Loving Time (15 page)

A
t six
P.M
. on Tuesday, November 2, Jason Frank had two unexpected messages on his answering machine. The first was from Clara Treadwell, the last person he’d have thought would want to consult him. Four years ago in California Jason had been the presenter of a paper, and Clara had been the discussant. She’d attempted to take him apart in front of two hundred colleagues with a stunning verbal assault that was completely unsubstantiated by any scientific or clinical evidence. After Jason provided a strong and compelling rebuttal, she’d asked him to lunch. She was a big deal at the hospital out there and gracious in defeat, so he’d accepted the invitation.

Then, in a dining room filled with a group of colleagues so finely tuned to nuance they wouldn’t miss a skipped heartbeat through a brick wall, she started massaging his knee under the table and suggested they work together. She was unapologetic for her earlier verbal attack on him and completely unconcerned about creating gossip in a public place. She had the supreme confidence of someone who had no fear of rejection or consequences. Jason realized that she was testing her power like a sport fisherman with a swordfish on the line. He’d been thirty-five then, only a year married to Emma, and might have been a bit too vehement about his refusal. After she returned to New York as head of the Centre, Clara Treadwell showed Jason that she was in a position to make things uncomfortable for him: She did not hesitate to do so whenever she had the chance.

So he was surprised to hear the warm voice on his answering machine asking him to be the consultant on a personal case of hers involving the mysterious death of a former patient. Clara said she thought he was particularly suitable in light of his knowledge of police procedure. She ended by
giving him her office and home numbers. He wrote them down and let the tape run on to the next message.

The second unexpected message was from his wife, asking if he minded if she came home for a few days. She was auditioning for a play in New York, Emma said, and needed a place to stay. This message cheered Jason so much that for a few minutes he refused to worry about who Clara Treadwell’s dead patient was, what she really wanted him to do, or what helping her out would cost him. He checked his watch. It was seven minutes past the hour. He dialed Emma in California. It was 3:07 there.

Emma picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me.” Jason’s voice was as warm as he knew how to make it.

“Hi.” Hers was a little hesitant and distrustful. He believed he loved her a lot and was a uniformly nice guy. He didn’t understand where the distrust came from.

“How’s the weather?” he asked.

“If you called me for the temperature in Southern California, you could have gotten it on CNN.”

He sighed. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in one sentence, and once again he’d blown it, whatever “it” was. “I just said hello. Why be so testy?”

“Darling, men who love their women say: ‘I got your message. I’m dying to see you, and I hope you get the part.’
You
say, ‘How’s the weather?’ What am I supposed to think?”

Jason was silent as he struggled with gender differences that sometimes seemed unbridgeable. Was he really so evil if the right words to him were not the right words to her? Wasn’t it the essence of feeling that mattered, the things that
weren’t
said and
couldn’t
really be said? Or was he just a caveman, no better than a scruffy, disorganized seventeen-year-old with a Walkman plugged into his ears, who just couldn’t deal, man, with anything else but lust? The silence led him into a contemplation of his working space.

Jason’s office had bookshelves up to the ceiling on two
walls. The third wall had two windows facing the side street high above the entrance to the building. These windows were covered with shutters so that no patient attempting to resist treatment could see out and thus be distracted by the weather or the view. There were five clocks in the office. None had chimes. In this room, everything else was old, but time passed without comment.

In spite of the odd array on the shelves and tables of the usually tasteless gifts from patients’ vacations—needlepoint pillows, painted rocks, sculptures made from colored sea-shells, watercolor landscapes, and his burgeoning collection of books and medical journals—Jason’s office had an ascetic, almost hermetical, feeling to it. The two doors that sealed the office off from the waiting room didn’t help. Sometimes even Jason had the feeling of being locked inside. His tour completed, he repressed a sigh.

“You there?” Emma asked after a minute.

“Where else,” he murmured, leaning forward to adjust the minute hand on the nearest clock. “Shall we try again?”

“Good idea.”

