Privileged Conversation

4: tuesday, august 15 — saturday, august 19

David knows at once that something is wrong.

She stands just past the security gate waiting for him, a black umbrella in her hand, her red hair pulled up under a man’s gray fedora that hides it completely, a black raincoat buttoned to her throat, jeans and yellow rain boots showing below the hem. She looks as if she’s been crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Lots,” she says, and kisses him swiftly on the cheek.

It is pouring outside the terminal. Kate has borrowed a car from one of the “kids” in the show, and it is tiny and cramped, and there is a faint whiff of stale sweat wafting from the backseat, which is littered with leg warmers, leotards, tights, socks, panties, bras and a tangled assortment of unidentifiable soiled or stained garments waiting to be transported to the Laundromat. Or the city dump.

She begins crying the moment she pulls the car out of the airport parking lot.

“What is it?” he says.

In fits and starts and bits and pieces, like a patient dredging up a traumatic experience, she rambles tearfully through the events of the past two weeks and more, starting with the delivery of the first box of roses, “I thought they were from you, well, naturally, the card said I love you, Kathryn,” and then the subsequent flowers, all of them sent to the theater and delivered to the dressing room, four boxes of roses altogether, long-stemmed roses, all with a different florist’s card saying I love you, and then the letters started, ten letters in all, so far. She’ll show him the letters when they get home, Clancy said it’s a crime, the detective, remember? From that time with my bike? I went to see him Saturday. Each letter constitutes a separate count of Aggravated Harassment, but he can only get two years in aggregate, whatever that means, I’ve been so frightened.

Bursting into tears again, trying to choke the tears back while David listens in amazement to the recited contents of the letters as she’s memorized them, the voice of a man obsessed if ever he’s heard one, and he most certainly has heard plenty of them. Once again, he listens to the familiar symptoms, altered to accommodate the scenario with Kate, the expected shift from reality to fantasy, Kathryn becoming Victoria, Victoria becoming a kitten and then a pussy, the repetitive fixation on the slang expression for the vagina, the slavish supplication, the reversal of roles so that he now becomes lord and master, the possessiveness and jealous rage, the abusive language and escalating obscenity, the initially veiled threats, the later open sexual invitation-cum-threat, the final threat against Rickie...

“Rickie?” he says. “Who’s Rickie?”

“The kid from the bike shop,” she says.

How’d he get into this? David wonders.

“How’d he get into this?” he asks aloud, and turns to her in puzzlement, his knees banging against the dashboard in this goddamn toy car. He should be listening to this in the limo she promised, he should be holding her in his arms while somebody else drives, telling her he’s here, assuring her that everything will be all right.

Well, she goes on to explain, crying more fiercely now, frightening him because it’s raining very hard and there’s quite a bit of traffic heading into the city at this hour of the morning, and he doesn’t want her to run into one of the trucks rolling ponderously toward the George Washington Bridge, but how can she see through this driving rain and her own veil of tears, her vale of tears? Well, she says, I got very scared when he sent the letter to my building because that meant he’d followed me from the theater and he knew where I lived, and it sounded very threatening, the business about my wanting it as much as he did and now he knew where to get it and all, it sounded like somebody getting ready to rape me, for Christ’s sake! And you were away, David, don’t forget that, you weren’t here, you hadn’t even called, where the hell were you?

She is beginning to sound hysterical, he has dealt with hysteria before. “Honey,” he says, “calm down, I’m here now,” but she keeps ranting about how she had to go to someone and the only one she could think of was Rickie, the kid from the bike shop, who was kind enough and brave enough to take her for something to eat after the show, and walk her home afterward, so that fucking lunatic would think he was her boyfriend and get scared off.

“Kate, watch the road,” he warns.

“It isn’t as if I have a brother or a father I can turn to,” she says, “and my sister is helpless, of course, and even if my mother wasn’t in San Diego, she wouldn’t give a damn if an ax murderer was following me. You don’t know what she’s like, David...”

And now he listens to a furious recitation that truly could come from any one of his patients, a conversation so privileged that it transforms this teeny-weeny car into a psychiatrist’s cubicle, or, more accurately, a priest’s confessional. Patiently, he listens. This is the woman he loves, and she is in serious trouble. As the windshield wipers snick at the incessant rain, he listens.

The fury she expends on her mother has one dubious side effect in that it stanches the flow of tears and forces a hunched-over-the-wheel concentration on the road, as if Kate is driving this tiny car not only through the fiercely slanting rain but also, like a sharpened stake, directly into her mother’s heart. Her mother’s name is Fiona, but it could just as easily be Shirley, or Rhoda or Marie or Lila, who are the respective reviled mothers of Arthur K, Alex J, Susan M and Michael D, or for that matter David’s own mother Ruth before he went through the extensive analysis that put his hatred for her to rest. (A father named Neil lurks in the background of Kate’s fiery recitation, somewhat like a shadow lingering offstage, a fact that brings him immediately to prominence in David’s trained analytical mind.) But her rage seems exclusively directed toward Fiona as the car approaches the bridge in a similarly raging storm that buffets it with wind and water. Everywhere around them, rumbling trucks lumber like dinosaurs.

According to Kate, her mother was — and is — a demanding, ungiving, unforgiving bitch who would rather kick a cripple than light a candle in church. “We used to call her Fee the Fair,” she says, virtually grinding the words out through essentially clenched teeth...

...not only because she was an extravagantly beautiful woman, but also because she was so fucking unfair with the girls, and even with their father (Neil still skulks in the shadows, a figure reluctant to take his proper place on the stage of Kate’s mind), accusing them of plots to thwart her will or topple her carefully organized plans. Bess was the true beauty in the family — with their mother’s red hair and green eyes, of course, which both of them had inherited — but also with a rare sort of radiant inner beauty that shone on her face like something beatific. Maybe this was why Fiona tended to pick on her more often than she did Kate, who, to tell the truth, was a scrawny, skinny kid who looked more like a boy than the girl she was supposed to be... well, he knows that, she’s already told him what she looked like at thirteen. Even so, Kate really was her father’s favorite, as her mother never failed to point out to poor Bess (Neil taking a step closer, into the spotlight, and then retreating swiftly into the shadows again).

“Here, I’ve got it,” David says, and hands her the change for the toll.

Kate rolls down the window, hands the coins over to the collector, and quickly rolls it up again before they both drown. The brief interruption serves as an end to the first act. But when the curtain goes up again after intermission, it is on another scene entirely, perhaps another play entirely.

David wishes they were someplace else, anywhere else, anywhere but inside this claustrophobic car hurtling through the rain. He longs to hold her, kiss the drying tears from her face, comfort her and console her, tell her how much he loves her, promise he will be here to take care of her, she has nothing to worry about, he’s here now. Somehow they make it over the bridge and are heading downtown on the Harlem River Drive. Out on the river tugboats move listlessly through the shifting mist on the water. As Kate sifts sobbingly through the tattered tissue of her memory, the windshield wipers swipe ceaselessly and ineffectively at the rain. He is truly afraid she will crash the car into any one of the vehicles everywhere around them, certain tomorrow’s headline in the Daily News will read LOVERS PERISH IN FLAMES.

Flames.

Flames have suddenly become the thesis of this large-screen, full-color extravaganza. Flames are what now envelop Kate’s sister on a night in August long ago, everything seems to happen to Kate in August, wasn’t it a wet and steamy day in August when she was just thirteen — yes, the theater’s business manager, or accountant, or whatever the hell he was, his small office, yes, her blatant, brazen seduction of her father’s best friend. But the fire is... what? Three years later? And flames are consuming her fourteen-year-old sister as she runs out of the burning house she herself has set on fire. Flames are everywhere, the house, Bess’s gown, her hair, red as fire anyway, redder now with flames that lick and bite at curling crackling strands. Flames are the theme, flames are the plot, flames are the horror. In hot and almost comic pursuit, like a small band of inept Keystone Kops chasing a human torch, Fiona and a shrieking Kate come running across the lawn after her. Bess is yelling, “Let me die, let me burn in hell!” Kate can hardly breathe. Her father suddenly rushes out of the house with a wet sheet trailing from his hand. He chases his younger daughter, tackles her, brings her to the ground, her nightgown in flames, her hair on fire, Jesus, oh Jesus, holds her pinned to the ground as Kate screams “Leave her alone, you son of a bitch!” and Fiona, all wide-eyed and shocked, stands by appalled as Bess repeats over and over again, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned... bless me, Father, for I have sinned... bless me...” He wraps her in the cool wet sheets, the sheets beginning to steam around her, the smell of her scorched and smoldering hair stinking up the August night, the sheets steaming on the humid August night, everything happens in August, August is the cruelest month.

“I almost told Rickie last Wednesday,” she says.

“Told him what?”

“All of it.”

And now young Ricardo Alvaredo Diaz boldly takes the stage, suddenly stepping out to tumultuous applause, grinning at the audience and flexing his muscles, the feathers rippling on the tattooed Indian’s headdress as Kate steers the car off the drive and onto East Ninety-sixth Street.

“Where were you, David?” she asks, turning sharply from the wheel. “Where the hell were you last Wednesday? Doing it to Julia up there on the Vineyard? When you should have been doing it to me?”

How did this get to be this? he wonders.

All I wanted to do was kiss you.

And who the hell is Julia?

“If you’d been here,” she says, “I wouldn’t have let him,” and suddenly yanks the car over to the curb and throws her arms on the steering wheel, and lowers her head onto them, and begins sobbing uncontrollably.

It is now almost ten A.M. Across the room, Kate is on the couch, the little girl on the Les Miz poster staring sorrowfully into the room from the wall behind her. She has stopped crying. She has taken off the black raincoat and the yellow rain boots, and she is sitting cross-legged in jeans, a white cotton T-shirt, and white socks, the man’s gray fedora still pulled down over her hair. It occurs to him that she covered her hair so that it wouldn’t signal blatantly to the man stalking her. But they are now in her apartment, where she is safe, so why is she still wearing the dumb hat?

