Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “Pushing the paper, Dad?”

  His father shook his head at the clutter.

  “I walked around this house last night and estimated that there are thirty thousand individual bits of stuff here. It’s crazy. We hoard junk, Peter, your mother, especially.” He opened a desk drawer full of string, old stamps, pencil nubs, pennies, rubber bands, and cracked family photographs in faded Kodacolor tones. His father, who still retained the lean jaw lines and earnest scruff of hair over his forehead evident in those ancient photos, flipped the drawer shut. “There must be two hundred items in that drawer alone.”

  “What’re you saying about me?” his mother called from the dining room.

  “I’m saying,” his father sang back, “that this house should be donated to the Smithsonian Institution so that someday anthropologists will be able to study the cluttered habitat of Americans in the waning decades of the twentieth century.”

  His mother came into the study.

  “Last night,” she said to Peter, “your father drank a little too much wine and seriously proposed that we attempt to throw out half our possessions. I told him—”

  “It’s entirely reasonable,” his father interrupted good-naturedly. “I was in the attic and I found baby clothing thirty years old! Keeping such junk borders on the perverse. I am not an Egyptian, needing to be buried with all that stuff.”

  “I told him that he would have to part with all his love letters from his old college girlfriends before he was allowed to throw out the letters I wrote him from France the summer I was twenty-two,” his mother teased. “Your father was once in love with a very buxom young miss. In love with her buxom, more than anything else, I think.”

  “Your mother’s a jealous woman, Peter. And I’ve made good use of it over the years.”

  “I’m not jealous at all. I pretend to be.”

  “Of course. Women love rotten men.”

  His mother scowled. Peter loved her playfulness with his father. Were they being that way to reassure him or to avoid each other’s fears? He’d never know; that was between them. He hoped they would both live another thirty years in good health. Odds were his father would konk out at about seventy-five, and his mother would hit ninety, ossifying from osteoporosis and arthritis as her mother had. Hysterectomies increased the chances of osteoporosis along with a number of other ills, including decreased sexual interest.

  “Speaking of women and rotting men,” he said, wanting to avoid thinking about his parents’ love life, “I’m sorry Janice isn’t with me. She’s busy today.”

  “I haven’t spoken with her in ages,” his mother answered absentmindedly. “I miss her.”

  “I can ask her to give you a call.”

  They moved to the kitchen to do the lunch dishes. His father’s shoulders, once large like Bobby’s were now, no longer filled out his clothes. Time, of course, waited for no man, not even as decent and dependable a man as Peter’s father, who somewhere early on had known he would never be a fiery or dramatic kind of man, and opted for quieter virtues. Nonetheless, there had been passion. Peter remembered the summer morning he was six and had wandered into his parents’ bedroom. His father was standing naked next to the bed, fiddling with the air conditioner in the window. His mother sleepily reached out and swung a lazy slap at his father’s rear end. She was naked and for a moment one breast hung free from the sheets. She fell back into bed and smiled. “All the heat in this room is due to you” his mother had told his father. Peter had then bounded onto the bed, screeching for attention.

  Dishes done, he and his father went out to the porch, where a couple of Peter’s high-school team trophies stood on the bookcase.

  “Did you ever wonder about the other lives you might have had if this thing or that had been different?”

  His father nodded. “Everybody thinks about that.”

  “You?” His father’s life had always seemed ordered, progressing along the logic of his habits.

  “The day I met your mother I was supposed to take a train to New York. The train was delayed and I went in to get a doughnut at a coffee shop. This was in Thirtieth Street Station in 1955.”

  “You mentioned this once maybe.”

