Burning Time

38

The lights were off, and Jason was not in the apartment when Emma returned from her long lunch with Ronnie. There was no sign that he had been there, and no messages from anybody on her answering machine. That was strange. Usually there were three or four. She wondered if it had stopped recording again. Sometimes it did that for a day or two. The heads or something got stuck. She took off her jacket and, with her heart pounding, she started going through the stack of mail she had picked up on the way in. She knew she was doing this to take her pulse, to see if she was all right. There hadn’t been one of those letters in the mail for three days and she was afraid to hope there would be no more.

Because of their two addresses in the building, mail was a little confusing. Some of it was put on a table outside Jason’s office door, and some of it was left on the mat outside their apartment a few steps away. That day Jason’s mail, the thick pile of envelopes, checks from patients, correspondence, books and periodicals, was still on the table. If he had come home, he would have gone into his office taking it with him. There were only bills, no personal letters to Emma in her and Jason’s joint mail. Not a sound came from the other side of the wall where his office was. She was still not all right.

A profound sense of aloneness overwhelmed her. The silence in the apartment was even more unnerving than the menacing sights and sirens on the street below. She was upset that Jason wasn’t there spying on her after all, and wondered if the creepy sensation she’d had outside, of being watched and followed around, was her own wish that he really had come back.

She shook her head. The truth was Jason wouldn’t take time off to spy on her. Time was everything to him. A lawyer could work at home, could work at the office when the client wasn’t there, would bill more hours than there are in a day, and no one could ever know. Heart surgeons could charge ten thousand dollars a day, could set their fee at whatever someone was willing to pay for a life. But a psychiatrist had only a few forty-five-minute periods in a day. And someone like Jason, who wrote and spoke, and did research, had to give away the price of every hour he spent on scholarship.

He didn’t waste his time without a good reason, and rarely had any for her anymore. It was a gift he used to give her, but not anymore. He was so involved with his work he didn’t enjoy the few occasions he had to cancel his evening patients to go see her in a play. For an opening night in Philadelphia, he had to miss much of the afternoon as well; he’d complained about it the next day. She hadn’t been at all surprised that he didn’t even consider giving up a three-day conference in Toronto to be there at her first screening. Often when she was alone in the evenings she dreamed about being a rich movie star, and buying some of Jason’s hours so he wouldn’t always feel he was losing something when he was with her.

Apprehensively, she flipped through the envelopes, mostly bills, a few invitations to events they would never in a million years attend. Nothing dangerous so far. Maybe she was just being nuts, afraid of success, afraid of making things worse with her husband, like Ronnie suggested.

“Everybody goes through rocky periods in the business, you know that,” Ronnie said.

Emma nodded. In marriage, too.

“Look, better face it now. Success is harder to manage than failure. The least of it is nasty letters.”

Emma came to the last envelope. It was from Save the Wilderness. Maybe Ronnie was right and this thing with the letters had played itself out. No more were coming in. The incoming fire was over. She picked up her jacket from where she had tossed it on a chair and wandered around the apartment, checking to see if it was in order. Everything was exactly as she had left it.

She was feeling all right and then without warning, anxiety about Jason welled up in her again. Where was he and why hadn’t he called her all day? It wasn’t like him. Was he just so mad at her he finally turned to one of his many fans, some woman, like himself terminally nice and comforting, from the ‘caring profession’? Someone who both sympathized and empathized with his needs?

That’s what they always asked her whenever she met one of them. “Are you in the ‘caring profession’?”

“No, I’m in the uncaring profession,” Emma was always tempted to retort. For Jason’s sake, she never had.

In the kitchen she found the slip of paper Jason left for her with the hotel number in San Diego on it. She never called him when he was away. He frequently made her feel guilty, but he didn’t like it when she made him feel guilty. She studied the number for a minute. Then she dialed it to see if he was really there.

The operator at the Meridien said there was no answer in his room. In a moment of pique at his secrecy, Emma didn’t care about the probability of bringing on his guilt. She left a message asking him to call her right away.