Intruder Page 5

  “So who’s upsetting anything?” She looks around like somebody’s tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m just talking about spending a couple of late nights at work, like you do. I’m not really helping people during regular hours. Face it. Alex is grown up and he doesn’t need me the way he used to. The house is basically coming together. And it’s not like we have another child around keeping us busy.”

  Jake looks down. Sometimes that empty fourth seat at the dinner table seems like a broken promise between them.

  “I’m sorry about that, babe,” he mutters. “I think about it all the time.”

  “Well, don’t blame yourself.”

  “The thing is, I do blame myself.” He studies the side of his fist. “Maybe if I hadn’t been working so hard, we could’ve started trying for another kid earlier.”

  Then perhaps they wouldn’t have gone through the ectopic pregnancy and the series of miscarriages that made the doctors tell them to stop trying.

  “We still could adopt,” she reminds him.

  “Ah, neither of us . . .”

  “. . . has the heart for that. All right, fine,” she says. “I never complained.”

  “Sometimes you complained.”

  “Well I never complained as much as I felt like complaining,” she says, finishing one glass of wine and pouring another. “At any rate, it’s fine now. I’m working.”

  “So what do your supervisors say about you seeing more people at the clinic?”

  “They went apeshit, as you would say.” Dana rubs the back of her own neck as if she’s still tense from the argument. “They were saying it would set the wrong precedent for all the other social workers on the ward. ‘Bad juju’ is the phrase they kept using.”

  Jake sighs. “Why can’t you set up a private practice and start seeing people with nice middle-class problems? You know? Like frigidity or fear of commitment. The worried well. I even heard about a partner at a white-shoe firm the other day who’s got a bran addiction. He can’t stop eating bread ...”

  “Look, Jake.” A thin smile plays on her rosebud lips and she puts her bare feet up on the table. “You’re good at fighting and defending people. I’m good at taking care of them. I took care of my mom when she had cancer. Then I took care of my father and my brothers after she died. And when Alex had encephalitis, I took care of him too. That’s my calling.”

  “I know. I just hate to see you stick your neck out for a bunch of. . .”

  “. . . skells.” She frowns. “Are you saying you don’t want me to do this kind of serious work?”

  There’s that other look of hers. The one that says: If we’re going to have an argument, I’m going to outlast you.

  Jake reaches over and massages the bottom of her left foot. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

  If anything, her work has given them something to talk about at a time when other marriages run out of gas.

  “It’s just, you know, it’s New York City, hon,” he says. “I hate to think about you coming home late at night.”

  “We didn’t have to buy this house,” she says, batting a stray hair out of her face like an intrusive thought. “Five hundred thousand dollars down would’ve bought us a lot of land in Rowayton and we wouldn’t have had a mortgage hanging over our heads the rest of our lives.”

  “Yeah, and then I’d get bitten by a tick the first weekend and come down with Lyme disease.” He squints at a plume of soot over the fireplace—just what he needs, another contractor to deal with. “There’s no safety anywhere.”

  He’s long since accepted the fact that he’s addicted to the rude shuck-and-jive of the city. New York is where he’s triumphed. Where else could a poor Jew from a housing project end up borrowing enough money to buy a million-dollar town house with an $8,000 chandelier over the dining room table? The nicest light fixture in his parents’ two-room apartment at the Marlboro Houses was a cracked bowl with three dead flies in it.

  “This is where I want to be,” he says.

  “All right, so I’ve accepted that.” Dana flexes her left foot three times. “And now I’m asking you to accept this is what I want to do for a living.”

  He leans over and kisses her on the lips. “I love you.”

  Upstairs, Alex is blasting an old Jimi Hendrix tape and playing along on his 1959 Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. The long sustained notes and feedback swells sound like loud tears coming through the concrete.