  “I handed the woman a twenty-dollar bill. She gave me change for a ten. Twenty dollars was more then, it was more unusual to use one to pay for a doughnut, like using a fifty today. I knew I was running late, but I needed every dime for the trip. I said the change wasn’t right, and she went back to the cash register to count bills. The manager came out and I explained and he didn’t believe me. I was worried about the train but also about the money. The woman was no help, she was a refugee from Europe and obviously worried she might lose her job. The man knew I was thinking about the train. His teeth were bad, he plainly needed the money as much as I did. He fumbled around in the cash drawer, saying there was no twenty. The announcer called the train for the last time. I spotted the twenty in the back of the drawer and pointed at it. The man just shook his head. Did I argue with him or not? No. I dashed down the stairs to catch the train and sat down next to your mother. Half an hour later, I was in love. That’s why I always say, I lost ten dollars and found my wife.”

  “Mom said you once told her you think you could have been happy with different women.”

  His father paused.

  “I did say that, because I think it’s true. But true of everybody, including her.” His father was finished with the topic. “Mom mention I talked to Eddie Cohen?”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He asked me how politically inclined you were. I guess he saw you on TV the other night. I told him I wasn’t sure.”

  “Mom said they liked what I stood for.”

  “Like Eddie said, you’ve got a law-and-order record of public service. You’re liberal on all the right issues, as far as I can see. We talked a few minutes. He said he’d call you.”

  Peter wondered if losing Janice would hurt his political value. Of course it would. And what did this say about him, if he cared?

  His father inspected the plants in the window.

  “What’s the trouble, Peter?”

  He shut his eyes, then opened them.

  “Janice and I are having a difficult time, Dad.” Telling his father first was supposed to be easier. “She’s moved out.”

  “Moved out?” His father lifted his glasses up, easing the pressure on the back of his ears.

  “I hope it’s temporary.”

  “Any reason to believe it might not be?”

  He rushed to fill the silence, but could not mention the divorce lawyers. “I don’t know how serious she is about it. Pretty serious, actually, I suppose. I can’t face Mom with this now … I wanted to just talk a little with you.”

  They sat there quietly.

  “I want Janice to come back and for us to give it another chance. I think we could do it.”

  His father put his socked feet up on the sofa arm. He always did his most serious thinking lying down.

  “Your mother and I have worried. It’s not like we’ve been blind to what’s been happening. You’ve been difficult to live with ever since you were fifteen. There’s nothing more tiring than endless conflict.”

  “I’m tired of it, too.”

  The room was silent.

  “Don’t tell Mom until afterwards,” Peter said.

  His father was a man of priorities.

  “I’d already decided not to,” he said. “Now, let me just ask, did Janice leave because of someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Good.

  “Of course by now she might have met somebody.”

  “It’s possible,” Peter hedged, hurt by his father’s accurate consideration that Janice might be unfaithful.

  “You want her back, son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go tell her that,” his father said firmly, though his eyes were watering a little. “She’s a wonderful woman, Peter. She’s worth going to the wall over. She’s
worth going over the wall, whatever that means.”

  What would Mastrude say? He didn’t care; his father knew him better than Mastrude, anyway. “I want to do something about all this, I want to fix it.”

  “I mean go to her when you’ve figured some things out. She’s not going to forget you. Get your life in order, be honest—and realistic. Present a choice. And don’t try all this until you’re ready. Give it time.”

  “How much time?”

  “I can’t answer that. Whatever it takes.”

