Hanging Time

26

The black lacquered mantel clock was just chiming ten P.M. when Emma returned Jason’s call. He sat in the living room, still in his suit trousers and dress shirt, working on half a glass of straight gin. At eight forty-five, after his last patient had left, he wandered out onto the street and turned left toward Broadway. He was hungry to the depths of his soul, hungry in a way he had never been before.

Ironically, Teddy, his last patient on Wednesdays, had talked for forty-five minutes about a dinner he’d had last night. Teddy was a food critic for a major magazine. Jason had to endure hearing a bite-by-bite account of a four-course meal so sublime and tempting he would have given a lot to share it. Jason didn’t usually let Teddy talk too much about food. It was bad for him, distracted him from his real problems and gave him a false sense of feeling better. Teddy always went to some fabulous restaurant either before or after his sessions with Jason, which Jason could never reveal drove him crazy.

Jason sipped his gin and felt the pressure ease. He had lived through therapy with surgeons who had described in excruciating detail every surgical procedure they did, with businessmen who talked about balance sheets and taxes who expected Jason to be up on The Wall Street Journal, with a chess player so intense and obsessed Jason had to learn the game to understand what he was talking about. There was more to his job than people thought.

Every kind of pathology was in the books on his shelves. The theory was, all manner of sickness could be described and categorized. But a whole lot of cases weren’t just one thing, not just a character disorder, a personality problem, a garden-variety neurosis. Each human being was different, sang his own unique song. No matter what the books said about technique, the good doctor—the really good doctor—had to learn a new language and reinvent himself for each patient.

The myopic and chubby food critic’s highly erotic description of last night’s dinner was all the more poignant since his problem was impotence. Teddy’s conflicts about food and love were right in step with Jason’s own hunger for nourishment, for human warmth, and love. He certainly got no love from Teddy, who called Jason a food-and-wine know-nothing.

The remark stung all the more for being right on the mark. Jason decided to prove Teddy wrong. He headed for Zabar’s for something interesting and upscale to eat. Healthy gourmet salads like tabouleh, jambalaya, rice and beans, crawfish and wild rice. The sort of thing Emma liked. He walked slowly, legs aching a little from his run earlier in the day, dying inside because his wife had called and hadn’t called back. He meant to stay at home until they talked, but in the end he was starving and couldn’t wait.

He turned east. His thoughts shifted to pickled herring, cajun shrimp, smoked salmon, bagels in exotic flavors. Barbecued chicken—all the things he could have carried home wrapped in white paper and eaten in the kitchen, over the sink. But he didn’t go to Zabar’s and buy gourmet bits and pieces, carry them home to molder in the fridge. He got to Broadway and was stopped cold.

“Jason. Hi.” The voice was warm and confident.

Jason, deep in his own thoughts, swung around in surprise at the sound of his name. Then frowned reflexively as Milicia Honiger-Stanton stepped into his space, her slim hand with its blood red nails held out to him.

“How are you?” she said brightly, as if he and Milicia were the oldest of friends meeting unexpectedly after a long separation.

He nodded, disgruntled. He didn’t like it when patients called him by his first name. Familiarity was inappropriate. Especially if the patient was a woman, lovely to look at, and definitely coming on to him.

She didn’t appear to be put off. Her warm, smooth hand was in his before he could ward off the intimacy. She maintained the contact several seconds longer than necessary, gazing deeply into his eyes as if she could read his desperation there.

Jason looked away, uncomfortable with the powerful sexuality she projected. He hadn’t slept with Emma since before her abduction in May; he hadn’t slept with anyone else since. A normal healthy male starts going bonkers after three or four days of physical deprivation. Couldn’t help it. It was a biological thing.

From habit, before going out he’d put on the khaki jacket that went with his trousers, as if a camouflage of formality could hide the desperation he couldn’t help feeling was exuding from every pore in his body, like the kind of smelly sweat that couldn’t be masked by any cosmetic known to man.

“What are you up to?” Milicia’s voice was throaty and low.

He smiled vaguely. “Just out.”

“I saw you from the corner, and you looked very alone. Have you had dinner?”

She was wearing a purple suit, the jacket open to its one button at the waist, the skirt short and tight. Jason tried not to look at the white silk blouse she had on underneath. Cut low enough to reveal stunning breasts that were bigger than Emma’s, it was embroidered with gold stars and crescent moons.

