Break and Enter (23 page)

Peter looked over the rest of the car. The inspection sticker on the window was expired. Somehow that and the parking tickets cheered him, slightly legitimized Vinnie’s surveillance—good old bad-meat Vinnie, plugged into every computer search the Police Department ran. He wondered how many Patrick Ewing would get that night against the Sixers—twenty, thirty points? The Sixers had once been a great and proud team. Peter didn’t even recognize all the names on the roster anymore.

The car would tell him nothing. On the opposite corner was a neighborhood grocery. Peter stepped across the street and went inside. A heavy man with the back of his hairline shaved two inches up the back of his head looked at Peter. Though he was in his late thirties, presumably past the age of foolishness, an earring the size of a fishing lure hung from his left ear. Janice probably shopped here for bread or a quart of orange juice. While she no longer ate or drank dairy products because of the link to breast cancer, she still drank the occasional diet soda, the caffeine of which had been linked to fibrocystic disease,
which made detecting malignant lumps difficult. Janice had once wept at the prospect of losing a breast; she feared he would leave her. He had said no, of course not, but as the words came out of his mouth, he realized he’d be forced to find some private peace within himself, as would, of course, she. One in eleven women got breast cancer, and those who contracted it before menopause, as had Janice’s mother, were more likely to die of it. Of course, Janice’s mother had killed herself before the cancer finished the job. What do you think about when you find your mother has killed herself?
I decided right then that I would never make the mistakes that she did, that I would always have the courage to get free,
Janice had told him long ago. He hoped for her sake she would get off the caffeine, preserve her life. Having children before thirty was supposed to help out with the odds—that was another thing he had not done for Janice. She had started reading baby books furiously when she was about twenty-eight, bringing them home, peppering him with facts. So often when walking in the park, she’d see a mother with a child and clutch his arm and sing half-despairingly, “I want one!”

He had stalled for a couple of years, basing his arguments on money, time, personal development. He scrutinized young fathers out with their babies: Did they appear
really
happy? Every day parents beat children to death at the simple provocation of hearing them cry. He hadn’t suspected himself of such violence but worried how impatient and aggravated he could become. Then, about the time the question began to ease in him, when he could picture himself as a father and had stopped considering all the things he couldn’t control—birth defects and accidents and money—Janice began to back off, to freeze. The statute of expectations had expired. She became ever more involved at the shelter, piling up the hours, making presentations to foundations and agencies, counseling mothers, making an occasional guest appearance in a class at Penn or Temple. She appeared happy, so the issue faded. Then one day they saw a mother and her baby in the supermarket. Before a wall of sugary children’s cereals, Janice faced him down: “I will never forgive you for not wanting to have children,” she said. The grocery cart was left in the store, half-full, while he chased after a tearful Janice to the car, where they sat, stunned and silent.

Before him were rows of foodstuffs, magazine racks, fresh fruit. No doubt Janice had stood right where he stood now, figuring what she needed to buy, and a clerk would soon notice an attractive woman shopping there regularly. But he couldn’t ask about her outright. People were tight-lipped in these neighborhoods, especially to strangers. He looked at the store clerk, knowing he had to open him up, hoping the clerk hadn’t seen him on the local news the night before.

“Give me a lottery ticket,” Peter said.

“Instant or Daily Number?”

“Instant. That’s fine.”

“And that’s a buck,” the man said, punching the cash register. “One dollar, U.S. of A. currency. Good the world over, best black-market money there is.”

Peter tucked the ticket in his shirt pocket. He stepped over to the cooler.

“I’ll take a bottle of orange juice, too.” He decided to say something stupid to put the man at ease. “I’m thirsty enough to drink ten of these.”

The other man liked this. “I got a two-hundred-milliliter bladder capacity. That’s about half a can of soda. You got about twice that.”

“What cut down your capacity?”

