Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “Okay, that means you probably tried to talk this out. You can afford counseling, and it’s the healing paradigm your wife subscribes to, no?”

  “Two-on-two counseling, listening script, personality testing. Eighty bucks an hour. An expensive failure.” Janice had insisted they get therapy. He had tried to be open and honest and a good listener. He had earnestly recounted all of his sins and shortcomings before complete strangers for twenty-eight weeks in a row. He had listened to Janice explain with deadly precision his inability to understand her and make her feel loved. The counselors had nodded their understanding while she spoke—after all, the three of them spoke the same language, grooved on the same buzzwords—and then, so conscientiously that it made him sick, asked how he felt. Like a fool, that’s how he felt—for putting up with the inane false intimacy they were shoving down his throat. He had been unable to complain about her, even upon the counselors’ prompting. Just sat there, the meter running, unable to weep or be angry or tell them that he hated himself for the way he was apparently torturing her. He looked up, saw Mastrude waiting. “The psychologists were pretty good,” he said. “I just didn’t want to be there.”

  “If they were good, they were helping you to break up instead of keeping you together.” Mastrude contemplated his belly as if it were an unwanted appendage. “That’s the danger, and that’s the incentive, see? They want you to keep on coming in their office. Figuring out who you are is a goddamned national industry—”

  Peter waved him past this topic.

  “Right, fine.” Mastrude nodded quickly, checking his coffee cup for a last sip. “I’m just trying to speed along your perceptions. I’ve done somewhere between four and five thousand divorce cases.” He pointed at the thick files on his desk. “It’s a messy business. Peter, you have to wake up. Your lovely wife wants a divorce and you’re going to deal with it and eventually heal. Deal and heal. My guess is this is the first major blow you’ve ever had. Rational discourse will not solve your problem. Remember Pascal: ‘The heart has reasons reason will never know.’ Maybe real love is the least aggravation. Maybe it’s pheromones—those things that come from a person’s body that you smell unconsciously. Maybe it’s having a sense of humor. I’ll tell you this: It’s not money or sex or children. I don’t know what went wrong in your marriage. It’s not my job to know. But it’s your job to find out. Listen to me, son. What I’m talking about can’t be taught but must be learned. You’ll find someone else whom you’ll love dearly and with whom it can work. And don’t think because you spend all of your time prosecuting murders that you have lost all of your innocence,” Mastrude warned him, waving a pointed finger. “You may innocently still believe that love conquers all. Often the most apparently jaded people are the most idealistic. And there’s a lot to be jaded about. As a society, we have become all that we abhor.”

  Peter felt the way he did back in school when an opposing player hooked him a vicious elbow in his gut and knocked the wind out of him—it only made him jump back up feeling invincible and angry. He appreciated Mastrude’s toughness; it was efficient and meant to be humane. But he didn’t agree with everything Mastrude had said.

  “I hear you,” Peter answered. “But I want you to slow the thing down. Draw out the discovery process, lose the interrogatories, pretend we’re going to trial, anything.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “It might. I want her shock to wear off, to give her a chance to miss me.”

  “Don’t prize yourself too highly. Don’t prize her too highly.”

  “I won’t. But I’m not selling myself short, and that’s the intangible area that you are in no position to judge.”

  Mastrude sighed, the folly of youth apparently discouraging him. “Fine. I can drag it out. It’ll cost you more, but you don’t seem to care, particularly.”

  “Whatever it is you charge.”

  They discussed the financial terms of representation and Peter wrote out a check that delivered the death blow to the savings account. “Look, I just want you to quibble for a while, buy a day here, two days there. It can be done. Put things in the mail late on Friday afternoons so the mail isn’t picked up until Saturday and delivered until Tuesday. Tell her lawyer I’m a mess and can’t get together my tax stuff, anything. I just want some time, see if I can work it out with her.”

  “It won’t pan out.” Mastrude shook his head.

  “I hope you’re wrong, and I won’t hold it against you that you have no faith in me.” Peter smiled. “I’ll be honest with you. The idea of losing her just kills me.”

