Hanging Time

22

Jason had an hour and fifteen minutes until his appointment with Daisy. He hesitated for a second just inside the door of his waiting room, then went out into the hall, turned left, and returned home.

The little entry hall, with the polished wood floor and the table where Emma always put the mail, was empty. The doors to the living room were open, revealing a generous space lit by two windows that overlooked the tree-lined street. The room was painted a pale lemon yellow and decorated with comfortable tweedy sofas. Built-in shelves on two of the walls were filled with books, souvenirs, and five of Jason’s antique clocks. There were nine clocks altogether in the room. All were over a hundred years old and all were in working order. Jason never bought a clock that couldn’t be made to work. Unlike human hearts, they were mechanical and could be fixed when they broke down.

It was painful for Jason to come home. Every time he heard those clocks and looked around, his heart started to race with the memories of Emma’s kidnapping and his part in her ordeal. He didn’t want to brood endlessly about everything. But he did. He went over and over his failure to read her, his failure to acknowledge how hurt and neglected she felt. His failure to read the script of her first film, the little thing that came along and destroyed their life.

He brooded that his insensitivity to Emma’s unhappiness might have made the difference. If he’d been thinking of her needs instead of his own, they could have had a baby by now. They’d be living in the suburbs. Forty had always meant the crossover to old on his life timeline. He’d be thirty-nine in a few days, and had no family except a set of parents he saw only a few times a year. Work was always the driving force in his life, but he loved Emma. Never wanted to hurt her. Never expected to be so desperately lonely. On the other hand, he knew that even if she had been happy, she might have made the film with the same tragic results anyway.

Jason brooded. He came from a long line, maybe five thousand years old, of serious brooders. There was a reason he was an analyst. He took in and processed information in big chunks, but it took him a long time to come around to action. He hung around the hall table, shattered by the emptiness of his home and the heat of the New York summer. The apartment was hot and musty. He turned to the kitchen, beginning to sweat. The inch of aged coffee in the coffeepot on the counter by the sink seemed a testament to his domestic misery. All around was the sound of clocks.

Living in this apartment in this building had always seemed to him like living in Europe in another century, when there were no telephones or faxes, no computers or copy machines. People communicated by mail which came twice a day, morning and afternoon. Men like Freud went home for lunch, and their wives tolerated them no matter what they did. In those days no one who ran away lived happily ever after.

Ask anybody, Jason thought bitterly, and they’d say that times were better now. He stood in the hall outside the kitchen, paralyzed with grief, wondering if his wife was finding happiness in L.A. after what happened to her. He didn’t think she could recover without his help.

The hall carriage clock chimed the hour. Emma used to say he spent more time with his clocks than he did with her. And it was true he had thought: of them as his friends, his link with the past and the future, his grasp on time. Now he knew they had been his little hedge against mortality, substitute for a lot of things.

Shaking his head, he shuffled down the hall to the bedroom. Emma had left most of her possessions and all of her souvenirs around the house, indicating a certain ambivalence about clearing out for good. Jason didn’t know whether to hope for an eventual return or not.

Depression was a dangerous state for a psychiatrist. A dozen years of training had taught Jason all about the management of troubled people. The main thing was that every second of every session counted. There were no time-outs, no moments for the doctor to escape into his own dreams, his own thoughts, his own agenda. There could be only the patient and his needs, for even the silences spoke loudly and with meaning. An empathic lapse of even a few tiny moments could bring about a cataclysm in a patient’s life. Jason’s primary responsibility was to his patients. He knew he was depressed, and there was no one he could trust with it.

Never mind his years of training, his expertise at listening to the other voice in sick people. A lapse on his part could be fatal. He worried about the safety of his patients. Jason brooded about the past. He had left his first wife, his high school sweetheart, after five years of utter misery. Emma, his second wife, had left him even though it could be argued he had saved her life. There were no blessings to count when he tried to get to sleep at night. He didn’t have children to prove his ability to love and nurture. He couldn’t know for a fact that he was truly competent.

No matter how many patients he had had over the years, or the fact that those who had the potential to get better under his care always did, he was still afraid that the failures in his personal life made him unfit to advise others.

And yet he knew he was better than most. His patient Daisy was the daughter of a colleague he didn’t know, who had resisted and resented her getting help. Daisy’s father was one of those psychiatrists who practiced with deep cynicism, not believing in what he did and deeply suspicious of everyone in the field. He had done everything he could to prevent Daisy’s getting help even though she had been a very sick girl and might even have died of anorexia and depression years earlier if she hadn’t found someone to intervene.

At twenty-five, after five years of therapy, Daisy was finally in her first precarious year of college. But she was still so sick, she was unlikely ever to function on her own. She was the only long-term patient Jason had who would never really get well. He would never take on another.

He put on a white Nike T-shirt and white shorts. His running shoes were two years old and needed to be replaced. He left the apartment and ran down the open staircase that spiraled down from the twelfth floor to the lobby. Jason lived on the fifth floor. Sometimes at the end of his run in Riverside Park, he staggered up the stairs. Sometimes he didn’t.

Downstairs he nodded at Pete, the tiny, balding ex-marine who manned the door.

“Hot out there, Doctor,” Pete said, opening the door.

Hot air hit Jason in the face. “Yes, it is,” he murmured, heading west toward the river.

He went out for the click, the moment after twenty minutes of loping along at four miles an hour when the endorphins kicked in and the black hole of despair lifted briefly. When he got back to his office forty-five minutes later, there was a message from Emma on his answering machine. She wasn’t in when he returned the call.