Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  One day Al caught John by surprise, strolling into the house before he could escape. John squatted under a living room table, while Frank and others crowded around as the trick came through. Frank later had a good laugh. But John didn’t think it humorous.

  “That motherfucker’s a pain in the ass,” he said.

  When Frank returned to Detroit for nine days in mid-September, he could see the routine was wearing on John, and that John and Dawn weren’t getting along very well.

  Frank had always seen Dawn as a prima donna. She snubbed most of John’s friends. She ignored people when they tried to strike up a conversation with her. She referred to the other prostitutes as “two-bit whores” and other addicts as “junkies.” When she did join a conversation, she was condescending, often flaunting her suburban upbringing.

  Al shows up and she turns into the queen of the nest, Frank thought. “I got a sugar daddy that beats all them whores on the street” was one of her favorite expressions. Once Frank watched her demean everyone in the house. A large group of people were gathered in the living room when she launched a verbal barrage.

  “Goddamnit, John,” she bitched. “I don’t like this. All these fuckin’ whores comin’ in here and junkies gettin’ drugs and all this shit. We live here. Can’t we get some kind of peace?”

  John Fry laughed. Then he looked her dead in the eyes and said, “Bitch, just what in the fuck do you think you are?”

  A few days later, when Frank and John were riding alone up Michigan Avenue in Frank’s pickup truck, John talked about leaving his hooker from Harper Woods.

  “That girl’s driving me nuts,” he said. “It’s this snotty attitude she has towards everything. Frank, I think I gotta dump her.”

  “If you do, don’t make any moves on Cheryl,” Frank said. “Try that again, my friend, and we’re enemies.”

  “No problem,” John said. “But I just can’t put up with the girl’s mouth no more.”

  They talked for quite a while that day. John said he felt as though the streets were closing in on him again. He recalled the clean days he had up in Alanson.

  “Frank, man, I was clean,” he said. “I was clean.”

  Now John estimated he and Dawn were going through more than a thousand dollars a day in high-quality heroin. They paid for it from his dealing and from money from Al and Dawn’s other tricks.

  “I’m goin’ nowhere, Frank.”

  “All you have to do is quit and run away. It’s not like you can’t get out of here. You know you got my place. It’s not like you don’t have someplace to go.”

  Frank had never known John Fry to be so out of sorts over a woman. Dawn Spens, he thought, must possess a little magic of her own. John seemed to lack the confident control he’d had all those years with Cheryl. John was silent as the pickup bounced and swayed down Michigan Avenue.

  “Frank,” he said, finally. “I got a bad feeling. If I stay in Detroit and stay with this broad, one of two things are gonna happen.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “I’m gonna die a dope fiend. Or, I’m gonna end up back in the penitentiary.”

  Frank didn’t say anything. But neither one seemed out of the question to him.

  54

  Love is an exchange of vulnerabilities. It is kind of frightening because you have to let yourself be open. A lot of people don’t want to take that risk.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Detroit Magazine; Modern Bride Magazine

  One cool September evening Jan Canty found herself debating whether to ask her husband the question she had held inside on many warmer nights. She could hear the water running for another one of Al’s baths, then only silence as he soaked. She sat alone on their bed, trying to put her anxiety into perspective.

  Much of the unsettling aftermath of his hospitalization had passed, and his manic interest in the house went as fast as it came. Now he was back in the daily clinical grind she thought had weakened him in the first place. But he wasn’t the man she married. The supportive, spontaneous intellectual she had known until a year ago had been replaced by a intensely private man who wrestled nightly with his own thoughts.

  His time in front of the TV was steadily increasing. That was as foreign to his character as the show he liked the most, “Mike Hammer.” Sometimes he watched “Hill Street Blues” or “St. Elsewhere.” But she noticed he often remained unaffected by the plots. Sometimes she wondered if he was really watching, though the volume was often quite loud. She suspected he tuned the shows in only so he could tune her out.

  Other nights she found him alone in his easy chair sipping on liqueurs—Amaretto or Drambuie. They were his favorites, but Al never had been a heavy drinker. Usually he only had one or two, and only when they were out. Now he was having three or four at home, sliding deeper into himself with each drink. She’d try to inspire conversation, but his attention span never lasted more than a few minutes.

  “What, Jan?” he’d say after she asked a question.

  “Al, is something wrong, something bothering you?”

  “No, I’m just tired. It’s nothing. I’ve had some difficult patients, lately.”

  And the work. Damn the work, she thought. Wouldn’t he ever learn? He was nearly fifty-one years old. What was the point? They had everything they would ever need. They had too much. She still wished they could dump the house, find a nice condo, and spend the difference on vacations.

  But Jan knew better than to push that point anymore. Al was dead set on keeping a full clinical schedule and finishing the parolee updates for the prosecutor’s office. He’d even reneged on the Saturdays. He’d cut the day in half for a few months but now was back to a twelve-hour shift.

  She was worried the stress might cause him to do something irrational. She feared he already had. Over the latter part of the summer Jan had made some sense out of Al’s fragmented monologue during the admission process at University Hospital in April. She and her girlfriend Celia Muir had talked about it over lunch one day. Celia told her what she heard under the roar of the emergency helicopters.