“The Cong fucked with a Claymore on our LZ perimeter and I had a little piece of our own mine zip in there and cut the thing in half. It brought me home, home to the absolute fucking paradise of South Filthydelphia.”

“This your old neighborhood?” The trial attorney’s credo: People talk about their life when they feel you like them.

“My mother’s got a place a block down. She suffers from Alzheimer’s, so I live with her. She walks the apartment. I finally had to throw out the rugs—she wore a track right through them. But she’s physically healthy. Least I pay no rent. And rents are going up around here, let me tell you.”

Peter nodded. “Looks like there’s work going on across the street.”

“Everybody’s fixing their shit up,” the man grunted in agreement.

“What’s that big dumpster out there for? In the alley?”

“For the house they’re rehabbing on the corner.”

“How do the people next door feel about it?” Peter asked. “All that noise.”

“Next door is a bunch of fucking neo-Nazi fundamentalists,” the clerk spat out. “House full of them. They come in here and tell me we should have dropped the bomb on Hanoi. Kids, mostly. They think Satan’s giving me a blowjob, so they put me on some mailing list. All those TV preachers send me shit. Hate their fucking guts. But they’re moving back to Odessa, Texas, or whatever place spawned them. Most racist people I ever met.”

One house down, two to go. “What about the rehab house?” Peter asked. “Owner doing a good job?”

“I don’t know anything about carpentry. I was a medic, now I work in a grocery. The painters come over here all the time on their lunch break. All women. Bunch of lesbians. I see them hanging on each other at lunch, kissing and hugging and shit like that. A couple of them are pretty goddamn good-looking, too. Hell, I can deal with unshaved armpits, same as the women in Europe, right? You should have seen some of the whorehouses in Saigon. ‘Course some of those places up in North Philly are pretty bad, dirty needles all over—”

Peter ceased listening, sipped his juice, and felt a sudden ease. That the corner house was being painted by a group of women painters was good evidence that it was where Janice was staying—virtually conclusive, knowing the sociosexual-political spin of the governing ideologies of Janice, her friends, and the shelter. Perhaps the house belonged to the women painting it. He stepped out of the store and returned to the corner house, pausing at the front doorway to listen for the sounds of power tools or hammers or people inside. He heard nothing.

Would he do it? Yes, of course—he had to. He pushed his way in past the peeling doorframe, sliding his feet cautiously over the dusty floor of the vestibule. He could see the empty living and dining rooms, every wall in both pocked by smooth white stains of joint compound. Wires twisted from unfinished electrical sockets. He moved quickly into the kitchen, hearing his footsteps echo, aware of his escape route. The kitchen appeared to be in working order. Through the back window he saw the painting crew eating lunch at a picnic table in the backyard beneath a half-dead elm tree. The rest of the yard included some leafless forsythia bushes, an ancient cracked patio, assorted trash and rotten lumber and a jungle of runty, untrimmed ironwood trees at the back. One of the
painters was unscrewing a Thermos, which meant, he figured, that they had just sat down. They were squinting happily into the oddly warm sun, chatting among themselves. He’d have a few minutes to look around. Dishes in the sink, a box of cereal in the cabinet. He pulled open the refrigerator. The old door stuck, but when he got it open, he saw a block of tofu soaking in a bowl and a pot of tabouli salad. Grapefruit, a jungle of veggies on the second shelf. Bottled water. Janice was here, in all her organically grown, vegetarian glory. Uncooked wheat-germ. Half a bottle of wine. Red wine unlocked in Janice a happy, celebratory lust. She was well moved in. Of course she slept upstairs.

Someone rattled at the door. Quickly Peter opened his briefcase and pulled out a legal pad. A short, powerfully built woman in a jean jacket and T-shirt pushed open the door. She was lightly speckled with paint and her breasts bounced heavily beneath her thin white cotton shirt. She thrust an empty soda can under the faucet and filled it up.

“What’re you here for?” she demanded of Peter, looking up into his face.

