Burning Time

23

Twelve minutes later, the two men were shaking hands in Charles’s waiting room.

“I brought the letters,” Jason said.

“Sit down for a minute. There’s a lot to this. A whole lot,” Charles replied, leading the way into his office.

There was a desk, chairs, the analyst couch, the usual things. At the far end of the room was a new leather sofa. A burnished antique coffee table was positioned in front of it.

Charles headed for the sofa and sat heavily. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

Jason raised his eyebrows. Drinking in the middle of the day now, were they? “Yes, I would,” he said. “But I better not.”

Charles shrugged. “Listen, I can’t get a handle on this.”

Jason blew some air out of his nose. He didn’t have a handle on it either.

“You know I don’t want to dig into places you don’t want me to go. But it’s a puzzle. I don’t have the pieces.” He shrugged apologetically. He was a big shrugger. “You know I’m here for you. I’ll do anything I can, but without the pieces—” He raised his shoulders again.

“What do you want to know?” Jason smiled wanly.

Charles took a breath. “Well, I saw the film.”

“I thought you would. What did you think?”

“I was very surprised,” Charles said carefully. “I wasn’t shocked. I mean, most films these days have some pretty graphic sex in them, but,” he paused, “the content is disturbing. There’s no question about that. It takes a dim view of therapists. But there’s a lot of that going around. That’s not an issue in itself.… You said Emma didn’t tell you about this, is that right?”

Jason nodded, and then shook his head. “Well, a film doesn’t just arrive out of nowhere,” he admitted after a slight hesitation that he knew Charles noted.

“The script was around for a—long time.” Jason could still visualize it sitting there on the table for many months. “I just didn’t read it.”

He hesitated again, then went on. “The guy who wrote it is a friend of Emma’s. I admit I never liked him—grubby, insinuating, supercilious sort of asshole. Defensive. But he had been a friend of hers since college. Emma was in several of his plays,” he added.

He smiled, thinking of the plays.

“Good plays?” Charles asked.

“She was good, but the plays were—nothing. Not daring, not involving. Just kind of dull.” Jason grimaced.

“So you didn’t read this one?”

“Emma says she asked me to read it, but I don’t remember her asking me. I don’t know, Charles. I just can’t imagine not reading it if she asked me to.”

“Well, you didn’t like the guy’s work. You didn’t want to read it,” Charles said neutrally, then more to the point: “I guess you’ve been drifting apart, as they say.”

It happened all the time, happened to everybody. Different tastes, different work sent people on tangents they didn’t expect when they married. Jason sucked in his lips the way Harold did when he didn’t want to admit something. So the great listener hadn’t been listening to his own wife. Charles’s empty stomach began to gurgle.

“So what do you think her involvement was?” he asked after a minute.

Jason frowned. “Uh, what do you mean?”

“With the script. Is Emma jealous of your patients? Does she think you’re involved with someone else? Did she write her own part? I mean her unconscious motivation, Jason. She may be acting, but who’s the voice here? Who wrote the story and why? Was she … involved with what’s-his-name?”

“Mark?” Involuntarily, Jason shuddered. “He’s a jerk.”

“He’s her director,” Charles pointed out. “Is he in love with her?”

“I don’t know. She’s attractive and bright.” Jason looked away. Warm, when she wanted to be. He was feeling very emotional and was beginning to sweat. “Who wouldn’t be in love with her?”

“So,” Charles said. “What were the areas of conflict between you?”

Sweat ran down Jason’s sides. He considered taking his jacket off. Charles wasn’t wearing one, and he had loosened his tie. Jason decided not to take his jacket off. He might need to leave soon.

“I didn’t think it was anything serious. She wanted more work, of course.” Wanted to spend more time together. She had been talking more about having a baby, and he had been resisting. He was involved with his patients and his writing. She didn’t like being left home when he went to conferences. She hated his jumping out of bed at dawn every morning. Very little morning love. He didn’t say any of that out loud.

“Look, I missed it. She may have been jealous.” He swallowed. “She may have been lonely, but I don’t think she wrote the thing. She’s not like that.”

“Involved?”

“Well, she’s always been involved with him. She knew him before she knew me. I didn’t think they were ever lovers.” Jason looked at the wall again. But he didn’t know that for sure.

He was the one who had been married before. They talked about that. A lot. At the time, his character was more of an issue to her than hers had been to him. She was a more interesting and beautiful woman than he ever expected to get. She was deeply in love with him. Why should he harbor doubts? He hadn’t. Could she be aggrieved enough to take a lover? He had seen it on the screen with his own eyes, the possibility of Emma with another man. Emma graphically showing him what she could do, what she was capable of doing, and still he had trouble believing that the woman he loved would do it.

“What about you?” Charles asked.

“What about me?”

“Are you involved with someone?”

