He has already forgotten the golden-haired redhead whose bike was stolen in Central Park.
But, of course, at parties all during that long weekend of the Fourth, Helen keeps urging him to tell the story of what happened in Central Park. And with each retelling of the story, even though David reports the facts essentially the same way each time, the story assumes mythic proportions in his own mind, the movie playing there differing from the actual script as much as if a director had arrogantly tampered with a writer’s original creation to make it indifferently his own. At a cocktail party in Edgartown that Saturday, as David retells the basic story as it happened, he visualizes something quite other in his imagination, and is surprised to hear himself relating a tale that is, by comparison, fundamentally mundane.
In his fantasy, the bicycle thief (good title for a movie, he thinks, thank you, Mr. De Sica), in The Bicycle Thief, then — David’s movie and not De Sica’s — the robber is no longer a scrawny sixteen-year-old black kid struggling almost unsuccessfully to wrench a bike from a slip of a girl who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, but is instead a brawny tattooed (Mom in a heart) black ex-con wearing a tiny gold earring in his left ear, sweaty T-shirt bulging with impossible muscles courtesy of Weight Lifting 101 at Ossining, New York. The girl, too, whereas not the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old he’d first thought she was yesterday in the park, becomes in the Never Never Land of his unconscious a girl of nineteen, technically a teenager but precariously poised on the cusp of womanhood, certainly a more appropriate victim for the brute assaulting her in this neorealistic black-and-white remake of Beauty and the Beast, a far far better prey, unquestionably more innocent, and therefore more defenseless than a woman of twenty-five would have been (if, in fact, that was her age).
As David tells the story to an interested circle of listeners on the deck of a house larger than the one they are renting in Menemsha, yet another glorious sunset provoking ooohs and ahhhs of appreciation, he does not exaggerate in the slightest his behavior yesterday in the park. He carefully explains that he did not run to the rescue until he’d examined the possible risk of such intervention...
“Well, of course,” his host says, raising an understanding eyebrow. “You were in Central Park.”
“Exactly,” David replies.
...and even then, all he did was yell “Hey!” which had no effect at all on the struggle, and then “Hey!” again when the boy was already pedaling off. This being Edgartown, he does not mention that the boy yelled “Fuck you!” in exuberant farewell. This being Edgartown, someone immediately begins talking about the absurdity of the Black Rage defense, and someone else suggests that if they catch this little monster he should be chained to a bicycle and forced to ride up and down the streets of New York with a sign on his back reading BICYCLE THIEF.
“Good title for a movie,” someone says with a sly wink, as if David hasn’t already thought of it.
“Thank you, Mr. De Sica,” someone else says.
That, too, David thinks.
But...
In retelling the tale that evening, and again at a Bring-the-Kiddies outdoor barbecue in Chilmark that Sunday, where — it being Chilmark — a heated discussion ensues regarding therapy programs for underprivileged minorities, and yet again at a West Chop picnic on Monday (“Of course, bring the kids!”) and yet again for the last time...
Or at least what he hopes will be the last time, if only Helen would quit urging him to tell about The Mugging in Central Park, her title for the episode, which in truth is beginning to bore him even in the extravagantly distorted version inside his head. Yet retell it he does, for what actually does turn out to be the last time, at yet another cocktail party on the deck of a house overlooking Vineyard Haven Harbor and affording a splendid view of the fireworks display that starts as darkness falls and the world grows hushed in expectation.
But...
In all of these retellings, the fantastic story unfolding in his mind has him not only rushing to the adolescent girl’s side, not only struggling with the brawny animal trying to steal her bike and rape her in the bargain — her costume torn, one breast showing where he’s ripped the orange tank top from her shoulder, the adolescent nipple erect in terror — not only struggling with this weight-lifting specimen twice his size, but actually exchanging blows with him, the girl standing by breathlessly, her hand to her mouth, the green eyes wide in fear and concern, the freckled face flushed, until at last her attacker hits David a good one upside the head, in his mind, anyway, and knocks him to the ground, in his mind, and kicks him while he’s down, in his mind, and races off shouting the words David had not thought wise to repeat in Edgartown, nor even here in Vineyard Haven, for that matter.
Over the harbor, fireworks burst into the sky, trailing glowing shivering sparks toward the dark waters below.
Arthur K’s sister is once again wearing her pink angora sweater, dark blue pleated skirt, string of pearls, bobby sox and saddle shoes. This is now the fifth of July, a hot and sultry Wednesday morning. It has been five days since Arthur K’s Friday afternoon session; apparently the long Fourth of July weekend has blown all memories of the open blue robe from his mind. He revisits the scene in the kitchen again and again, tiptoeing around it like one of the ballerina hippopotami in Fantasia, but they are already thirty minutes into the hour and the blue robe has remained adamantly closed over Veronica’s luminous pearls.
Arthur K is now telling David that he really had a lousy time at the synagogue dance that night long ago, and that, in fact, he hadn’t made out with Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac, or anywhere else, for that matter.
“I guess that was some sort of fantasy I made up,” he says. “I guess that was what I wished would happen, but it didn’t.”
David says nothing.
“Does that make you angry?” Arthur K asks.
“No, no.”
“My lying to you?”
“Do you feel you were lying to me?”
“No. I told you it was just a fantasy, didn’t I? How is that lying? I was only sixteen at the time. It was just a fantasy.”
In his notebook, David writes 
, and then waits, his pen poised over the lined yellow page.
“Nothing wrong with fantasies,” Arthur K says. “I’m sure you have fantasies, don’t you?”
They are perpendicular to each other, Arthur K on his back on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, David sitting in the chair behind his desk.
“By the way, how do you determine what’s important and what’s not?” Arthur K asks. “How do you know what to write down?”
David does not reply.
“I guess Shirley’s important, hm?” Arthur K says. “You always make a little note when I mention her, I can hear your little pen going, zip, zip, zip. Is that because she had the same name as my mother? Has, for all I know. She may still be alive. She’d be an old woman by now, of course... well, sixty-five, sixty-six, for a woman that’s old. She was very beautiful back then, it was easy to fantasize about her, you can’t blame me for fantasizing about her. I realize that what I told you... about the car and about her and me on the backseat... isn’t something I fantasized back then when I was sixteen, of course, but something I made up now... well, not now, not this very minute, but whenever it was I first mentioned it to you. What I’m saying is I know I was telling you something I made up, I know I was lying to you, if that’s what you choose to call it, telling you a lie about making out with Shirley when actually all I did was drive her home and say goodnight to her. Didn’t even kiss her, in fact. Just said goodnight. I don’t think we even shook hands. Just G’night, Shirley, G’night, Arthur, and I went home. I think I had a hard-on, I’m not sure. She was so fucking beautiful, it was impossible to go anywhere near her without getting a hard-on. I’m sure I must’ve had a hard-on.”