Privileged Conversation

5: monday, august 21 — monday, november 20

David places his call at twelve noon that Monday.

He knows by then that Kate has been murdered. He has read about it in the New York Times and has also seen the news on local television and on CNN.

“I was just trying to locate you,” Clancy says. “Where are you calling from?”

“Martha’s Vineyard.”

“I got the package. Thanks.”

“Will they help?”

“Working on them now.”

There is a silence on the line.

“How well did you know her?” Clancy asks.

“Just casually,” David says.

“But well enough that she could ask you to send that stuff to me, huh?”

“Asked me to take it to you, actually. But you were away.”

“Well enough for that, huh?”

“It wasn’t much to ask.”

“So you sent it FedEx. Cause I was away.”

“Yes. I knew I wouldn’t be in the city today.”

“Right, you’re up there.”

“Yes.”

“Have you got a number up there where I can reach you? If I need you?”

“Sure,” David says, and reads the number from the little plate on the phone. Seven summers up here, still doesn’t know the number by heart.

“And that’s where?” Clancy asks.

“Menemsha. Martha’s Vineyard.”

“Might as well give me the address, too,” Clancy says. “While we’re at it.”

They are not properly dressed for sunshine and sand.

Detective Clancy is wearing a brown suit, a white shirt, a darker brown tie, and brown shoes and socks. The man walking beside him is wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a red tie, and black shoes and socks. Like a mirage, they materialize out of glaring sunshine and ocean mist, and come trudging shimmeringly over the sand. It is the twenty-fourth day of August, a hot, sultry morning without a breeze stirring. Five days since Kate’s murder, three days since he spoke to Clancy on the phone. These men are dressed for business.

“Dr. Chapman,” Clancy says. “Nice seeing you again. This is my partner Detective D’Angelico, is this your little girl?”

“How do you do?” David says, and shakes hands first with D’Angelico and then with Clancy. “This is my daughter, Annie, yes.”

“Few questions we’d...”

Annie suddenly sticks out her hand, squinting up into the sun as she shakes hands with each of the men in turn. David wonders if they plan to question him in her presence. Annie is wearing a little green bikini. He is wearing blue trunks. All at once, he feels very vulnerable in swimming apparel, the two detectives standing there in business suits.

“Have you got anything yet?” he asks.

“Well, we’ve been trying to track down the wild prints on the envelopes.”

“But no luck so far,” D’Angelico says.

In contrast to the lean and wiry Clancy, he is short and rotund. Fat and Skinny, David thinks. Mutt and Jeff. Good Cop/Bad Cop. But Who will be playing Whom? Which one is which?

“We appreciate your sending the stuff, anyway,” Clancy says.

“Are you really detectives?” Annie asks.

“Yes, honey,” D’Angelico says.

“I want you to know,” Clancy says, “that you’re not a suspect in this case.”

“Who, me?” Annie asks.

“Well, I should hope not,” David says.

“Me, too,” Annie says, nodding vigorously.

D’Angelico smiles indulgently.

“Although during the course of our initial investigation,” Clancy says, “your name came up quite a few times.”

“As you might imagine,” D’Angelico says.

Bad Cop, David thinks.

“Why might I imagine anything of the sort?” he asks.

“Your knowing the dead girl and all,” D’Angelico says.

“I knew her only casually,” he says at once.

He does not want Annie to hear whatever he feels certain is coming next, but they are still at least a quarter of a mile from the house and he doesn’t want her walking back alone, either. It occurs to him that this is a cheap NYPD ploy, questioning him with his daughter standing not a foot away. He wants to say something to them about it, but he thinks they may suspect him, after all, no matter what Clancy just said, and he’s afraid he’ll get deeper in trouble if he starts any kind of fuss here.

“In any case, we’re not here to discuss your relationship with her,” Clancy says.

Good Cop.

“What are you guys talking about, anyway?” Annie says, squinting up at them, her hands on her hips, her head cocked to one side.

“Whyn’t you run on up the beach?” D’Angelico says.

“I like it here,” Annie says.

“Whyn’t you send your daughter up the beach?” D’Angelico suggests.

“Go ahead, Annie,” David says. “Not too far ahead. Stay where I can see you. And don’t go in the water.”

“What do these guys want, anyway?” she asks, looking up into David’s face now.

“Do you remember the girl whose bike got stolen?” David asks.

“Yeah?”

“Someone hurt her,” David says. “They want to ask me some questions about it.”

“Why?”

“Why, gentlemen?” David says, turning to Clancy.

“So your daddy can help us find who did it,” Clancy says.

