Break and Enter (5 page)

Janice had kept the supply under the bathroom sink, stacked neatly like firewood. As a man with nothing better to do than to wander through the wreckage of his marriage, Peter pulled back the covers, padded into the bathroom, and opened the cabinet door under the sink. She’d left one solitary, curled, used-up tube there, strangled and dead. A note was taped to it.

I KNEW YOU WOULD LOOK,
said her wry, tight script.

Back in the darkness, the blood pooling in his brain, already forgiving her for her little cruelty, since as a dark-humored jest it acknowledged his torment, he suddenly and quite against his will recalled the ritual he and Janice had performed a thousand or more times when he put her to bed on the nights he worked late. He would lie next to her and ask, “Hey, you, whisper-woo, how many kisses do you want?” She would turn a sleepy face toward him, enjoying his sticky sentimentality, and be able to say any number that came to mind, knowing that even if it took all night, he would give her that many kisses; it was like money in the bank, and she derived great pleasure from making very small withdrawals, since they implied by inverse proportion all the love she had from him. So she would dreamily say, “Seven,” or “Nineteen,” or even, in a rare mood of profligacy, “Thirty-two and all of them
good
ones,” whereupon he would indulge her, knowing in his heart that it was one of those rare acts that was easy and meant so much to her.

Then they would snuggle and maybe talk a little happy nonsense and she would fall asleep, her breath evening out; at the same time he would snooze for ten or twenty minutes, just let the first layer of sleep wash over him. Then he would get up and prep a case in his study, his eyes burned out by the lamp, and finally go downstairs and putter around, get a couple of things done. If he had any energy left, he’d do the dishes; if not, he would at least take the garbage out to the cans in their tiny backyard. Walking over the moist rug of grass toward the yellow square of the open kitchen door, he might look up, able to see a couple of stars under the bright Philly sky. If he was lucky, he picked out the Big Dipper, but beyond that he was lost.

But that was then and this was now and he lay back in bed, empty except for him, and wondered about his heart. There was pain in there, some ventricle too tight. His grandfather had died of a massive coronary in his father’s arms. These things skip generations. He took a deep breath and his chest muscles seemed to flutter, faster than a spasm, as if trying to squeeze out all the caffeine, Nutrasweet, MSG, and other daily poisons. Janice would live to be one hundred. He probably already had early arteriosclerosis, the gunk clogging his pipes.

The pain receded. He wanted to sleep but his mind pulled up the day one last time. Robinson slept now on prison-issue sheets, waiting. And only twenty-two. On
his
twenty-second birthday, Peter was already in law school, starting the slave years, which were better forgotten except for the good times with Janice. He always worried about whether the verdict actually matched the reality. With decent evidence, anybody could convict the obviously guilty person; it took real skill to convict somebody who was innocent. He had that skill to convict somebody who was innocent. He had that skill. Therefore, it was his habit now, after seven years, to ask himself quietly before a trial began if he was sure of a defendant’s guilt. He could not and should not convince a jury if he was not sure himself. Of course, this sentiment had little to do with the truth. The law dealt with evidence, not with proof. Once Robinson was convicted, his youth would be squandered within the concrete walls of prison. Peter pictured Robinson wiping Judy Warren’s quickly coagulating blood on his shirt, tracking it over the floor of her apartment with his shoes. Peter did not like blood. When he and Janice had sex during
her period, he’d withdraw and see himself slick and glistening and erect, and though Janice hastened to mop up, he’d be stunned by the sight of himself—felt strangely and powerfully guilty, as if he had wounded her.

