Hanging Time

8

Within a second of Milicia’s entrance the air was charged with her perfume. Jason knew it would still be there in an hour, and his next patient would remark on it. What was it—woody, herbal, spicy? Not his favorite aroma. He made an effort not to sneeze.

Milicia slowly appraised his office, turning around, showing him her back so he could study her if he wanted to. He didn’t. He had long ago learned to focus on one of the clocks or the window, even his cuticles if absolutely necessary, anything but the bodies of his female patients when they walked around his office.

Well or sick, a large number of women these days took the position that men looking at them any way whatsoever was a kind of sexual harassment. Jason never let any of them make that an issue with him.

So he focused on the pendulum of the clock on his desk. But even watching its measured process back and forth across four inches, Jason did not miss any of the many attributes of Ms. Honiger-Stanton. As indeed she did not wish him to.

In a red blouse open at the neck that in no way disguised her ample breasts, and a short red skirt, she had a statuesque presence. Everything about her signaled a difference from the ordinary, including her level of self-confidence. Her perfume was definitely spicy, not flowery or herbal, Jason decided. Maybe it was Opium. He didn’t like Opium.

The perfume reminded him of the day he dared to ask his skinny, discontented father for a baseball glove. He got more than no for an answer. His father, already a bitter and defeated old man, shook several tobacco-stained fingers at him, warning if Jason got what he wanted, it wouldn’t make him happy.

In ominous tones Herman Frank illustrated his point with a story about how Jason’s mother, Belle, had spent a great sum of money, “more than a week’s worth of food, on some gardenia perfume,” Herman said, “to please me on our wedding night.”

He inhaled his cigarette down to the very end, and fiercely stabbed it out, still angry over that long-ago extravagance.

“And you know what?” he demanded, blowing smoke into his son’s puzzled face.

“What?” Jason remembered the smoke choking him.

“It smelled so bad I couldn’t stand to be near her. Made me vomit.” Herman ended the story in triumph, hacking up a lump of brown phlegm and spitting it into his grimy handkerchief.

It took Jason a long time to figure out what his father’s vomiting on his wedding night had to do with Jason’s being denied a baseball glove fifteen years later.

Milicia examined his environment critically, as if it were an architectural disaster in need of complete rehabilitation. Jason felt a stab of insecurity. His office was comfortable, had a bit of a view into himself in it—his clocks, gifts from his patients that included small sculptures, watercolors, needlepoint pillows, paperweights. The paint was beginning to peel in a number of places on the ceiling. It was clear to anyone with an eye for these things that the place had never seen a decorator.

Her striding into his office, posing for him, demanding attention, and smelling as if she’d doused herself on the way up in the elevator was very far from the usual nervous and highly stressed behavior of a person in need of psychological counseling. His clinician’s sensitive antennae bristled.

Finally she finished her visual tour of his furniture, which was the usual collection of aged leather, semi-matched pieces, Oriental carpet on the floor, objects on his desk and windowsill. His bookcases were far from adequate for his growing collection of reference material. Books and periodicals of all kinds covered every available surface.

“I like this building,” she said, finally settling into the Eames chair behind Jason’s analyst’s couch and crossing her legs.

Jason nodded and took his desk chair opposite her. For many years he had liked this building, too. It was a jewel, a copy of the kind of buildings in Paris and Austria that were built before the turn of the century. It had a sandstone façade in the front and a heavy wrought iron and glass front door. The centerpiece of the ornate lobby was an elaborate staircase that wound around a central space open all the way to the top floor, where there was a stained glass skylight. The elevator was a cage with a folding gate that had never been replaced with anything more modern. Now that Emma was gone, Jason was seriously considering moving, growing a beard. He stroked his chin in a rabbinical sort of way, waiting for Milicia to reveal her reason for being there.

She swiveled from side to side, showing off her long legs.

“I feel a little nervous,” she murmured. “It’s an odd situation, particularly since we met socially.… Of course, you must get this all the time.”

Jason smiled neutrally. So far Milicia had revealed that she was sophisticated. She could appropriately identify the awkwardness of the situation and relate it to the present social context. Saying he got this all the time was meant to flatter him by enhancing his professional identity. His impressions of her were camera clicks.

She knocked over her handbag with her foot, leaned over to right it, showing off her cleavage and a black lace bra.

He had an uneasy feeling. Her flaunting was about on the level of a man carrying on a conversation with his hands in his pockets, rattling his change. Guess what I’ve got in here.

Milicia did a lot of rattling her change. Jason wondered why.

Her eyes slid around the room again. “Your books are reassuring. I’ve always loved books. If you’ve read them all, you must know what you’re doing.” She laughed briefly.

“The clutter is nice, too,” she went on. “It means you’re not one of those uptight people without any real feeling. You’re not a plastic person.” She studied him intently, a smile playing on the lower half of her face.

Jason didn’t respond to this foray either. He was clicking the camera on her. And also on himself as he measured his reactions to her. It wasn’t clear to him what was going on.

“So. Why don’t you tell me what’s happening with you, and what you think I can do to help,” he said.

There was a long pause while she gazed at him some more, as if trying to decide if she could trust him.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said finally. “I need some advice, that’s all. I didn’t want to talk to Charles about this. He’s a client. I’m sure you understand about that.” She shrugged. “You impressed me the other day. I figured I could ask you.”

Jason nodded. “Go ahead.”

“I’m very worried about my sister.” She crossed her legs the other way, and readjusted the handbag at her feet. Once again the blouse fell open.

Jason picked up a new black and white notebook from his desk. “What worries you?”

“Her behavior, her moods. She’s very sick, and I have no one to help me manage her. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself, or someone else.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Oh, God. She’s out of control. She’s depressed, moody, violent. She’s had a problem with alcohol and drugs for years. When she drinks she’s vicious, screams at people, hits them—why are you taking notes?”

Jason looked up. “Does it bother you?”

Milicia frowned. “It gets in the way.”

Jason closed the notebook. “Is there a special urgency about your sister right now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I get the impression this has been going on for a long time. Why are you seeking professional help now?”

Milicia bristled. “What kind of question is that?”

“Just asking if something special has happened, a crisis?”

“What if something really awful has happened? What do I do?”

Jason glanced at his notebook but didn’t open it. He didn’t have to. He was trained to remember everything he saw and everything he heard. He waited for her to go on. In a second she did.

“Do you know how hard it is on a family when there are two perfect children and then one of them starts going off? It’s like at the Olympics on the balance beam when the first back flip is straight on the mark and the next one a centimeter to the left. After that, a gymnast can’t get it back. She keeps going crooked until she falls off.”

She was silent for a second.

“And then the whole system comes crashing down, and nobody is left whole.”

Jason nodded, touched by the way she said it, by the image of the child gymnast doing it right to a certain point and then faltering, failing to be “normal,” thus destroying the careful façade of the family front.

“I know what that’s like,” he said gently.

He looked at her with his inner eye, searching for the real person under the cloud of flaming red hair and dusky perfume, the perfect makeup and bravado. Who was really in there and what piece of music was being played?

“Tell me,” he said to Milicia, “about falling off the balance beam.”