  In a perverse way, the volume is thrilling. It pleases Jake that his son has a room bigger than the apartment he grew up in, with more than $5,000 worth of audio and computer equipment. Though there are still money struggles ahead, he loves giving Alex things he never had. Spending cash, love, and a kind of ease that comes from not being worried all the time. It makes Jake feel that something’s been accomplished in this life.

  “So you’ve already made up your mind about this thing with the clinic, huh?” he says, turning back to Dana.

  “I’m going to start off seeing John Gates and a couple of other people twice a week on a volunteer basis. I wouldn’t back down to Rod and the rest of them.”

  Jake looks bemused. “And did you just want to hear yourself talk about it?”

  “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  He throws up his hands. “I guess that’s one of the three basic differences between men and women. Women like to talk out their problems without necessarily hearing a solution.”

  “Interesting.” She finishes what’s left of her wine. “What’s the second difference?”

  “Women have more shoes.”

  “And the third?”

  “You come upstairs, you might find out.”

  They start to make love.

  Jake rubs Dana’s back for a few minutes, and then pulls off her T-shirt from behind. They stand, front to back, as he eases off her sweatpants and panties and then removes his own clothes, so he can lose himself in the smoothness of her body.

  In the mirror on the open closet door, he sees a stocky, hairy Jew nuzzling this beautiful blonde woman and wonders what that guy did to deserve such luck.

  “Let’s take a bath,” Dana murmurs.

  She goes into the bathroom and starts the water. He follows her in and she stops him at the door a moment, listening for the sound of Alex on the phone upstairs with Lisa. That ought to keep him occupied for an hour.

  When the tub is half full, they get in together, watching the water level rise dangerously. They are face-to-face and Dana climbs onto his lap, straddling him. He starts to move into her.

  “Is this all right?”

  “I think I can manage,” she says, guiding him in deeper.

  She begins to moan. The inside of her is like a warm bath within the bath. She throws back her head and arches her back, as droplets of water slide down her breasts. Twenty years of marriage and he still wants her as much as he did that first night he saw her at a college party. He’s never been seriously interested in another woman. Other partners at the firm would complain about what happened to their wives’ bodies after childbirth or would acquire younger, trophy wives after the first models reached a certain age, but Dana has only grown more sexually attractive to Jake with the passing years. His desire for her hasn’t diminished; it’s deepened and developed character and contours. Maybe it’s his familiarity with her body. Her velvety skin, her long legs, the dimples just above her buttocks, the sound she makes when he licks her nipples.

  Or maybe it’s just that they’ve been through so much together. Every small wrinkle and strand of gray hair can be traced back to a memory he shares with her.

  Twenty years of marriage. It began for both of them as a refuge from an unhappy childhood. But over the years it evolved into something infinitely more intense and mundane. They’d survived major and minor resentments, periods of neglect, meaningless flirtations, and near breakups. They’d sustained themselves with small mercies, selective memories, and hard-won tolerance. And after two decades, they were both amazed to find th
ere was no one else they’d rather sit next to on the bed, watching television and paying bills. It was love, but it was also more than love; it was a life.

  He thrusts into her again and she folds herself around him, arms and legs across his back. A perfect fit. Why would he want anything else?

  “The bed,” she says, standing and drying off. “I’m getting pruny. Let’s finish on the bed.”

  He picks her up and carries her unsteadily out of the bath and into the bedroom. He drops her onto the white down comforter and they finish making love in a wild improvisational frenzy, with Dana flipping her husband over and riding astride him, arms out, eyes closed, hair whipping around like lashing rain and then finally pouring down the front of her face like a waterfall.

  She sighs and shudders and rolls off him. Jake looks over at the mirror on the open closet door.

  The image is not altogether familiar. In the past, he’s seen himself as a fighter, an outsider, the Jewish kid trying to get by in a tough Italian neighborhood, a lonely boy shooting baskets by himself, the object of his father’s rage and his mother’s comfort, the despised Legal Aid lawyer, the struggling Brooklyn son striving to make his way through the brutal city. But now the angle has changed and he sees himself slightly differently. For a fleeting moment, he sees a man who is happy.