There remained one last thing to do before sleep. He forced himself up and went to the bathroom to get his glasses. They had toothpaste crud on them from the sink. He put them on anyway, and little pale stains blurred his vision, making him feel dazed and clumsy. Downstairs he retrieved the two halves of the hunger envelope. He found a roll of tape and carefully rejoined the envelope, aligning its bar code so well that the post office optical scanner would be fooled. His checkbook was in his desk. He’d be paid at the end of the week, but money was becoming a problem. Virtue was not attainable by doing what he planned to do, but he did it anyway, quickly wrote out a check for three hundred dollars—after taxes, about two days’ work—and put it in the envelope. He sealed and stamped the envelope and pulled on his coat and boots. Outside, he hurried through the cold toward the corner mailbox as the PNB clock tower twelve blocks west gonged midnight. What was Janice doing now? Dreaming? Her feet tended to flutter as she slept, and sometimes she called out. So often she had woken to nightmares about her mother and he had woken, too, to hold her. She suffered the freefloating fear of an orphan—that she was not worthy of love, that those who might love her would abandon her. His reassurance had its limits, beyond which Janice ventured alone. The cold metal handle stung his hand as he pulled open the mailbox. Tomorrow was already today. He slipped the envelope into the slot and walked quickly back—a big, hunched, hatless figure in pajamas and dark coat—shut the door, turned the heat down in the house to save money for his estranged wife’s rent, and found sleep.

PETER STOOD IN THE COLD
and through the restaurant window suffered an intimate view of his wife. It was the first he had seen her in twelve days, and time was slipping past too quickly. Was she getting used to being without him, liking it? These, the dead days of January, when daylight seemed to last only a few hours, were the absolutely worst time of year to launch a reconciliation, but here he was, doing his best.

Janice wore her burgundy dress and her hair was up, and she only put her hair up when she had time to fuss around before a mirror. It occurred to him that she would pick a place to eat that was more or less on the way to work at the women’s crisis center in West Philly and not far from where she was staying. So maybe she had an apartment around the corner, or a few blocks away. She wore the pearl earrings he had bought her in San Francisco. Peter squinted and saw Janice had on eyeliner. She never wore makeup to the shelter; she was a good-looking woman unadorned, and the women who came in there were so distraught and ashamed and suspicious that the last thing they needed was to feel they were competing with silk and tastefully applied makeup. How many women would choose careers in which their beauty could work
against
their effectiveness? And that wasn’t all. The shelter’s support community included a few hard-core lesbians who chopped off the hair on their heads, grew it under their arms, went unashamedly fat, picnicked on the solstice, and dressed in overalls and flannel shirts. Some of these women looked at Janice with disgust, and
others with longing, as he did now. Her lips moved a little as she read the menu written in colored chalk on slates. He knew her breath tasted of the natural toothpaste she used, that because she had on the black hose with the little white diamond design, which he could see, she also wore the black heels, which he couldn’t see. They were beautiful calfskin shoes and she saved them for special occasions. He liked it when she wore heels; they were unabashedly sexy, and Janice had beautiful legs. He and Janice had made love last November in a Club Med swimming pool in a desperate flight to the Caribbean to inject something lost into their lives. In the lapping chlorinated water, she was remiss at first but he convinced her that not only was it anatomically quite possible but that no one could see them. They had laughed about it later, and for the rest of their vacation she kept bringing glassfuls of cloudy pool water up to their hotel room.

Now Janice was checking her watch but in a casual way, which meant she expected him to be late. People walking into the restaurant were staring at him but he didn’t care—I don’t care what you think, that’s my wife in there, mister, don’t touch her, he thought, don’t look at her, don’t even think about it.

He yanked off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, unbuttoned his coat, and opened the door.

“Peter,” she said softly as she turned around, offering her large blue eyes to him, whispering his name with such disarming and conspiratorial love for him that it was as if they had booked a room at the old Bellevue-Stratford Hotel three blocks away for a tryst, something they had never done but which the tone of her voice allowed him to imagine—heavy blankets, champagne, high view of the city, snowy rooftops, the color of the winter dusk across her breasts. Of course, the old Bellevue-Stratford, once one of the finest hotels in the country, rivaling the swanky New York hotels—faux marble and thick red carpeting in the lobby—had been chopped up into offices, stores, restaurants, and a parking garage, and was called something else now.