  LATER, WHILE HIS PARENTS WENT SHOPPING, he prowled the house as he always did when he came home, searching absentmindedly for that elusive secret that explained who they were and what held them together. In the self-written myth of his life with Janice, he was the one who had enjoyed the perfect childhood. But nobody enjoys a perfect childhood, and for all the suburban bliss, in his most honest moments, or those moments when the power of remembrance overcame the desire to forget, he knew that for years he had come home to his mother’s note on the kitchen table that instructed him how to cook the meal. Gotten off the school bus, walked from the corner, pulled his key out of his lunch box, unlocked the side door, and then encountered the quiet loneliness of the absence of his parents. Of course Bobby was there, too, but he had several friends down the street. By age twelve Peter could cook a full meal, put chicken in the oven, make a salad, set a table, boil some rice, whatever. Sometimes, especially as they got older, he and Bobby would sit alone at the table eating the meal he had prepared while their mother was stuck on the Schuylkill Expressway. He would end up taking it out on Bobby. There had been several terrible brotherly fights in the backyard, once with steak knives meant for the evening dinner. One time, being chased by Bobby through the laundry room, he had run out the side door, flinging the glass storm door open. The door banged shut just as Bobby—running as fast as he could—placed his palm against the glass. His arm went through the window. Peter had calmed his terrified brother and told him to lie down. Blood spurted from Bobby’s forearm and tiny daggers of glass disappeared into the skin. He wrapped kitchen twine tightly around the arm just below the shoulder. He called the ambulance, crisply rattling off street directions, continuing to hold Bobby’s arm up in the air. When the paramedics arrived, the arterial bleeding had slowed. Neither of their parents could be reached from the hospital.

  Later, the long shadows of private-school expectations began to reach him. It was understood that there was no reason he should not get A’s in school. His mother insisted he take Latin, three years of it, and there were many evenings that she drilled him on his declensions and endings. Amabo, amabis, amabit, amabimus, amabitus, amabunt. “Now give me the ablative absolute,” she’d say, staring into his Latin book. And he had joylessly performed for her, confusing praise with love. Perhaps he had started to become a lawyer right then, back in the seventh grade. His father was usually not home on these nights, and Peter had learned to fall asleep with the light on, waiting for his father to come home, and when he did he would climb the stairs heavily and turn off the light. “The electricity bill last month was sky-high,” his father would complain. “These boys must learn to turn off lights.” He thought he remembered a time when his father or mother would bend over and kiss him good night, and he hadn’t understood why that had ceased.

  Years later, it was Janice who restored his parents to him. He was easier to be with, less raw. His mother—quite inexplicably at the time—had suddenly come forth with family china and silver and paid for every cent of the wedding. In this he saw the goodness of his mother, and loved her freshly for her acceptance of Janice. Within a few years he had started to loosen up with them, make his return. The four of them would sit around and talk, and he felt that they knew him now, or as much as they could know of him, and he saw, too, that their affection for Janice had helped to heal the wounds caused by her own lack of parents, and so he’d seen, somewhere in his late twenties, the redeeming power that is family.

  The light was fading from the day. He quietly shut the door of the study and phoned Janice. His father was right that he should take the issue back to her, tell her how much he wanted to be with her, but wrong about waiting. This time, he decided, he knew more than his father. As the phone rang and she answered, he wondered if John Apple had spent the night there.

  “Janice, before I say anything, I apologize for coming over to the new house. It was insane to do and I won’t do it again.”

  “I knew you’d find me.”

  She said these words softly, which was good. It meant she didn’t know about the journal. If she had found out he had read about John Apple, he wouldn’t have a chance.

  “I have no excuse, Janice. It’s just that—”

  “I’m glad you called, Peter.”

  “I miss you. That’s not a helpful thing to say so abruptly, but I have to say it. I miss us.” Would she acknowledge John Apple? “Janice, sometimes I wish we had done it differently.”

  “Sometimes,” she responded, her voice slurry and confessional, more intimate than he could have hoped for, “I think about us being together again. It’s like we’re going along still connected, just not together. Like you’re right next to me.”

  “I’d like to still be right next to you, Janice…. You’re the one I wanted—”

  “Hey,” she said happily, “let’s have dinner tonight.”

  “Where?”

  Where they usually ate on their anniversary. Quiet and dark, impeccable and fantastically expensive. The French waiters watched like statues from the corner of the room and made you feel catastrophically ill-mannered. But he liked the anniversary symbolism and, like any trial attorney, knew to quit when he was ahead. The answer was yes and he’d make the reservation.

  Later, readying to leave, he asked his mother if he could take home a couple of light bulbs.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Actually, I need more than a couple, Mom.”

