Hanging Time

38

Jason stood on the patio, watching the fog dissipate from the trees below, listening to the nine new messages on his machine since the previous day. He checked his watch. Eight Sunday morning made it eleven on the East Coast. Odd. Three calls from Milicia.

“What is it?” Emma came out of the glass doors holding a glass of orange juice.

He frowned, shaking his head. “Nothing.”

“That’s what you always say.” She turned around and headed back into the house. “It’s always something, and you always say it’s nothing.”

“Hey, don’t go away mad.”

“I know. Just go away.”

“I didn’t mean that.” He followed her through the doors, still holding the phone. A Dr. Wilbur Munchin from Austria was speaking to him on tape, asking about having some meaningful correspondence about his latest paper on listening. Herr Docktor Munchin was in New York and wanted to meet. Then Charles was telling him he was in Manhattan on his own for the weekend and wondered if Jason was free for dinner. Then the fourth call from Milicia, breathless, saying she was desperately worried about her sister. It seemed that she was always desperately worried about her sister. Maybe worrying about her sister was her thing. Milicia rang off, and his patient Douglas started telling him he was having a panic attack over flying to Chicago to his father’s funeral. “Do I really have to go?” came the plaintive cry. Jason pushed the button to save the calls.

“Was that for me?” he asked, watching Emma drink the orange juice he’d watched her squeeze only moments before.

“No.”

“You know I have to call in.”

“You have only two speeds, Jason. On and on.”

“I’m off now. Look.” He put the phone back in its cradle. But he felt bad about Douglas, torn between the funeral and his terror of the skies. Go, he said silently. Go for it, Douglas.

“I guess I’d feel better if I knew who they were,” Emma murmured. “All these unseen rivals for your love and attention.”

“The whole point is that no one knows who they are,” he replied mildly. It was better not to get defensive with Emma over old grievances. He refrained from adding no one was supposed to know who she was either. And her film career had changed all that.

Emma swallowed the last of the orange juice without offering him a single sip. She would never have done that in the past. He sighed. “I miss you,” he said.

She went back into the kitchen without answering. After a minute or two he looked up Milicia’s number in his telephone book and dialed it. In spite of Milicia’s desperate eagerness to talk to him, she wasn’t waiting for his call. He got her answering machine and spoke to her on tape. Same with Douglas.

He heard the sound of the juicer and perked up. He and Emma still had a whole day and night.

Sometime between five and five-thirty on Monday morning, Jason watched the dawn slowly suffuse Emma’s room with a soft gray light from the skylight over the bed. A thick blanket of fog did not descend low enough to hide the branches of the eucalyptus tree that towered over the house on the side of the back patio.

In the Bronx, where he came from, very few trees dotted the sidewalks; every building was the same squat configuration of brick and concrete. Even in comparison to Riverside Drive, with its attractive park along the Hudson River, the town of Canyon Beach was beautiful. Still it seemed a pretty fragile setup.

The first night he slept there he could see the shape of the tree, far blacker than the sky, framed in the skylight, and had to resist thoughts of it crashing through the roof of the house in a light wind. He was afraid of an earthquake, a natural disaster that would end in total destruction of the entire West Coast and most particularly this tiny portion of it. The foundation of Emma’s charming house seemed unbearably flimsy, the angle of the street going down to the beach way too steep.

And he knew his anxiety about the durability of the setting was a mask to cover his grief about the fragility of his marriage, indeed the whole structure of his life. Emma told him she hated his lifestyle, his philosophy of work and being, his rigid personality. And then she let him hold her, make love to her. Indeed, kept him up half the night with the other half of her ambivalence.

Jason lay still, listening to the quiet. He was used to sirens screaming all night long, used to hostile encounters on the street. Used to the pace and the dirt and the difficulty of getting around in New York. He lived in the psyches of people who couldn’t fall in love, couldn’t work, couldn’t face their death or their life. He worked all the time without thinking much about where he lived or what he ate, how much his back hurt from sitting so still all day. His physical comfort was not a high priority to him.

He figured that was what Emma meant about his rigidity. Even in his sleep he did not escape the tortured world of his patients. He worried about them all the time. After a peaceful dinner three thousand miles away from her he felt compelled to call Milicia again. Just in case.

“Where are you?” she had demanded angrily.

His patients were often angry when he went away. They seemed to expect him to have no life but theirs to think about. Some of them punished him by hurting themselves. Women got pregnant. Men had accidents. Emma didn’t bother to ask him what made him call, or what made him shake his head when he hung up.

The next morning, watching the sun rise, he wondered if the calls from Milicia were just another attempt to get his attention and control him. He wasn’t particularly worried about it. He returned to his anxiety about an earthquake and all the things Emma had said in the past three days.

“It isn’t worth the effort” was the last thing she said before falling asleep. “We’re too different.”

He knew it was stupid to tell Emma he would change. Nobody could really change very much. The best they could do was feel better about who they were.

“Nothing worthwhile comes without effort” was his wimpy reply.

“That’s just shrink talk,” she grumbled.

She didn’t want to admit there was anything worthwhile about him. Still, he got the picture it was no picnic being a single woman in California.

“It’s no different from high school,” she had remarked the first day.

“Are you surprised?” he asked. They were walking on the beach, waiting for the sun to set. Emma glanced around at the crowd gathering at the water’s edge.

“I was surprised none of these pretty people has anything to say. There’s no one to talk to.”

So. He was still good for something. It was his first soaring indication that he would not have to sleep in the loft.

Now, as the sun rose higher on the last day, he had to prepare himself for the separation. Emma was still asleep, her body pressing his. Once again they had been up much of the night. She’d fallen asleep with her head on his chest and her shoulder somewhat painfully crushing his arm.

He hadn’t wanted to disturb her by moving. Now his arm and shoulder were numb, and he still didn’t want to disturb her.

“I could go for this,” he murmured.

He liked walking on the beach, liked the feeling of the place, the perfume of the sea and the foliage. The brilliance of the sun. He looked up at the eucalyptus tree, wondering how long it had been there.

“What?” she said sleepily.

“The whole thing. I like the whole thing, Emma. It’s all great. I love you. If this is what you want, you should have it.”

He was surprised when she answered. “So?”

Now he could see that she was awake, had been feigning sleep all along.

“So we could try to work it out. I could visit. You could visit. We don’t have to make any decisions now.”

She sat up suddenly, brushing her hair away from her face, fully awake, totally feminine and confusing, with a logic all her own.

“I don’t know what to do. You’ve ruined me, Jason,” she wailed. “I can’t trust anybody but you anymore.”

He was silent for a long time. It wasn’t the most romantic thing he had ever heard. In fact, she made him feel like an old shoe. Still, he wouldn’t forget the way she had loved him in the dark. And trust was more than just a place to start. It was central to everything.

“Yeah,” he told her finally. “Me, too.”