“He saved her life once,” Annie says, nodding. “He’s a psychiatrist.”

“So run along now, okay, honey?” D’Angelico says.

“Okay,” Annie says, and goes skipping off up the beach ahead of them.

“Nice kid,” D’Angelico says unconvincingly. “She knows about the stolen bike, huh?”

“Yes, I told my family about it.”

“Brave thing you did,” D’Angelico says, again unconvincingly.

“Looks like an army handled those letters you sent us,” Clancy says conversationally.

“Including the kid from the bike shop,” D’Angelico says. “Who we talked to the minute the other girls in the show told us he was there with her one night.”

“Alibi a mile long for the morning she got killed, though,” Clancy says. “She ever mention anything to you about this guy?”

“I only knew her casually. I wouldn’t know anything about anyone in a bicycle shop.”

“Of course not. I meant the guy who was sending her the flowers and...”

“Or did you send the flowers?” D’Angelico asks.

“Me? Why would I...?”

“Then you didn’t, right?”

“Of course not. I hardly knew the girl.”

“So did she mention anything about this guy?”

“She must’ve said something about him,” D’Angelico says.

“As I told you in my letter...”

“Yeah, she contacted you quite unexpectedly, isn’t that it? So what’d she say when she contacted you quite unexpectedly?”

“Just what I wrote in my letter.”

“Nothing more.”

“Nothing more.”

“Guy’s sending her flowers...” Clancy says.

“You see, we’re trying to separate the fancy fucking from the killing here,” D’Angelico says.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t beg our pardon, Dr. Chapman. We get people begging our pardon every day of the week. If you’d stop covering your ass here for a minute...”

“Hey, come on, Ralph,” Clancy says.

“A guy’s sending her flowers, writing letters to her, she never says a word about him to her goddamn boyfriend?”

“Her boyfriend?” David says. “What are you...?”

“We know you were seeing her,” Clancy says. “I’m sorry, Dr. Chapman.”

“Well, you know nothing of the sort. How can you possibly...?”

“We do, I’m sorry.”

“I thought I wasn’t a suspect here.”

“You’re not,” Clancy says.

“Not anymore,” D’Angelico says.

“But put yourself in our shoes.”

“What shoes are those, Detective?”

“We had a lot of people placing you with her. Doormen here and there, the super at her building, other girls in the show, a lady in her elevator, the kid in the bike shop, and so on. We also have her phone bill with collect calls you made from up here. And the bike shop kid says your voice was on her machine the whole four days before she got killed. All of which seemed to add up to the fact that you would have known the girl pretty well for about seven weeks at the time of her murder, actually fifty-one days according to our calculations. So you’ll forgive us for thinking you were maybe fucking her, huh?”

“If you think I killed her...”

“No we don’t. Not anymore.”

David looks puzzled.

“The coroner’s report set the time of her death at around eight-thirty, nine o’clock in the morning,” Clancy explains.

“You were on a plane coming up here at that time,” D’Angelico says.

“We checked passenger lists,” Clancy says, almost apologetically.

“Dr. Chapman,” D’Angelico says, “your personal business is your personal business, and we’re not interested in it, believe me.”

David wishes he could.

“All we want to know is whether Miss Duggan ever said anything at all about this guy who was bothering her. Did she indicate he might be someone she knew, for example?”

David says nothing for a moment.

The detectives are waiting.

He takes a deep breath.

“No,” he says at last. “She had no idea who he was.”

“When did you first hear about him?”

“When I went down to New York on the fifteenth.”

“Were you staying with her?”

He hesitates again.

“Dr. Chapman?”

“Yes,” he says.

“In her apartment, right?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever phone her while you were there?”

“Not at the apartment.”

“Then you wouldn’t have spoken to him?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t have heard his voice.”

“No. He called her at the theater.”

“When?”

“The Wednesday before her murder.”

“The sixteenth,” Clancy says.

“Yes. Just before the matinee performance.”

“Did she actually speak to him?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say what he sounded like?”

“No.”

“Did he give her a name?”

“No.”

“Any name at all?”

“No.”

“What did he say?”

“Warned her not to go to the police. Which is why she asked me to get the letters to you.”

“Make any threats?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Didn’t say he was going to kill her or anything, did he?”

“No.”

“Harm her in any way?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Any idea why she was out of the show the rest of that week?”

“Yes. She was scared.”

“Then she didn’t really have a sprained ankle, huh?”

“No. The phone call scared her.”

“With good reason,” D’Angelico says.