“I got your message.”

“Good. What do you think?”

“I think it’s great, Em, really great. You’ve always wanted to work on the stage.”

“It’s a good play.”

“I’m sure it’s a good play, otherwise you wouldn’t want to do it.” He doodled on his appointment book. It was the official one of the APA, with enough lines for every hour of the day. He could see that tomorrow was completely booked, and so was the day after.

“It’s really a comedy. I probably won’t get it,” Emma said.

Jason didn’t counter with his belief that she would get it. For many years Emma had auditioned relentlessly for every part in every play that was remotely appropriate for her, as well as every commercial in New York. She never got anything except voice-overs. She had a great voice and did a lot of
voice-overs for people who looked right for such things as Excedrin headaches but didn’t sound right for them. He didn’t dare ask Emma to show him the play script, either. He’d abdicated that particular right when he neglected to read the script of
Serpent’s Teeth
, the film that brought about her kidnapping and their estrangement six months ago.

“What’s it called?” he asked finally. “The play.”

“
Strokes
.
”

“Ah, another
S
title. Who’s the author?”

Her triumph traveled east across the country with the speed of sound. “Simon Beak.”

“Wow, no kidding.” Now Jason’s voice registered real excitement. “Jesus, Emma, that’s thrilling. That’s Broadway. That’s—”
Big time
.

“Look, don’t get too excited. I probably won’t get it.”

“So what. I’m impressed,” he breathed. “I’m really impressed.”

“You didn’t think I was up to it, did you?”

“Yes, I did. You didn’t think you were.”

She didn’t say it took a far-out, trashy vehicle like
Serpent’s Teeth
for her to get noticed, and he didn’t say it, either. What people had to do to get what they wanted—well, it was more complicated than either had thought. They both knew more about ambition and drive now. Getting ahead in any field was no picnic.

“So, do you have to clear someone out of my bed? Or should I stay in a hotel?” Emma’s voice was light, but she meant it. She could take her lumps. That’s what got her through ordeals that shoved other people into the shredder.

“That’s a joke, right?”

“No. That’s not a joke. It’s no secret that they’re lining up for you, Jason. All those lovely ladies in the caring profession.”

“Ah, now you sound bitter,” Jason said, a little pleased that the wife who wandered away from him was jealous. Many wives of psychiatrists were psychologists or social workers or
teachers, sweet, understanding women who didn’t make too many demands lest their busy husbands slap them down.

Whenever Emma met one of these wives, they always asked her if she was in the caring profession. And she always replied, “No, I’m in the uncaring profession.” To which no one ever reacted negatively because that would be aggressive and judgmental. Aggressive and judgmental weren’t politically correct in his field.

“Are we bitter?” Jason asked.

“Just a little. So what’s the story on the bedroom?”

“The story is the sheets are clean. You have nothing to fear on that score. I’ve been saving it all for you.”

“Oh, and what if I didn’t come back? What would happen to it then?”

“Baby, you know what you have to do. Move your things out and tell me it’s over. After that what I do is none of your business. Until then I’m yours.”

“Good, I’ll be home Saturday.”

Jason flipped to Saturday in his appointment book. “Any particular time?”

“I’ll let you know.”

There was nothing written down for Saturday. He scratched at his beard. Emma hadn’t seen it yet. Maybe he should get a haircut and a shave, but maybe he shouldn’t. He pondered: To shave or not to shave, that was the question. “I’ll be here,” he told her.

“B
obbie …”

Bobbie Boudreau heard the soft, muted cry and swung his body around to look for trouble behind him, his hands curling instinctively into fists. Half a block south on Broadway little Gunn Tram was hurrying after him, calling out his name in the noisy, densely populated, brightly lit rush-hour dusk. Bobbie had turned into the wind off the river and now felt the bite of approaching winter on his face. He had important business on his mind, scowled at having to be distracted.

