It is Westport, Connecticut, and little Katie Duggan — “That’s what my parents used to call me, Katie” — is thirteen years old and working for the summer as an apprentice at the Westport Country Playhouse, a job she got through her father’s best friend, who that summer was the theater’s accountant or something, “I forget what his exact title was,” she says, “but he was there in some sort of financial capacity, he wasn’t the artistic director or anything,” sounding very genuine in her little schoolgirl role, relating that she was just beginning to develop at the advanced age of thirteen the teeniest budding little breasts, “Well, look at me now, nothing’s changed much,” she says and lowers her eyes in mock shyness again. He does, in fact, look at her now, looks at the front of the pristine cotton blouse, and discovers that as usual she’s not wearing a bra, and discovers, too, that her nipples as usual are erect against the cotton fabric, puckering the fabric, and wonders again if she’s wearing panties, “although I already had pubic hair,” she says, “it started coming in red when I was twelve.”
“How interesting,” he says. “Are you wearing panties now, miss?”
“Yes, I am, Doctor,” she says, and smiles briefly, and then resumes the pose of serious little girl relating something she’s already told Jacqueline Hicks, but which she feels is something he should know, too, don’t you think, Doctor? As she begins talking again, she seems to immerse herself more deeply in the role so that he now finds himself truly listening intently, just as any real psychiatrist might, just as Dr. Hicks might have if such a story had actually been related to her, just as — he realizes with a start — Dr. Hicks must have when Kate first told her about that summer when she was thirteen. This is real, he is too skilled a listener to believe any longer that it is playacting. Not three minutes into the story he knows that this is what really happened and that she has chosen this method of revealing to him what she has already told Dr. Hicks, whom she was seeing when she was “really crazy.”
Looking directly into his eyes, Kate tells him that what she decided to do that summer was lose her virginity to her father’s best friend, a married man with three children, whose exact title she forgets but who came in every day to tally the box office receipts and balance the books and pay the salaries and all that in a little office he had down under the theater. “Do you know where the rest rooms are, have you ever been to Westport, to the theater there? Downstairs where the rest rooms are was where Charlie had his office, his name was Charlie. He had this little office with a desk and a chair in it, and some filing cabinets. I used to go down to the office when I’d finished doing whatever they told me to do, they give the apprentices all kinds of shit to do, and I’d sit on his desk and spread my legs for him. That was later.”
In the beginning, she used to find excuses to go down there to his office to complain about how badly they were treating her. He listened patiently, he was after all her father’s best friend, seemed happy in fact for any respite from the tedium of poring over figures and balancing books. She’d stop down there in cutoff blue jeans and T-shirt, nothing under the shirt, of course, she didn’t have anything much to put in a bra except those tiny breasts that were almost entirely nipples. She was beginning to develop pretty good nipples that summer, at least recognizable as such and discernible enough for him to comment one day in a very fatherly manner, “Katie, you ought to start wearing a bra,” which meant he’d noticed, which meant she was making some progress here. And, of course, her legs looked terrific in the cutoffs.
“I’ve always had great legs,” she tells David now, “even when I was just a little girl. But I’d been taking dance for quite a while by the time I was thirteen, and my legs were really quite long and shapely...”
“They still are,” he says, forgetting for the moment that he is neither her real psychiatrist nor her fake one, remembering all at once that they are here to make love, presumably, and the time she is a-flying, and he hasn’t had lunch, and his next patient will be here in forty minutes, and besides he’s not even sure he wants to hear this story of teenage...
“Thank you, Doctor,” she says. “Anyway, I guess he thought my legs were pretty spectacular...”
“They are,” he says, a psychiatrist’s ploy, a cheap trick, an unabashed prompt, hoping she will respond Yes, come put your hands on my creamy white thighs, Yes, come slide your hands under my schoolgirl skirt and onto my...
“Thank you, Doctor,” she says again, “because one day he said in a very fatherly manner, ‘Katie, some of the boys have been noticing your legs,’ which meant he’d been noticing them, which was further progress. By the way, seducing him wasn’t the main reason I was at the Playhouse, if that’s what you’re thinking. Actually, that was just something I decided to do because I got so bored. And maybe angry, too, because I didn’t get to dance in On the Town, which I knew they’d be doing that summer, and which was the main reason I was there to begin with — but that’s another story.”
Charlie was a man in his early fifties, she guesses now... well, her father was forty-three that summer and Charlie was older than he was, so yes, he was either in his very late forties or his early fifties. He had a bald head and he was sort of short and stout, and he wasn’t very attractive although he did have nice sensitive blue eyes, but she can’t imagine now why she was so intent on having him notice her to begin with, which he certainly did with more and more frequency, and then touch her, which he finally did one rainy day in August while on stage the actors, including two of them from Broadway, were rehearsing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and in the workshop the other apprentices were busy painting scenery.
She rises from the couch now, as if the memory of that steamy day in August is too much for her to bear sitting still and erect on a black leather couch, rises and begins pacing his office, the pleated skirt swirling about her long legs as she walks back and forth before his desk, turning at opposite ends of the short course her long strides define, the skirt swirling, swirling. She is a dancer, she was a dancer even back then, surely she realizes that her abrupt turns are causing the short skirt to billow about her legs, to expose above the taut black stockings a wider expanse of white thigh each time — and yes! There! A glimpse of the now world-famous bicycle-shop white panties, not the black ones she promised on the phone, but plain white panties instead, girlish cotton panties more appropriate to the schoolgirl uniform, similar to the panties she was wearing on that dripping wet day in August when she was thirteen and she slipped down the stairs to his office wearing, yes, white panties, yes, under her habitual cutoff jeans and a thin white cotton T-shirt that had the words WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE printed across its nipple-puckered front.
He is sitting at his desk, bald head bent over the ledger spread open before him. A narrow window is on the short wall opposite the door, and rain beats steadily in a widening street-level puddle just outside of it, droplets of water splashing up onto the glass. A lamp with a green shade illuminates the yellow ledger and his bald head bent over it. Suddenly a flash of lightning turns the horizontal window glaringly blue, and there is immediate thunder in the parking lot outside. He glances up toward the window, shaking his head in awe, and then turns back to his books again. He does not yet know she is in the office. They have never been alone together in this room with the door shut. She eases the door shut behind her. He looks up when he hears the click of the lock as she turns the bolt.