Jason’s whole body stiffened defensively. He didn’t like her intimate tone, her body language, her insinuations. The assault of sexuality was like Teddy’s aromas from the kitchen, irresistibly tantalizing. Like a computer, he scanned his database for his true feelings. Was he attracted to Milicia, Charles’s architect, who had come to his office looking for—what?

“How’s your sister?” he asked stiffly.

“Horrible.” The eagerness faded from her eyes. “Really horrible. I have the feeling—” She stopped.

“What?”

Suddenly tense, apprehensive, Milicia shook her head. “I—can’t talk about it here.”

They had stopped in front of a restaurant, an Italian restaurant, not very fancy. Milicia gazed through the window wistfully, as if she were as hungry as Jason was.

“Have you eaten? I could tell you in there.”

Jason glanced at the busy restaurant with its red and green flag-of-Italy façade. The pungent fragrance of garlic and tomato sauce blew out of the air-conditioner exhaust above his head. He was tempted to go for it. Charles had suggested he go for it. He had already eaten a meal with Milicia. Hey, what did it matter? Emma had left him; he was free to go for anything. He was tempted and didn’t dare look at her, didn’t want her to know. She had come to him professionally. He could not do it. Probably couldn’t have done it anyway.

“I’m looking forward to talking to you,” he said, trying to keep the ice from forming on his words. “On Friday.”

He didn’t give a reason, and didn’t allow himself to worry at the way her face collapsed at the rebuff. He’d already told her social and professional couldn’t mix. He stood there, inhaling the garlic until she was out of sight, then he grabbed a hamburger and french fries in the Greek coffee shop. His encounter with Milicia brought him way down.

He had been on his way to eat fancy food, but guilt made him instantly slide back to the old habits of before Emma—fast food gulped on the run, pizza, hamburgers, steak. French fries with everything. He ate the takeout hamburger and fries in his kitchen, dripping over the sink. Well, Teddy was right, but he didn’t exactly have a gourmet background. Jewish boy from the Bronx, not so far from the peasant past. What did anyone expect? His parents favored heavy Jewish food, the heaviest. Boiled beef, knockwurst and sauerkraut. Potato pancakes with apple sauce, and gobs of sour cream piled on top. Pastrami and chopped chicken liver sandwiches four inches thick. Matzo-ball soup and chicken in the pot, thick with noodles and chicken fat. Everything made with chicken fat. The men in his family often dropped dead before they reached sixty.

Jason finished up the fries and threw the wrappings in the garbage. Fuck his arteries. He got the bottle of Tan-queray and poured himself a healthy drink, then sat in the large pale green armchair that Emma had chosen, shuddering at the gin’s fiery path down his throat. Gin had always been his drink, bitter and medicinal. It went straight to the heart of the trouble, kicking in with a jolt like nothing else.

Ebony branches stood out against a sky of midnight blue, slowly fading to gray, then black. He felt like shit, then began to feel a little better. He thought about the twilight sky. The first time he’d seen a Magritte painting of this kind of sky he’d thought the image came from the imagination of the painter. All his life he’d been too busy studying books and the insides of people to see the way light changed colors as time passed and the earth moved around the sun. Now light and colors were preoccupations of his, along with his passion for time. In a few days, he thought, he’d be thirty-nine.

The sound of the mantel clock striking nine was as deep and resonant as Big Ben. The clock kept perfect time exactly seven and a half minutes late. Every forty-eight hours Jason wound the clock and set it to the correct time. Three or four hours later it would be seven and a half minutes late again. There was no explanation for it. Clocks were not alive. They were just mechanical things that measured precise units through a series of spur gears.

Some considerable part of every day, Jason studied the way time was measured. He couldn’t help being awed by what a breakthrough the clock was, the brilliance that conceived the whole idea. The falling weight, or an unwinding spring, that powered the driving wheel through a pinion geared to rotate once an hour. The driving wheel turned the two hands around the face of the clock, ensuring that the minute hand moved exactly twelve times around the dial for every revolution of the hour hand. The pinion drives the minute hand directly. The hour hand is driven through two sets of spur gears that together reduce its speed to one-twelfth that of the minute hand. Another set of gears sets the speed at which the driving wheel rotates by connecting it to the escapement, the heart of the timekeeping mechanism. The escapement was the thing that went back and forth. The tick-tock.

On the eighth strike of the tenth hour, Emma called.