He is inordinately, and unprofessionally, angry with her. He is supposed to be a psychiatrist, trained and caring and concerned, but instead he is reacting like a jealous schoolboy. After all she told him in the car, and knowing now the very real trouble this son of a bitch letter-writer has been causing, all he can think of is that last Wednesday she let that kid from the bike shop... the very word infuriates him. Let him. Like kids on a goddamn rooftop. Will you let me, Katie? Sure, Rickie, just let me take off my panties, dear. The Miss Saigon helicopter is waiting to take him out of here, perhaps back to the Vineyard. The cats in the apartment — the real one nuzzling his leg, and the yellow-eyed one in the poster above the sofa, and the green-eyed one sitting on the sofa opposite him, still wearing the goddamn hat — are all waiting for his next move. He’s thinking if she doesn’t give him the right answers, he just might...

The problem is he wants to hold her.

Touch her.

Kiss her.

The problem is he has missed her desperately.

“All right,” he says, “tell me what happened last Wednesday.”

“I don’t wish to discuss it further,” she says.

Then go to hell, he thinks.

“Then why’d you bring it up?” he says.

“Because I wanted to get it out in the open.”

“It’s not in the open yet. Not until I know what happened.”

“What do you think happened?” she asks.

“Just tell me, okay? Was Gloria here, too?”

“No. How’d Gloria get into this?”

“How’d Rickie get into it, is what I want to know.”

“Then why’d you mention Gloria? Can’t you wait to get at her again?”

“Look, Kate, don’t try to shift the goddamn guilt here...”

“I’m not trying to shift any guilt. I don’t feel any guilt.”

“Then why were you bawling in the car?”

“Not because I was feeling guilt. Don’t give me guilt, okay? I had enough guilt with Jacqueline. I’ve been through guilt and back again, David, okay? I’m fine now, okay, so don’t...”

“Why’d you go to bed with him?”

“Go to bed with him? Are you dreaming?”

“You said...”

“I said...”

“You said if I’d been here, you wouldn’t have let him.”

“That’s right.”

“Let him what?”

“Kiss me, for Christ’s sake! Anyway, are you so celibate up there on the Vineyard?”

“You know I’m married.”

“Yes, and you know I’m single.”

“What is that supposed to be? A license to kill?”

“Nobody killed anybody, David.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that.”

“Anyway, we’ve been through this before.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I told you he’d asked me out.”

“You also told me you didn’t give him your number.”

“I didn’t. Not then. I went to see him right after the letter was delivered here. That’s when I gave him my number. He was helping me, David. Anyway, we’re not married, you know.”

“So I’m beginning to understand.”

“You make love to her, you know. So you can’t...”

“That’s something altogether...”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So you have no right...”

“That’s right, I don’t. So I guess if there’s nothing further to discuss, I’ll just...”

“We’re having another fight, you know. About Rickie again.”

“With a difference this time.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Last time, you hadn’t kissed him.”

“It didn’t mean anything.”

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s the cliché of all time. If it didn’t mean anything...”

“It didn’t.”

“Then why the hell did you do it?”

“To thank him.”

“For what?”

“For helping me. For being here! Where the hell were you, David?”

“Look, what’s the sense of this?”

“None. Not if you want to keep on fighting.”

But she seems delighted that they are fighting. He senses the argument adds a dimension of domesticity to their tottering romance, perhaps provides it with the promise of longevity as well. After all, if they’re having their second fight, and if they survive it, the implication is there’ll be a third fight and a fourth and a fifth ad infinitum. Just like Mum and Dad, kiddies. Having their cute little fight, so they can kiss and make up afterward. Except that he has no intention of kissing her now, not after she kissed her young toreador last Wednesday night. And God knows how many times since.

“Have you seen him since?” he asks.

“No.”

“Has he called you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll bet. Give them a taste of honey...”

“Stop it, David! I’m not a whore!”

“Who said you were?”

“I’m not a whore!”

He has not even mentioned this word, and he wonders where it comes from now. A whore? Simply because she kissed...

“What kind of kiss?”

“What do you mean?”

“A friendly kiss, a brotherly kiss, a paternal...”

“A goddamn soul kiss!” she says angrily.

The room goes silent.

“I thought you loved me,” he says.

“I do.”

“In your fashion.”

“No. Completely and utterly.”

He looks at her.

He wishes he could believe her, but then why the Wednesday night Latino? Besides, she’s correct in maintaining there are no strings on her, mister, she is as free as a bird and entitled to kiss whomever the hell she chooses. The thing is... he thought... he assumed... mistakenly, it now turns out... but nonetheless...

“Do you plan on seeing him again?” he asks.

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Never mind what I want!” he shouts. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I want you.”

“Then why...?”

“I want only you.”

“Then...”

“I want you to love me.”

“Kate, why don’t we just...?”

“Don’t say it!”

“I think we should just...”

“Don’t say it!”

She is staring at him now, looking small and vulnerable and tired and pale in the blue jeans and white cotton shirt and adorable gray fedora, hands folded in her lap, green eyes wide and beseeching. He does not want her to cry again, he does not believe he can bear it if she starts crying again. She sits there on the very edge of dissolution, the tears standing in her eyes but not spilling over, and in a barely audible voice, she says, “Don’t leave me, David.”

He stands watching her.

“Please,” she says. “I beg of you.”

He takes a step toward her.

“Love me,” she says. “Just keep loving me.”

He calls Stanley Beckerman at a little before eleven.

“Boy, thank God,” Stanley says. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“There was a lot of traffic,” David says. “The rain.”

“The sun was shining in Hatteras,” Stanley says.

“The Vineyard, too.”

“Any trouble getting away?” Stanley asks, lowering his voice though David suspects he is alone in his office. Or perhaps his little nineteen-year-old bimbo has already joined him. Perhaps she is already sitting on his couch like Sharon Stone, legs wide open, no panties.

“No trouble at all,” David says.

Stanley believes that he alone is the one who needs protection and cover in the days ahead, and David doesn’t plan to disabuse him of the notion. Therefore, the responsibility of working out a series of fictitious lectures and whatnot has fallen to Stanley as presumed solitary philanderer and liar in this four-day subterfuge. David has given Helen only the scant information Stanley provided in his one invitational call to Menemsha two weeks ago. Now he listens carefully, eager to protect his own ass, but playing to the hilt the role of Stanley’s beard.

“I’d like to fax this to you, hmm?” Stanley says. “Do you have a fax in your office?”

“No,” David says.

“Well, can I leave it with your doorman then?”

“Where?”

“The office, the apartment, wherever.”

“The office would be better,” David says.

“I’ll drop it off later. Meanwhile, can we go over it on the phone?”

“Yes, let’s.”

“I really don’t want any contradictions here, Dave. This is too important for either of us to be saying something the other one contradicts. What’d you tell Helen?”

“That Syd Markland...”

“With a ‘y,’ right?”

“Yes.”

“Syd with a ‘y.’”

“Yes, had put together the program and invited all the guests.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the name you gave me...”

“Yes, he doesn’t exist.”

“Good.”

“Did you say the APA was sponsoring it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s what I told Gerry. Did she question any of this? Helen?”

“No.”

“Good. What I’ve tried to do, Dave, is set up a practically morning-to-night round of talks, meetings, panel discussions... I’m sorry to do this to you, I know you’ll just be killing time here in the city...”

“I have work to do, don’t worry.”

“I truly appreciate this, Dave.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I just want to seem busy and involved all day long, hmm?” Stanley says. “That’s why I’d like you to look over the schedule carefully, so in case Helen asks where you’re going to be on such and such a night...”

“She probably will.”

“Why?” Stanley asks at once. “She doesn’t suspect anything, does she?”

“No, no.”

“You didn’t tell her about me and Cindy, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why would she want to know where you’re going to be? Gerry never asks where I’m going to be.”

“It’s the sort of information we normally exchange,” David says.

“Why? Doesn’t she trust you?”

“Yes, she trusts me.”

“Well, Gerry certainly trusts me. Which is why she never asks.”

“Then why’d you work out such a complicated schedule?”

“In case she asks. Besides, it isn’t complicated.”

“You said panels, meetings, lectures...”

“Yes, but scattered throughout the day, hmm? It isn’t complicated. Besides, I didn’t leave her a copy of it. But in case she asks what’s happening tonight, for example, I can tell her I’ll... where the hell is it? Here. Dr. Gianfranco Donato from Milan will be giving a talk on Learning and Motor Skill Disorders.”

“Okay.”

“At the Lotos Club.”

“Okay.”

“Five East Sixty-sixth.”

“Got it.”

“You don’t have to write this down, I’ll be dropping the schedule off. Are you at the office now?”

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“In a coffee shop. A phone booth in a coffee shop.”

“Shall I bring it to you there?”

“No, just drop it at the office. I’ll pick it up later.”

“Are you sure? Suppose Helen calls you ten minutes from now?”

“Stanley...”

“All right, all right. But you can’t blame me for wanting to be careful, Dave. You have nothing to lose here. I realize the favor you’re doing, but even so, please try to understand my caution, hmm?”

“I understand completely.”

“When will you be at the office?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m just afraid you’ll talk to Helen before you get the schedule, and you won’t know where the hell we’re supposed to be all day.”

“I won’t be talking to Helen until later tonight.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s what we arranged.”

“Doesn’t she trust you?”

“Stanley, we’ve been over that.”

“I mean, calling on schedule, that sounds like a woman who doesn’t trust you.” His voice lowers. “Cindy’s with me now,” he says. “You should see her.”

“Stanley, I have to go now.”

“No, wait. Wait! Let me read this to you. At least, this afternoon’s meetings and tonight’s schedule. In case you talk to her.”

“I won’t be...”

“In case, okay? In fact, you’d better write it down, after all. Have you got a pencil?”

David sighs.

“All the lectures are at the Lotos Club,” Stanley says, “but I’ve put the panels and meetings at different places, in case anyone tries to get to us. By the way, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give all of this to Helen. I mean, if she asks, you can tell her where you’ll be at any given point in time, but I wouldn’t volunteer the entire schedule.”

“I wouldn’t do that, anyway.”

“That’s in case she talks to Gerry. Though I can’t see why they’d be talking in the next few days, can you?”