  6

  John G. is standing outside the Bedford Avenue homeless shelter in Brooklyn, a huge medieval-looking fortress in a neighborhood full of churches and auto body shops.

  A hard rain is starting to fall and a line of angry, confused men stretches out before him. But somehow his heart is full of hope. He checks the back pocket of his jeans and makes sure he still has the card Ms. Schiff gave him. He studies the curved zeros and soft twos in her writing, and wonders how long it’s been since he touched something made by a woman. He savors the moment when he stood next to her in the doorway. Tomorrow he will seize control of his destiny and reapply for his benefits. It’s time to live again.

  The line moves and he nearly runs into the young man ahead of him, who wears a black sweatshirt with the hood up.

  “Next time you say, ‘Excuse me,’ a-right?” The young guy barely bothers to turn around. The threat in his voice doesn’t need a look to back it up.

  John glances down and sees the kid has a knife in his back pocket. Not a little Swiss Army number with a can opener, but a big hungry serrated blade with a wood-grain handle.

  As the young guy walks through the metal detector, there’s a high-pitched beep. John takes a bite out of the bologna sandwich he got at the assessment center and braces himself for the inevitable hassle with the security guards. It’s a good thing he gave away that box cutter he was carrying.

  But instead of stopping the kid, the guard, who looks about fourteen, laughs and waves him through.

  “My man Larry Loud’s in the house,” he says, slapping hands with the young guy.

  “G-Love, ‘sup?”

  “Yo, yo, that shit was fly, man. That shit was phat. I’m goin’ have a talk with you. Five dollah you owe me.”

  Larry Loud screws up the right side of his face, as if to say such matters are beneath him. John G. starts to walk through the metal detector.

  “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t bring that in here,” the guard says.

  “What?”

  “That sandwich. You’re not allowed to bring food in.”

  John G. looks startled. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Those is the rules. You don’t like them, get the hell on out.”

  “I just saw you let in a guy with a knife,” John says.

  He’s suddenly aware that people have stopped talking in the line behind him. Then he turns and sees Larry Loud with his hood still up, waiting for him on the other side of the metal detector.

  “You a troublemaker, man?” says Larry, leaning against the metal detector’s wooden frame and ignoring the beeping it sets off.

  “I just want to finish my sandwich,” John G. steps up to the threshold and faces him.

  He knows he should be backing down. But something won’t let him. Maybe it’s Ms. Schiff’s card in his back pocket.

  Larry Loud’s face goes slack and his hands drop to his sides. No knife. “You want a piece of me, white boy?”

  White boy? John G.’s never thought of himself as particularly white. He’s been around black people most of his life. Grew up and went to school with them in the Bronx. Worked with them at the TA. Learned to walk like them, talk like them, even do the same drugs as them.

  So why are so many of them staring at him now? The guard. Larry Loud. The other homeless guys in line behind him. All waiting to see if he’ll hand over the sandwich and succumb to the Rikers Island laws of survival: give up your shit once and assume permanent punk status.

  He looks at Larry and tries to gauge the risk of standing his ground. All he sees is a scared kid. This is not the day he will die, he decides. After all, if he could handle that wolf pack in the park, he can handle one punk.

  He walks through the metal detector with his chin held high and steps right up to Larry. The security guard stands a yard away, shaking his head.

  “You and me later, we’ve got a date,” Larry mumbles. But he doesn’t sound like he means it.

  “Excuse me.” John G. moves past him. “I’d like to find my bed. I’ve had a very long day.”

  A half hour later, he is sitting on a cot in the middle of a vast concrete drill floor, surrounded by three hundred other beds. A thick hazy scrim of funk hangs about twenty feet off the floor, like an atmospheric condition created by the dozens of aimless men wandering around. John can almost hear the distant admonition in their murmuring voices: this is where you go if you go wrong.

