Burning Time

3

Three blocks from home Jason looked out the taxi window and was startled by a movie marquee that hadn’t been there when he left town. Serpent’s Teeth. What in the—?

“Stop,” he said suddenly.

The taxi skidded to a halt at Broadway and Eighty-third Street. Jason paid the fare and dragged his things out into the cold. It was a foggy March afternoon, still dead of winter in New York. His flight from Canada had taken less than two hours. He hesitated outside the theater, studying the poster. There were just two faces on it, with all the names at the bottom too small to read. One face he knew well. He shivered as the cold mist turned to rain, intensified, and began pelting down. Jesus. Jason bought a ticket to get out of the deluge and ducked into the moldy old theater.

Inside it was dark and smelled powerfully of popcorn. Jason chose a row in the back and put his suitcases on the seat beside him. The film had already started. The camera pulled in tight on a girl sitting on a couch with her legs crossed. She was tracing patterns on her bare thigh with her index finger. A man sat behind her watching on an angle, so that he could see what she was doing but she could not see him. Jason frowned. He didn’t want to see a story about a psychiatrist. No one ever got them right.

He drummed his fingers on the grubby armrests.

For some long moments there was no sound on the screen and nothing else happened. There was some shuffling and coughing as the movie audience became impatient. Then, just as the stagnation on the screen reached the point of being unbearable, the woman stretched out her legs and leaned back, arching her back slightly. She had been an attractive woman, but suddenly she was dazzling. Her presence in the film took ordinariness, a simple story of corruption, and gave it a dark little twist that sent it spinning into a kinky sexual corner that was scary, erotic, and disturbing.

The story was of a pretty, vulnerable woman slowly drifting into a relationship with a vaguely sinister young man with a hard empty face and very little in the way of a life. They were shown taking a number of aimless walks in various New York parks, and sitting in restaurants. The only relief from walking and restaurants came when the woman was with her therapist.

He was a paunchy, unattractive man who managed to be both passive and sexually menacing at the same time. The audience couldn’t hear what they said to each other. The patient’s lips moved, but only the sound of flushing toilets, of cars in the streets, a radio from next door, could be heard. The scenes looked like they had been shot through a keyhole, as if someone could imagine how therapy looked, but not how it sounded. And it looked like an unsavory seduction.

The woman sat up or lay down, turned on her side, used various kinds of body language that became more and more provocative. The psychiatrist responded in kind. Without words there was no way of knowing what the content of the scene between the two really was. Jason became tense and anxious at the thought of having to watch the code he lived by violated.

Then suddenly the scene changed and she was naked with the other man. The young hoodlum was wearing jeans and a leather jacket with a zip front. It hung open. He leaned over the woman and rubbed the zipper back and forth across her flawless neck and breasts. Then he sank to his knees on the floor in front of her.

Jason did not want to see what he was going to do, or what she was going to do. He wanted to be magically out on the street and miss the rest. He didn’t like a second of this, didn’t like it at all. But the woman was mysterious and unusual, mesmerizing. He couldn’t leave.

She leaned over the arm of the chair, arching her back as she had earlier in the psychiatrist’s office. Her rich wheaty hair hung down, and her head was bent back in that way that never looked right in films because most people couldn’t do it in life. Her legs were very long. The man buried his face in her lap. She clasped him with one bare leg around his back, then the other.

Jason swallowed and looked furtively around. He could see that the men in the audience were aroused, as he was himself. Every man wanted to be that character, that aimless hoodlum making love in his black leather jacket. The shirt that had been under it was suddenly gone. Jason’s unease reached the stage of extreme discomfort. He crossed his legs the other way.

Then the scene changed. They were back in the psychiatrist’s office. The woman was talking with no sound. Jason’s heart beat faster still. He didn’t want to see her naked now with the shrink. Perspiration broke out on his forehead as the screen went white and a hum filled the soundtrack. It was unbearable. What was happening now?

Slowly the picture cleared. The woman and the hoodlum were in a room with little colorful picture transfers all over the wall. It was a tattoo parlor. Jason’s heart raced. What was this about? They were looking at each other intensely. The hoodlum had his shirt off. He was on a stool with his hairless chest filling the screen. The woman caressed his shoulder as another man appeared on the screen, fiddling with some sort of instrument.

A whine that sounded like a swarm of bees filled the theater. The man took the instrument and began to tattoo the shoulder of the hoodlum. The woman watched with intense excitement as the tattoo grew. The lovers looked at each other. Their feet touched. Their fingers entwined.

Finally, the mean Chinese-looking symbol in blue and black was finished, and the young man got up. Jason looked at his watch, thanking God it was over.

But it wasn’t over. Now the woman took his place on the stool. Slowly she unbuttoned her blouse and lowered it over her shoulders until her whole back was bared. The man began caressing her neck and arms, encouraging her as she had him. Her expression changed to one of sly satisfaction as the whine began again, and the tattoo needle moved toward her naked shoulder. Freeze frame.

Jesus Christ. Jason shook his head as the credits began to roll. Emma Chapman’s name came first. She was the actress Jason had come to see on the screen for the first time. He felt dizzy at the sight of his wife’s name, as if he had the kind of food poisoning that shot toxins straight to the brain. Somehow, in all the months of preparation for the film and the shooting of it, she had neglected to tell him what she did in this film and what it was about. He sat there in shock for a long time.