The men fall silent. Overhead, a flock of gulls wheels against an achingly blue sky, shrieking.

“Anything else, Ralph?” Clancy asks.

“No. You?”

“I don’t think so. Dr. Chapman,” he says, “here’s my card, case you think of anything else.”

“I’m sorry you had to come all the way up here...”

“Well, you were very helpful,” D’Angelico says.

“Thanks a lot, we appreciate your time,” Clancy says, and extends his hand. David takes it. The gulls are shrieking again. In a grave voice, like an Irishman at a wake, Clancy says, “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

David realizes he’s talking about Kate.

His eyes suddenly mist with tears.

Summer is dying.

August inches inexorably toward September and the big Labor Day weekend that will signal its symbolic end. The days are still hot, but at night there is a hint of autumn briskness in the air, and in many of the houses along the beach, smoke curls up from chimney pots. He keeps reading the newspapers and watching television for news that they have caught her killer, hoping that in mysterious ways known only to policemen they have somehow managed to locate the telephone from which her unknown assailant made his call to the theater on that Wednesday before her death. But there is nothing.

The days drift idly by.

He feels that he is watching the end titles of a movie. Under the titles as they crawl past, he can see still photographs of scenes from the movie. The stills serve as a reminder, a summary of what has gone by. It is a device he has seen used by many directors.

The movie is titled PROJECTION, which he feels is infinitely more commercial than RATIONALIZATION, both of which are psychiatric terms appropriate to the film since the male lead is a psychiatrist and the female lead is a troubled young woman. In psychiatric terms, projection and rationalization mean essentially the same thing. Both are defense mechanisms designed to project upon another person something that is emotionally unacceptable to the self.

PROJECTION is a very good movie title because of its double meaning. The movie, after all, is being projected on the screen of David’s mind. Well, not the entire movie. Just the still photographs with the end titles running over them. Oddly, the titles do not list electricians or grips or best boys or other technical people, but instead seem to be snatches of dialogue with quotation marks around them, as if this is a silent movie, except that the dialogue appears over the photographs instead of on separate cards. The song “Gently, Sweetly,” played by the London Philharmonic with lush strings and mournful woodwinds, accompanies these silent-film photographs and snatches of dialogue. And perhaps, psychologically speaking, the title PROJECTION may have a triple meaning, who knows? In that the word can also be used to describe an estimate of future prospects based on current tendencies. Who knows?

The first photograph shows Kate as she appears out of a shimmering haze. Where a moment ago the screen was empty, there is now a young girl on a bicycle, fifteen or sixteen years old, he guesses, sweaty and slender, wearing green nylon running shorts and an orange cotton tank top, tendrils of long reddish-gold hair drifting across her freckled face. She is smiling. The dialogue appears over her smiling face...

...and is gone at once in a dazzle of sunlight.

But the shot clearly establishes that the girl in this movie, the woman actually, is the one who makes initial contact, an approach to which the man doesn’t even respond. Moreover, as the parade of succeeding shots unfolds, it becomes more and more evident that the girl, the woman, is the aggressor, the pursuer, the ardent seductress... well, just look at the photographic evidence!

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

...which is in itself suggestive, even when not coupled with the next line, which reads...

...indicating that what she needs is something that’s beginning to swell, hmm, Doktor? Moreover, these blatant invitations run like a leitmotif throughout.

They are standing on Ninety-sixth Street, just outside the park. They have just exchanged addresses. They shake hands awkwardly. As he walks off:

She comes down off the stage from the side ramp on the right of the theater, surprising him when she crawls through the wide space in front of row K, and then in her catlike way, sits up, seemingly detecting a human presence, seemingly startled, jerking her head around and looking directly into his face, her green eyes wide. The superimposed dialogue reads:

The camera lingers on her green eyes. Green flecked with yellow. Sitting in slanting sunlight at a table just inside the window of the restaurant she’s chosen for brunch on the West Side. Eyes glowing with sunlight:

The West Side restaurant dissolves to a Thai newcomer on the East Side, the strains of “Gently, Sweetly” rushing through beaded curtains, caressing, embracing them as they sit sipping their wine. The pale gold of the chardonnay echoes the outfit she is wearing this evening, a wheat-colored mesh linen vest with a sort of sarong skirt in crinkled silk with a sheer leaf print that matches the color of her nail polish.

On and oh the titles come, relentlessly rolling upward on the screen of his mind, flashback and fast-forward combined, each successive photograph and remembered word fortifying the knowledge that the relationship was almost entirely a product of her own making, a reconstruction, a restaging, as she’d put it, of an unresolved childhood trauma.