Gunn quickened her small steps. For a second, she looked to Bobbie like an aging dachshund. Her big head and thickening body teetered precariously along Broadway on stubby legs and tiny black-sneakered feet. He didn’t call out to her but remained rooted where he’d stopped so she wouldn’t scream louder and draw more attention to herself.

Finally within hailing distance, she called out to him: “Going to the house?”

“Maybe,” he said slowly.

“Walk with me? I have news.”

“All right.” His eyes wrenched away from her, and he started moving again. He was pained to see this so-called
friend
in a shapeless pants suit and sneakers. It was embarrassing. It occurred to him that Gunn was letting herself go, was getting to be an old woman now, no longer bothering even with the pretense of carrying a good pair of shoes back and forth to her job in the personnel department at the Centre.

Gunn was sixty-two on her last birthday and joked about changing the dates in her own file so she couldn’t be retired. Not that anyone would think of retiring her, she said comfortably. “I’m the heart of the Centre, the
human
resource,” she liked to say.

Until recently, Bobbie had always thought so, too. Gunn
was kind of saintly, soft on people. She was an optimist, she said, liked fixing bad situations. And she had the tools to do it. She had access to the computers with the business information, to the color-coded files on the shelves that had the personal stuff, to the progress and evaluation reports. Gunn knew almost everything there was to know about everybody who worked at the Centre, including the doctors and administrators. And she cared about everybody, especially him.

Bobbie had believed in Gunn all the way until he was fired last year and lost his insurance just when his mother got so sick. Gunn paid for the old lady to come north and told Bobbie how to get the maintenance job in the Stone Pavilion, but Bobbie still felt it was Gunn’s fault his mother had died. Gunn told him he couldn’t ever apply for another nursing job. Bobbie was bitter about that, too.

And now it was worse. He’d never minded the twelve years’ age difference between them. Gunn had been twelve years older than him all along, all the years he’d worked there. She wasn’t another white bitch out to get him, was Swedish and didn’t know how to be mean. He didn’t know why she was the way she was, maybe because she’d come from somewhere else, though you could hardly hear it in her voice anymore. She was bubbly and enthusiastic, never saw the bad in anybody. He liked her in spite of the annoyance of having to listen to her foreign ideas. Real good-looking never mattered much to him, anyway. He never spent any time looking at anybody, and fucking was just—fucking.

No, older had never bothered him, but
old
was beginning to get to him. Bobbie still felt like a
young
man, like the boy who’d gone off to the Army and still had opportunity in front of him. He still had the juice, expected to inherit the earth sometime soon. But more and more these days when Gunn bugged him about keeping his head down and holding his temper—when he looked at the strange, frightened old woman she was becoming—he felt he was history like Gunn and wanted to howl like a dog.

“The police came to the Centre today,” Gunn said as soon as she calmed down and caught her breath.

“Yeah, what for?” Bobbie didn’t slow his pace for her even though she had to struggle to keep up.

“You’ll never guess what.”

“A patient death.” He guessed what. What else was there?

“How did you know, Bobbie, you sly old fox? Have you heard already?” Her hand bunched into a tiny fist to punch playfully at his massive arm. He stood way over a foot taller than she, wore a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and had the tight, mean look that made cautious people make a wide berth around him. She changed her mind and put her hand back in her pocket.

“It’s not a hard one. Accidents happen all the time. Who’s taking the fall this time?”

“Oh, Bobbie, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.… I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”

“What then?” He spat out the words, didn’t give a shit.

“Clara Treadwell, that’s whose patient.” Gunn said it with great satisfaction. “Rumor is she was sleeping with him.”

“And she killed him for that? Overprescribed? The old cow should have been grateful.”

Gunn laughed. “She didn’t kill him. It was a suicide. She didn’t hand him the
cup—
”

“
I
didn’t do that.” Bobbie interrupted her furiously. “
Alice
gave him the stuff. Fuck, why did you say that, Gunn? I’d never hurt a patient, never.”

“Sorry—I’m sorry, Bobbie.” Gunn’s face was instantly repentant.