Oh, so that was it. Charles had involvement on the brain. He couldn’t imagine anything else. Jason frowned irritably.

“This isn’t about that. It’s not about love affairs. Look. This is something else.” He took the letters out of his briefcase and laid them out on the coffee table in front of them. Fifteen of them. One had arrived each day except Sundays for the last two weeks. On Thursdays, two letters always arrived. Jason figured the second letter was the one the writer mailed on Sunday, when the mail wasn’t picked up or delivered. The postmarks were all smudged. No way to know where they came from.

“Just take a look at this. I’m worried about her safety.” Jason raked a hand through his hair. “I’m worried about keeping her safe, Charles. There’s somebody out there who knows a whole lot about her, who wants to hurt her. It’s all here in these letters. Emma doesn’t see it, but anyone with training can see what this stuff means.”

Charles frowned, still unconvinced about the real story. “So,” he said. “You still love her.”

“Of course I love her. I’ll hate her forever, but I love her.” Jason was surprised to hear himself say it.

“Fair enough.” Charles turned his attention to the letters.

Jason had put a date and a number on the top of each one. Charles read them through, and then read them again. Then he read them a third time, going over each one very slowly. When he was finished, they sat in silence for a long time.

“Jesus,” Charles said finally. “You have reason to be worried. What is this thing here?” He pointed to the drawing at the bottom of each letter. “A chariot, a Chinese symbol, a wheel with flaming swords?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before. It seems to be a signature for him.”

Charles frowned. “He’s quite a poet. Listen to this: ‘If you could read my mind, what a tale my thoughts could tell. Just like an old time movie, ’bout a ghost from a wishing well. In a castle dark, or a fortress strong with chains upon your feet. You’ll know the ghost is me. And I’ll never be set free as long as I’m a ghost you can’t see. You won’t walk away like a movie star who gets burned in a three-way script. Enter number two. A movie queen to play the scene bringing all the Right things out of me. I don’t know where you went wrong but the feeling’s gone, and I have to get it back. But stories always end, and if you read between the lines, you’d know why I can’t get you back.’ This is weird.”

“Gordon Lightfoot.”

“What?” Charles said.

“It’s a song by Gordon Lightfoot. But he’s changed some of the words.”

The blood climbed up Charles’s face as he blushed. “I didn’t recognize it.”

“Where were you in the sixties?” Jason said lightly.

“Medical school, same place as you. What’s this about amputation? And guided missiles.” Charles frowned.

Jason read aloud. “ ‘The pathway seemed so sure. You were so pure. The pathway seemed so right. The road wasn’t supposed to go left. You were meant to stay right and true.’ He seems to have an obsession about right and left. He may be left-handed. Some people suffer a lot over that.”

“Here he does it again in letter seven.” Charles pointed to the phrase. “ ‘Do you ever wonder why the heart is on the left. You turned left. I am your heartbeat. I follow you in my dreams.’ Here he calls her California Dreamin’.”

“I call her that sometimes,” Jason murmured.

Charles looked at him with a thin smile. “Maybe it’s you.”

Jason’s face darkened. “Emma says that. Look at the type. It’s from a really old portable. I have a really old portable.”

“Then she could be writing them herself. Maybe she doesn’t think she has your attention yet.”

Jason shook his head. “She doesn’t know how to sound that crazy, and she’s right-handed. She wouldn’t know how someone would express a left-handed obsession. There are more than twenty-five references to the left, i.e., wrong side of things … Fire in the sand. Is that a religious reference?”

Charles shrugged. “Not a specific one. Did you check and see if it’s the same typewriter?” he asked. Still on the typewriter.

Now it was Jason’s turn to blush. “I looked for it. I thought it was on the shelf in my closet. But—it’s not around.” He paused. “I must have thrown it out.”

They both started at the sound of the outer door opening and closing.

Charles sighed. “Well, I think you’re right. There may be something to your concern. No point in taking any chances. I think you should get in touch with the police.”

“It’s someone who knows her,” Jason said flatly.

“Obviously, it’s someone who knows her, someone from a long time ago. How much do you really know about her?” Charles asked.

“I thought I knew everything,” Jason said.

So much for that.

“Uh, do you mind if I make a copy of these?” Charles was already on his feet.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I want to think about it.”

“I don’t want them out of my hands,” Jason said, shaking his head.

Charles opened the door to his closet. It had filing cabinets like Jason’s, but unlike Jason’s, it also had a Canon copier. “I’ll make copies. Any objection?”

Jason shrugged.

Charles copied the letters. “I think you should call the police,” he said again. “Maybe they have a way of finding out where these came from.”

“Yeah,” Jason said slowly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Call me later. I’ll be in this evening.” Charles opened the double doors carefully so the patient in his waiting room couldn’t see him.