Housebreaking

by Dan Pope

  So he was surprised to find three pink Post-its on his desk waiting for him one Friday afternoon that October. Leonard got out his reading glasses, examined the notes one by one. They all said the same thing:

  Dick Funkhouser called.

  * * *

  WHEN THE WAITRESS delivered the bottle of wine, Leonard examined the label with his glasses perched halfway down his nose. A red wine from Orvieto. The waitress filled a glass and passed it across the table to Terri Funkhouser. Leonard waited for her to take a sip. She gulped. “Well?” he said. “Do you like it?”

  She shrugged. “What’s not to like? It’s a forty-dollar bottle of wine. Of course I like it. Do you expect me to send it back?”

  Terri Funkhouser was husky-voiced, a lifelong smoker like Myra. Her dyed blond hair was pompadoured high above her head; gold baubles dangled from her ears. A handful, Dick Senior used to call her. Leonard was never sure if he meant her ample figure, her disposition, or both.

  The restaurant was called the First and Last Tavern, and Leonard thought that apropos: This would be his first and last evening with Terri Funkhouser. The whole thing had been a trick. Dick Junior had tricked him. When Leonard had returned his calls earlier that day, Dick Junior had proposed a dinner meeting to discuss buying a new car for his mother. I’m off to sell a Cadillac, he’d told Benjamin proudly. (“Drive safely, Dad, okay? Your night vision’s not so great these days.”) But when Leonard arrived at the Funkhouser house to pick them up, Dick Junior claimed an emergency and begged off, saying, You can get Mom home okay, right?

  “What kind of car are you interested in?” asked Leonard.

  Terri Funkhouser reached into the breadbasket and picked through the rolls. “They’re cold,” she said. She ripped one in half and took a bite. “I’m not interested in cars. That’s Dickie’s idea. He thinks I should have a new one, something with an air bag. He doesn’t trust the Cutlass anymore. He says I drive like a blind person.”

  “What year is the Cutlass?”

  “You’re asking me dates? You expect me to know the make and model?”

  “They stopped making them in the nineties.”

  She shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

  “You have to keep up with the times. You can never be too safe.”

  Her nails were long, painted a bright red. “Who can afford a new car?”

  “New, used. You’d be surprised at the deals you can get these days. Dick Junior wants the best for you.”

  “Forget it, Leonard. Dickie’s a dreamer. He can’t afford a lawn mower, let alone a new car, and neither can I. Let’s not talk about cars anymore.”

  “Fine. That’s fine.”

  “Dickie’s been after me to call you for a month. He thinks we should be friends.” She emptied her wineglass and held it toward him. Leonard refilled the glass, which was smeared around the rim with lipstick.

  “He wants you to be happy.”

  She laughed, a short raspy sound. “He wants me off his hands.” Again, she gulped the wine, dripping some out of the side of her mouth, and quickly lapped it with her tongue. “He wants me out of my house so he can sell it and take the money and go to Florida with his shiksa.”

  “He’s a good boy,” said Leonard, trying to calm her. Her voice traveled; a couple at the next table turned their way. When Leonard had parked outside the restaurant, she’d grabbed his arm to steady herself as they walked toward the entrance. A bit tipsy already, he’d thought then. “He means well, I’m sure.”

  “You think it’s a good idea we become friends? You like that idea, Leonard Mandelbaum, do you?”

  “Most of my friends are dead.”

  “You’re an old man, Leonard.”

  “Eighty-four.”

  “You outlived them. Myra, Dick Senior. Everyone.”

  “I always liked Dick Senior.”

  “Oh, Dick was a prince. A real prince.” She offered her wineglass. “To Dick Funkhouser, wherever he may be.” Leonard clinked her glass with his own, and she drank off a few ounces. “I need a real drink. Order me one.”

  When the waitress arrived with their dinner, Leonard told her, “A sidecar for the lady and a scotch on the rocks for me.”

  “How did you know?” She had her head down, sawing her chicken cutlet with a serrated knife.

  “You always asked for it at parties.”

