

“You really are the prettiest cat in it. Whatever it was he said in his letter.”

“Prettiest kitty,” she says. “Thank you.”

“You’re also a very good dancer,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll bet he sees every performance, don’t you think? Judging from the letters?”

“Probably.”

“Probably standing downstairs right this minute. Looking up at your window.”

“Well, I hope not.”

“Probably jacking off in some doorway,” he says. “Where do these nuts come from, anyway?”

The Incident is suddenly upon her full-blown.

“There used to be a kid lived in my building,” Rickie says, “he used to throw bricks down from the roof. Just at anybody passing by. My uncle comes to visit us one day, this crazy bastard on the roof throws a brick down at him. He runs up the roof, my uncle...”

A hot summer night at the beginning of August.

A Sunday night.

Thirteen-year-old Kate is standing in front of the misted bathroom mirror, drying herself in a large white puffy towel.

“...gave me the shirt, by the way.”

“What?”

“My uncle in Mayagüez. The one who told the kid to stop throwing bricks off the roof or he’d throw him off the roof. He’s the one sent me the shirt I was wearing tonight. With the parrot on it. Did you like it?”

“Yes, it was very nice.”

“Yeah, it’s cool.”

Eleven-year-old Bess is submerged in the tub in a sea of white suds.

“He used to be a doorman on East Seventieth, he retired last October, went back to the island. He’s got a house down there, a pool, anything a person...”

Downstairs in the living room, her father is listening to his records.

Gently...

Sweetly...

Ever so...

Discreetly...

Her hand suddenly begins shaking.

“Rickie,” she says, “excuse me, but I have to go now.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing, I’m all right.”

Her hand is shaking so hard she’s spilling gin all over the front of the kimono.

Open...

Secret...

Doors.

“Kate?” he says.

She can see her sister in the tub, precociously budding, thin and tan and supple, her sweet dear innocent Bess.

“Kate?”

You always were his favorite.

“I’m okay,” she says.

She can’t stop trembling.

“There’s nobody there, is there?”

Yes, there’s everybody here, she thinks.

“No, I’m just very tired.”

“I can imagine. I’ll let you go then.”

Her father’s words.

But he doesn’t.

Ever.

“Can I call you again sometime?”

“Yes, fine,” she says.

No, don’t, she thinks.

“Goodnight then.”

“Goodnight,” she says, and hangs up, and drains the glass, and goes back into the living room to refill it. The orchestra is into the “Hornpipe” section. She turns off the stereo. The apartment goes suddenly still.

If David were here, she thinks, he would know how to deal with this, right? A fucking shrink? But David isn’t here. If Jacqeline were here, she too would know how to deal with this. She dealt with it ad infinitum and ad nauseam over the years, didn’t she, so she would certainly know what to say now to soothe the savage beast, something Handel’s venerable music apparently did not have the charms to accomplish.

Listen, she thinks, let’s either do the mantra or go hide the silverware, okay?

She swallows a goodly amount of gin, which burns on the way down, strengthening her sense of resolve. Through Understanding, Peace, she thinks. So leave us understand.

I was not responsible for what happened.

I know I wasn’t.

I was not to blame.

I know.

I didn’t need to go fuck poor Charlie.

Daddy’s dearest friend.

I didn’t need to pursue him like a lioness after a warthog, chasing him into his underground hole, yanking him out by his tail, forcing him to relive with me...

Stay away from the Incident, she thinks.

I felt no guilt over what happened.

The blame was all my father’s.

I felt only shame.

Because I wasn’t able to stop it.

Isn’t that why you make it happen again and again?

But I don’t.

Without Bess each time?

My poor darling Bess.

It’s what you do, Kate.

Is that it?

Oh, yes, that is most definitely it.

Over and over and over again.

Thank you, Dr. Hicks.

She puts down her glass. Deliberately, she goes into the bathroom and runs a hot tub. She pours in a generous amount of bath oil. She slides out of the kimono and steps into the foaming suds.

Take off the curse, she thinks.

Take off the curse.

It was all that kid’s fault in the park, she thinks.

If he hadn’t stolen my bike, we wouldn’t have met.

Gloria’s eyelids are shaded with a blue that complements her pale scoop-necked blouse and somewhat darker mini. Her narrow face, the eyes as dark as loam and somewhat slanted, the nose as exquisitely sculpted as Nefertiti’s, today possesses a curiously vulpine look that seems to say I want a part and I will kill for it — but perhaps that’s because she’s just come from an audition. Her mouth is a voluptuous contradiction to the wolf metaphor, Bugs Bunny transplanted onto Brer Fox, its upper lip flaring imperceptibly to reveal a minuscule wedge of faintly bucked teeth, exceedingly white against her chocolate complexion.

“The show is set in the year 3706,” she’s telling Kate, “in a sort of striated — is that the right word? — society where the robots are in charge and they’re chasing humans. Oh, I get it, it’s Blade Runner, right? Only Daryl Hannah’s Basic Pleasure Model is a Belgian nun, right? Anyway, the humans still wear clothes but the robots wear only body makeup. Which is understandable, since if you’re made of metal, why would you need clothes? The producer asked me if I’d be willing to be a dancing robot who wears just body makeup and these metallic stiletto-heeled pumps. I told him that could get awfully chilly in the wintertime. You know what he said?”

