Loving Time

thirty-nine

Dead leaves drifted over the paths of Riverside Park and brushed against Jason’s pant legs as he hurried to the Psychiatric Centre to find Hal Dickey’s course syllabus. It was Thursday, November 11, at 9:50 A.M. Emma had been with him for six days. In that time she’d been called back twice for the Simon Beak play. She was trying out for the part of the wife who finds out her husband had a secret life only after a stroke immobilizes him. The day he returns home from the hospital, a vegetable in a wheelchair, she finds out he cheated on his taxes and stole all their savings to set his girlfriend up in a house nicer than hers. Jason loved the play. Reading it, he almost fell off his chair laughing at the sexually repressed timid woman who revenges herself in a variety of ways. But he was ambivalent about Emma being in it. Anticipating domestic misery, he shuffled grumpily through the leaves.

Out in the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, a number of sleek sailboats bobbed at their moorings in the sparkling river. Jason didn’t notice the boats or the leaves or the sun glinting on the water. He was too busy juggling his thoughts about work and his wife. The movie role that had made Emma famous featured a smarmy shrink whose sexual interest in his female patient prompted her to act out sexually with a hoodlum. The film had humiliated and devastated him—in no small part because it had come as a complete surprise. Jason had been too busy with his own work at the time to bother reading the script and discussing it with her.

And now she had a vehicle that would allow her to vent her rage at him in a wholly different way. This time her role was funny, complicated, and so satisfying at the end that it demonstrated how perfectly theater could balance story and emotions that were utterly unmanageable in real life. In this part, Emma and all her voices would finally come together. Jason dreaded the possibility of her getting it. What would happen then?

He put his head down against the glare of the sun. What he did for a living was ease other people’s pain. The way he did it was to work out the structures of people’s minds in his head, using Tinkertoy parts with psychiatric labels. He made a weightless space for each one and created the Star Trek stations that incorporated each person’s mental makeup. He saw each space station of a human being as three-dimensional: the inside, crowded with booby-trapped baggage; the outside, bristling with antennae for picking up ever more hurt and disappointment. He was always working on what was really going on in a person’s mind, not just what appeared to be happening in the room at the moment. His reserve made him seem to be holding back, waiting for the next piece of information, the next session, the next day. His analytic gifts didn’t exactly help him with his own life. Emma wanted a husband with simple thoughts, thoughts that stayed in the room with her, preferably focused on her all the time. It wasn’t going to happen.

Now he’d been drawn into hospital politics. He’d begun to study those first sessions between Clara Treadwell and Raymond Cowles eighteen years earlier and knew already that things about Cowles’s treatment were disturbing. Without noticing, he’d left the path on Riverside Drive and crossed the street. As he approached the entrance to the Centre, he automatically drew his ID from his pocket and clipped it on his jacket pocket.

“Hey, Jason. Too bad about Dickey. I hear you’re taking his spot.” A colleague Jason had known since medical school spotted him waiting for the elevator and shouted over the crush of attendings, outpatients, social workers, secretaries, all craning their necks to catch a useful tidbit of gossip to trade later.

“Just filling in for a week or two, and it is too bad,” he muttered in response.

He checked his watch. Two minutes for the elevator to come and four minutes of stopping and starting to get where he was going. While he waited, he thought of the young and powerfully magnetic Clara Treadwell in her first session with Raymond Cowles.

I asked RC to lie down on the couch. He didn’t want to. He said it made him nervous not to be able to see me. We talked about how the blank screen was part of the analytic process and would make it easier for him to say things without worrying what my reaction was going to be. He said it reminded him of the Wizard of Oz, who hid behind a screen and wasn’t really a wizard. I remarked that wizard or not, he got the job done. RC seemed to accept that and lay down on the couch. Immediately he began to talk about how much he loved his fiancée, Lorna. How beautiful and sweet and gentle and understanding she was. How comfortable he felt with her. I could see that he had begun to sweat. Then he said he didn’t know why he kept having these fantasies about doing “things” with men. He wasn’t a fag, couldn’t imagine being a “fag, having intercourse with a man.” He’d had sex with Lorna, his fiancée. He wanted to marry Lorna and be with her forever. But in his head it was like there was some kind of switch. Like the Devil or a demon distracted him. He said he didn’t like thinking about Lorna’s breasts, or touching them. He was terrified that wasn’t normal. He said he had to imagine that she was a man in order to get excited enough to “get in her” … Then he stopped talking suddenly and turned around to look at me. I was sitting in the chair behind him. He looked at me in a very piercing way. I held his gaze and did not look away. After that, we made the treatment plan. RC agreed that he would not act on his homosexual impulses or marry until the treatment was complete. That night he cruised a gay bar, met an older man who took him home to his apartment. They had oral sex. Later in the evening he called Lorna and set a date for their marriage. This was the first thing he told me in our second session. I was stunned. We’d just started

In his supervisory session Dickey had told his student Clara that her patient Ray had had his first homosexual experience the night following his first session with her because he was resisting his true heterosexuality. Jason shook his head as he got off the elevator.

Resistance to heterosexuality had been the classic diagnosis of homosexuality for almost a hundred years. Many people all over the world still believed a man wanting to have sex with another man, or a woman with a woman, was just being contrary and could change if he or she wanted to. Now a great deal of scientific data pointed to sexual preference being innate, already fixed at birth. Jason wondered what Dickey would say now if he read what he had said and Clara had carefully recorded eighteen years ago when the views he expressed were already out of date.