  “It’s been thirty years since I’ve been to a party at your house.”

  “Part of my job. I never forget a drink or the name of a spouse. People like to be remembered.”

  “What a salesman. You and your Cadillacs.”

  “Staci and Gary. Your grandkids.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t you forget anything?”

  “Seems like all I do is forget these days, or try to.”

  “Don’t be maudlin.” She wore a white sweater with gold sequins, and Leonard noticed a fresh splotch of spaghetti sauce on her chest. The woman had a healthy appetite. Half the cutlet was gone already. Her plump fingers worked diligently, cutting and forking the meat into her bright red mouth. “Dick Senior was a maudlin man. He cried during television commercials. Tears streaming down his face during an Alpo ad.”

  “I always liked Dick Senior.”

  “You said that already, Leonard. Please stop saying things twice.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine.”

  “Dick Senior got me pregnant on a cot in his dry-cleaning shop. I came in to pick up a blouse for my mother and I ended up in the back room with my skirt up. I was married at seventeen. I didn’t even finish high school. Did you know that?”

  “Did I know what?”

  “The man was twenty years older and hung like a horse. I never knew men could be small until I found out the hard way. No pun intended.”

  Leonard glanced at the neighboring tables to see if anyone could hear her. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Am I embarrassing you?”

  “I might know someone here.”

  “All your friends are dead, Leonard. You said so yourself. Who’s going to care if you’re seen cavorting with a drunken woman? Who’s left to notice?”

  “Eat your shells,” he said.

  “Fine. I’ll eat my shells. You talk. I’ll eat.”

  “I didn’t know Dick was that much older.”

  “You mean you didn’t know I was so young. You mean I look older.”

  “No, no. You look fine.”

  “I don’t look fine, Len. I’m a wreck. I’m sixty-nine years old and I can’t afford a car and my son feels he has to pimp me out to an old devil like you.”

  This made Leonard smile. He was enjoying himself, he realized, in spite of the commotion she was causing, in spite of the spectacle of her spilling gravy onto her sweater. She was a disaster, but in her presence he did feel somewhat devilish—the way she’d hung on his arm when they’d entered the restaurant, the movement of her large hips and breasts. The woman was lively conversation, you had to give it to her. You never knew what might come out of her mouth next.

  “You don’t look a day over sixty,” he said.

  “Sixty-nine,” she stressed. “That’s a dirty number, you know.”

  “A what?”

  “A dirty number. ‘My favorite number,’ Dick Senior used to say.”

  Leonard’s face must have betrayed his bewilderment.

  “Never mind, Len,” she said, patting his hand. “You play your cards right, maybe I’ll show you sometime.” She winked lasciviously. Something sexual, then. He would ask Benjamin or one of the salesmen. They knew all the dirty jokes.

  “You do have those little blue pills, Len? All the old men have them these days.”

  His Halcion were blue. He couldn’t sleep without them, ever since Myra died. Alone in the big bed, the sheets drawn tightly. She’d always run hot, Myra had
. Better than an electric blanket, he used to say. “Sure,” he said. “I can’t get to sleep without them.”

  Terri snorted so loudly that he flinched; a small piece of food projected out of her mouth and landed in his salad. “Viagra, Len,” she blurted. “I’m talking about Viagra. For your you-know-what. For your putz. Not for sleeping.”

  “For God’s sake, Terri. They’ll throw us out.”

  And indeed, he looked up to see the waiter approaching, looking stern. But the man was only delivering their cocktails. Leonard bit into his meatball; he’d barely touched his dinner.

  “Go to your doctor,” she said. “They give them out like vitamins these days.” She forked the final piece of chicken into her mouth and began wiping up the sauce with a roll. “More bread, Len,” she rasped.

  Myra too used to get boisterous in restaurants. Once she’d asked the maître d’ at Scoler’s to dance, and when he politely declined, she called him fancy pants. You’d dance with me if I were a man, wouldn’t you, fancy pants?

