Loving Time

these ghosts, you hear me? They’re a mean set of ghosts. And you know what else? These people may still drink the blood of their enemies. So call him Mike, Ma, and treat him with the respect he deserves.”

Sai glared at the gun, then away. April could see that her mother was fighting the urge to say something truly terrible, but for once she didn’t dare. Watching the wrinkles in Sai’s face close in around her rage, April realized that Skinny Dragon Mother was actually afraid of Mike Sanchez. She was afraid to say anything bad about him and push April into liking him even more. The thought that her mother was afraid of a friend of hers cheered April up quite a bit. “Come on, Ma. I’ll get you some dinner,” she offered. “You want to try some take-out chicken mole?”

thirty-five

Jason sat on the bed in his shorts and tee shirt, the Raymond Cowles file open on his knees. It was thick and quite detailed, and he wasn’t much further along in it than he’d been when he set it aside to make love to Emma seven hours earlier. Since then they’d done a lot of talking. They’d had dinner, talked some more. Then she’d gone for a run on her treadmill in the tiny room behind the kitchen. Now he felt her eyes on him as she padded into the bedroom.

He looked up from the page he’d read four times. “Hi.”

“Hi yourself.” Her shorts and the white cropped shirt that showed half her abdomen were wet.

Emma had a beautiful body that Jason had never been able to resist, no matter how hurt or angry he was with her. Her hair was blonder now, short. She had real movie-star hair and a real movie-star body—not too thin. Her face could be anything. Now it was a little tense. She shook her hair out as he watched her. She’d had all day to rim and finally gotten to it after dinner and half a bottle of wine. He didn’t know how she could do it.

She spread out the towel on the floor, sat on it, and starting doing sit-ups. He figured she’d throw up soon, must be scared to death.

“What time is your audition?” he asked, watching her crunch and grimace.

“Really early,” she grunted.

“How early is really?”

Grunt “Eleven-thirty.”

He laughed. For him, by eleven-thirty half the day was over. She had twelve hours to prepare. “Nervous?”

Grunt. “Always.”

“You really want to do a play, the same thing over and over every night—and twice on Wednesday and Saturday?”

“You do the same thing over and over, with the same people year after year. Don’t you get tired of it?”

“Mmmm, no.”

“So, it’s a night job instead of a day job. Might be fun for six months. Then I’ll do another film.”

Jason felt a chill and shivered. Six months. His wife planned on being around only six months. Thanks for letting me know, he didn’t say. What did she think, that she could just come and go in the marriage without consulting him? What was he, a piece of furniture? His brows came together in a single angry line. Passivity wasn’t exactly easy for him. A part of him wanted to throw the baggage out, let her have her brilliant career on her own. Fine.

Emma stopped midcrunch, staring at the fringe on the bedspread.

Fine. He could live without her. There were lots of women in the sea. He’d find another. His jaw set.

“What?” she murmured.

“What yourself?”

“You know, I’ve been thinking. How would you like a different look in here?”

He looked around at the cream-colored walls and tasteful prints, the teal bedspread and chair, the many coordinating pillows. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s time for a change.”

“Humph.” Jason went back to the file. He’d never really liked the strange blue-green bedspread and drapes she’d chosen when they married. But he didn’t like change. He liked his life the way it had been before. He didn’t want a new bedspread or a new and different wife. If Emma got the part in this Broadway play, she’d be an even bigger star. If she didn’t get the part, she’d go back to California to her pretty rented house on the beach and make stupid movies, leaving him alone in limbo. The whole thing pissed him off.

Jason understood his ambivalence and conflicts about connection, but after all his training and two wives, at almost forty he still wasn’t sure what made love sometimes conquer all. Was it a sensory thing that could be regenerated over and over by sight or touch or smell, or was love driven by fantasy, the secret things that happened in a person’s head?

“Well, what do you think?” Emma said.

“About what?”

“Never mind.” She pointed at the Cowles file he’d been lugging from one room to another all day. “What’s the case?”

Jason was still on Intake’s descriptive assessment of Raymond Cowles’s analyzability. He’d noted in the part on family history that Ray’s mother’s father had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for most of his life and had died under suspicious circumstances when Ray was two. Out of a lot of routine information, in the middle of his annoyance with his wife, that piece jumped out at him. It was important because it meant there was a possible history of suicide in Cowles’s family. It also meant that his mother might well have experienced a profound depression herself when her father died. The grandfather’s cause of death was unclear and was stated in the most perfunctory way in the assessment. No further questions about that seemed to have been asked because there was no elaboration.

The chart read:

Diagnosis deferred in 20-year-old man with what appears to be a character neurosis and identity confusion. In addition, the patient has repetitive and recurrent ego dystonic homosexual fantasies that he has never acted on. Masturbation fantasies have been homosexual. Patient is likable, highly intelligent, responsible, and intends to stay in the area since he has a job waiting for him, and his fiancee is getting a doctoral degree at the same university. He has limited financial resources.

“Jason?”

“Huh?” Jason looked up. He realized Emma was waiting for an answer to something or other. He dropped the report guiltily.

“Plus ca change.” She laughed.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, darling. I know. I know. If I want you, I have to take you the way you are.”

“And it appears I have to do the same. Is that fair?”

She nodded. “You have your life. I have to have mine.”

Is that fair? he wanted to whine. Was that the deal? Damn, she was gorgeous. “What’d you ask?” he muttered.

“Nothing. I just asked about the case. I can’t know, right?”

“Wrong. I can tell you about this case. A former patient of Clara Treadwell committed suicide last week, and Clara asked me to review the file.”

“Oh, my. The Clara Treadwell?” Emma pulled off the cropped shirt and the bicycle shorts, rolled them up in the towel for the laundry.

Her nudity was a conversation-stopper in more ways than one. The body was lovely, but around Emma’s navel were the broken images of the tattoo started by her abductor. They were just bits of black now, more than half removed by the laser surgery she was having in California. It was no longer possible to decipher what the tattooed picture had been, but Jason had already seen it. The thing that really startled him was how his formerly modest and reserved wife—who used to hang back never wanting to annoy him with too much of herself—was now a bold temptress. He wanted to maintain his equilibrium and not be bowled over by it, but the balance was gone. A renewed surge of enthusiasm for the woman driving him crazy jolted through Jason.