Burning Time

5

“Jesus!” A wave of dizziness surged over Jason. He reached for the wall to stop himself from staggering at the second shock from his wife in less than two hours.

Emma was in the laundry room of their apartment when he got home. She was wearing a black tank top and bicycle shorts, and she was running on an expensive treadmill that hadn’t been there when he left.

Drops of sweat glistened on her neck and chest. The skin of her midriff was winter pale. He turned toward the kitchen, then looked at her again, stunned. If anything, she was more beautiful in real life, and seemed farther away from him than if she were a stranger he had never seen before.

“Hi.” She turned to him, surprised to see him, smiled her dazzling, thousand-watt smile, and slowed the machine to a walk before getting off.

“I didn’t expect you for hours in all this fog. How did it go?” She reached out to him.

He shook his head, speechless. The only thing he could remember about Toronto was the anxiety, the premonition he had that something was not right with her. Too bad it had taken him so long to have it. He felt like an idiot, seemed to have missed an awful lot.

In patients and friends with marital problems he always looked for what was missing in the relationship, not for what was there. If passion was missing, if humor was missing, if warmth and life were missing, then he worried. Bickering and nagging were often signs of life, useful outlets for the unwelcome, and sometimes frightening, ambivalence that was part of every love relationship. Jason had always felt it was fine that he and Emma didn’t bicker. She didn’t like confrontation. It was a cultural thing.

“Sorry. I’m sweaty.” Emma backed off at his apparent rebuff.

Emma didn’t nag, either. She didn’t tear out her hair in violent rages, or throw the plates around. When she was troubled or in pain, a Protestant coolness settled over her and she went to another place in herself to think it out. He had always thought hers was not a bad way to deal with the vicissitudes of life. Cooling out was certainly easier than temper tantrums to live with. Pretty stupid of him to take it easy because it was easier.

Jason had no illusions about the common failing of his sex to mistake outward calm in a woman (or anyone else for that matter) for inner peace. But in his case there was more to it than insensitivity. Managing intimacy was a tricky job, and he deeply believed both partners needed space and privacy. He would never have intruded on Emma, probing for trouble when none was expressed, but clearly he should have.

He colored slightly. “No, no. It’s not the sweat. It’s the—” He shook his head, still unable to believe what he had seen her do on the screen.

“Oh, the treadmill,” she said. “Don’t be mad at me, sweetheart. I paid for it myself.” She dabbed at her face and chest. Tendrils of damp blond hair curled around her face. There was the trace of a smile on her lips.

“Jesus,” he muttered. She had broken his heart, and her eyes were clear. She felt no guilt.

“Why?” He coughed, trying to choke back the wrong start.

“Hey, if I’m scared of being attacked on the street, you shouldn’t have to pay for my terrors, Jason.” She slung the towel around her neck and changed the subject. “How did the trip go?”

He was incredulous. He couldn’t believe this, and couldn’t seem to get to the real subject. The antique mantel clock on the hall table chimed the hour. It was seven o’clock.

“Oh, God, Emmie. I know how you love to run. I would have paid for the treadmill. Why didn’t you tell me you wanted one?” His voice was agonized.

He wasn’t talking about the treadmill, and she clearly knew it. He looked at her, waiting for an answer to questions he hadn’t asked. And when none came, he turned and left the laundry room. He passed through the kitchen.

Most of the books and clocks he collected were in the living room ahead of him, on the other side of the entry gallery. He paused in the gallery. Everything felt different, altered in some fundamental way. The lights were off in the living room, but the sound of several clocks ticking in different rhythms animated the darkness. He turned left and headed down the hall to their bedroom.

For more than a dozen years he’d had extensive training in handling all situations. He could deal with paranoia, schizophrenia, psychosis, violence, hysteria, furies of every description. Once he disarmed an enraged adolescent wielding a knife. Another time he persuaded a drunk GI not to shoot the rifle he had pointed at Jason’s head. But seeing his lovely, reserved, ladylike wife nude, and having sex on the screen, was something Jason had no preparation for. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do.

A set of richly colored prints of the bridges and aquaducts of Rome lined the hall to their bedroom. The walls were painted a pale green above the chair rail, and white below. The bedroom was cream. Emma’s clothes were strewn around, and the bed looked like it hadn’t been made since he left three days ago. Of the three old clocks in the room, only the eight-day regulator was still ticking. Emma didn’t like to wind the clocks. She let them run down and stop when he was away, then said they only worked for him.

Jason went into the closet, still feeling dizzy. He breathed deeply, inhaling the smell of leather and running shoes, swallowing the saliva in his mouth.

Emma followed him into the room.

“I’m sorry I missed your screening,” he said. “How did it go?”

“Fine.” She started undressing.

Inadvertently, he thought of Daisy, one of his favorite patients. At every session she shed several layers before speaking, her coat, her jacket, a sweater, a scarf, her backpack. A whole bunch of stuff. Only when all her things were arranged around her, on the floor, on a chair, would she sit down and stare at him contentiously.