  “To little blue pills,” Terri Funkhouser was saying, her sidecar raised. She drank it down in a few swigs. But that was her final toast. The sidecar finished her. She became quiet, then unresponsive. Finally she announced that she felt sick. “Take me home, Leonard.”

  He and the maître d’, a heavyset Italian man, got her out to the Cadillac, Leonard holding on to one arm, feeling the fleshy weight of her against him. They managed to strap her into the passenger seat. On the drive back to her house, her mouth fell open and she began snoring. In the close confines of the car Leonard began to feel light-headed from the scent of her; he opened the driver’s-side window to get some air; her perfume, as Myra had always said, could stop a bull.

  When Leonard pulled into her driveway and honked the horn, Dick Junior came out immediately, striding purposefully toward the passenger side, as if he’d been expecting them.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING Leonard got the photo albums out of the den closet. He was looking for a picture he’d taken of Terri Funkhouser, many years ago. He could summon the image in his mind: young Terri standing ramrod straight, chest thrust forward, a cocktail glass in her hand. One of his grandkids, combing through the photo albums, had once said, Who’s the pretty lady in the red dress?

  As Leonard searched, Benjamin suddenly bounded down the hallway, calling out, “I’ll be right back.” Where are you going, he wanted to ask, but the door had already closed behind his son. Leonard smiled. That was Benjamin, always in a hurry. He talked fast, typed fast, drove fast. It was nice having his son back in the house, despite the marital concerns. They had dinner together most evenings and TV time afterward in the den. Benjamin even watched television fast, flipping through the channels in a blur.

  Leonard turned past the countless photographs of dogs and cats, the pets that had kept Benjamin and Sissi happy in their youth. The two of them had taken the photos with their Instamatic cameras. “Take pictures of people,” he’d lectured his children, but they hadn’t listened. One of the albums had a psychedelic purple plastic cover with a typewritten title page: Winter Sojourn by Benjamin Steven Mandelbaum. This was his son’s junior high photography project, an album of black-and-white pictures of clouds and trees in winter. His son had developed these pictures himself in the darkroom he’d jury-rigged in the basement, with his potions and trays and red safelight. Leonard could detect, even now, a lingering whiff of the chemical solutions. Photography had been a phase of Benjamin’s, like his interest in baseball cards and the electric guitar, hobbies that got boxed up once he turned sixteen, when he discovered beer and girls.

  As he thumbed through the albums, Leonard lingered over pictures of Myra, so vivid in her prime: Myra in her tennis whites at the club, racket in hand; Myra on the beach in Sarasota, reclining on a lounge chair; Myra in ski pants at the foot of the mountain in Stowe, leaning on her ski poles.

  He pulled another stack of photo albums from the bottom shelf, breathing heavily, pushing aside board games and poker chips, coughing on the dust. He opened their honeymoon album, covered in white leather: Bermuda, Summer of 1959. He’d taken these pictures with his Hasselblad 1600f with its eighty-millimeter lens, a camera he’d bought in Paris a few years after the war. The photographs were three-inch squares. The negatives, nearly as big, were contained in an envelope, taped to the back cover of the album. Leonard had always been well organized with his hobbies.

  There was Myra, twenty-seven years old in a white bathing suit outside the cottage they’d rented on the grounds of the Black Angus Hotel, posing Hollywood-style, one hand behind her head, hip cocked. Every night they dined at the same small corner table in the hotel restaurant. “We’ll have the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,” she would tell the waiter. “We’re hungry people.”

  His beautiful Myra, so young, so full of life. How proud he’d been, walking arm in arm with her through the hotel dining room. “You’re a lucky man,” the waiter had confided to him one night. Lucky, indeed. Leonard could see the joy in his face in the final photo in the honeymoon album, slightly out of focus: Leonard grinning, his eyes narrowed to slits against the sun. He had the woman of his dreams, with a lifetime ahead of them.