“What’d he say?” Kate asks.

“He said, ‘Yeah, well this is still August, honey.’”

“He wanted you to undress for him, is what that was.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Gloria says.

“Did you?”

“No, I told him I wasn’t looking for that kind of dancing role. He said ‘Too bad, it’s a featured role.’ I told him ‘Yeah, too bad.’ Who needs that kind of shit?”

“Really,” Kate says.

The two women are in a cappuccino joint in the Village. Kate has already told her about the guy who’s been writing letters to her, and how last night she tried to scare him off, which is probably why Gloria went into the long story about the producer wanting her to take off her clothes. Now she tells Kate that she once had a guy phoning her day and night, but this was somebody she knew. Kate tells her, “No, this isn’t anything like that, this is some nut.” She keeps looking around the coffeehouse. Trying to spot anyone paying excessive attention to her. She is uncomfortable out in the city, out of her apartment. He has done that to her. Made her feel that any one of the people here in this place might be watching her as she sips at her latte.

“Have you told David about it?” Gloria asks.

“No. Not yet.”

“Is he still coming in next Tuesday?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because he told me he’d be back again on the fifteenth.”

“I haven’t heard from him.”

Gloria says nothing for a moment.

She sips at her espresso and then looks across the table with those coal-black eyes of hers and says, “That’s too bad. I was hoping to see him again.”

Me too, Kate thinks.

Because, yes, now that this lunatic has entered her life she is finding it more and more difficult to suppress what happened during that summer long ago. Which is why she supposes she couldn’t fall asleep last night, even after the hot tub, even after, in fact, she masturbated under the suds.

You’re right, she thinks, I’m a whore.

Was that the word he’d used?

Whore?

Or was it slut?

Which?

But, yes, if David does by some miracle come in next week, she would like Gloria to be with them because if there’s one thing she’s learned over the years, it’s how to restage the Bloody Fucking Incident in a variety of inventive ways. With a bit more practice she guesses she might even be able to forget entirely what happened back there in the Westport house on that August night fourteen years ago. Aluvai, as they say in the trade. But then she might start stuttering again. Or worse. Again.

But that’s all behind you now.

Sure, Jacqueline, thank you very much.

And I certainly hope so, Ollie.

Still and all, she would like to be together with both of them again.

You always do this.

You’re right, she thinks, I’m a cunt, okay?

Yes.

Le mot juste.

Exactly what was said.

“So call me,” Gloria says. “If you hear from him.”

“I will.”

“Because I’d really like to do it, you know?”

At eight minutes before curtain on Friday night, the doorman announces over the P.A. system that she’s wanted on the telephone. It is David calling from Menemsha to tell her how much he loves her and to assure her that he’ll be there on Tuesday, as he’d promised, will she be coming to the airport to meet him?

“Yes,” she says, “I’ll be there.”

“My plane gets in at seven thirty-eight,” he says.

“LaGuardia or Newark?”

“Newark.”

“I’ll be there. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Why haven’t you called?”

“There’s only one car. We go every place together. I just haven’t been alone. There’s always someone with me.”

“Where are you now?”

“Home. The house. They all went...”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want anything to happen to us.”

“Neither do I.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Five,” the stage manager warns.

“I love you, David. Please hurry before...”

She stops herself dead.

“I love you, too,” he says.

“Tuesday,” she says.

“Tuesday,” he repeats.

And is gone.

The letter is waiting in her mailbox when she conies down to the lobby on Saturday morning.

It reads:

The detective is the same one who ran the lineup for her and David back in July. His name is Clancy...

“No relation,” he says at once, though Kate doesn’t understand the reference...

...and he seems happy to see her again, happy to be of assistance to “one of the tribe” as he puts it. Kate has never thought of herself as being particularly Irish, except for her looks, but she’s grateful for the ties that seemingly bind. Clancy could not look less Irish. He has brown hair and brown eyes and a mouth that seems perpetually set in a skeptical sneer. He also needs a shave. She suspects he had a tough Friday night here in the big bad city.

The letters she has collected as evidence of whatever crime the lunatic is committing are now on Clancy’s desk, bathed in sunshine on this hot, sticky, what-else-is-new, late Saturday morning. Clancy is sitting in shirtsleeves, the better to promote the image of hardworking cop. A pistol is holstered at his waist on the right-hand side of his belt. He is smoking, of course. He looks like a cop on a television show. Except for the fact that they don’t smoke on television these days. To Kate’s enormous surprise, he opens the top drawer of his desk, and removes from it a pair of white cotton gloves. He pulls on the gloves. They give him a somewhat comical appearance, like a vagabond at a society tea.

“Has anyone but you handled these?” he asks.

“Well... yes. I showed them to a friend.”

“His name?”

“Rickie Diaz.”

“How do you spell the first name?” Clancy asks, and opens a thick black notebook.

“With an ‘i-e.’”

Clancy scribbles the name into his book.

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

“O-kay,” he says, and opens the first of the envelopes.