“So?” she would demand, as if everything that had gone wrong in her life was all his fault.

He loved it. He loved her. Another patient always left something of his behind in the office. Jason was waiting for the right moment to make him start taking charge of his life. Jason loved him, too. The young man had battled cancer, and now had to face the unexpected prize of a future he had no idea how to handle.

On the table the regulator chimed its deep gong. Reflexively, Jason checked his watch. The regulator was a full five minutes slow.

“It wasn’t a screening, was it?” he said suddenly.

“What?” Emma said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, my love, it’s already opened. I saw it.”

“When?” She reached for a towel to cover herself.

“Just now. It’s at the Eighty-third Street theater.”

“I thought your flight came in at seven.” She frowned, glancing quickly at her own clock, a functional, battery-operated alarm that was never wrong or quirky. “When did you get back?” she asked, confused by the discrepancy in timing.

“About four. I didn’t stay for the lunch.”

“Oh.” She stared at him. “You didn’t call.”

“No, I thought I’d surprise you.”

“You never surprise me.” There was a long pause. “Did you like it?” she asked when nothing more was forthcoming.

“What do you think?” he replied, as calmly as he could.

She smiled almost shyly. “The Times said it was good. So did the Voice.” She warmed to the praise. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

No, it wasn’t. Her appearing nude in a film that made psychiatrists seem evil was very far from wonderful. Jason dumped some clothes and books off the chair by the bed and sat heavily. Why did she tell him it was a screening when it was an opening? She must have wanted him to go to Toronto and miss it. He simply couldn’t believe her first film was in the theaters, had already been reviewed, and she had neglected to tell him a thing about it. He was utterly crushed.

She, on the other hand, was smiling with wonder and excitement, obviously thrilled with herself. Where was her brain? She never asked him if the film would hurt him, never consulted with him. And it was a terrible embarrassment. His patients might not know that Emma Chapman was his wife, but his colleagues did. She had just opened a big window on their life that could not fail to humiliate him deeply.

He watched her pull on another pair of stretch pants and sit cross-legged on the bed, holding the towel up to her neck to hide the breasts that were already property of the world.

“Ronnie had three calls today,” she went on.

Jesus Christ, there was more. He looked at her legs. “What did she call you about?” he asked.

“About other scripts. Isn’t it amazing? After all the years when I couldn’t even get a commercial.” Emma talked as if she hadn’t done anything unusual, as if this sudden interest in her, these calls to her agent, were totally unexpected.

“No, it’s not amazing,” Jason said. Of course she would get other offers to fuck on the screen. The camera loved her.

“So, you liked it,” she said eagerly. “It’s kinky, isn’t it?”

It was kinky all right. He paused for a long minute. If this were a session it would seem like an hour of empty space. Some of his patients squirmed in such spaces, felt they were falling into the abyss. He shook his head, sure of one thing. He wasn’t kinky. He couldn’t stand sadistic movies. Hated horror. He experienced enough terror in his work. He didn’t want to see it in his free time, didn’t want a wife who would do something like this—mock his work, destroy his dignity, his privacy, everything he believed in. Still, he was a professional. He kept his voice calm.

“Why didn’t you mention the nudity and the sex to me?” he said softly.

She twisted the towel in her hand. “I don’t know, it was a private thing.”

“A private thing?”

“Yeah, kind of like therapy. You don’t talk about therapy with anyone, do you? It’s your private life, your work.” She looked at him challengingly. “This is my work.”

“Emma, there’s a difference. Therapy really is private. No one else can know what happens in it. It has to be confidential.”

Emma shrugged. “Well, I thought it would help me be more secure, because up there it isn’t really me.”

“Oh? Who is it?” He didn’t try to control the coldness of his tone.

“It’s the character. I do what the character would do.”

Jason shook his head. “Baby, it’s still you up there, and you have something to do with me. You’re not alone in the world. You’re married to me. Don’t my feelings count?”

She lifted a shoulder with a provocative smile. “Well, did it turn you on?”

“Jesus, is that what you wanted to do?”

“Oh, come on, Jason, acting is what I do. You knew that when you married me. Don’t you ever secretly want to sleep with a star?” she asked slyly.

“No,” he said sharply. “No, I don’t. And we agreed you’d never do that kind of thing.”

Her lip trembled. “I thought you’d like it. Your whole world is mystery and secrets. You love your patients. You live in a secret world with them. I have nothing to do with your life.”

“That part of my life. Only that part,” he protested. “You’re in this part. You’re everything in this part.”

But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. They came home with him. They lived with him in his heart. They wounded him, and touched him, and often made him want to cry. Nobody could compete with the drama of their lives.

“I can’t live in anybody’s shadow,” she was saying.

Emma had a life of her own. She didn’t live in his shadow. Jason couldn’t bear this. He got up to wind one of his beautiful, silenced clocks. He heard her now, as if from a long way away, telling him she had done it to have something of her own.