Privileged Conversation Page 4

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

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

  “I was happy to help.”

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

  “Don’t be silly.”

  He feels oddly removed from her all at once.

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

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

  “Oh, don’t worry about …”

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

  “That isn’t necessary. Really.”

  “You saved my life,” she says simply.

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

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

  “Like what?”

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

  David smiles.

  “Well, Miss Duggan …” he says.

  “Kate,” she says.

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

  “Well, Dr. Chapman …” she says.

  “David,” he says.

  “David,” she says.

  There is a very long silence.

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

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

  But on Saturday morning, Stanley Beckerman calls.

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

  “I’ve been meaning to call you …”

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

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

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

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

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

  Or on your Loony, actually, David thinks.

  He does not know why he accepts the offer.

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

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

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

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

  Stanley has a habit of saying “Hmm?”

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

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

  Well, for example, the one that had come up during a session with Alice L, who’d related a terrifying dream of water rushing through a sluice, totally mystifying until David recalled that such a gate was called a penstock, and lo and behold, one association led to another until the penstock became Guess What, and the rush of water became her husband’s premature Guess What, live and learn, my oh my.

  If David’s three o’clock patient—a man named Harold G, who’s been complaining about his itchy balls for the past three sessions, and who, David guesses, is afraid he may have caught some dread disease from the black prostitutes David suspects he’s been frequenting—were to come in next Monday afternoon to disclose a dream about Jellicle Cats and Jellicle Balls, would this not in some way relate to his thus far unrevealed fears? David doesn’t expect this will really happen—Harold G may be the only other person in New York who hasn’t yet seen Cats—but if it did
, wouldn’t he be justified in surmising a reference to Eliot’s descriptions of Jellicle Cats as white and black, black and white, and didn’t Jellicle cross-rhyme with testicle, after all, and isn’t a jig mentioned in the poem … well, a gavotte, too … but jig is certainly slang for …

  “… skirt up to here,” Stanley is saying. “Sits across from me with half her ass showing, how am I supposed to take that, hmm? If I were a less principled man, Dave …”

  No one ever calls David “Dave.”

  “… I would most certainly take advantage of the situation. I’m only human, after all …”

  A matter for debate, David thinks.

  “… mere flesh and blood, hmm? What would you do in a similar circumstance?”

  “I would remind myself that I’m supposed to be a doctor,” David says, sounding prim even to himself.

  “You haven’t seen this girl,” Stanley says.

  “Her appearance has …”

  “Or her pussy,” Stanley says.

  Which comment, David hopes, will serve as a segue to the subject matter of the musical they’re about to see together.

  “Sits there like Sharon Stone,” Stanley says relentlessly, “legs wide open, no panties. What looks good to you?” he asks, and picks up the menu.

  David is happy for the respite.

  But Stanley seems determined to pursue the matter further. Standing on Broadway outside the Winter Garden Theater with its banners proclaiming in black and white CATS NOW AND FOREVER, as if anything but cockroaches can be forever, and its three-sheets with the big yellow cat eyes in which the pupils are formed by dancing figures, David finds his mind wandering again as Stanley begins describing in detail the patient he is certain is trying to seduce him.

  This is a particularly unattractive location for a theater, lacking all of the showbiz hubbub of the marquee-lined side streets west of Broadway. Instead, the theater is adjacent to a Japanese restaurant whose austere front looks singularly uninviting. Furthermore, it stands directly opposite a tall black featureless office building across the avenue, and faces diagonally to the northwest a similarly unattractive red brick Novatel Hotel with a Beefsteak Charlie’s restaurant on its street level. The sidewalk outside the theater is packed with an inelegant crowd all dressed up for Saturday night, probably bussed in from New Jersey. Most of them are smoking. David always takes this as a sign of lower-class ignorance, although Stanley himself is smoking and he is a man with many years of education and training who was raised in a home with a geneticist mother and a college-professor father.

  Smoking his brains out, he tells David—while assorted New Jersey theater-partygoers crane ears in their direction—that Cindy, for this now turns out to be her name, has been dressing more and more provocatively for each of their sessions, coming in just yesterday …

  “I swear to God this is the truth, Dave, I wouldn’t be telling you this if you weren’t my closest friend …”

  … wearing the short mini Stanley has earlier described, no panties under it, and a flimsy little top that shows everything God gave her …

  “And believe me, Dave, God gave her plenty. She is overabundantly endowed, I would give my soul to rest my weary head between those voluptuous jugs …”

  And here a man smoking a vile cigar turns toward Stanley in open interest.

  “… if only I weren’t such a dedicated healer,” he says, and smiles like a shark surfacing to devour a hapless swimmer. “What do you think I should do, Dave?”

  “See a shrink,” David says.

  “Just between us …” Stanley says.

  Privileged conversation, David supposes.

  “… I think I’ll fuck her.”

  And the man from New Jersey almost drops his cigar.

  The show starts with pairs of white lights blinking in the onstage dark and spilling over to enwrap the audience beyond the proscenium arch. It takes David a moment or two to realize that all those blinking white lights are supposed to be the eyes of cats shining in the dark. The lights, or the cat eyes, all suddenly wink out, to be replaced by strings of red lights that only faintly illuminate the garbage-dump stage. These resemble the lights strung on a Christmas tree. David wonders why Christmas-tree lights are strung all over a garbage dump and why they are all red. While he is trying to figure this out, someone in the audience lets out a gasp and then begins laughing. David realizes it is because human beings dressed as cats are now crawling on all fours down the aisles and through a two- or three-row gap deliberately left between the row ahead and the row in which he and Stanley are seated.

  These are very good seats, even though Stanley has labeled as a “cheap bastard” the suicidal patient who gave them to him. They are, in fact, house seats, Stanley’s patient being not only a cheap bastard, but also a friend of one of the show’s wardrobe supervisors, a job that has to be monumental judging from the elaborate costumes on the twenty or thirty feline humans now gathering in midnight conclave on the stage. The seats are so good, in fact, that one of the marauding cats prowls to within a foot of where David is sitting in seat K102, directly at the intersection of the center aisle and the gap between the rows, and peers directly and somewhat unnervingly into his face before crawling away again to scamper onto the stage.

  On the stage now, something cylindrical in shape and lighted all over its underside begins rising from the floor like the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to what purpose David, clever analyst that he is, cannot immediately discern. The assembled cats—for David realizes at once that he must begin thinking of these crawling, creeping, back-arching, furry, fake-tailed humans as cats if the show is to have any credibility at all—begin singing an introductory number titled “The Naming of Cats,” which seems taken entirely from the Eliot poem of the same title, but which is an ill-conceived notion since the names spilling from the stage in full choral unison are cutesy-poo names like Mungojerrie and Skimbleshanks and Jennyanydots and Bombalurina, names no cat-lover in the universe would ever foist upon any self-respecting feline. The cat he and Helen had owned was named simply Sheba, an honorable name harking back to King Solomon’s time, ultimately killed by a Doberman appropriately named Max, the Nazi bastard.

  All of these preposterous cat names seemed okay, if undeniably cute, on the printed page. But here, being belted by twenty-four, twenty-five people in cat makeup and cat costumes, they are virtually incomprehensible, followed as they are by a number titled “The Invitation to the Jellicle Ball,” which repeats the word jellicle over and over again, to the utter mystification of anyone unfamiliar with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a rather cutesy-poo title in itself, Eliot should have stuck to Prufrock.

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

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

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

  But she continues to hold his interest.

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

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

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

  She is every inch a cat.

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