Evan Hunter
Privileged Conversation
This is for
Otto Penzler
New York City is real, and so are Boston and Martha’s Vineyard and Radcliffe and Mass General and Cats and Les Misérables and Miss Saigon and the American Psychiatric Association and Mount Sinai Hospital and the New York City Police Department and any other civic or cultural institution mentioned herein by name.
But Kathryn Duggan and David Chapman and all of the other characters in this novel are fictitious, as is each and every narrated event.
1: friday, june 30 — sunday, july 16
He has eight patients in all, evenly divided between those in analysis and those in therapy — the “Couches” and the “Chairs,” as he often refers to them in private to Helen. All told, he puts in a thirty-hour week at the office. Well, they’re only fifty-minute hours, of course, but still, he makes all his phone calls during the ten minutes between patients, so it really can be considered a full work hour. The rest of the week he teaches and supervises at Mount Sinai, just a few blocks up on Fifth Avenue.
On his lunch hour, he usually grabs a quick sandwich and coffee at the deli on Lex, and then goes for a walk in the park. The weather this June has been miserable thus far, the customary New York mix of heat and humidity broken by frequent thunderstorms; today is muggy and hot, as usual, the perfect finale to a perfectly ghastly month, not an ideal day for walking, but his little jaunts in the park are more for relaxation than for true exercise. Nor does he experience any feelings of guilt over these leisurely, peaceful strolls, his brief respites from the often tortured narratives unreeling all day long in his office.
The girl up ahead seems to appear out of a shimmering haze. Where a moment ago the path 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. Smiling as she pedals abreast of him, she calls, “Good morning, sir!” and is gone at once in a dazzle of sunlight — although it is already afternoon, and he will not be forty-six till the end of July, thank you.
A trifle perplexed, David wonders if his new glasses make him look older than he actually is (but Helen picked out the frames), wonders, too, if the girl who just whisked past on her bike was in fact much younger than he’d taken her for, not the fifteen or sixteen he’d originally supposed, but perhaps twelve or thirteen, in which case the “sir” is understandable, though barely.
He looks at his watch.
It is almost a quarter to one, time he started back. Arthur K is always on time. Never even a second late. Frowns scoldingly if David doesn’t open the door to his office precisely on the hour. Listening to Arthur K, listening to all of his patients, David tries to visualize the enormous cast of characters they conjure for him, the boiling events, real or imagined, around which their lives are structured. Listening, he tries to understand. Understanding, he tries to—
The scream is molten.
It hangs hot and liquid and viscous on the still summer air — and then abruptly ends.
David whirls at once, his heart suddenly racing. Standing stock-still in the center of the path, he keeps listening, hears only an insect-laden silence, and then scuffling noises around the curve up ahead, the rasp of feet scraping gravel. The same voice that not moments ago brightly chirped, “Good morning, sir!” now shrilly shouts, “Let go of it, you...!” and is cut off by the unmistakable sound of a slap, a smack, flesh against flesh, and then, immediately afterward, a duller, thicker sound — a punch? This is Central Park, David thinks, you can get killed here, he thinks. Strangers can kill you here. From around the bend in the path now, out of sight, he hears the sounds of earnest struggle, the scuffling, grunting, shouting noises of battle, and suddenly there is another scream as jangling as the sound of shattering glass, and just as suddenly he is in motion.
They are still locked in grim and sweaty confrontation on the gravel in the center of the empty path, the black boy repeatedly punching at her as he tries to wrest the bicycle from her grip, the slender girl with the reddish-gold hair clawing at him as she tries with all her might to stop the theft. “Hey!” David shouts, but neither of them seems to hear him, so intent are they on their fierce combat. The boy hits her again with his bunched right fist, his left hand still tugging at the handlebar as if in counterpoint. This time the blow sounds thuddingly sincere. The girl lets out a short sharp gasp of pain, releases the bicycle, and staggers backward, moaning, falling to the ground on her back. The boy yells “Yaaah!” in triumph, and instantly wheels the bike away, a sneakered foot already on one of the pedals, gathering speed, and then whipping his leg over the seat and sliding down onto it.
“Hey!” David yells again.
“Fuck you!” the boy yells back, and pedals away furiously, wheels tossing gravel, around the curve just ahead, out of sight.
The summer’s day goes still again.
Hot.
Hushed.
Insects rattling.
The girl lies motionless on the ground.
Kneeling beside her, David asks, “Are you all right, miss?” and then, for no reason he can properly understand — the last time he’d treated anyone for a physical disorder must have been twenty years ago or more, when he was still an intern at Mass General — he adds, “I’m a doctor.”
She says nothing.
Looking down at her, studying her closely now, he realizes she isn’t a girl at all, although these days he’s likely to consider anyone under thirty a girl, but is instead a woman of... what, twenty-five, twenty-six?... the lightly freckled face, the fine wispy red hair, gold hair, the long coltish legs in the loose green running shorts, the small high breasts in the damp orange tank top, all conspiring to lend her a much younger appearance.
She is very pretty.
Sunlight filters down through the leaves, dappling her face, the high pronounced cheekbones dusted with tiny freckles — he does not at first notice that one of her cheeks is bleeding — the slender elegant nose and full mouth, its upper lip tented to reveal even white teeth, except where one is chipped. He wonders if the black boy’s insistent blows to her face broke the tooth. Or anything else. That is when he notices the abrasion on her cheek, oozing a thin line of blood, bright red against her pale white face. Her eyes are still closed — is she unconscious?
“Miss,” he asks again, “are you all right?”
“I think so,” she says tentatively, and opens her eyes.
The eyes are as green as new leaves. Delicately flecked with yellow. A cat’s eyes. He and Helen once owned a cat with eyes like that. Before the children were born. Sheba. Killed by a neighborhood Doberman. Sheba the cat. Eyes like this girl has. This woman.
“Did he get my bike?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“The son of a bitch,” she says, and sits up. Green shorts hiking up a bit. Long long legs, freckled thighs. White socks and white athletic shoes. Green cat’s eyes.
“Your cheek is bleeding,” he says.
“What?” she says, and reaches immediately for her right cheek, and touches it, and looks at her hand, the palms up, the fingers together, and frowns, puzzled. She touches the other cheek at once and feels the oozing wetness there, and mutters, “Oh shit,” and looks at her fingertips and sees the blood now, and says again, “The son of a bitch.”
“Here,” David says, and offers her his handkerchief.