“I’m with the real-estate company.” He clicked a pen.

“How did you get in?”

“The front door was unlocked,” Peter replied. “But I do have the key.” He smiled easily. From his pocket he drew out his ring of keys, and selected his own house key as if he were very patiently willing to demonstrate to her that he was legitimate. The woman barely looked at it.

“You know what this place is going to be used for?” the woman asked suspiciously, dumping the water from the can.

He didn’t know why she was testing him.

“Yes,” he began, “but I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to discuss it. The owners … have asked me … I, uh, hope you understand …”

The woman found this acceptable, and even nodded as if she knew exactly what he meant. She refilled the can and opened the back door. Peter motioned to continue the conversation.

“Before you go, how’s the upstairs coming along? The plumbing was one of the things we—”

“That’s
shot to hell,” she interrupted agreeably. “They’re going to have to tear up a lot of flooring under the tub. The plumber won’t be back till three. Go see for yourself. I got to get back to lunch.”

She closed the door and strode across the backyard. Peter watched to
see if the other painters looked back at the house when the woman arrived at the picnic table. He decided he couldn’t wait and darted up the back stairs through a hall past several empty bedrooms. Janice would take a room with morning sunlight. Hers was the last bedroom, a mattress on the floor—a single: That’s a good sign, he told himself—and a telephone beside it. In the middle of the room sat an old kerosene space heater, the same device the Philadelphia Fire Department hated so much. Who would put that there? In overcrowded slum houses, the heaters had a tendency to be knocked over and start fires. He considered dismantling the heater and buying Janice a good electric one, but of course he couldn’t do that, and instead offered a small prayer that she be careful around the heater. By the phone were stacks of file folders, all shelter stuff. A quick glimpse: funding proposal, architect’s plan for renovation, contractor’s agreement. The house belonged to the women’s shelter—what else would a renovated house being painted by women painters and lived in by Janice using a quasi-secret phone number be? Legal habit getting the better of him, he took his time with the funding proposal. “… need for the establishment of a satellite home, due to the eroding confidentiality of the West Philadelphia address and to our strong desire to serve women in a different part of the city. This unit will comprise temporary emergency facilities for 8 to 10 women and their children. Our effort continues to be crucial and inadequate in a city in which thousands of women live in crisis each day. Referrals and counseling will continue to be centered in the West Philadelphia unit…”

That explained the renovation, the untagged phone number, and Janice’s new parking habits. He felt disoriented, suddenly full of grief, for Janice had not even mentioned the house to him, even though it must have been at least six months in the planning. She had been preparing to leave long ago, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He wondered if she had thought about her plan while he had been on top of her, sawing away like a goddamned fool, fat-headedly believing she was half-dead with pleasure. Had she thought about her carefully planned stages of escape while they had breakfast? While he told her about office politics? While she chatted with his mother on the phone? While they gave their last dinner party three months back, smiling and making clever conversation with their guests? While she folded laundry, while they argued, while he
told her—crying on a few occasions—that he loved her? That seemed impossible, yet it had to be true.

Sadly, he replaced the folders, pulling his hand away from the cardboard file separators with the strangely disturbing knowledge that he had just left his fingerprints all over them, probably several dozen already in the house, enough for a basic breaking and entering charge. Next to Janice’s perfectly made bed was a clock radio, a ghetto box with a bunch of tapes—her tastes ran to the lyrical and rhapsodic—and a new journal. Oh, how he knew his wife! Janice’s periodic decisions to completely reorganize her life were often accompanied by her purchase of a tiny spiral-bound notebook or a bound black-and-white-covered composition book, or, when the desire for sweeping change was most acute, a beautifully bound diary of blank pages. These she kept with her until sooner or later she forgot about them, until they migrated to the miscellaneous drawer of her desk, joining a pile of predecessors. Peter picked up the new journal.

He really must not read it. He really needed to read it. The first entry was dated about two weeks prior.