  His eyes watered. The loss was nearly unbearable. How could he express it in words? When his neighbor Betty Amato called to check on him, when she asked how he was doing, he would always say the same thing: Not very well without Myra. Not very well at all. He missed her every hour, every day. I know, Leonard, Betty would say, I miss her too. I miss her so much. That would start him crying again, and Betty would say, But you can’t dwell on it. You have to move on or you’ll make yourself sick with grief. Move on? How could he tell her that there was no possibility of moving on? That there was nothing left for him, no life without Myra? She couldn’t understand. Neither could Benjamin or Sissi. For them, life was about looking ahead, about what would happen next.

  There was one final photo album. Leonard flipped absentmindedly through the pages, and there it was, the shot of Terri Funkhouser. He’d almost forgotten he was looking for it. In the picture, she was posed exactly as he’d remembered—standing tall and proud in a flashy red dress, cocktail glass in hand—but she was younger than he’d thought (barely into her twenties, by the look of her), and Leonard had forgotten the other person in the photograph, with her arm curled around Terri Funkhouser’s waist: Myra herself, wearing a short black cocktail dress and pearls. How young they seemed, the two women staring into the lens, unsmiling. He removed the photograph from its cellophane sheath and turned it over: Summer solstice party 1963, Myra had written on the back.

  Leonard carried the photograph to his desk in the hallway and dialed Terri Funkhouser’s number. Benjamin had gone outside; Leonard could see him through the front window, standing on the lawn, talking to some woman—the new neighbor, he guessed, who’d moved into Eleanor Hufnagle’s house. Just as well, Leonard figured. He wouldn’t need to keep his voice down. He hadn’t told Benjamin about his outing with Terri Funkhouser. Benjamin might find it disloyal of him, calling another woman. But Leonard only wanted to tell her about the photograph and offer to send her a copy. It would be a quick phone call, before his son came back inside.

  She answered immediately.

  “I’ve got a picture of you,” he said.

  “Not from last night, I hope.”

  “From 1963. It’s you and Myra at a cocktail party on the patio in my backyard. You’re wearing a red dress.”

  “Dick bought that dress for me at Saks. I told him it made me look like a streetwalker, but he insisted.”

  “Myra has her arm around your waist.”

  “Myra was lovely. I always envied her those almond eyes and her figure—so trim, not falling out everywhere like you-know-who. You had the pick of the litter, Len.”

  “I did. I did.” This started him crying again, though he tried to hide it by clearing his throat.
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  “Don’t get weepy on me. I told you last night, I can’t stand that sort of thing.”

  “I’m surprised you can remember last night.”

  “Of course I remember. Did you do what I asked? Did you call your doctor?”

  “My doctor?”

  “Viagra, Len. The little blue pills.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Terri. You’re not serious.”

  “Of course I’m serious. It’ll be a nice change for you. Don’t underestimate the benefits of a good lay. You’ll feel twenty years younger.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Dickie will hear you.”

  “Dickie’s out with his shiksa. And he wouldn’t care anyway. He wants us to be friends, remember. This whole thing was his idea.”

  “You and Myra.” He sighed, holding the photograph a few inches from his face. He’d left his reading glasses in the den. Somehow it made him feel closer to Myra, seeing her together with Terri. “The two of you. You look like movie stars. I’ll show it to you.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Soon.”

  “Get the pills first. But you have to be able to do five push-ups.”

  “Push-ups? What are you talking about?”

  “The doctors won’t give you the pills if they’re worried about your heart. They don’t want you jumping into bed and having a coronary, which is what happens sometimes with old devils like yourself. So they’ll ask you to do five push-ups before they’ll write a prescription.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “Trust me, Len. I’ve been through this before. You did push-ups in the Army, right?”

  “Navy.”

  “Then it’ll be no problem for you.”

  She fumbled the phone, and a moment later the line went dead. Leonard shook his head. Barely past noon and she was drunk again. The way she talked, she had to be drunk. Or maybe just teasing. Didn’t she know that he hadn’t been with a woman for twenty years? And a woman other than Myra for how long—fifty years?

  He went back to the den and slid the picture of Myra and Terri Funkhouser into its cellophane holder. Then he gathered the photo albums, got to his hands and knees, and stacked them on the bottom shelf in the closet. He sat on the rug, resting for a few moments.