“No, I can’t imagine that happening.”

“Neither can I. But just in case. Okay, this afternoon at two, there’ll be a panel discussion on Mood Disorders, chaired by Dr. Phyllis Cagney who’ll also be doing the one on Eating Disorders tomorrow afternoon. She doesn’t exist, either. I’ve got those at a meeting room at the Brewster, that’s a small hotel on Eighty-sixth off Fifth, this isn’t supposed to be a huge convention or anything, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’ve already given you Dr. Donato at the Lotos Club tonight...”

“Yes, what time?”

“Eight. I told Gerry you and I would be having dinner together first, hmm?”

“Where?”

“Bertinelli’s. On Madison and Sixty-fifth. Actually, I’ll be taking Cindy there,” he says, his voice lowering again on her name. “I’ll put it on my credit card, and say it was you.”

“Fine. I’ll do the same.”

“I didn’t tell her where. That’s just in case she asks later. I didn’t think we have to give them any restaurant names in advance. Unless they ask.”

“Okay.”

“Will Helen ask?”

“I’m sure she will.”

“So where do you want to say?”

“Well, not Bertinelli’s. If you’ll be there with her.”

“Cindy.”

“Yes.”

“You should see her. So where will you say?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, pick something, just in case Gerry...”

“You can tell Gerry it was Bertinelli’s, I’m sure Helen won’t be calling her. I’ll tell Helen whatever. Wherever I finally end up tonight. I’ll let you know in the morning where it was.”

“But not too early, hmm?” Stanley says.

He has never before used the call-forwarding feature on the telephone in their apartment, but when he goes there late that morning he first calls the Vineyard to tell Helen he’s arrived safely, and then he consults the manual. The manual says:

He reads the instructions yet another time. He keeps the manual open before him as he punches out 7, 4, #. He listens for the dial tone. He dials Kate’s number. He hears a beep and then her phone begins ringing.

“Hello?” she says.

“It’s me,” he says.

He feels like a spy.

Later that afternoon, he records an outgoing message on Kate’s answering machine, and then, from a pay phone on the corner, he dials his own number. There is a single ring, and then an almost imperceptible click, and then another ring, and another, and another, and Kate’s machine kicks in, not with her familiar, “Hi, at the beep, please,” but instead with David’s recorded voice: “Hello, no one can answer your call just now, but if you leave a message at the beep, someone will get back to you as soon as possible.”

Aside from that tiny click — which could, after all, have been the answering machine switching modes — there is no way that anyone on earth can know that the call is not being answered in the Chapman apartment. If Helen calls from the Vineyard, she will have no way of knowing his voice is coming from Kate’s machine rather than their own. She will have no way of knowing that her husband is a lying cheat.

“Does it work?” Kate asks.

“Yes,” he says.

Smiling, she takes his arm.

After dinner that night, they go back to her apartment.

He feels relatively safe.

Sort of.

“Your boyfriend’s on the phone,” Mistoffelees says.

Already in costume for the Wednesday matinee performance, he comes bouncing down the hall as part of his warm-up exercises, a virtual jack-in-the-box in black, springing up and down and up again as he gestures toward the wall phone and leaps away out of sight.

The receiver is hanging from its cord.

She picks it up.

“Hi, darling,” she says.

“Well,” he says approvingly, “that’s better.”

A chill races up her back.

“Who is this?” she asks at once.

“Who do you think it is, Puss?”

“Go away,” she says.

“Don’t hang up,” he warns.

She stands transfixed, a barrage of thoughts bombarding her mind. This number is unlisted, how did he get it? Does he know someone in the show? Is he an investor? Is he an actor who once worked the Winter Garden? Has he dated one of the...?

“How are you?” he asks pleasantly.

“I’m going to hang up.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Obedience,” he says.

“Leave me alone. I’ll go to the police again.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Have you gone to the police?”

“No. But I will if you don’t...”

“Have you?”

“I will go. I said I will”

“No, you said again.”

“No. But I will.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I will.”

Her voice weakening.

“I’m watching you, Puss.”

“Please. You have to stop...”

“I’ll be there tonight.”

“No. Please.”

“Watching. Dance nice.”

“No. Don’t come. Please. I don’t want you to come.”

“You don’t want me to come, darling?” he says, and begins laughing.

She hangs up at once. She is shaking violently. She stands by the phone, her open hand pressed to her pounding heart.

“You okay?” someone asks.

She looks up.

Rum Turn Tugger.

“Yes, fine,” she says.

But immediately following the performance that afternoon, she limps over to the stage manager and tells him she thinks she sprained her ankle during the “Growltiger” number.

“I want to check with my doctor,” she lies. “But meanwhile I wouldn’t count on me for tonight.”

David has chosen a place he’s read about in New York, a dim, wood-paneled, clubby sort of dinner-dancing spot in the Village. “The steaks are terrific,” wrote the magazine’s restaurant critic, “and the eight-piece band plays much bigger-band music.” The tunes these musicians are playing now are hardly reminiscent of those David grew up with. Starting with when he was twelve or thirteen and first beginning to notice girls, the doowop songs he favored seemed to reflect his every adolescent mood and emotional shift, ranging from Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I” to “So Much in Love” by the Tymes, and all the other hanging-out, malt-shop, jukebox tunes that dominated the radio waves.

When he was fourteen or fifteen the charts exploded with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I Feel Fine” and “She Loves You,” and more Beatles tunes than he could county, all of them an integral part of his tumultuous adolescence — when you were in love, the whole damn world was Paul, John, Ringo and George. And then when he was sixteen, the song that possibly best expressed his own inner turmoil, the song that seemed to speak directly to him, was the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” of which he, too, couldn’t seem to get none nohow. Oddly, when he was seventeen and his taste began to change somewhat, he played Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” day and night, longing for that stranger in the night who would fill his arms one day. Or night. Or anytime, for that matter.

When he got out of high school and decided early on in college that he wanted to be a doctor, his musical taste took a more serious turn. “Ode to Billie Joe” was perhaps his favorite song that year, all haunting and solemn with ominous cello passages and dark hints of abortion or infanticide or both. When he turned nineteen, pop music seemed to go out of his life completely. The future was looming. “Mrs. Robinson” perhaps best exemplified for him the turn from a silly childish past to a mature responsible future. He was, after all, twenty-six and already a doctor when he first met young Helen Barrister on the bank of the Charles.

Tonight, much older but perhaps no wiser, he holds in his arms a radiant twenty-seven-year-old who floats with him to the strains of “Moonlight Serenade” and “You Made Me Love You,” rendered as Glenn Miller and Harry James must have done them back in the dim, dark forties before either he or Kate was born. He knows how foolhardy it was for a clumsy oaf like himself to have asked a dancer, a professional dancer, to go dancing with him, but here they are and she makes him feel like Fred Astaire in Top Hat, makes him feel like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, makes him feel light-footed and light-hearted and light-headed as he glides her airily about the floor to these Golden Oldies neither he nor she recalls. To David, a Golden Oldie is Elvis Presley’s “Surrender.” To Kate, a Golden Oldie is Styx’s “Too Much Time on My Hands.”

Most of the patrons here have come to dance. Many of the women are wearing ballroom gowns, although this is a mere Wednesday night. One dark-haired woman in a long red gown is even wearing a tiara. The couples drift about the floor like so many versions of Velez and Yolanda, showing off their ballroom training in whirls and dips and fancy turns — but their brilliance kneels to Kate’s luster. You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate, he thinks out of nowhere, and wonders again about the wisdom of bringing her here to a place where he can be seen dancing with her in public.

She is wearing black tonight.

He is beginning to think that any color is her color, but she wears black superbly, her fingernails painted not to match the sleeveless, V-necked mini she is wearing, thank God, but echoing instead the carnivorous red lipstick on her mouth and the dangling red earrings on her ears. She has left a sheer, black, long-sleeved jacket over the back of her chair, and she steps out now in just the short flirty dress, piped in white at the hem and neck, flaring out dramatically over long legs sheathed in black. Her hair is swept up and away from her face, ribboned with the same piped fabric entwined around a fake white carnation tilted recklessly onto her elegant brow. Black high-heeled strapped sandals designed for a runway rather than a dance floor add several inches to her already spectacular height.

She is leading him, he realizes.

But perhaps she’s been leading him from the start.

He suddenly remembers her seduction of poor hapless Charlie. And wonders why she did that. And wonders again why she soul-kissed that kid from the bicycle shop. But the frown that creases his forehead is only momentary. He is lost in the scent of her perfume, lost in the dazzle of her flying feet, lost in the silken feel of her in the gossamer gown.

But perhaps, too, he was lost from the very start.

He has developed the philanderer’s habit of checking out a room the moment he enters it, reconnoitering it further as the evening progresses, wanting to be prepared for any unexpected contingency that will force him to explain, plausibly he hopes, what he is doing here with this young and beautiful dancer. As they come off the floor now...

The bandleader has announced something called “Elk’s Parade” which turns out to be a jumpy tune David has never heard in his life, and something neither he nor Kate would care to dance to, though he’s sure she can dance to anything and make it look spectacular...

...as they come off the floor, he scans the room again, checking out the diners, checking out the men and women moving off the floor or onto it, even searching the faces of the waiters and busboys to make sure there are no surprises lurking in the shadows here. He has thought of how he might introduce Kate if he ran into anyone he knows, but he has not come up with anything that would sound even remotely plausible. This is a psychiatrist from Seattle, we’re attending the same seminar. Nice try, David. This is a student of mine at Mount Sinai, I’m instructing her in Dance Therapy as a course of treatment for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Oh yes, completely believable, David. Hi, this is my daughter’s first-grade teacher, I’m filling her in on Annie’s feats and foibles. Sure, David. Nudge in the ribs, accompanied by sly conspiratorial wink. The vast Brotherhood of Philanderers. Or, as it is known in the profession, the Order of Priapic Disorder Victims. Just kidding, folks. But he finds none of this funny.

The steaks are good.