  “Take whatever you need.” She smiled.

  He kissed her and held her shoulders with both hands so that she would look straight at him.

  “I’ll see you Monday morning, Mom, after the big bad surgery that everybody is terribly afraid to discuss because it scares them, which they don’t like to admit to anybody, least of all themselves.”

  His mother looked at him with love, eyes wet.

  “That’s unfair.” She smiled tearfully. “And you know it.”

  WALKING FROM THE SUBWAY to Delancey Street, carrying the light bulbs stuffed in the pockets of his wool coat, he believed he had good reason to hope. He cleaned the living room and kitchen and replaced the burned-out bulbs on both floors—there was a genuine satisfaction in restoring normalcy. If Janice came back to the house, she would feel comfortable if the place was in order; she would think he wanted her back for other than housekeeping purposes, which was true. The mail had continued to pile up, so he attended to that, too, setting the bills on his desk, tossing out the junk. Phil Mastrude had sent a letter outlining the steps he was taking. Peter left the rest of the mail on the hall table. Then, like an athlete preparing for a big game, he forced himself to lie down and take a ninety-minute nap. When he woke he shaved, inspected his face. Was he getting heavier and more tired-looking? He showered, finished Janice’s shampoo, and stepped out steamy and relaxed. In the bedroom, he replayed his answering machine for the first time in a day.

  “Peter? Cassandra. It’s Friday afternoon and I think it’s time for a little diversion, don’t you?” Her voice lilted out of the answering machine, assuming more than it should. Did she see sex the way some people viewed drugs? There seemed an improvident eagerness in Cassandra that suggested some undernourished aspect of her personality. The other night, as she whispered obscenely into his ear, he had wondered if she actually remembered who was on top of her. She was one of those rare women who moaned while her partner was still on the other side of the room.

  “Your line’s busy at work,” Cassandra’s voice c
ontinued, “and I have to go into a meeting for the rest of the day, so I thought I’d leave a message here. There’s a party Sunday night. I’ve been invited and told I should bring”—whatever poor sap is currently dicking you, he thought—“you. Talk to you soon.”

  No, you won’t, he thought, I’m bringing my wife home tonight. He erased the phone messages. He removed all obvious signs of Cassandra, every cigarette butt. He vacuumed the rug in case she had left some distinguishing shoe mark; women, he knew, saw things men could not, and this reminded him that Cassandra had left the diaphragm in a tissue upstairs. The tissue had dried and hardened. He washed and returned the diaphragm to its original spot. He put new sheets on the bed and washed the old ones, not knowing what Janice might be able to smell; he threw open the windows to the winter cold and aired the house. He checked the bathroom drains for hair, under the bed for panties or stockings. He wondered if Cassandra had done the dishes. He checked, and she had. The silverware in the dishwasher rack was arranged by forks, knives, and spoons. He removed them. Janice knew he just shoved them in any old way. When Cassandra had made toast recently, she had carefully put the twisty piece of plastic around the bread wrapper. This, too, he removed. He vacuumed the bedroom a second time, and searched on his hands and knees for—what? A foreign brand of toothpaste, a hair, a kind of bobbypin Janice didn’t use? Women see everything. He wiped down surfaces for fingerprints, though of course they couldn’t be seen. An eyebrow pencil, an earring stud—and the game would be lost. What he needed was the mobile crime detection unit. And what he really needed was for them to find a little bit of Johnetta Henry’s blood on Wayman Carothers’s coat. That wasn’t too much to ask.

  Done with cleaning, he considered what to wear. Janice liked him to look his best, so he pulled out his last fresh suit, the blue one she bought him two Christmases ago, a clean shirt, and red tie. If he drove the Ford, that would give them two cars, reinforce their separation. If, however, he took a taxi to the restaurant, then the issue of her driving him home had to be considered. He checked his wallet—he’d use the American Express—made sure a light was on, locked the front door, and left.