  “Jan, he kept saying, ‘I’m so very bad, and you are so pure.’ Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”

  Jan thought about his rambling during the ride to the hospital. She’d heard him say “Cass Corridor” and “prostitute.”

  Could this, she thought, be what all this was about? The depression. Was Al suffering from the guilt over a one-night stand with a prostitute?

  She had to face it. Their sexual relationship had gone the way of their evening walks. Even before his illness, it had been in serious trouble. Al had always been a patient, sensitive lover. But when she got her Ph.D., he lost all interest. After his advances stopped, he greeted hers with moodiness or excuses of being too tired. Usually he didn’t have to say a thing. She could tell by his body language he was unwilling.

  At first she thought it was something about her. But then she realized other shows of affection, such as holding hands or hugging, hadn’t waned at all. Well, she thought initially, maybe it’s his age. Then she realized how ridiculous that notion was. Male menopause was one thing, she thought, but men didn’t just one day stop having sex altogether.

  Jan had been trying to discuss the problem delicately. She always prided herself in not being a nagger, and she certainly wasn’t going to nag him about sex. In fact, as his work schedule increased in recent months, she tried a bit of humor.

  “Al, now that you’re back working,” she said, “does that mean we can stop playing brother and sister?”

  “I’m working on that in therapy,” Al said.

  The response was beginning to serve the same purpose as his TV shows. Well, she thought, I guess I can’t expect him to regain his sexuality overnight.

  But Jan remained troubled that he might have sought an outlet before his breakdown. For months she held back asking him about the prostitute when it popped up in her mind now and again. He already was embarrassed about his hospitaliz
ation, and she didn’t want to add to his anxiety right afterward. But now, she told herself, there’s just no reason not to ask him what that Cass Corridor stuff was all about.

  She was waiting for him in the hallway when he got out of the bathtub. Al paused outside the bathroom door momentarily to towel off his face.

  “I’m bushed,” he said. “I think I’m going to lay down for a while.”

  “Al,” she began. “There’s been something I’ve been wanting to ask you about for a long time. Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

  He walked to the guest room instead of their bedroom. She thought it odd. He rarely went into that room.

  She began by recalling the scene—the breakdown, the drive out, the hospital.

  “You remember you were talking in and out on the way out to Ann Arbor?”

  Al nodded his head.

  “Al, do you remember saying you were in the Cass Corridor with a prostitute?”

  There, she finally said it.

  “That you’d gotten in over your head,” she added.

  Momentarily Al seemed to lose his breath. Then he looked at her very quizzically, as though he was searching his own mind for some kind of misplaced thought.

  “You did, Al, and I want to know what you meant by that, honey.”

  “Aw, Jan-Jan,” he said.

  She saw that boyish look of embarrassment she knew so well. He bowed his head, shaking it slowly, as though he’d really let her down.

  “Before you answer me,” Jan continued, “let me tell you that I think that everybody is human, and these things happen. What’s more important right now is honesty, not, you know, worrying about my reaction.”

  “But Jan-Jan.”

  “Because everybody makes mistakes. And I do, too. I mean, a one-night stand isn’t going to make a difference. I mean, you’ve always been very good about helping me when I’m in a jam, and what’s bugging me now more than anything is: Is it true or false?”

  She was offering him full forgiveness if he needed it. She was offering him a way out. She just needed to know the truth, for the sake of his own conscience as well as her peace of mind.

  He was very matterof-fact.

  “Confused,” Al said. “I must have been very confused. I might have thought it was me because of my fatigued state.”

  His amplification was quite elaborate. A female therapist he was supervising was trying to rehabilitate a Cass Corridor prostitute and had “gotten in over her head,” he said.

  “She didn’t know her limitations. And I was trying to steer her back to her professional role. She was overinvolved with this patient. She was seeing her outside the clinical setting. But you don’t leave your office. You know that. It’s unethical. You don’t try and rescue people like that. But I was very worried about her at the time, so I must have confused myself with her. I couldn’t see myself doing anything like that. It’s just plain unethical.”

  “You’re asking me to believe that?” Jan said, studying his eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, looking right back into hers. Then he looked hurt that she’d carried around the question so long.

  Jan thought carefully about his response. She’d already weighed his behavior. Al didn’t fit the profile of the wayward husband. She’d seen plenty of them in marriage counseling and heard the stories from other women. Every hour of his day was accounted for. Al didn’t hang out in bars. He never stayed out all night. He never leered at other women. He had never abused her, verbally or physically. As far as she knew, Al had no resentments against her.

  At times the notion even seemed preposterous. Al cruising for a prostitute in downtown Detroit? God, she thought, I can’t even get him out of the house to see a Tigers baseball game.

  Well then, she decided, I’ll believe him. Until he proves otherwise, she thought, I have to believe him. I want to believe him. If he’s lying, she thought, then he’s the one who has to live with it. She resolved right then she could not spend the rest of their marriage worrying about something he may have done one night. She hoped she wasn’t fooling herself.