He doesn’t very often eat red meat because he is a physician and well aware of the fact that his father suffered a serious heart attack when he was only fifty-seven, eleven years from now on David’s personal calendar. Moreover, until six years ago, he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day — Marlboros, no less — and he knows his former habit increases his relatively high genetic risk. No need, therefore, to increase the old cholesterol intake, hmm? No need either, he supposes, to take this risk tonight, perhaps far more dangerous to his health than any tiny little cholesters, as he thinks of them, swimming around and clogging his arteries.

They are on coffee and dessert when Kate asks whether it might be possible for them to get out of the city for the next two nights, maybe find a little country inn...

“Well, I...”

“...someplace, figure out something...”

“I’d have to talk to Stanley first,” he says. “Make sure he can justify...”

“You can say one of the lecturers lives out of town.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“And can’t travel because he broke his leg or something.”

“Like you.”

“God forbid. All I told him was that I sprained my ankle. Which leaves me free, you see. That’s why I thought...”

“I guess there’s nothing really tying us to the city, is there?”

“Not until my ankle heals.”

“Where’d you have in mind?”

“Not Massachusetts. Too close to her.”

“Connecticut then?”

“Too close to her.”

He looks at her, puzzled.

“I was thinking maybe New Hope,” she says. “Have you ever been to New Hope?”

“Once. Long ago.”

“With her?”

“With Helen, yes.”

But why does she think Connecticut is close to Martha’s Vineyard? Or has he misunderstood her?

“I’ll talk to Stanley,” he says. “See what he thinks.”

“Don’t leave the thinking to Stanley. Stanley sounds like a jackass.”

“He is.”

“Then tell him what you’d like to do...”

“Well, I can’t...”

“Not about me, of course. Just say you’re finding it very dreary, hanging around all alone in the city, and you’d like to get out of town, and you’ve figured out a way to make it sound plausible.”

“Yes, what’s the way?”

“I don’t know. You’re the married one. I don’t have to make excuses.”

“You’ve already made one to your stage manager.”

“Yes, but not because I wanted to get out of town.”

The band is playing something he recognizes, but it’s something everyone recognizes, Artie Shaw’s arrangement of “Stardust.” The dance floor is suddenly filled again with stiletto-thin men and women, gliding, floating, drifting to the sound of the soaring clarinet. He tells her about the time he was in Liberty Music on Madison Avenue and Artie Shaw was in there buying records. This was around Christmastime, oh, ten, twelve years ago...

“I was fifteen,” she says.

“Well, yes, I suppose you were. Shaw was buying dozens of albums as gifts. He told the clerk he had a charge at the store, and the clerk said, ‘Yes, sir, may I have your name, please?’ And Shaw said, ‘Artie Shaw,’ and the clerk said ‘Is that S-H-O-R-E, sir?’”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m serious. A music store.”

“Didn’t know Artie Shaw.”

“Incredible.”

“Everybody knows Artie Shaw.”

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” David says.

“Our Gloria?” Kate asks, and they both laugh.

“Why did you tell him you sprained your ankle? I thought it was because...”

“He called me.”

“Who? Your stage manager?”

“No, Artie Shaw.”

“Really, who...?”

“The nut who sent me the flowers and...”

“Called...?”

“...the letters. Yes.”

“Where?”

“Backstage.”

“At the theater?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t those numbers unlisted?”

“Yes.”

“Then how...?”

“I don’t know. David, I’m very frightened. That’s why I want to leave the city. That’s the real reason.”

“Kate,” he says, “you have to go to the police again.”

“No, I can’t. He warned me not to.”

“Then call Clancy. Ask him to come see you. I’m sure he’d be willing to...”

“Sure, in New York? Anyway, how can I call him?”

“Why not?”

“He’d find out.”

“How can he possibly...?”

“He knows everything I do!”

“How can he hear a phone call you make from your own...?”

“How do I know? How’d he get the number at the theater?”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“Of course. Who do you think it was?”

“Maybe someone you know. Maybe someone playing a...”

“I don’t have friends who kid around that way. Besides he called me Puss, of course it was him.”

“You didn’t give Rickie either of those numbers, did you?”

“No.”

“Who else has them?”

“Everybody in the show.”

“I mean, who’d you give them to?”

“My agent, of course. And my mother. A few friends...”

“How about your sister?”

“My sister doesn’t make phone calls.”

“What do you mean?”

“My sister is in Whiting.”

“Whiting?”

“The Whiting Forensic Institute. In Middletown, Connecticut.”

The band is playing “Gently, Sweetly.” A male vocalist croons into the microphone. A mirrored globe rotates over the dance floor. Spotlights strike its myriad facets and beam splinters of reflected light to every corner of the room. Across the table, Kate’s face seems shattered with light.

“It’s a maximum security hospital,” she says.

“Gently...”

“For the criminally insane.”

“Sweetly...”

“Burning down the house was just the start.”

“More and more...”

“Completely...”

“She tried to kill my father.”

“Take me...”

“Make me...”

“Yours.”

The band’s saxophone section — two altos and two tenors — modulates from the singer’s key to a somewhat higher one that lends a soaring semblance to the next chorus.

David is staring at her now.

“Yes,” she says, and nods in dismissal.

The song ends.

They order coffee.

They hold hands across the table.

They dance some more.

She doesn’t wish to discuss her sister further at this present time, thank you.

He respects her wishes.

Frankly, he doesn’t want to open that can of worms, anyway.

When she excuses herself to go to the ladies’ room, he tells her he’ll meet her near the coat check at the front door, and then pays the check and goes to the men’s room.

Dr. Chris Fielding is pissing in the urinal alongside his.

“David!” he says, cock in hand, “how are you?”

“Fine, fine, Chris, and you?” David says, unzipping his fly, thinking Jesus, did he spot us on the dance floor, does he know I’m here with, Jesus, Helen knows him, Helen knows his wife, Jesus Christ!

Side by side, they urinate.

“How do you like this place?” Chris asks.

“Great, great.”

“What does Helen think?”

Helen?

Helen thinks I’m listening to Dr. Gianfranco Donato giving a talk on Learning and Motor Skill Disorders at the Lotos Club, is what Helen thinks, he thinks, and immediately says, “I’m here alone. Helen’s on the Vineyard.”

“Oh?” Chris says.

“I love listening to these old songs,” David says. “It’s a great band. Sounds much bigger than it is,” he says, quoting New York magazine. “And the steaks are terrific.”

“So they are, so they are,” Chris says, a trifle in his cups, giving his cock a little shake with each repetitive observation.

But Kate is waiting at the coat check.

No one needs coats in this sweltering August, but she is waiting there nonetheless, looking eminently gorgeous in her little black Fuck Me dress and strapped high-heeled Fuck Me shoes and sheer black Fuck Me jacket. And as fate would have it, as fate always fucking does, mousy Melanie Fielding is also waiting at the coat check as Chris Fielding — Question: What do you call the guy who ranked last in his class in medical school? Answer: Doctor — Dr. Chris Fielding, then, staggers his way toward his wife with David close behind him, trying to catch Kate’s eye, but she seems thoroughly absorbed in reading the framed reviews of the place hanging on the entrance wall, her back to him, “David, hello, what are you doing here?”

This from Melanie Fielding, who spots him now and quickly looks past him to see where Helen might be. For this is a place where couples come to dance, no? What then...?

Kate has turned.

Please, he thinks. Be smart.

You’re smart.

Be smart.

“Hi, Melanie,” he says, and takes her hand, and leans into her, and kisses the air beside her cheek, and says, “I love this big-band stuff, Helen’s on the Vineyard...”

“She’s on the Vineyard,” Chris says blearily.

“...and the steaks are terrific.”

“Oh, what a shame,” Melanie says.

Kate is walking out the door.

“Give her my love, won’t you?” Melanie says.

“I’ll be talking to her in...”

David looks at his watch.

“...a half hour.”

“Give her my love.”

“I will.”

“Mine, too,” Chris says.

There is only one message on her answering machine when they get back to her apartment at eleven that Wednesday night. It is from Rickie Diaz.

“Hi, Kate,” he says, “who’s that answering your machine?”

“None of your business,” she says.

“I was hoping I could see you this Friday night. I have tickets for the Mets game, and I thought you might like to go with me.”

“Nope,” Kate says.

“I don’t know if you like baseball or not...”

“I hate baseball.”

“...but let me know either way, okay? You have the number, give me a call. Thanks.”

“Friday night, I’ll be down in New Hope,” Kate says, and tosses the gossamer jacket over the back of a chair.

“I have to call Helen,” David says.

“Sure,” she answers. “I’ll go hide in the bathroom.”

She blows a kiss at him, and goes into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. As he dials the number in Menemsha, he hears the water running. He is on the phone with Helen for perhaps five minutes, telling her he went to this place in the Village, highly recommended by New York magazine, where he had a steak and, oh, guess what, he ran into Chris and Melanie Fielding, they both send their love. Annie gets on the phone, wanting to know when he’ll be coming home — both girls already think of the Menemsha cottage as home — and he tells them he’ll be up on Saturday morning, and she tells him she caught a frog and she has him in a jar and his name is Kermit. In the background, David hears Jenny say, “How original.” He speaks to her for a few minutes, and then Helen gets back on the line and they talk for a few minutes more before they say goodnight.

A narrow line of light is showing under the bathroom door.

The water is still running.

“Kate?” he calls softly.

The air conditioner is clattering noisily.

“Kate?”

He walks to the bathroom door and knocks gently.

“Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course. Come in.”

The bathroom is full of steam. She is lying in the tub under a mountain of bubbles. Her hair is wrapped in a white towel, a single red tendril curling on her forehead like a tiny wet serpent. Her arm comes out of the water. She turns off the faucet, and then pats the rim of the tub. “Come sit,” she says.

Soapsuds cling to her fingers.

There is an odd little smile on her face.

He sits on the edge of the tub.

She slides deeper under the suds, closes her eyes, rests the back of her head on the white porcelain rim. “Do you remember the movie 1984?” she asks.

“Yes?”

“Where the thing he fears most, the hero, I forget his name...”

“Smith.”