They went silently through the cafeteria line, sliding bright green trays along chrome rails, aware of the distance between their shoulders. By habit he leaned close to her, then corrected himself when he saw her stiffen. He ordered an omelet with ham. She looked at him in surprise.

“Eating meat again,” he said.

She smiled at him tentatively and paid for herself before the cashier could ask whether their orders were together. He watched her hold her wallet, believing he could name from memory nearly every paper and card inside it.

“But,
I still put that brewer’s yeast in my cereal.”

They found a table. The artwork on the wall was a collage of President Bush with a big grin. Instead of teeth, the President flashed a row of miniature white space shuttles. On the left upper incisor—Peter knew the term from forensic dentistry testimony—was a tiny picture of a homeless black man. Thus, the smile wasn’t complete.

“What’s up?”

“Oh, just busy. I told you we have a full house. We’re working with the next group of volunteers,” Janice said evenly.

“New crop?”

“Half will burn out by the third session. Too invested in their own issues to help others. One woman is so mad at men she can’t be nurturing of others now. She’s on a kick to warn women away from men.” Janice nodded at him. “Pretty unfortunate.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I had to bring her into my office and say maybe she had to work out some personal issues before helping other women.”

“Did you point out the fascist similarities between radical feminists and the neo-fundamentalists?” he asked, trying to sound amusing.

“Peter, she
means
well—”

“We all mean well.”

“Everybody does, Peter,” she said softly before taking a small, precise bite. “You know that.”

“Yeah.” He needed to hide his bitterness. “Can’t you at least tell me where you’re living?”

He knew her secret and now she realized that. She stared at him, thinking.

“No, I can’t.”

“Why? You found some guy?”

“No.”
She angrily dug her spoon into her grapefruit.

He didn’t expect another man yet; not at all, actually. He knew Janice better than that. And neither did he expect himself to be involved with
another woman. He didn’t
want
another woman. All that had happened thus far was that they had lived apart for a couple of weeks; not so bad, really. But where the hell was she sleeping? A friend’s house? Possibly, but Janice had a lot of pride—too much, in his view, though not enough self-esteem. Besides, she had moved out, she said, to lose her dependence, not transfer it. It was possible she was still in the apartment but had her phone disconnected, meanwhile taking and making calls somewhere else. He had called Information and she was not listed anywhere, nor listed as “unlisted,” so the phone number she had given him earlier was just a number among millions and wasn’t tagged with her name. It wouldn’t be too hard to get the address of the phone number through the police, but that was illegal. But all this was the wrong track, perhaps. It was
unlike
Janice to live somewhere without a phone. She needed one—she received calls from the women’s house at all hours of the night from staff members and women who couldn’t control their children or who were feeling suicidal or angry, or who wanted to complain about other women in the shelter, or worst, and common enough, had a husband who had discovered the address of the shelter and had threatened to come harm them or steal the children. Occasionally men showed up at the shelter—drunk, pissed off, explosively angry—and yelled the house down; it was not for nothing that the building had a police call alarm.

He watched Janice inspect each bite of fruit as she ate. He admired her; she had pulled off some pretty spectacular stunts in helping wives hide from battering, angry husbands. He was certain she wouldn’t disconnect herself from the shelter, and thus, she
did
have a phone, was reachable somehow. He knew, too, that there was no way for him to work through the shelter, to call up casually and ask for his wife’s number. The shelter staff had always been quite pleasant with him—indeed, he knew most of them by name—but he was certain that by now Janice had told all of them of her situation—if only as an act of solidarity—and they would steadfastly refuse to reveal her whereabouts. This, after all, was what they were trained to do, and he was no longer an ally; in their terms he had crossed over to the other side. The easy methods of locating Janice wouldn’t work.

“You won’t tell me or you can’t tell me?” he finally said, squeezing the words out in anger.

“Both. Stop cross-examining me. Let go of this now, Peter. If we can talk, I’ll stay. If you badger me, I’m leaving. It’s really pretty sad that you have to sit there trying to figure out where I’m staying. Like we’re playing a game. I can see it all happening on your face.”