  “Don’t let it,” Mastrude jumped in. “There’s better theater down at the Shubert. I’ve seen a couple of husbands kill themselves. The last guy felt sorry for himself, he worked down at Philly International Airport and crawled into an unheated luggage compartment on a flight to Norway. It was a mess. The Norwegian authorities, the airline security, U.S. Customs, the city coroner’s office. The wife got rid of him and got his entire estate. Homer, Shakespeare, and half the junk on TV to the contrary, love’s not worth that.”

  “I’ll remember it.”

  “I doubt that. I get the feeling you’re not listening to a thing I’m saying.” Mastrude’s face reddened. “But I’ll keep talking—that’s what I’m paid for. If it helps at all, fool around. Get a handle on it. Remember what Sophocles said.”

  “What? What did he say?”

  “ ‘Marry well, and you’re happy. Marry badly, and you’re a philosopher.’ So, go out and rent all of Woody Allen’s movies.”

  “Right, right.” Peter looked at his watch.

  “Son, maybe I’m not the lawyer you need.”

  “No, I like you. I’m listening.”

  “Then listen to this”—Mastrude bent painfully over his desk, so close Peter could smell the fried rice on his breath and even see a bit of scallion jammed between two tiny yellow teeth—“when it comes to knowing what love really is …” Mastrude’s bright greasy face loomed disturbingly near, his tiny eyes playing back and forth over Peter’s face, searching for something.

  “What?” Peter exclaimed. “What do you see?”

  Mastrude leaned back suddenly, as if discovering an unfortunate answer to a difficult question, and concluded the consultation in a remote voice: “I’ll be in touch.”

  “YOU WERE NO HELP, “Vinnie said hoarsely over the phone.

  “What do you mean?” asked Peter.

  “I mean the address where you told me to look was no goddamn good. But traffic division picked up the car this morning down toward the river, on Christian Street and Sixth. The car was parked on the wrong side of the street when they tried to clean it.”

  “Christian Street and Sixth?” This was an old, working-class Italian section of South Philadelphia, very conservative and one of the last places he expected to see Janice.

  “It’s been parked down there all day, all night.”

  “You have an address of the driver?” Peter asked, frankly amazed at how quickly Vinnie had procured an answer for him. Maybe the man was more powerful than Peter knew.

  “You told me to look for a car, not a driver, as I remember.”

  “Yeah, Vinnie, you’re right. But you wouldn’t pass up the information if you could get it. I’m just trying to save myself a little time, so if you have the address, tell me.”

  “Actually, I don’t have a driver, because traffic doesn’t do that.”

  “Not far from the Italian market.”

  “Yeah,” Vinnie said. “Got it?”

  “What’s this going to run me, Vinnie?”

  “It’s a favor,” Vinnie said slyly. “It’s always a favor.”

  “I’d rather it not be a favor. I don’t want to worry about you collecting when I’m not ready to pay.”

  “You want to pay now?”

  By any reasonable view, Vinnie was diseased meat who sooner or later would be regurgitated by the system. Peter pictured FBI sound technicians squatting over a tape recorder i
n an unmarked van. They could be on to Vinnie and catch him, Peter, as well. The beleaguered Police Department and half the elected officials kept coming up with new ways to entice an FBI or Justice Department investigation. Commission after commission was formed to clean up the corruption, with little effect. And now, with his help, the District Attorney’s office—about the only relatively clean office left—would be dragged into the mess. Assistant District Attorney Indicted for Misuse of City Resources to Find Estranged Wife.

  “Where you calling from, Vinnie?”

  “A pay phone,” Vinnie answered. “How you think the Sixers will do against the Knicks?”

  “They’ll win.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I’ll make you a little personal bet,” Peter said.

  “What is it?” Vinnie asked, understanding. “Make it good.”

  “Sixers win, nothing. Knicks win, I pay you ten times whatever Ewing gets.’’