“Yes, he fears rats more than anything in the world. And what they do to him, what Richard Burton does to him, is put this cage over his face where there’s a rat in one end of it, but the rat can’t get at his face because there’s a sort of partition that keeps him away. What Burton is trying to do is get John Hurt... that’s who played the hero... to betray his girlfriend, her name is Julia. So he starts opening this little partition that separates Hurt’s face from the rat, this little sort of gate that pulls up, or to the side, I forget which, and as it’s starting to open Hurt yells, ‘Do it to Julia!’ I was thinking of that before you knocked on the door,” she says.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Richard Burton opening the gate. I just happened to think of it.”

“Who’s Julia?” he asks.

“The girl in the movie.”

“Yes, but you mentioned her once before.”

“I don’t know anyone named Julia.”

“But don’t you remember saying...?”

“Even when I read the book, I found that scene frightening.”

“When was that?”

“The summer I worked at the Playhouse.”

“The summer you were thirteen?”

“Yes. But, listen, David, if you’re going to play shrink, I’ve been over this a hundred times already, really. I don’t enjoy...”

“Over what?”

“What happened. I was in analysis for six years, you know. Jacqueline and I...”

“What do you mean, what happened?”

“What happened.”

“At the theater? With Charlie?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about this.”

“What happened, Kate?”

“I’ve talked about it enough. I’m sick of talking about it. I’m sick of my goddamn sister and her goddamn prob—”

“Did it have something to do with your sister?”

“No.”

“You told me she set the house on fire...”

“That was three years later. I also told you I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Who’s Julia?”

“Nobody.”

“Don’t you remember saying something about my doing it to Julia...”

“No.”

“...on the Vineyard...”

“No.”

“...when I should have been doing it to you?”

“I never said anything like that.”

“Yesterday morning. In the car.”

“I know your wife’s name is Helen. Anyway, let’s not talk about her, either. And you’d better not be doing it to her.”

“Why’d she try to kill your father?”

“Who, Helen?”

“Kate, you know who I’m...”

“Who, Julia?”

“Your sister. Who’s in a maximum security hospital for the criminally...”

“Go ask her, you’re so interested.”

The room goes silent. She nods in curt dismissal. The mirror over the sink is dripping with mist. Everything looks slippery and wet.

“Put your hand in the water,” she says.

The same little smile reappears on her face.

“No sharks in here,” she says playfully.

Tilts her head to one side. Towel wrapped around it like a turban.

“Give me your hand, okay?” she says.

Smiling.

“Don’t you want to?”

Lifting one eyebrow.

“Say.”

Her voice turning suddenly harsh.

“Do it!”

He plunges his hand into the foam, wetting his sleeve to the elbow.

“Yes,” she says.

And finds her.

“Yes.”

“I want to get away for a few days,” he hears himself telling Stanley. “Tonight and tomorrow night. Go down to New Hope maybe. Or someplace else in Pennsylvania. I’ll fly back to the Vineyard on Saturday, from wherever I happen to be.”

“Why?”

Careful, he thinks.

“I’m getting cabin fever,” he says.

“But I’m not, Davey.”

Davey? he thinks. When did I get to be Davey? Just when I was getting used to being Dave.

Stanley has taken the subway downtown to Fifty-ninth and Lex, and has met David outside Bloomingdale’s, as arranged. Their Thursday morning stroll takes place on East Fifty-seventh Street as the two men saunter westward toward Victoria’s Secret, where Stanley hopes to purchase lingerie suitable for his nineteen-year-old delight.

“I don’t want to leave the city,” he says. “I even hate having to go out for food. So why would I choose to go to New Hope, of all places? I’m perfectly happy doing just what I’m doing. Life is sweet, Davey, and time is short.”

He is dressed for his lingerie-shopping expedition in clothes that look as if he’s slept in them. Perhaps he has. Aside from Tuesday night’s visit to Bertinelli’s, he and Cindy have not budged from his office. His beard has grown several inches since the last time David saw him. He looks like a homeless person who hasn’t shaved in a month. A derelict who sleeps on the sidewalk in a cardboard box or else on a black leather couch in some philandering psychiatrist’s office. He can’t wait to get back to his little Cindy. He wants to buy her some crotchless panties and a garter belt...

“I don’t think they sell crotchless panties,” David says.

“Oh, of course they do.”

“Victoria’s Secret, I mean.”

“Then I’ll find them someplace else. You ought to buy some panties for Helen today,” he suggests. “I certainly plan to buy some for Gerry.”

“Stanley, let’s get back to this, okay?”

“Davey, I do not want to leave the city.”

“I do.”

“Why are you so eager to get out of town?”

Their eyes meet.

He knows, David thinks.

“I’m bored,” he says.

“So go eat your chocolates.”

David doesn’t get the reference. Nor does Stanley bother to explain it. They are approaching Victoria’s Secret now. Stanley looks in the window. He doesn’t see any crotchless panties, and he confesses that he’s somewhat embarrassed to go inside and ask for them. Will David ask the salesclerk for a pair of crotchless panties, size five?

“They don’t carry crotchless panties,” David says.

“Would it hurt to ask?”

“I’ll ask, but it’ll be a waste of time.”

“So will any story we give our wives about getting out of town.”

David looks at him.

“I’ve been at this a long time, hmm?” Stanley says with his crooked little shark grin buried in his beard. “Not with a patient, that’s a first. And never with a nineteen-year-old, that’s a first, too. But a long time, Davey. A long long time. And I can tell you what a woman will buy and what a woman will not buy. And no woman’s going to believe that thirty psychiatrists attending a conference in New York are going to shlepp all the way down to New Hope...”

“It doesn’t have to be New Hope.”

“Wherever the hell. It won’t wash, Davey. They won’t buy it. And if we try to sell it, we’d be jeopardizing everything we have going for us. So the answer is no.”

“Stanley...”

“No,” he says again.

And of course he’s right.

And of course he knows.

Luis the doorman seems pleased to see him, and asks how Mrs. Chapman and the “leetle gorls” are enjoying the seashore. David tells him they’re fine, thanks, just fine, and then goes to the lobby mailbox to see if anything has collected there. He is here at the building only to establish a pattern in the unlikely event Helen and Luis ever get into a conversation about his comings and goings. He goes upstairs as part of the deception. Ten minutes later, he is downstairs again and walking uptown to his office.

Gualterio, the doorman there, seems equally happy to see him and asks if he is already back at work again. David tells him he’s here for some lectures and won’t begin seeing patients again till the fifth of September, the day after Labor Day. Gualterio tells him to enjoy the rest of the summer, and then rushes to the curb when a taxi pulls up.

Again David is here only to establish a pattern; all is pattern, all is deceit. He checks for mail, goes into his office, sits behind his desk. Dust motes restlessly climb the shaft of sunshine slanting in through the blinds. On impulse, he looks through his Wheeldex for Jacqueline Hicks’s office number, and then debates calling her.

But why would he want to?

And what will he say if he reaches her?

Hi, I’m having an affair with a former patient of yours, and I was wondering if you might be able to give me any insights into her behavior?

Absurd.

He dials the number, anyway.

An answering machine tells him Dr. Hicks is away for the summer.

Tonight, Kate is wearing an outfit designed to complement the setting she herself has chosen. For this is moonlight and roses, this is candlelight and wine, this is soft violins and soft-spoken waiters, this is cautious footfalls and discreet silences. To echo this faintly Mozartian locale, or perhaps to startle it into modernity, she has chosen to wear a very short double-layered silk organza dress, its bottom layer an apricot color, its top layer a gossamer tangerine — “They had it in blue and green,” she says, “but Fee the Fair says blue and green should never be seen.” She looks like a frothy double-flavored cotton-candy confection. Her long legs are bare, her feet slippered in high-heeled tangerine-colored patent-leather slides. A misty blue eye makeup causes her green eyes to snap and snarl.

He remembers the joke Stanley fumbled so badly this morning, and he tells it to Kate as they wait for their dinners to arrive. They are sipping champagne. He remembers the bottle of champagne in the limo. He remembers everything about her. It is almost as if she has been a part of his life forever.

It seems this little boy is sitting in his first-grade class with his hand in his lap when his teacher spots him. “What are you doing there?” she asks, and he tells her he’s playing with his balls. “Why are you doing that?” she asks, and he tells her he’s lonely. “Oh, you’re lonely, are you?” she says, and she drags him down the hall to the principal’s office, and whispers in his ear, and leaves the two of them alone. It isn’t long before the kid’s hand is in his lap again...

“I love it,” Kate says.

...and the principal asks what he’s doing there and he says he’s playing with his balls and the principal asks why and the kid says because he’s lonely and the principal sends for the kid’s parents and they decide to remand the kid to a psychiatrist.

“Enter the shrink,” Kate says.

“So they take the kid to a psychiatrist,” David says, “and the two of them sit staring at each other for a little while until the kid’s hand at last drops into his lap again, and the psychiatrist asks, ‘Vot are you zoing dere?’ Well, the kid tells him he’s playing with his balls, and the psychiatrist asks, ‘Vhy are you zoing dat?’ And the kid tells him it’s because he’s lonely, and the psychiatrist says, ‘Oh, come now, lonely. Vot are you, fife, zix years oldt? How can you bossibly be...?’ and the telephone rings on his desk. He picks it up, listens, says, ‘Ja, hold on vun minute, please,’ and excuses himself to go take the call in the other room. When he comes back to his office, he sits behind his desk and says, ‘Zo tell me, how can a poy, fife, zix years...’ and stops dead and looks at his desk and says, ‘Vhen I left zis office, dere vass a two-pound pox of chocolates on z’desk. Now z’chocolates are all gone. Zid you eat z’chocolates?’ The kid tells him Yes, he ate the chocolates. ‘Vhy zid you do dat?’ the psychiatrist asks. ‘I vass gone only fife minutes, you ate a whole two-pound pox of chocolates? Vhy?’ The kid says, ‘Because I was lonely.’ And the psychiatrist says, ‘Zo vhy didn’t you play vid your palls?’”

Kate bursts out laughing.

“Stanley got it all wrong, though,” David says. “He told me to go eat my chocolates. Anyway, he said no.”