He reads the letters in sequence.

He looks up every now and then and nods across the desk to her.

At last, he sighs heavily, lights a fresh cigarette, and says simply, “Yeah.”

She wonders Yeah what?

She waits.

“Your typical nut,” he says.

But this she already knows.

“Nine times out of ten, they’re harmless,” he says.

Which is reassuring.

“But this is a crime,” he says.

Good, she thinks.

“What’s the crime?”

“Aggravated Harassment.”

She nods.

He opens the top drawer of his desk again, takes out a paperback book with a blue and black cover. Upside down, she reads the title of the book:

Clancy opens the book, begins leafing through it.

“I think it’s two-thirty,” he says idly, though the clock on the wall behind his desk reads eleven twenty-seven.

He keeps leafing through the book.

“No, it’s two-forty point three-oh,” he says, and turns the book toward her. “This is the Penal Law,” he says.

She reads:

“He hasn’t called me,” she says, looking up sharply.

“Not yet,” Clancy says.

Which is somewhat less than reassuring.

“The rest doesn’t apply,” Clancy says.

Thank God, she thinks.

“What’s Aggravated Harassment in the first degree?” she asks.

“Has to do with race, color, religion and so on. That’s a felony. Second degree is just an A-mis.”

“What’s that?”

“A class-A misdemeanor.”

“Like stealing my bike, right?”

“Well... yeah.”

“Then this isn’t a very important crime, right?”

“I would say harassing someone is important.”

“Important enough for anyone to pay attention?”

“Oh, sure.”

“So how do I stop him?”

“You file a complaint. There’s not much to go on here, but hopefully we can find him.”

“How?”

“Well, there may be latents on the letters here. He may have a record, or he may have been in the service, or in government employment, there are fingerprint records we can look at. If we locate him, we check his handwriting against what we have here. Then there are two ways we can go.”

Kate waited.

“We can have somebody talk to him, we’ve got...”

“Talk to him?”

“Yeah, we’ve got people here who are very good at this. Take the guy aside, tell him Listen, you want to go to jail, or you want to be reasonable here? Leave the girl alone, don’t bother her no more, that’s the end of it, you don’t hear from us again. But you try to contact her, you write to her, you phone her...”

“He hasn’t...”

“I know, I’m just saying. You phone her, you go near her building, you even walk on her block, we’re gonna come after you and put you away. Lots of times, they listen.”

She is thinking This guy isn’t going to listen to anybody talking to him. This guy is nuts.

“What if he doesn’t listen?” she asks.

“You let us know he’s still bothering you, and we arrest him and charge him with the A-mis.”

She is thinking What if he kills me between the time you talk to him and the time I tell you he’s still bothering me?

“Each letter he sent constitutes one count of the crime, you see. What’ve we got here, eight, nine letters?”

“Ten.”

“Okay, that’s ten counts of Aggravated Harassment. But the most he can get is two years in jail, even though technically there are ten counts of the crime. It’s complicated. If he gets off with less than the max...”

She is thinking What happens when he gets out of jail?

“...the judge can grant an order of protection, which if he comes near you again is contempt of court and yet another crime.”

“I’m very afraid this person will try to hurt me,” she says levelly, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

“I realize that. But what I’m trying to tell you, Miss Duggan, you’re not entirely helpless in this matter. We can look into it for you, if you want to file a complaint, or there’re people in the D.A.’s Office you can talk to, if you prefer that, the Sex Crimes Unit down there.”

She is thinking Jesus, what am I getting into here?

“Do they ever just stop?” she asks. “On their own?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes, if you ignore them, they...”

“I am ignoring him.”

“I know that. What I’m saying, sometimes they just get bored or whatever and go away.”

“He doesn’t seem to be getting bored.”

“No, he doesn’t, but sometimes they just quit all of a sudden. There are lots of women out there, you know.”

“Yes,” she says, and nods thoughtfully.

“So how would you like to proceed?”

“What I’m afraid of, you see, is if somebody goes to talk to him, he’ll come after me.”

“Well... I really think that’s a very remote possibility.”

“But a possibility, right?”

“Anything’s possible, Miss Duggan. The roof of this building could fall in on us right this minute. That’s a possibility, but a very remote one. I really don’t think this person would try to harm you after somebody from the police talked to him.”

“But he might.”

“There’s no telling what crazy people will do, but in my experience...”

“I’d like to give it some further thought,” she says.

“Entirely up to you,” Clancy says, with what she detects as a slight dismissive shrug. He opens the top drawer of his desk again, takes from it a large manila envelope printed with the words POLICE DEPARTMENT — CITY OF NEW YORK and below that the bolder word EVIDENCE.

Evidence, she thinks.

He turns down the flap of the envelope. There are two little red cardboard buttons on the envelope, a red string dangling from the one on the flap. He wraps the string around the lower button.

“You’d better hang on to these,” he says. “Case you decide.”

David calls collect on Monday evening.

He reminds her that his plane will arrive in Newark at seven thirty-eight tomorrow morning.

“I’ll be there,” she says.

Hurry, she thinks.

Please hurry.

And closes the blinds against the encroaching dusk.