Housebreaking

by Dan Pope

  The line went dead.

  In a rage, he twisted and ripped apart the phone and threw it into the backseat, the pieces scattering. His crappy old flip phone.

  * * *

  HE DROVE TO Wintonbury Center. He couldn’t go home, not yet. He was way too angry, too drunk, to let Audrey see him like this. He parked outside the restaurant where he and Sampson had dined—Max Baxter’s Fish Bar. A drink to calm his nerves. Getting out of the car, he noticed a pay phone on the corner and headed for it, nearly tripping on the curb. Sampson didn’t answer. The little prick, he’d sniffed him out. Andrew vented into his voice mail. I’m going to do everything I can to fuck up your career was the gist of it. “I know every litigator worth a damn in the entire Northeast and I’m going to call every one of them personally and give them the scoop. You didn’t think that far ahead, did you? Sure, you might get your pissant settlement, big deal. Then what? You think anyone will want to hire a backstabbing piece of shit like you? Who sues his own firm? They’ll see you coming a mile away. You’ll be lucky to get a job as a paralegal—” He went on until the mailbox filled.

  Inside the restaurant there was only one other customer—a middle-aged guy sipping a scotch at the bar—and some waiters at a table in the rear, eating a late dinner.

  “Tequila,” he told the bartender.

  “How about a beer?”

  He looked up. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Your eyes look a little red,” the bartender explained.

  “Fine, then. A beer. You wouldn’t want to risk a lawsuit.”

  He sat at the bar, watching the waiters at the rear table. One of them had the hiccups. The others found this humorous; they laughed every time he erupted. Andrew studied his beer, running foggily through explanations he might present to Audrey, trying to make them turn out in his favor. When the lights came up, as sudden and shocking as a camera flash, Andrew downed the rest of his beer and went out to his car.

  He sat in the driver’s seat, staring at the empty street. He checked his watch.

  11:58 P.M.

  Monday

  November 26, 2007

  He didn’t want to go home before midnight. He wanted to be sure Audrey was asleep before he got there. He grabbed another beer out of the backseat and slowly sipped, gathering his resolve. When he finished the beer, he checked his watch again and said aloud, “To hell with it.”

  He started the car and pulled away from the curb. On the next corner was a gas station. He parked and got out and went inside to pour himself a cup of coffee. He was hungry, he realized; he hadn’t eaten all day. He picked a premade grinder out of the refrigerator and paid the attendant. He drank the coffee in the front seat of his car and gobbled half the grinder, which was stale and dry.

  On the drive home he passed a police car at an intersection without incident. Pulling into his driveway, he noticed every light in the house was on. What the hell was going on? From the outside it looked like they were throwing some kind of party.

  In the kitchen he called his wife and daughter, then went from room to room, even checking the basement—but no one answered, only the dog, who followed him, whining and sniffing: despite the lights, no one was home.

  Where were they? Had she opened the legal letter and read the numbered points of the lawsuit, the narrative of his disgrace? Had she left so quickly, without even waiting for an explanation, without wanting to hear his side of the story?

  He tried Audrey’s cell phone—only to have it go to voice mail.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING he woke on the couch, hungover in his soiled suit, still wearing his shoes. He opened his eyes to see Audrey standing above him. She looked terrible. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy.

  “Where were you last night?” she asked.

  “Where was I? Where were you? Aren’t you the one who stayed out all night?”

  “Didn’t you get my messages?”

  “No.”

  “Check your phone.”

  “My phone is broken,” he said.

  She turned to leave, but he called after her. “Hey. Talk to me. What’s going on?” He realized that something else had happened, something unrelated to him; she knew nothing about the lawsuit. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been with Emily.”

  “Emily?” He paused. “Isn’t she in school?”

  She stood in the doorway and in a calm, expressionless tone told him what had happened the night before; he didn’t interrupt or ask any questions—and when she was done, as she was turning to go, she uttered two final words—words, he realized, that he’d been expecting for a long time and that, later, much later, living in a different state with a different woman, he would come to recognize as a blessing:

  “Please leave,” she said.