Her laughter trails.

She nods.

“So let’s hope nothing happens,” she says.

There are two messages on her machine.

The first is from Rickie Diaz.

“Hi, this is Rickie again,” he says. “I’m wondering if you got my message about the Mets game. I don’t want to rush you or anything, but I really would like to know if you think you can make it. Can you give me a call when you get a chance? The game is this Friday night... well, tomorrow night, in fact, I guess, so try to get back to me, okay? Thanks a lot, Kate. Talk to you soon. I hope.”

Kate shrugs.

The second message is from Helen.

“David, where are you?” she says. “Can you please call me when you get in? There’s something I forgot to mention when we spoke earlier. Love you. Bye.”

David looks at his watch.

“I’d better call her,” he says.

“Sure,” Kate says, and goes across the room to sit on the sofa. She watches him as he dials.

“Hi, sweetie,” he says.

“Hi, how’d the lecture go?”

“It was very good, in fact.”

“Where’d you eat?”

“I grabbed a sandwich before it started.”

“With Stanley?”

“No, alone.”

“He’s not so bad, is he?”

“He’s awful.”

Helen laughs.

On the sofa across the room, Kate watches and listens.

“Do you think you’ll have time to do something for me tomorrow?” Helen asks. “Before you come up?”

“Well, I won’t be coming up till Saturday, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Saturday morning. I’ll be on the...”

“I know. I didn’t mean you’d be coming up tomorrow, I meant can you do something for me tomorrow.”

“Sure, what is it, hon?”

Hon, he thinks. Sweetie, he thinks. Kate is hearing all this, he thinks. Cat-eyed, she watches him, her face expressionless.

“Do you know that little shop on Madison and I think it’s Sixty-second or — third? I don’t remember the name, but they sell all kinds of kooky handcrafted jewelry and things?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Do you remember it? We bought Aunt Lily’s Christmas gift there last year. The quilted cat.”

“Is that the name?”

“No, that’s what we bought her.”

“Oh. Yes, I think I remember it.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“Neither do I. But I’ll find it. What did you want?”

“Can you see if they’ve got something really beautiful but not too expensive that would make a nice birthday gift for Danielle? Harry’s throwing a surprise party for her on Saturday night, and I haven’t been able to find anything really nice up here. You know how she dresses...”

“Yes.”

“Very chic, very French. I thought something in that oxidized metal, whatever it’s called, eulithium, eulirium, delirium...”

David laughs.

“...whatever, some nice dangling earrings maybe, but not too expensive.”

“How much is too expensive?”

“Anything over a hundred dollars.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“Well, you can’t get anything nice for less than a hundred, but don’t spend more than that.”

“I’ll go there first thing.”

“I don’t think they open till ten.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“When will you call again?”

“Tomorrow sometime? After the morning panel?”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I love you, David.”

“I love you, too.”

“Good night, honey.”

“Good night.”

He puts the receiver down gently.

“You miss her so much, why don’t you just go up there?” Kate asks at once.

“Honey,” he says, “I...”

“No, don’t ‘honey’ me,” she says. “She’s your honey, don’t give me any of that honey shit. You want her so much, just get out of here. Go do it to her, you want her so much.”

And suddenly she’s in tears.

He goes to the sofa and tries to take her in his arms, but she shrugs him away, telling him she’s the one in danger here, she’s the one getting phone calls at the theater from a lunatic, but instead Helen’s the one who gets all his attention, Helen can feel free to call here at any hour of the day or night...

“Honey, the call was forwa—”

“I told you not to call me that. Don’t you ever call me honey again, do you hear me? Call her honey if you want to call someone honey. But don’t call me honey, not anymore, do you hear me?”

She is sitting in the center of the sofa in her misty little delicate apricot and tangerine dress. Tears are rolling down her face, hands clenched in her lap. He wonders why it has come to this again, Kate in tears. Where has his exciting young mistress gone? Who is this troubled woman in her place?

“Kate,” he says, “I love you.”

“Sure.”

“You know that, Kate.”

But he is wondering.

“Then why don’t you do something?” she asks.

“What would you like me...?”

“You can go shopping for her...”

“Kate, I’ll do anything you...”

“But you can’t do one simple fucking thing for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Take the letters to Clancy. I want to make sure they’re safe in his hands. Tell him to come here. Tell him I want to press charges against this person who’s ruining my life. I want this to stop, do you understand me?”

“Yes. But in all honesty, Kate, I think it would be more effective...”

“Is something wrong with you? I’m being watched, can’t you understand that? Are you afraid to go, is that it?”

“I’m thinking of you, Kate. I’m trying to find the best way...”

“Are you afraid he’ll find out you’re fucking me?”

“Of course not!”

But he knows she’s right.

“Are you afraid he’ll tell Mama?”

“You know that’s not...”

But it is.

“Tell Helen up there on the Vineyard? Give her a call and say, ‘Hey, guess what, Mrs. Chapman, your husband’s diddling a dancer in Cats, did you know that?’”

“I’m not afraid of anything like...”

But he is.

“Then why won’t you take the letters to him?”

“I will. If that’s what you want. That’s...”

“I mean, I realize it’ll be difficult for you, but at least nobody’s about to kill you, is he?”

“Nobody’s about to kill you, either.”

“No? Then why is he hounding me?”

David sighs heavily. He knows her fear is appropriate; there is, after all, a very real person out there threatening her. But her behavior of the moment seems somewhat irrational, no? A bit peculiar? A tad bizarre? A trifle off the fucking wall, vouldn’t you zay, Doktor? He is an analyst, after all, and not a pig farmer, and he knows a fit of hysterics when it erupts in his presence. But he’s not her analyst, is he? And besides, maybe he’s wrong. After six years with Jackie — admittedly not the best in the business, but certainly capable enough — Kate may have entirely put to rest whatever was haunting her. Either way, it’s not his problem, is it?

He wonders again where his sweet young mistress has gone. Will this ranting young woman on the couch — how appropriate that she’s on a couch, he thinks — next confess that she has a weeping boil on her ass? Quite frankly, he doesn’t want to hear about it. Until ten minutes ago, she was his lover. When did she get to be his patient? Tell it to Julia, he thinks.

Maybe he is a pig farmer, after all.

Maybe all he ever wanted from her was exactly what she’d provided all along. Maybe all he wanted was an eternal roll in the hay with a flaky twenty-seven-year-old dancer. Maybe the only difference between him and Stanley Beckerman, after all, was the eight-year age gap between their respective little roundheel darlings. Maybe if he grew an unsightly beard and dressed in clothes he found in a Dumpster, he’d be Stanley Beckerman exactly.

No, he is not Stanley Beckerman.

Nor was meant to be.

“Kate,” he says patiently, soothingly, “the man is a classic...”

“Please don’t give me any shrink bullshit, okay?” she says. “All I know is you won’t take the letters to Clancy...”

“I just told you I would.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Go now.”

“Now? It’s almost midnight.”

“So? Don’t cops work past midnight?”

“I’m sure it can wait till tomorrow morning.”

“Sure. Let him come here tonight and kill both of us...”

“Nobody’s coming here to...”

“...in our own fucking bed!”

“Kate, try to calm down, okay?”

“He knows where I live, he’ll figure out a way to get in here. Even if we double-lock the door...”

“Kate, there’s no way he can...”

“He knows how to do things!”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Is he making sense?”

“He’s a fucking lunatic!”

“Exactly! Suppose he comes here tonight? Suppose...?”

“I’m here tonight,” he says simply.

She looks at him.

She nods.

“Then promise me you’ll go first thing tomorrow.”

“I promise you.”

“Because I want this to end.”

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

“It has to end, David.”

“I know,” he says.

It already has, he thinks.

Here in this office where he has helped so many other troubled people in the past, he sits behind his desk on Friday morning, and tries to determine how best he can help this troubled person who has been a part of his life for the past month and more. He has promised her he will go to the police, but he realizes the danger inherent in such an act. How can he explain that an encounter presumably ended after July’s lineup has apparently blossomed by August into a relationship close enough for him to be running this errand for her?

Kate. From the park. The victim, remember?

He can visualize Clancy’s cold blue eyes frisking him.

Just how well do you know this young girl, Dr. Chapman?

Well... ah... casually. This is a... ah... casual relationship.

The cold blue eyes mugging him.

And yet, it had to be done. David suspects that the man harassing Kate is as harmless as most of the obsessive stalkers out there, but the possibility that he might become truly dangerous makes it imperative that the police go to see her at once. The trick is to alert them without...

Are you afraid he’ll find out you’re fucking me?

Yes, he thinks.

The trick, then, is ending this honorably and decently without creating any problems for himself.

And, yes, of course, without causing unnecessary hurt and additional damage to a person obviously traumatized sometime long ago. And still struggling — despite Jacqueline Hicks’s treatment — to understand whatever the hell happened to her back then.

He looks up the number of the precinct.

He hesitates a moment, his hand resting on the receiver. Then he picks up the receiver and dials the number, and tells the sergeant who answers the phone that he would like to talk to Detective Clancy, please.

“Clancy’s on vacation,” the sergeant says.

“Can you tell me when he’ll be back?”

“Monday morning, eight o’clock. One of the other detectives help you?”

He hesitates for merely the briefest tick of time.

“Thanks, I’ll try him later,” he says, and hangs up.

Reprieve, he thinks.

Oddly, his heart is beating very rapidly.

He sits quite motionless behind his desk.

He picks up the receiver again, dials another number.

“Hello?” Stanley says.

His voice sounds groggy but wary.

“Stanley, would you happen to know where Jacqueline Hicks goes on vacation?”

“Who is this?”

“David Chapman.”

“What?”

“I need Jacqueline’s...”

“Do you know what time it is, Davey?”

“Yes, it’s ten o’clock.”

“Yes, exactly. We’re still asleep, Davey.”

“This is urgent,” David says.

Urgent? he thinks.

Stanley sighs in exasperation. In the background, David hears a very young voice asking, “Who is it, Stan?”