But as he reviews, in effect, the story line of this film, as he plays the end titles over and over again in his mind, he realizes at last that perhaps he was the true victim here, that any red-blooded American male, for example, would have succumbed to the temptation of a young and beautiful redheaded dancer who supplied him with yet another eager young girl, woman, in her twenties...

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

...and promised him in the bargain even more opulently erotic adventures, perhaps even with countless other twentysomething Asian girls from Miss Saigon...

So who in this star-studded cast can cast the first stone, truly?

He did send those letters off, didn’t he? A happily married man taking an enormous risk. Did in fact take the letters to the FedEx office on Eighty-sixth Street...

In one of the few end-title photographs of David alone, he is seen at the branch office counter, addressing the package and paying for its delivery in cash. Over the photograph of him looking intent and deliberate, the dialogue reads:

The last photograph shows Kate and David sitting on a green park bench as mist rolls in off a narrow path. Her head is bent, she is weeping. He is sitting beside her attentively, the very image of a concerned physician. The superimposed dialogue reads:

The music swells. The mist rises to envelop the bench and the figures sitting frozen in time upon it, obliterating them at last until the entire frame is a shifting swirl of pure, innocent, blameless white.

Take me...

Make me...

Yours.

And the movie ends.

And so does the summer.

Arthur K has bought a new automobile. He proudly describes it to David, even shows him pictures of it from the catalog. It is a Camaro like the one his sister was driving when she got killed, though not in the same color. He plans to go to the Motor Vehicle Bureau to apply for a new driver’s license. He tells David that he has begun dating a young girl who looks a lot the way Veronica did when she was sixteen.

Susan M no longer needs to plan her wardrobe weeks in advance. She now limits her scheduling to a mere three days, the first three days of the week, and she does her planning for those days over the weekend. This leaves Thursday and Friday free of any compulsive activity. Over Christmas, she plans to visit her mother in Omaha. By then, she hopes she will not have to plan her wardrobe ahead at all.

Today is the sixteenth day of October.

David hopes she will make it.

Alex J has fallen in love with the Puerto Rican girl he followed home from the subway again last Tuesday night. He has actually made contact with her. He has approached her on the street, and introduced himself, and told her he found her quite extraordinarily beautiful. And despite the wife and three children he adores, he has asked if she would like to go to a movie with him one night. Tonight is that night.

As Alex describes her, his face is rapturous.

Moreover, he feels quite proud of himself, having approached this gorgeous “Latina,” as she prefers calling herself, in a neighborhood where everyone looked like a dope dealer who would slit his throat for a nickel, and there he was talking to one of their women for Christ’s sake, “Don’t you think that took balls?” he asks David.

David remains noncommittal.

“Well, fuck you,” Alex J says. “I think it did.”

The kids have already watched their Disney fare and are upstairs asleep. The rented movie David and Helen are watching is about a couple going through a very stormy divorce.

“Do you want to watch the rest of this?” she asks.

“Not particularly,” he says, and hits the STOP button on the remote control unit. He turns off the television set. The room is suddenly very still.

“Do you believe people really fall in love that way?” Helen asks.

“What way?”

“The way the man and woman in the movie do?”

“I suppose.”

“I mean, meeting cute that way. In a rainstorm. Sharing an umbrella.”

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter how people meet,” he says. “You were sitting on a park bench when I met you.”

“Yes,” she says thoughtfully. “But in movies, they’re always strangers, did you notice? Why don’t people who know each other ever fall in love?”

“Well, they do, I guess.”

“In movies, I mean.”

“In movies, too.”

“No, in movies it’s always strangers.”

“Well, I guess strangers are more interesting.”

“I think two people who know each other could be interesting, too. Finding out more about each other, you know? Learning things they didn’t know about each other.”

“Well, nobody says movies have to be true to life.”

“Only life has to be true to life,” she says.

He turns to look at her.

She takes a deep breath.

“David,” she says, “I’m in love with Harry Daitch.”

He keeps looking at her.

“And he’s in love with me,” she says.

“I see.”

“Yes.”

“When... ah... did all this happen?” he hears himself saying.

This is a movie, he thinks.

“Well...” she says. “I guess you know that Harry and Danielle were having trouble for a long time... well, you’ve seen him at parties with his hands all over women...”

I haven’t seen him with his hands all over you, David thinks, but that’s yet another movie.