  Emily Martin-Murray

  The first day of school, 2007

  WHEN HER PARENTS announced their plan to move to the suburbs outside Hartford, Emily couldn’t believe it. Move? They were kidding, right? Move from her own house, where she and Daniel had grown up, the place she loved the most? How could they do this to her—and right before her senior year, to make it worse? The feeling of disbelief would remain with her for weeks afterward. She’d never even heard of the town—Wintonbury—or the public school she was forced to attend, Wall High School. A fitting name, Wall: The place was like a prison, with its high, pseudomodern concrete walls and thin horizontal windows.

  On her first day of school she got sick twice due to nerves—once before leaving home, then again halfway through morning assembly. She sat in the back row of the auditorium, terrified that the principal might ask her to stand and introduce herself. The new girl. She slipped out of her seat and went directly to the bathroom, barely reaching the stall before letting it out. At the sink a blonde painting her lips with gloss turned and said, “Can you close the door when you do that, please?” At lunch period, this same blonde pointed at Emily and mouthed something to her companions, who all turned to gawk. Emily ate quickly, alone, then fled the building.

  She wandered toward the rear courtyard, hearing music from a boom box. A group of boys were standing around a giant metal sculpture that looked like an anchor. She considered going over to bum a cigarette. But the bell rang, and the boys came loping back toward the building. One of them approached her and whistled between his teeth. “Yo, what up?” he said.

  She was wearing her tightest jeans and a fitted tee, her hair straightened—not her style, generally, but for the first day she figured she should try to fit in, to get a sense of the scene. He was tall and incredibly hot, with dreads to his shoulders. He looked Hispanic, at least in part. He had a tattoo of a snake crawling out from under his collar. “B-Ray,” he said. She stared up at him and raised an eyebrow. In her nervousness she somehow didn’t understand that this was his name, that he was introducing himself, so finally she just blinked and looked away.

  “You deaf, new girl?”

  “You rude?”

  “So what’s your name?”

  “You just said it. New girl.”

  He laughed. “That’s easy to remember. That’s what I’m gonna call you.”

  Classes were ridiculous. Her Spanish teacher talked about his supposedly favorite novel, Love and Death in the Time of Cholera, and no one even bothered to correct him. In American history, the teacher mispronounced the word Hessians. This same teacher called her by name and asked her to read from her paper, apparently due that day, about her summer reading assignment.

  “I can’t,” said Emily, her voice filling the hushed classroom.

  “And why not?”

  “I didn’t get the assignment.”

  The teacher shook her head. “Everyone got the assignment.”

  Emily couldn’t stop her voice from shaking. “I’m new.”

  “New?”

&nbs
p; “I’m a transfer.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? Welcome to Wall. Now, let’s hear from someone else.”

  She vowed not to speak in class again. In the hallway, among the throng, she looked for the tall boy with the dreads. B-Ray. He would be easy to notice; he towered over the crowd. She caught a glimpse of him standing by a locker, but she panicked and turned the other way.

  At last, the final bell. She waited in the parking lot for Audrey, cursing that she didn’t have a car of her own: her parents wouldn’t even let her get her license. A yellow bus pulled away from the curb and roared off, everyone inside yelling. Kids peeled off down the street, honking horns. From the playing fields came screams and a whistle.

  Someone came up beside her. She gave a quick glance: a jock in a varsity jacket, his friends lurking behind him. After a moment he said, “So how was your first day?” She smiled, relieved that she’d been noticed, but she could sense something mocking in his expression, in the expectant face of the boys behind.

  “Fuck off,” she said and walked to the other end of the lot.

  Her mother was fifteen minutes late.

  “What the hell, Audrey?” She got in, dropping her backpack at her feet. They’d given her mammoth textbooks for nearly every class.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I haven’t figured out these back streets yet. How did it go?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “Not good?”

  “Abysmal, Mother.” Her eyes were filling with tears; she turned toward the passenger window, looking out at nothing.

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It’s worse.”

  Her mother sighed. “None of this was my idea.”