“A colleague,” Stanley answers gruffly. “Just a second,” he says into the phone. David hears muted voices in the background, and then what sounds like drawers opening and slamming shut. He visualizes young Cindy on the black leather couch, watching her analyst stamping around his office naked. He wonders how Stanley is explaining to his wife the peculiar habit he has developed of sleeping at the office these days. He guesses Stanley has never heard of call forwarding. Or perhaps young Cindy Harris doesn’t have her own apartment. Perhaps she still lives with her parents.

“This is two years old,” Stanley says into the phone.

Like your little playmate, David thinks.

“Jackie used to go to East Hampton. I don’t know if she still does.”

“Could I have the number, please?”

Stanley reads it off to him. David writes it down on the phone pad and then draws a picture of the sun shining over it.

“Thank you, Stanley,” he says. “I really apprec—”

“I’ll see you at the lecture tonight,” Stanley says, hitting the word so hard that anyone listening would immediately know there is no lecture. “And, Davey... don’t call me at the crack of dawn anymore, hmm?” he says, and hangs up.

David looks at the East Hampton number with the sun shining benevolently above it.

What am I doing? he wonders.

He dials the number.

A man’s voice on the answering machine says, “No one is here to take your call just now. Please leave your name and number when you hear the tone. Thank you.”

David wonders if everyone in the world has Call Forwarding.

He does not leave a message.

The office seems inordinately silent. For a moment, he wishes for the voices of Arthur K, Susan M, Alex J, resonating against the tin ceiling of the room. He wishes for all the great motion pictures of the past.

He shakes the letters out of Clancy’s manila evidence envelope.

They sit on his desk in slanting sunlight, the thick cream-colored envelopes, the lurid purple ink. He must deliver these letters. He has promised to deliver these letters. But Clancy is away and won’t be back till Monday.

He takes a piece of stationery from the top drawer of his desk. His name and office address are across the top of it. He rolls the sheet of paper into his typewriter and begins typing:

He rereads the letter, and signs it in the space above his typed name, and reads it again, and reads it yet another time and another time after that. He thinks he has covered everything. More important, he thinks he has covered himself.

In the stillness of his office, he nods, convinced that he is doing the right thing, pleased that he is doing it in a way that will help Kate and not cause any problems for himself. He opens the lower right-hand drawer of his desk and takes from it the NYNEX Yellow Pages for Manhattan. He finds the number he is looking for — 777–6500 — dials it, and asks for the location of the branch office closest to Ninety-sixth and Madison. He is told there’s one at 208 East Eighty-sixth Street, between Second and Third. He looks at his watch. It is almost eleven o’clock. He makes a Xerox copy of his letter and then calls Kate’s apartment and asks her if she can meet him for lunch in an hour.

“Did you take the letters to Clancy?” she asks.

“No.”

“No? Why not? You prom—”

“He’s on vacation.”

“When will he be back?”

“Monday. He’ll have them by then, don’t worry.”

“You won’t be here Monday.”

“I know. But he’ll have them.”

“But you won’t be here.”

“I know that, honey.”

Honey, he thinks.

“Then how can...?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you,” he says. “You’ll be pleased.”

“Okay,” she says, sounding suddenly relieved. “Where shall I meet you?”

Before he leaves the office, he tries Jacqueline Hicks’s number again, and once again gets her goddamn answering machine.

Over lunch, he shows Kate the Xerox copy of his letter, and tells her he sent the package by Federal Express from their office on Eighty-sixth. Although he could have opted for delivery tomorrow morning, he knew Clancy wouldn’t be back by then, so he’d settled on Monday morning delivery instead.

This doesn’t seem to please her.

She asks why he didn’t just go to the police station and give the letters to some other detective.

“I thought Clancy would pay closer attention to them.”

A lie.

Now he is even lying to her.

“Him knowing you, I mean.”

Embroidering the lie.

“You mean you didn’t want to get involved, isn’t that what you mean?”

“Well, no...”

“Well, yes,” she says. “But that’s okay. I know you’re married, listen. I just hope the letters don’t get lost.”

“FedEx is very good.”

“I hope so.”

“What I thought I’d do, I’d follow up with a phone call from the Vineyard...”

“Could you do that?”

“Yes. Of course. Make sure Clancy got the package, make sure he plans to come see you.”

“Oh, David, thank you,” she says, and reaches across the table to take his hand between both hers. Her fingernails are painted to match her short, pale blue, pleated skirt and cotton top. She is wearing strappy low-heeled blue sandals. There is blue shadow over her sparkling green eyes. She seems happier now. She does not yet know he plans to end it this afternoon.

They walk in the park after lunch.

“This is where we met,” she says.

“Yes.”

“The last day of June,” she says.

It is insufferably hot and clammy today. Waves of mist rise from the foliage on either side of them, drifting over the path so that it seems they are in a movie about Heaven, where clouds are billowing up underfoot as they walk.

“I spoke to Gloria this morning,” she tells him, and glances sidelong at him. “She wants to join us tonight.”

“I’d rather she didn’t,” he says.

“Oh come on, I know you’d like her there.”

“No, really.”

“Gloria? Come on.”

“Really,” he says.

“Well... that’s very nice of you,” she says, sounding pleasantly surprised.

He is wondering how he can tell her it’s over.

“Of course, that’s what Jacqueline would love,” she says.

He turns to look at her, puzzled.

“No more Glorias,” she says.

The mist shifts ceaselessly around them. They seem to be alone in the park. Alone in the world. Alone in the universe.

“No more Davids, in fact,” she says.

He wonders for a moment if she is about to tell him she wants to end it. But that would be too ironic. Letting him off the hook that way.

“But, of course, I love you,” she says.

He says nothing.

“So how can there be no more Davids?”

He’s not sure what she means. He remains silent.

“Jackie says I’ve mastered the art of restaging the Incident, you see...”

“The what?”

“The terrible trauma of my youth...”

Joking about it. But he’s too smart for that, he’s an analyst.

“...so that each time it’s performed, so to speak, I’m the one in control. Like a director shooting through a lens smeared with Vaseline, do you know?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Softening the outlines. The way the fog here in the park is softening everything. Blurring the edges of reality. So that everything is beautiful at the ballet again, nothing is threatening, all is serene.”

Her voice itself sounds utterly serene, too, in sharp contrast to its hysterical stridency last night. He knows instinctively and at once that she is about to tell him something of vital importance, but he does not want to hear it, not now when he is on the edge of telling her something of vital importance to himself. Or rather, something of vital importance to David Chapman, Lover Boy, erstwhile Lover Boy, former Lover Boy who is about to lower the ax while Dr. David Chapman should be listening to what this troubled young woman is attempting to say. He remembers quite suddenly and with a pang of guilt, the oath he took once upon a time, when the world was young and covered with mist.

“Would you like to sit?” he asks.

The bench is green and flaking, it rises from the mist like a floating couch. In the mist, side by side, they sit silently on the bench. She is quiet for what seems a very long time, but he is accustomed to long silences and he waits. She keeps staring into the mist as if peering into a past too distant to fathom. He has been through this scene before. He waits. Patiently, silently, he waits.

“What I do, you see...”

She takes a deep breath.

He waits.

“I find a man old enough to be my father, some middle-aged man, you see, and I allow him, nay, invite him to do anything and everything he wishes to do to me. I guess you know that. I guess you know that’s what I do. I keep looking for the Davids of the world, over and over again.”

He says nothing.

“And then I... I bring in a Gloria, cast her in the leading role, a woman rather than a child, and transform her into a willing accomplice rather than a victim. Is what Jacqueline says I do. Over and over again. Because I’m just a cunt, you see.”

“I can’t believe Jacqueline said that,” he says.

“No, not the cunt part. The cunt part came from a higher authority.”

“Tell me,” he says.

His soothing, analytical voice. Dr. David Chapman speaking. Who is still ready to end his romance with this beautiful young woman who sits on a green bench wearing pale blue that fades into a paler gray mist, but who listens, anyway. Her eyes, he sees, are brimming with tears.

“Oh dear,” she says, and falls silent.

He is afraid he will lose her in the shifting mist. But no, she begins speaking again in a voice as soft as the fog itself, a rolling haze enveloping her as she sinks yet another time into an embracing cloud of memory. Now there is mist of quite another sort, a hot wet mist that fills a remembered steamy bathroom long ago...

“I’m wrapped in a big white towel in a room full of steam,” she says.

...toweling herself dry before a mirror clouded with steam, wiping a portion of the mirror clear with one edge of the towel, seeing her own shining, thirteen-year-old reflection in the glass.

“Everything in the mirror, everything in the room is soft and hazy, and there’s music playing somewhere far below, somewhere out of sight, drifting, floating. It’s the beginning of August, and there’s a full moon, and the night is soft and hot and misty...”

Eleven-year-old Bess is in the tub across the room, Kate can see her reflection in the big irregular circle she’s cleared on the mirror. Her sister is smiling. Luxuriating in a sea of suds, only her face and her toes showing, upswept red hair spilling in ringlets onto her brow, she moves her head idly in time to the sweet strains of music floating upstairs from the living room below.

— Gently...

— Sweetly...

It is a Sunday night. The Playhouse is dark tonight, which is why Kate is home at ten o’clock, preparing for bed. Fee the Fair has gone to a movie with a woman the girls call the USS Hawaii because she weighs two thousand pounds and always wears muu muus. Kate’s father is downstairs listening to his old records.

— Ever so...

— Discreetly...

The faucet over the sink needs a new washer. It drips intermittently against the white porcelain as counterpoint to the lovely lyrics flooding the house.

— Open...

— Secret...

— Doors.

Lean and bony Kate stands in front of the misted bathroom mirror, drying herself in the large white puffy towel. Bess, precociously budding at the age of eleven, sits up in the tub and begins soaping herself.

— Gently...

— Sweetly...

— Ever so...

The bathroom door opens.

— Completely...

Kate’s father appears suddenly in the door frame, an odd little smile on his face. He is wearing a green robe over white pajamas, the robe belted at the waist, no slippers.

“Good evening, ladies,” he says.

Bess says, “Oops!” and immediately slides under the suds, only her head showing from the neck up. Kate hugs the towel to her and says, “Daa-aad, we’re in here.”

