Free Loving Time by Leslie Glass Page A

he had to conquer every year. It was November already. Pretty soon he’d have to stop running outside and start traveling across town towork out at the 92nd Street Y. Jason hated that. It took up too much time. Six months of the year, when it was warm, he ran in Riverside Park. He ran in the morning before he saw his first patient or sometime between twelve and two. He had a rationale for everything he did, and in the eight years since he had qualified as a psychoanalyst, he had worked out his days and hours exactly to fit the requirements of his profession, which was unlike any other.
    He taught medical students and psychiatric residents. For each hour-and-a-half lecture, it took about forty hours of preparation. He taught at three different levels. Every level had to know certain things by the end of one of his talks. Medical students got the basics. The same subject for residents was much denser and deeper. For colleagues in associations he had to write the papers in advance. Jason got paid nothing for teaching and nothing for supervising residents. The personal cost of becoming an important analyst, a mover and shaker in a rigid and unyielding field, was something no analyst talked about.
    No one got paid for the thousands of hours spent writing articles for psychoanalytic journals. Nor for the hundreds of dollars it cost to reprint the articles and send them all over the world to people who wanted them. Jason was paid an honorarium for about half of his speaking engagements, but even those did not begin to cover the cost of the hours and hours it took to prepare. And the days to give them, because a speaker didn’t just fly somewhere and speak, then get on a plane and go home. A speaker had to meet students, had to have lunch with the head of the department, colleagues who wanted to interact. Sometimes it was too far to go home. He had to stay, have dinner and spend the night.
    For conferences, topics had to be approved in advance by the program committees. Then presenters had to hand in papers in advance so the discussants could read them and prepare their rebuttals. Of course, one had to stay and listen to other people’s papers. Often Jason was asked to be both adiscussant and a presenter. When he got back home, exhausted and drained, he was immediately plunged into a grueling round of twelve-hour days packed with teaching and patients and had stacks of unopened mail waiting for him. That was the career track for someone who wanted to make a difference in the field. Jason was on that career track, an independent attached to an institution that considered teaching an honor that shouldn’t be polluted by any recompense.
    He crossed Riverside Drive at Eightieth Street and broke into a comfortable jog. Up at Eighty-fifth Street was the huge hospital complex, one building of which was the Psychiatric Centre where he had trained and where he now supervised and taught.
    He passed the Centre without looking at it, didn’t feel like going in, which was the reason he didn’t have a full-time job there. Jason had never acquired the taste for politics and committees and endless meetings. The only way for an independent like him to earn a living was in patient hours. And he knew exactly how many patient hours he had to book to support his writing and teaching. He was never really idle, never without a thousand demands on his time. He had married twice. He’d left his first wife. Emma, his second wife, had left him. Whenever he wasn’t working, he was thinking about that.
    He barely noticed the majestic Hudson River or the cliffs of New Jersey on the other side of it. He was worrying about his wife acting in movies, living in California, who spoke to him on the phone at a scheduled time every week and told him there wasn’t a thing about him she’d ever loved. It was at this point that he broke into a sweat.
    When he reached Ninety-fifth Street, he was thinking that he didn’t have a car, a country house, a child. The