  * * *

  WEEKS PASSED, autumn turned everything earth-toned. School sucked, worse than she’d even imagined. She didn’t make a single friend. She went through the halls alone, her books clenched to her chest. At the start, she’d tried to decipher the hierarchy, deciding who she should talk to, who she should avoid. It was a large school, more than two hundred in the senior class, and the social order was not immediately apparent. The pack of mall blondes were popular, but they didn’t want her, and the feeling was mutual. They were Spackle girls, caked in makeup, dressed atrociously, probably none of them had even been to New York. But there was a part of her that wanted their attention anyway, wanted them to want to know her. It didn’t make sense. At Denton she’d ascended to the top of the social structure with no effort. Here, she was invisible, irrelevant, shunned. When they didn’t come to her, she decided not to care. At lunch she sat by herself, looking out the window at B-Ray and his pals in the rear courtyard, wanting to know them, because bad boys would be good for her reputation; with their drugs and tattoos, they offered a certain level of cover. Mainly she wanted out; she couldn’t wait to graduate. A few weeks into the semester someone broke into the school at night and smashed up the trophy cases and administrative offices. It was a building that should be trashed, all bad karma and tears and wasted time. But as long as she was stuck here, at this miserable place, she wanted to be known, talked about, envied.

  Saturday mornings felt like a reprieve; she didn’t have to get up, dress, confront the masses. She stayed in bed, listening to music on her iPod, texting and emailing friends from the city. She would open her calculus textbook and doodle in the margins: designs for dresses, skirts, purses. Above these figures she wrote in an elaborate script: Fashions by Emily Ricci. Her designer name, borrowed from her favorite actress. She opened an issue of Vogue and copied some of the evening gowns, then colored them with a red marker. Disembodied gowns. Sometimes she’d add a single arm or leg to the drawing.

  One Saturday in October, a blue-collar dude banged around the house all morning, putting in new light switches and fixtures. Her mother hissed at her for flirting with the guy, but she wasn’t flirting; she was playing him. When he went outside to get a tool, she followed him to bum a cigarette. They smoked leaning against his truck. Most workmen had drugs on them, she’d learned, but when she asked if she could buy any, he teased her and called her jailbait.

  “You’re not worth the risk,” he said.

  “Jerk,” she said, tossing the cigarette at him.

  In the afternoon her mother barged into her bedroom to announce that Sheba had escaped.

  “How?”

  “The electrician—” said Audrey impatiently. “Just come help.”

  Emily pulled a sweater over her tank top, a floppy V-neck with moth holes in the sleeves, and buttoned on a skirt. This—rather than the false polish of her school outfits—was her usual look: mismatched layers over long skirts. The sweater had come from one of the first boys she’d ever dated, a senior, during her freshman year. Daniel had met him and hated him, of course. (“Phony,” he’d called him, “wanna-be,” which was a pretty good summation.) It had lasted only a month anyway. But he was her first older boy, and she liked it. Boys her own age didn’t interest her; they didn’t know anything; they hyperventilated when they kissed her, and they had none of the things she liked.

  “I can’t believe you lost my dog.”

  “Hurry. Put your sneakers on.”

  Emily grabbed an elastic hair tie from the dresser and followed her mother into the bright afternoon.

  “Sheba,” her mother called. “Sheeeeba, come!”

  A lawn guy, clipping hedges next door, glanced over. Emily saw him take in the spectacle of Audrey, screaming at the top of her lungs. Embarra-Mom.

  “You don’t have to yell like that,” she said.

  “How else will the dog hear me?”

  “You can yell less hysterically. Dogs have very good hearing.”

  “Please, Emily.”

  “You sound like a disturbed person.”

  “I am disturbed. You are disturbing me.”

  Geese flew overheard, honking and flapping furiously, the V formation moving over the hill.

  “Go down toward the grammar school. I’ll go up the street.”

  “Good thinking, Mom. That way we’ll double our search capacity. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Thanks for the sarcasm, Em. That’s a big help.”