“So I see, so I see,” her father says.

Kate suddenly smells alcohol on his breath.

— Tell me...

— I’ll be

— Yours.

“Come on, Dad,” she says playfully, wondering what the hell’s the matter with him, can’t he see they’re in here? But of course he can see they’re in here, he knew they were in here when he opened the door and walked in. The funny little smile is still on his face.

“Just wanted to check,” he says. “Make sure you weren’t drowning or anything. Hello, Bessie,” he says, waggling his fingers at her. “How’s my little darlin’?”

“Fine, Dad.”

She, too, looks puzzled. She has sunk even lower under the suds. The water just covers her chin. Her green eyes are wide above the white foam.

“Dad, we have to get dressed now,” Kate suggests gently.

“I used to change your diapers,” he says. “Powdered your little behinds, too.”

“Why don’t you go down and listen to your music?” Kate suggests gently.

“No, I’ll be going to sleep now,” he says.

“Goodnight, Dad,” Bess immediately chirps from the tub.

“Goodnight, Dad,” Kate says at once.

“Where’s my goodnight kiss?” he asks. “No goodnight kiss?” And takes a step toward her. She is still clutching the towel tightly to her, her knuckles just under her chin, the towel cascading to just below her knees.

— Here with a kiss...

— In the mist, on the shore...

He leans into her and cups her chin in his hand and kisses her full on the mouth.

— Sip from my lips...

— And whisper...

— I adore you.

And kisses her again.

Kate is terrified. But she is excited, too. She can feel her father’s hardness under his robe and pajamas, feel him stiff and probing through the thick towel shaking in her hands. “So tender,” he says, and reaches behind her and pulls her to him, and she feels his huge hand spread wide on one naked buttock and suddenly he yanks the towel away with his free hand and she is standing naked and trembling before him.

— Gently...

— Sweetly...

“Dad, no,” she says, “please.”

“Shhh, Katie, darlin’,” he says.

— More and more...

— Completely...

“Please, no, Dad,” she says, because now she can see him huge and purple and throbbing in the opening of the robe, “Shhh, Katie, shhh,” and she tries to hold him away but he is pressing her naked against the sink, lunging at her below, until at last she turns sidewards to deflect his thrust with her hip, and slips out of his grasp.

— Take me...

— Make me...

— Yours.

Huddling against the wall with the narrow window high above it, moonlight yellow in the blackness outside, she cowers in fear against the towels on the rack below the window and all she can think to whisper into the suffocating steam-filled room is, “Do it to her.”

Downstairs, the music in the living room soars to a crescendo and ends abruptly.

The house is still except for the dripping of the water faucet in the bathroom sink.

“As you wish, Katie,” he says, absolving himself of all guilt, the dutiful father merely following his favorite daughter’s instructions. He actually makes a courtly drunken bow to her, and then turns away and walks rather jauntily to where Bess lies wide-eyed in the tub. The suds are dissipating. Patches of her tanned body show through the tattering white.

“Any sharks in here?” he asks playfully. “Anything going to bite me in here?” and thrusts both hands into the water, reaching under the suds for her, soaking his robe to the elbows. She tries to slip away from him, darting like a fish as he searches for purchase under the foam, saying, “Daddy, please,” and “Daddy, stop,” water splashing everywhere until finally he gets a firm handhold between her legs and yanks her out of the suds slippery and wet and squirming and struggling and kicking and bursting into tears and sobbing, “Help me, Kate, don’t let him!” but Kate does nothing.

She is the one, after all, who made the single wish impossible to retract, and he is doing now to Bessie what he would have done to Kate herself had she not suggested otherwise. As she watches in fear and loathing and shame and excitement, a thin trickle of urine runs down the inside of her leg.

In the mist, side by side, they sit silently on the bench.

He puts his arm around her.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says gently.

“So they keep telling me,” she says.

“You weren’t to blame,” he says.

“I should have locked the door,” she says, and turns her head into his shoulder and begins weeping bitterly.

In bed that night, she says, “Would you mind if we didn’t make love tonight, David?”

No more Davids, he thinks.

“I’m simply exhausted,” she says.

The alarm clock goes off at seven A.M.

“What time is your plane?” she whispers.

“Eight-thirty.”

“Will you make it?”

“Oh sure.”

“From where?”

“LaGuardia this time.”

“Mm,” she says, and falls back asleep.

He considers this another good sign.

He is showered, shaved and dressed by seven-thirty. He goes back into the bedroom. She is still asleep. He debates waking her, decides against it.

He leaves the apartment without saying, “I love you,” gently closing the door behind him for the very last time.

He is at LaGuardia by eight-fifteen.

They are already boarding his flight.

He looks for the scrap of paper on which he wrote Jacqueline Hicks’s number in East Hampton. The sun is still shining above it. He hesitates a moment, and then dials it. This time, she picks up. He apologizes for calling so early in the morning and then explains that a woman named Kathryn Duggan stopped by for a consultation while he was in the city this week...

“Is she all right?” Jacqueline asks at once.

“Yes, she’s fine, fine. But she mentioned that you’d treated her...”

“Yes, I did,” Jacqueline says.

“And since she’s considering analysis again...”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I wondered if you could tell me a little about her.”

“David, I have a houseful of people just now...”

“Yes, but...”

“...and we’re just sitting down to breakfast. Can you possibly call me...?”

“Jackie...”

“...after the weekend? On Monday? I’d be happy...”

“Can you just tell me...?”

“Yes, but then I really must go, really. Call me Monday, okay? I love her, I’d be happy...”

“I will. What was the nature of...?”

“She was suicidal.”

“I’ll call you Monday,” he says.

He looks at his watch. Eight-twenty. He wonders if he has time to call Kate. He wants to warn her not to do anything foolish. He wants to assure her that he’ll be contacting Clancy again on Monday. He wants to tell her everything’ll work out all right for her.

But just then they announce final boarding for his flight.

And he hurries toward the gate.

Her telephone rings at twenty-five minutes past eight, awakening her.

David, she thinks. From the airport.

She fumbles for the receiver. Picks it up.

“Hullo?” she says.

A furious voice shouts, “Get him off your machine, cunt!”

There is a click on the line.

She slams down the receiver at once.

My home number! she thinks. He has my home number!

Naked, she pads into the living room, and stands trembling before the answering machine, obeying his command at once, pressing the ANNOUNCEMENT button, holding it down, “Hi,” her voice quavering, “at the beep, please,” removing David’s offensive message from the tape. I have to get out of here, she thinks. He’s too close. He has my number.

Hannah the cat rubs against her naked leg.

“Not now, Hannah,” she says, and rushes back into the bedroom. She crosses to the dresser, fumbles open the top drawer, finds a pair of white cotton panties, steps into them, I’ll go to Clancy, pulls them up over her thighs and her waist, I have to put an end to this, crosses to the closet, hurls open the door, we have to get him, takes a pair of blue jeans from a hanger, we have to stop him, and is about to put them on when all at once she wonders if the front door is locked.

Did David lock the door when he left?

But how? There isn’t a spring latch, the door can’t be locked by simply pulling it shut.

Then...

Did she get up to lock it?

She lets the jeans fall to the floor. Barefoot, wearing only the white panties, she runs out of the bedroom and toward the front door — “Not now, Hannah!” — feeling a sudden urgency to get to that door and lock it, he knows where she lives, he has her number, “Goddamn you, Hannah, not now!”

She is reaching for the thumb bolt on the top lock when the door opens, almost knocking her over. She backs away, and all at once he is in the room, the door slamming shut behind him.

“Hello, Puss,” he says.

She has never seen this man before in her life.

He is a total stranger, a thin balding man wearing rimless eyeglasses, and blue jeans, and white sneakers, and the black “Cats” T-shirt with the yellow eyes on it, yellow against black, black dancers in the yellow eyes, she cannot breathe. He is holding in his right hand a two-foot section of wood cut from a green broom handle, its end splintered and jagged as though while sawing it off he’d lost patience with the task and simply ripped it free, the naked wood showing raw and white beneath the bilious green paint. Before she can scream, before she can beg him to leave her alone, before she can utter a single sound, the short green club lashes out and strikes her across the bridge of her nose. She feels only blinding pain at first, and then everything in her field of vision goes red.

His fury is monumental.

She cannot imagine what she has done to provoke such rage.

Hands flailing, she keeps backing away from him as he strikes at her soundlessly, incessantly. Bleeding, trying to see through the blood, her eyes swollen, trying to speak, her lips swollen, she says, or thinks she says, Please, don’t hurt me, please. But he has already hurt her, he has hurt her seriously, and he is still hurting her, and she knows he will hurt her even more severely than he already has, knows he will not stop hurting her till he has killed her.

Do it to her, she thinks.

“Do it to her!” she screams, or thinks she screams.

But there is only Hannah the cat in the blood-spattered room.

Wet with blood, slippery everywhere with blood, drifting in and out of whiteness, she knows he will kill her, knows he has already killed her, knows she is dead, knows she is not yet dead, knows she is dying, hopes he will kill her, has already killed her, but, no, she’s still alive. And she thinks perhaps God, who knows how to get unlisted phone numbers, who knows how to get inside buildings and inside apartments, God in all His infinite mercy and splendor will spare her after all. In which case, why is He hurting her so?

And where is David, she wonders, why isn’t David here to save me, where are you, David? And where’s my vain and glorious mother on this blood-drenched night in this steamy bathroom, how was the fucking movie, Mom? Where’s vainglorious Fee when there’s real trouble? Do you know I’m dying, Mom, do you know I’m dead? I truly beg your pardon, but if I’m dead then please end the pain, please stop hurting me this way! I’m sorry I let him do it, really, I should have locked the door, I should have, I know I should have in some way, but you see, I’m sorry but I simply couldn’t, I was just a kid, you see. So... so please... I... I... I beg you to... to... bess me... to bless me... to forgive me, truly, I’m very sorry, Bess, forgive me, Bessie, please forgive me, only stop it, just, please, stop it!

In the instant before she dies, she understands with blinding clarity that doors can’t be locked against monsters.