“Sorry, sir. You can’t go in there.” A stocky officer snaked out an arm the size of a watermain to stop him outside of Dickey’s office.

“What’s going on?”

“Room’s been sealed.”

“Why?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

April Woo opened the door and popped her head out. “Hi, Jason. I thought I heard your voice. What’s up?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” Jason cocked his head at the red-faced man blocking his way.

“Officer, would you mind giving us a little breathing space here? The doc is on our side.” April smiled at the cop.

The uniform hesitated, then shuffled sideways two paces so Jason could get two steps closer. Slowly he took in the mess. Paper all over the place, documents from the spilled stacks of files, notes, reprints of articles. Spots on the floor by the green vinyl couch that looked like vomit and dried blood. A Brooks Brothers jacket hung on the back of the chair. Abandoned lengths of plastic tubes, torn packaging of disposable needles, sterile wipes, and other medical detritus left where they’d been dropped. More files were stacked on Dickey’s desk next to a laptop computer with a portable printer attached to it. There was nothing on the pull-out board except a nearly empty glass with a small quantity of brown liquid with a greasy film around the sides. The rest of the room seemed untouched, the bookcases with plaques and knickknacks, the table by the window with small, fragile decorative objects on it.

“It’s peculiar,” April told Jason. “I’ve gone over the place pretty carefully, and there’s no sign of medications of any kind. No aspirin, no cough medicine. Guy didn’t even take antacids. That’s unusual. Another thing. In suicides, the pill containers are on the scene. They don’t just walk away after the guy drops dead. How did the Elavil get into him?”

“He has another office. Maybe he kept his medications over there.”

“Well, Jason, if he took the stuff in his other office, wouldn’t he have died over there?”

“Not necessarily. It might have taken several hours for him to get really sick. If he ingested the Elavil by accident somewhere else, he might have felt fine for a while and gone about his business.” Jason scratched his beard. “What was he doing with all these files on a Sunday? Do you know?”

“All I know is the lady with him at the time says she locked the door after they took him away and no one touched a thing. Does she always tell the truth?”

“There was a lady with him?” Jason asked.

“Yeah, Dr. Treadwell.”

“Really.” Jason remembered Clara’s phone call on Sunday night telling him Harold had died. Clara always seemed to leave a few key items out of every story. This time it was the fact that she had been with Harold when he had his seizure. What had she been doing with him? He let his breath out in a rush, didn’t want to think about it.

“The woman in Personnel is real upset. She says there’s going to be hell to pay if she doesn’t get her files back where they belong. She’s in quite a panic about it.”

Jason smiled. “Gunn’s an anxious person. So, what’s the procedure for investigation here?”

“I’m waiting for my supervisor. By the way, where’s that other office of his?”

Jason took her arm and moved down the hall away from the uniform. “It’s in the doctors’ office building. That’s where he saw patients.”

“So what did he do here?”

“This is his academic office.”

“Yeah?” April deadpanned. She didn’t even have her own desk, not even a drawer of her own. Academic office, patient office. What’d these doctors need two offices for, her face said clearly.

“Yeah.” Jason smiled. She was cute.

“You got two offices, too, Doc?”

“Uh-uh, only the one.” He scratched his face.

“So what’d Dickey do in this office?”

“This was where he did the administration side of his job. Harold was on hospital committees, taught classes, supervised residents. He wrote articles for journals, spoke at conferences. Maybe he was working on some kind of patient follow-up project with those files.”

“Like what kind?”

“Like I don’t know what kind, April. Like to make statistics, see how patients were doing five years later, ten years later. Something like that.” He checked his watch, was certain that was not what Dickey had been doing with the files.

They’d arrived at the elevator bank. Miraculously, no one else was around. “A patient like Raymond Cowles committing suicide fourteen years after treatment ended?” April asked. “Are you suggesting Dickey was working on that?”

“Huh? No … Look, April, a certain percentage of the borderlines commit suicide no matter what you do to help them. It’s a fact of life. If they want to die, they find a way.”

“Oh, I didn’t know Cowles was a borderline personality,” April murmured.

Jason tsked. “You know what I mean. I’m just saying don’t jump to conclusions. There may be no connection between the two deaths.”

“Maybe not. This one might not be a suicide. I don’t see a note. I don’t see a container of pills. I smell liquor, I see a glass, but I don’t see a liquor bottle or a flask. Where did it come from? Where did it go?… Anyway, Jason, the files Dickey was working on are employee files. Very few are patient files.”

Jason’s brow furrowed. He had to talk to Clara. Maybe Hal had been working on the condom thing and the person he’d been looking for somehow … “Look, April, I’ve got to go. I have a patient waiting for me.”

“Yeah, well, what did you come here for, anyway?” April’s face stayed blank.

“It’ll have to wait. Will you keep me posted on this?”

She smiled suddenly, as if he’d told her something important. “Well, thanks for the input.”

“So keep me posted,” he said again.

“Hey, I’ll level with you as long as you level with me.”

“Oh, come on, April. When have I ever not leveled with you?” He’d punched the button twice for the elevator. It didn’t light up. He punched it again.

“Oh, Jason, this is something different This is your turf. I’m not feeding you information so you can house-clean before we get the facts.”

Would he do that? He opened his mouth to protest. The elevator doors slid open. The elevator was full of people.

“Hey, Jason. Good to see you. I heard you’re—”

Jason pushed in. “Is this a down? Oh, sorry, getting out.”

Too late. The doors slid shut.