“...which, of course, was a clear signal that he wasn’t too terribly happy with her, otherwise he wouldn’t have been fooling around, would he?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Well, men don’t fool around with other women unless they’re unhappy at home. That’s a basic fact of marriage, David.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. I’m sure you know that, a psychiatrist. In any event, we got to talking one night on the deck of his house, and I began to realize... I’d always considered him nothing but a womanizer, you see...”

Gee, I wonder why, David thinks.

“...but that night... this was in July sometime, there was a full moon, I remember. You were in the city, David, this was during the week sometime. Anyway, I discovered that night that Harry was truly a very sad person with depth and sensitivity... he writes poetry, you know...”

To you? David wonders.

“...which is unusual for a lawyer, whom one usually expects to be rather stiff...”

Great word, David thinks.

“...and unyielding, rather than... well... romantic and adventurous. In any event, one thing led to another...”

To make a long story short, David thinks.

“...and by the time you went into the city for your August seminar, I guess it was, we... well... we realized we were in love.”

“In love, I see.”

“Yes.”

“So this has been going on since August.”

“July, actually.”

“Well... congratulations.”

“David, I want a divorce.”

“I see, a divorce,” he says.

“So Harry and I can get married and go live in Mexico.”

“Mexico.”

“Yes.”

“I see, Mexico. Land of opportunity.”

“He does, in fact, own land down there.”

“I see.”

“Why do you keep saying that? It’s infuriating.”

“Well, I do see. You love Harry Daitch and you want a divorce so you can marry him and go live on his land in Mexico. Isn’t that it?”

“That’s about it, yes.”

“Well, that’s about all of it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not quite.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Pregnant, I see. Then I suppose you’ll want the divorce in a hurry, so you can rush down there and give birth to a Mexican citizen.”

“I would like the child to be born in my new marriage, yes. Not necessarily in Mexico.”

“Fine, I’ll call Peter...”

“I’ve already called him.”

“You called our attorney before you...?”

“We spoke only in general terms.”

“But about divorce, right?”

“Yes. I told him a friend of mine was thinking about divorce.”

“Must have fooled him completely.”

“I wasn’t trying to fool him.”

“Just called to ask how this friend of yours should proceed, right?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“What?”

“Which friend did you say wanted a divorce?”

“Well... Danielle, actually. She will, after all, be need—”

“Danielle, perfect. I’d like a drink. Would you care for a drink?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I think I’d like one.”

He goes to the bar, pours himself a very hefty vodka over ice, and then stands at the window, looking out at Manhattan, looking out at the heavy snow falling outside, covering everything with white, blanketing the rooftops and the streets and the world and the universe with pristine white. When he hears her coming into the room behind him, he asks, without turning to look at her, “What about the children?”

“What about them?”

“They stay with me, you realize.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You plan to take my daughters to Mexico?” he says, turning to face her, his hand tight around the glass in his hand. “To live with Harry Daitch?”

“Of course I do.”

“Over my dead body,” he says.

“Well, we’ll talk about it when you’re...”

“We just did. And you heard what I said.”

“David...”

“You heard what I fucking well said!”

“Goodnight, I’m going to sleep.”

“Go to hell, for all I care.”

Helen stares at him silently for just a moment. Then she merely sighs, and nods, and leaves the room.

He stands looking out at the falling snow. He drains his glass, carries it to the sink, rinses it, puts it on the drainboard. Down the hall, he can hear Helen thundering around the bedroom, preparing for bed. Take his kids to Mexico? Over his, fucking, dead, body!

He remembers that the tape is still in the video player.

He snaps on the television set, picks up the remote control unit, hits the PLAY button and then the RW button and sits down to watch as the tape rewinds. As it flickers in reverse, as the actors walk backward out of a room, or move out of each other’s arms instead of into them, David keeps watching the flickering images on the screen. The main titles appear, running backward to the very beginning of the film. The movie is almost ready to start all over again. He hits the EJECT button. The tape slides out of the video player with an audible click. He snaps off the set, carries the tape back to where its protective plastic case is sitting on the coffee table.

He stands looking at the blank screen.

He stands looking at it for a long while, as if trying to remember what the movie was all about.

Well, no matter, he thinks.

He finds a blanket and a pillow in the hall closet, stretches out on the couch, and tries to make himself comfortable. At last, he closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep.

He dreams that they are taking a long walk up the beach. He and Helen are holding hands. The girls are running up the beach ahead of them, circling back occasionally to hug them both around the legs, skipping off again, skirting like sandpipers the waves that gently rush the shore.

“Forever, right?” Annie says, turning to look back at him.

“Forever,” he says.

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

“Boop!” she says.

And he awakens with a start.