“No phones any of those places, huh?”
“None at precisely ten minutes to the hour.”
“How about before you went to the theater?”
“I tried your office but you were already gone.”
“Did you leave a message?”
“I didn’t know who might be listening with you,” she says.
Touché, he thinks, and almost smiles.
“Did you try the apartment?”
“Yes. There was no answer. You were probably on the way there.”
“What time was that?”
“Around six. And I called again from the theater at seven-thirty, after I was in costume and doing my warm-ups.”
Which was when he’d gone down to dinner.
“I’m sorry we kept missing each other,” she says.
“Was Ron with you?”
“Ron?”
“When you went out for a bite with the kids?”
“Ron’s in Australia. Ron?”
“So who were these kids?”
Her calling them “kids” makes him feel like Methuselah. On the twenty-seventh of the month, he will be forty-six years old. His grandfather was forty-six when he died of lung cancer. Now he is forty-six. Well, almost forty-six. And Kate is twenty-seven and she goes out for a bite with “kids” from the show.
“The girl who plays Demeter,” she says, “and the girl who plays Bombalurina and the guy who plays Munkustrap. He’s gay, if you’re wondering. You have nothing to worry about,” she says. “I love you to death. I thought of you all day long.”
“I thought of you, too.”
“There are two pay phones backstage,” she says. “I can let you have both numbers. So something like today won’t happen again. Our missing each other.”
“I guess I should have them,” he says.
But he wonders how he can possibly use either number. Call backstage and have someone other than Kate answer the phone? Risk that? Who shall I say is calling, please? Whom? Who. Whoever, it definitely ain’t me, mister. A married man named David Chapman calling a showgirl in a cat costume, are you kidding?
“I’m sorry I woke you,” she says. “But I just got home.”
He’s wondering why she didn’t call before she left the theater. From one of the pay phones backstage. But he imagines they’re all ravenously hungry after a performance, all those cats leaping around for two and a half hours, well, not quite that long when you count intermission, but even so. They must all be eager to change into their street clothes and get the hell out of there, put some food in their bellies. He wonders what she wears when she goes to and from the theater. Blue jeans? He wonders if anyone recognizes her when she’s walking in the street— Hey, look, Maude, there goes that girl from Cats. He supposes not. He himself didn’t recognize her in makeup, and he’d already known her before he saw the show.
“...shooting it in New York,” she is telling him, “or I wouldn’t even think of considering it. Leave you to go on location? No way. It’s a costume drama, where I’d be playing the confidante of the female lead who’s having an affair with a Russian diplomat. She’s British. So am I, if I get the part. What it is, they’ve taken Ninotchka and changed the Russian girl to a Brit and the American guy to a Russian diplomat, and they’ve set it all back in the eighteenth century. At least, that’s the way the producer described it to me. In Hollywood, they can only think of movies in terms of other movies. Tunnel vision, it’s called. Which, by the way, was a movie, wasn’t it? Tunnel Vision? Or a book? Or something? I’d have to learn a British accent again, I had a pretty good one when we did Lady Windermere’s Fan in high school. British accents are easier to learn than almost...”
He tries to imagine what she’s wearing now. What color are her fingernails today? Has she already undressed for bed? But no, she just got home after a bite with the kids. He visualizes her bed. Visualizes her in her bed. Does she wear a nightgown when he’s not there making love to her? Is she wearing a nightgown now?
“...why you never ask me about myself,” she is saying now. “Don’t you want to know how I became a dancer, how I happened to land in Cats when I was only seventeen? Don’t you want to know if my parents are still living together, or if they’re divorced, or if I have any sisters or brothers... well, you know I have a sister, you read that in the program notes. But don’t you want to know anything at all about me, David? You’re supposed to love me so much...”
But he’s never told her that.
“...and yet you never ask me anything about myself. Why is that?” she asks.
Why is that? he wonders. He also wonders if she expects him to ask her about herself at one, one-thirty in the morning, whatever time it is now. Are your parents divorced? If so, are they remarried? Where does your sister live, or did you tell me? What is Ron doing in Australia, and does he send you an occasional postcard? Maybe I don’t want to know about you, he thinks. Maybe the less I know about you...
“...never even said you love me, when I know you do,” she says.
There is a silence.
“Don’t you?” she asks. “Love me?”
He hesitates.
“Yes,” he says, “I love you.”
“Of course you do,” she says.
His first patient is scheduled to arrive at nine this morning. He likes to get to the office at eight-thirty or so, check his notes from the patient’s previous session, generally prepare himself for the long day ahead. The mail is delivered at nine, nine-thirty. He usually goes out to the lobby mailboxes after his first session, leafs through it during the ten minutes before his next appointment. His office routine is rigid and proscribed. In that sense, he is a well-organized man, dedicated — he likes to believe — to the arduous task of helping these people in dire need.
He has set his alarm, as usual, for seven forty-five.
When the telephone rings, he is in deep sleep and he thinks at first it is the alarm going off. He reaches for the clock, fumbles with the lever on the back, but it is still ringing, and he realizes belatedly that it is the telephone. The luminous face of the clock reads six forty-five A.M. He grabs for the phone receiver.
“Hello?” he says.
“Hi.”
Her voice signals a violent pounding of his heart each time he hears it.
“Are you awake?” she asks.