  Afterward they went downstairs to watch television. Al turned up the volume. This time she was glad the TV was there. She felt very awkward the rest of the night.

  55

  Every day, Cheryl Krizanovic found herself walking the mile up Parkinson Street from the house on Clayton to Michigan Avenue, where she flagged dates outside a topless bar called Dirty Harry’s.

  Some days she saw Dr. Al Miller’s Buick Regal cruise by—the doctor heading for another date with Dawn. Then one afternoon when the October chill had transformed green trees to orange and red, Al stopped to give her a lift. As they headed to the house, he complimented Cheryl on her appearance. She still looked pretty healthy from her sabbatical in Alanson.

  “I’ve been clean for four months,” she said.

  “I’m so happy for you, Cheryl,” he said. “I really am.”

  Cheryl was lying. She had been dipping into the raw heroin John was dealing on Clayton. But several times before, Al had encouraged her when she spoke of staying clean.

  Cheryl always found that odd. She wondered to herself why he didn’t feel the same way about Dawn. He appeared to prefer her strung out. His only concern was the presence of other men. Again it was on Al’s mind as they drove down Parkinson.

  “Cheryl,” he said. “Who else is Dawn seeing? Is Dawn still seeing that guy John?” He said it as though he already knew the answer.

  “Not to my knowledge,” she said.

  Cheryl didn’t want to get in the middle of that triangle. Al dropped the subject as fast as he brought it up. He steered the conversation to the colors of the maples and elms.

  Al was slick that way, Cheryl had observed over the past ten months. He could slide in and out of a touchy subject gracefully. From the beginning she had suspected he was a student of human behavior. She’d noticed how he often sat quietly with his coffee, seemingly studying all of them on his visits.

  Cheryl could see why John called him a goof. But she always felt her old boyfriend underestimated Dr. Al Miller. Now, she guessed, Al had detected John was still in the picture.

  But Al, Cheryl thought, was selling John short as well. She suspected Al had no sense of how calculating her old boyfriend could be when it came to ensuring an adequate supply of cash. In fact, she already knew that John Fry had taken out a policy on Al. She learned that the afternoon Dawn, John, and she took the white Thunderbird to get some cash from the trick. Al had suggested Dawn meet him outside his office at Harper Hospital. Dawn dropped Cheryl and John off across the street, then drove to the hospital entrance to wait for her sugar daddy. When Al emerged, John started talking.

  “This is all bullshit. The man don’t fuckin’ work here. He’s got a place in the Fisher Building.”

  John was smirking. She’d seen that expression many times over the years. When he looked like that, John couldn’t resist serving up some information.

  “And, besides, the punk ain’t no doctor.”

  “Well, John, I told you that exam he gave me was kind of funny.”

  “Yeah, he ain’t no real doctor. And, the punk’s married.”

  If it was true, she knew John considered the information priceless. She wondered what he’d done—followed Al home? Followed him to his office? Or maybe he was just running another line of intrigue. She’d always found it difficult discerning fact from fiction with her old boyfriend.

  John smirked again. He wouldn’t say anything else.

  Cheryl had seen him play private eye before with regulars, such as the one-armed plumber she dated for three months. When she couldn’t milk any more money out of the man with sweet talk, John stepped in. He asked her to check the plumber’s license and probe him for details about his income. One night John followed the guy right to his house, threatening to tell his wife. John squeezed him for $350 in all. Later John lost interest, complaining he wasn’t worth the effort.

  The plumber’s cash flow
was minor league compared to Al’s. Cheryl guessed it would only be a matter of time before John would make a move on Dawn’s date. She knew one thing for certain about Lucky Fry: When it came to money, nobody just walked out on the man. Before John met Dawn, Cheryl had tried. But he had always found a way to get her back—whether it was by bullshit or brawn.

  The little chat between Cheryl and Al would be their last. On October 23 she left Detroit for good. The exact date would stick in her mind for a long time. She would consider it an important anniversary.

  Frank McMasters had headed back to Alanson. He’d given up trying to get her back. The day he left they had an argument over her drug habit outside of the house on Clayton. Frank pulled her leather coat off her shoulders.

  “I’m not leaving this crap just so you can hock it for dope,” he said.

  She screamed for help and John came running out of the house. John showed her that day just how much he really cared about her.

  “Hey, man,” John yelled from the porch. “You guys are gonna attract the police.”

  The month she spent living with John and Dawn on Clayton reminded her of the days at the Homewood Manor. She came back to Detroit thinking her old boyfriend John Fry had changed. The only difference in John was he had switched to a better-quality dope.

  John still blamed his downfall on Dawn and Al. It sounded all too familiar. She remembered all the times John had told her she had let him down—“hurt him” was the way he always put it. She’d let him down by getting raped by one of his friends. She let him down when she refused to turn tricks. She wondered, but what about my feelings? I was the one who was raped. I’m the one who has to turn the dates.

  Cheryl finally was beginning to see how her old boyfriend operated. He had no conscience. He had no real feelings for anyone. He had only an array of realistic disguises he used to cover those flaws. She’d spent five years looking at nothing but masks—the caring philosopher, the prideful protector, the hurt little boy. But everything he touched told another story.