  “Say, man, you might want to hide those shoes you’re wearing,” says a heavyset black man on his right who has Asian eyes and a beatific smile that immediately makes John think he’s out of his mind. He smells from urine and old Chinese food.

  “Where?”

  The fat man points to his own battle-scarred Adidas, impaled under two steel legs of his cot.

  “That way you’ll feel it if anybody tries to steal ‘em,” the fat man explains.

  “Think they’d steal your shoes in here?”

  “Motherfuckers’ll kill you for the salt in your shaker.”

  “Yeah? So this is a dangerous place?”

  “The worst.” The fat man smiles and hums. “I only wish I was living back in that tunnel under Riverside Park. At least I knew I was safe there.”

  When the lights go down a few minutes later, John feels as if he’s being left overnight in a zoo cage. The knocking and grumbling noises seem louder, the odors seem more pungent. Someone gives out a loud whoop from across the drill floor and a lit match goes flying over his head.

  He tries to lie back and relax on the cot, but he keeps thinking about Larry Loud and his knife. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so bold with him. What if Larry does intend to come looking for him? It’s a long shot Larry would find him among so many people in the dark, but still he wonders, Would anyone care if he got hurt?

  He thinks about his wife and his daughter, feels their absence like missing limbs. Somehow he hasn’t felt complete since they’ve been gone. All the drugs in the world can’t change that. What he remembers most is the small things. Happy Meals at Mickey D.’s. Stroller rides through Van Cortlandt Park. Sunlight through the trees. The memory of love. When he dwells on it too much, he feels himself coming apart inside. So he moves on.

  He begins thinking about his own childhood. Growing up in Patchogue. Crabbing at the marina. Swimming in the mill pond. The smell of vanilla and fresh-cut lumber from the old converted lace mill nearby. His mother pushing him in a shopping cart through the Bohack’s on Main Street. Happy days. The scrappy little fake carriage house on South Ocean Avenue with the horse and coach on the screen door. He remembers lying on a patch of brown grass in the backyard, watching clouds as thick and slow as cotton floating in water. S
itting on the porch next to his mother in the days before she got sick and started having her moods. Laughing Mary. That’s what everyone called her. Always laughing too loud, drinking too much, bringing home too many men. She was a lunatic: she put pizza crust in the goldfish tank and fried hamburgers in $12 olive oil. He can still smell the smoke in her hair and the patchouli on her neck where she’d let him nuzzle her. Before she started hiding in the bathroom and telling him to just let her be.

  He remembers the long drive up to the Bronx where they were going to live with her old Aunt Rose from Donegal. How his mother was supposed to pick him up from P.S. 156 one day and never showed up. He walked for blocks and blocks looking for her, passing under the shadow of the el and Yankee Stadium, until he wound up at the precinct, a frightened eight-year-old sucking his thumb while a grumpy old patrol sergeant pounded out a report on a manual typewriter.

  He remembers crying for her before bed that night in Aunt Rose’s apartment in the Webster Houses. But all he got was Rose without her dentures and a warm glass of milk with hair in it. He can still see those car shadows on the ceiling and feel that yearning for the way things used to be. The memory starts to carry him away, though he wonders now whether Mary really did love him. His eyelids grow heavy and his breathing slows down. From across the drill floor he hears someone singing an old song:

  “I can’t stop loving you, I’ve made up my mind, To live in memories, Of a lonesome time.”

  And just as he’s finally about to fall into a restful sleep, he feels the sting of cold metal against his throat.

  “Yο, excuse me, man,” whispers a voice. “Remember me?”

  Hot breath forces its way into his ear. He realizes he must have rolled onto his stomach when he fell asleep. Now the serrated blade is against his larynx.

  “You best just lie back, relax, and enjoy the show,” Larry Loud says in a low voice. “ ‘Cause I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ throat if you make a sound.”