  “He had thirty-two last time,” Vinnie mused.

  “He could go high or low.”

  “You got a deal.”

  Peter hung up, and checked to make sure he wasn’t due anywhere during the next two hours. The Robinson jury hadn’t come back yet. The press was badgering the police about new suspects in the double-murder—“the murder that has rocked the city,” they were calling it—and the police were busy putting West Philadelphia through the sieve, searching for somebody to charge. Now that Peter knew where Janice was, the case seemed very far away.

  But on his way to the elevator he passed the inspecting eyes of Hoskins, whose bow tie was tied so tightly it appeared ready to spring off his neck at any moment.

  “Everything under control?” Hoskins called.

  “Yes,” Peter answered.

  “Good. Keep it that way.”

  OUTSIDE, WALKING TOWARD BROAD STREET, he decided not to take the #64 bus—it would take too long. Instead he checked his cash—each day there was less money in his account—caught a cab, and settled back in the cracked vinyl seat.

  The cabbie drove down Broad Street before turning south, then stopped a couple of blocks away from the five hundred block of Christian Street. He’d go the rest of the way on foot. He had brought along his briefcase, so as to appear to have business in the neighborhood. The cab sped off. It was after two; Janice would have long since left for work at the women’s shelter in West Philly. Vinnie had said the car wasn’t being parked at the West Philadelphia address. She had to be taking a bus or the subway.

  He walked the sidewalk, conspicuous in a good suit and shined shoes. The sun was high and bright, the radio in the taxi had said temperatures were running in the forties, warm for late January. It was a transitional neighborhood, the old Polish and Italian strongholds disintegrating as the unions lost strength and the newest generation yearned for the suburbs. The Vietnamese had moved in, and as the older generation migrated one by one to VA hospitals or Catholic rest homes, the tide of gentrification advanced. The buildings were all brick, variously restored and dilapidated, mostly the latter, places that sold for fifty thousand. All you paid for was the shell, and if you sanded down the wooden floors, patched the walls, and hung a decent-looking door on the front, the value skyrocketed, assuming enough other people were doing the same thing in the vicinity. A couple of barrels of trash sat at the mouth of the alley behind Christian, and an overloaded green dumpster sat on the street near the corner with FUCK ME DEAD spray-painted on its side.

  He paced the street, risking being seen. The Subaru was parked near the corner exactly as Vinnie had said it was, tucked in between a VW and a vintage Cadillac with two flat tires. A couple of faded parking tickets were stuck under the Subaru’s wiper. The car was registered in his name at his address and Janice had made him a scofflaw. Why was she so careless? Perhaps she was concerned with other things, maybe even another man.

  Since neighborhood parking spots were more or less holy ground, the car had to correspond closely with the house she lived in. He therefore had his choice of the corner house and the two next to it on Christian Street. One had a pile of old neighborhood newspapers on the stoop. Janice, the queen of cleanliness, wouldn’t allow that, except of course if she knew he would look for her and make the assumption—that she didn’t live there—he had almost just made. In that case, she would leave the newspapers there. Or was this kind of reasoning as unstable as it sounded? Was he just paranoid and overanalyzing, seeing strategies and counterstrategies in every tiny fact? He had reached the point where he inferred Janice’s feelings toward him from old newspapers on a front stoop.

  The second house had a child’s doll left on the top step. The third one, the rowhouse shell on the corner, was larger than the other two. The door had been stripped of paint and was being refinished. The first-and second-floor windows facing the street were boarded over with plywood. The recessed whine of a power tool worked its way through the front door. Hard to say which house she lived in. He needed a clue, and he looked in the back of the Subaru with curious trepidation, as if he were peeking into a coffin. His grandfather’s rocking chair was still there. His grandfather, an old-school Quaker banker, had been the last one in the family to use the Quaker “thee” and “thou” privately. Twenty-five years back, from across the room, he had stated firmly as Peter complained about something: Thou art an impatient boy, Peter. Thee must learn better discipline.

  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.