  Her mother started up the hill, pumping her arms like an Olympic race walker. Emily pitied her, how ridiculous she looked. When her mother tied her hair back, her nose looked enormous, the same awful nose she’d inflicted on Emily, the only feature they shared. Two years ago Emily had asked her parents for a nose job. Many of her friends had gotten them, and summer was the time to do it, when no one would know. Her parents refused. There was nothing wrong with her nose, they said, couldn’t she see that? She was a beautiful girl, her face was lovely. Everyone tells you how beautiful you are, do you think they’re all lying? Do you think it’s a conspiracy? Why would she want to change her nose? “Because it’s long and bloated at the end,” she told them. “I have a penis nose, and so do you, Mother.” Her father sent her to her room for that one. But how was she supposed to feel? Beautiful? She could barely look at herself in the mirror. Her nose, too big. And her chin was sort of dented, like Willem Dafoe’s. On a man like him, with his wide face and acne scars, the chin worked. On her face, a disaster. She wanted to fix her nose, her chin, and she wanted a tattoo on her wrist, a lowercase d in the font of an old typewriter followed by a period: d for Daniel. No, said her parents. No to the nose job, no to the chin job, no to the tattoo. No to everything.

  It hadn’t always been this way; they used to be much cooler. When she was thirteen, she’d read about Denton, an alternative private high school on the Upper East Side that allowed students to design their own curriculum. She showed her parents the website and they talked it over with her like an adult, and they agreed to let her go there instead of Greenwich High, even though it cost thirty thousand dollars a year and meant taking the train into the city. Each morning her mom or dad dropped
her at Metro-North in Greenwich—a ninth grader climbing the platform alongside the business suits, the train roaring toward her: This was being alive. The city was a secret she carried with her back to Connecticut every night: the crowded subway, the street musicians playing Bach on violins and cellos, the homeless men who called to her as she passed, the lights of downtown, beyond anything she could have imagined. It seemed unbelievable that this life existed, just an hour from Cos Cob.

  Denton was another revelation. The kids were nothing like her classmates in junior high. They knew movie directors and famous chefs, and they’d been to places like Madeira, Hong Kong, Johannesburg. They didn’t treat her like a freak because she had her own style. Some of her classmates were related to famous writers. Harold Bloom came to school one afternoon to lecture about Shakespeare, his belly jiggling as he paced before the chalkboard. Another day, after school, a movie star drove up in a Porsche convertible to pick up his sister, and he winked comically at Emily, the same expression she’d seen him make on-screen.

  At Denton she made friends with the kinds of people who didn’t seem to exist in Cos Cob: mixed-race boys, gay boys, drug dealer boys. Her best friend, Leo, lived in Chelsea with his father and his father’s boyfriend, a fashion designer. Emily stayed over at their loft a few times a month, gorging on sushi or foie gras, while the boyfriend showed her sketches of clothes he’d created for YSL.

  Another friend, Douglas, a scholarship student from Camden, taught her how to punch—how to make a fist, how to turn her body. She would stand outside the front gates of Denton, punching his biceps. “Harder,” he would say, no matter how hard she hit him, “I can’t feel it.” She would throw lefts and rights until her hands were sore. And then he would half-hit her if she asked for it, once on her arm, as heavy as a sledgehammer. How wonderful, that feeling of deadness and the bruise that would blossom later, the deep purple flower, and the sensation that lingered. She and Douglas didn’t get together, they only punched each other; but the feeling was just as satisfying as sex, maybe more so.

  Numbness was what she wanted. After the accident, she didn’t want to feel, think, exist. She sought out oblivion. Her prescription for pain: more pain. It somehow brought her closer to Daniel, to wherever he was. At times he seemed so close, she could hear his voice. He could not be dead, not really. He was somewhere else, she just had to figure out where. She went with boys to their parents’ apartments, unoccupied in midafternoon. She did not feel used afterward. Just the opposite. It had felt good and she had pleased the boy; he’d held her close and wanted her, she could see the need in his eyes. That was the main pleasure, the feeling of being desired, of being beautiful, of being at the center of someone’s world. The act didn’t last long; a few minutes, and it was done. How could she tell them that they were too gentle? That she wanted that sensation of numbness, like when Douglas punched her? She wanted them to know this, but the boys, even the bad boys and drug dealer boys, the ones who gave her coke and X, even they never seemed to figure it out. And of course saying it was impossible, it would defeat the point. None of them knew how she felt, the emptiness without Daniel. Even Douglas, even Leo, who said they could only imagine, who said they would do anything to help—even they seemed to retreat from her. She didn’t blame them, not really. Of course it was too much for them. It was too much for her.