That makes twelve calls in the last five days and he still hasn’t heard back from Andy. There hasn’t been anything in the newspapers either. Not bad news, but not necessarily good news either. He wonders if there’s some problem with the police. Of course, he could just pick up the phone himself and volunteer to tell the cops what happened.
I was involved in a couple of homicides.
Oh really? Hope you got a good lawyer. Murder two in New York State can carry a sentence of twenty-five to life.
But you see, officer, I didn’t know that’s what was going to happen. I thought we were just going to throw a scare into a guy.
Oh yeah? Who’d you think you were going with, Mother Teresa? You were going to give these bums a civics lecture? Sure you were. Come on, Counselor, you’re a shrewder judge of character than that. Aren’t you?
He hangs up the phone and tries to lose himself, channel surfing with the TV remote control. MTV bodies writhing. Pesos plummeting on the business channel. A film clip of Hakeem Turner slam-dunking on some hapless Phoenix Sun player. A televangelist talking damnation. Then on Channel 16, a familiar fuzzy head and a set of bushy eyebrows against an artificial New York skyline backdrop. His lawyer Andy Botwin is holding forth on some cable call-in program.
“What I’m saying, Bill, is that my client cannot expect to get a fair trial because he’s a succesful person living in America,” he intones, waving a finger in the air. “He’s being punished for playing the game too well...”
For a split second, Jake feels a surge of panic: is Andy discussing his case on national TV?
“There’s too much prejudice in the air.” Andy goes on, propping that thoughtful fist against his chin. “A jury of his peers should have at least one or two people familiar with the world of entertainment...”
Good. It’s one of his other cases. Calm down, Jake tells himself. You haven’t been charged with anything. Yet.
35
Philip is stuck in a line of cars outside the Midtown Tunnel. A matchstick-thin homeless guy with a mop of wild filthy hair stumbles up with a squeegee and offers to wash his windshield.
“Get the fuck away from me, ya hairy puke.” Philip reaches for the aluminum bat still in the backseat.
The bum backs away, as if he’d somehow divined Philip’s history just by looking at his face.
The light changes and Philip drives on fuming into the long tunnel under the river. Bums. Niggers. Spies. Faggots. Jews. Women. He truly hates this fucking city.
For a few minutes tonight, he thought he might finally be able to conquer it. If only he could have worked things out with this lawyer Schiff and the contracts, whole new vistas could have opened up. From the school asbestos deal, he could have moved on to bigger projects: more school construction, bridges, roads, civic centers, and then on into the private sector. He’d pictured himself subcontracting superstores for Bob Berger, hotels, skyscrapers. The day would come when he’d be able to stand on a rooftop, look out at the horizon, and calculate the amount of money he’s owed for each building on the skyline. He would become ... a player.
Instead of just being a meatball collecting debts for his ungrateful uncle.
Emerging from the tunnel and heading out onto the Long Island Expressway, he turns on the radio and starts punching through stations. He’s meant for better things, he decides, but the odds in life have always been stacked against him. He’s never gotten the respect he’s deserved. Not from the college loan officers, giving all the breaks to the nigs and spics after he got his discharge from the army. Not from the guards and the other shit birds on his cell block when he went away. Not from Carmine, and especially not from his wife and kids.
“Make way for the homo superior!” a song on the radio bleats.
Philip punches in another station, still not exactly sure what he wants. He drives past the old World’s Fair grounds and a plane from Kennedy roars overhead, a red streak through the night. Why has he always felt so trapped and held down? He’s never been sure why he got married in the first place. The dirty little secret is that the first time he really felt turned on as a teenager was seeing Little Joe stripped to the waist and getting whipped over a wagon wheel on Bonanza.
That certainly didn’t make him a faggot, but it could be that he’s just one of those guys who never should have gotten hitched in the first place. Instead he let his uncle and his mother pressure him into marrying Nita, a mousy little girl from the old neighborhood with stringy hair and thick glasses. Of course, he could never really make it with her. In bed, it was like trying to put a wet noodle through a keyhole.
When she’d ask him what was the matter, it got him furious. What right did she have, implying there was something wrong with him? Yeah, he had to smack her around a little. He was the man in the house. It was his biological imperative. Of course, when he tried to exercise that imperative with other women he couldn’t get hard most of the time either. But that was because of all the pressure he was under from his uncle and the rest of them. He had to think of Little Joe and the fucking wagon wheel just so he could get hard enough to get Nita pregnant the two times.
Kids. The truth was the kids were just background noise to him. Blurred reflections of a misconceived union. Two more things he couldn’t control. That made him feel trapped. No wonder he felt happier sometimes beating people over the head with baseball bats and crowbars. At least then they’d do what you want. You had some control over them. It was his biological imperative. To dominate.
But now he has this divorce to think about. He couldn’t believe it when Nita served him with papers five months ago and asked him to move out. The infamia! At least he’s been able to keep Carmine from finding out about it so far, since Nita’s covering for him. No one else in the family has ever even thought about getting a divorce. ‘Til death do us part. Isn’t that what it says? That means you stay together until you kill each other. But then Nita had the nerve to say, “I’m sorry, Philip. I just can’t do this witchoo anymore. You need help.”
He needs help? She’s the one needs help. What the fuck was the matter with her? Didn’t she understand she couldn’t just leave him? It wasn’t that he ever wanted to fuck her again. But she belonged to him. The kids too. No one else could have them. In fact, he’d just as soon see them all dead before he’d let another man move into the house and take his place.
He veers off the LIE and takes the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway south to Sunrise Highway. Barry Manilow breaks through static on the radio. “I Made It Through the Rain.” Guilty pleasure floods Philip’s bloodstream like pure sugar. His other dirty secret: unlike other guys in the crew, he prefers Manilow to Sinatra. Somehow Manilow understands what guys like Philip have been through. What it’s like to be rained on.
He decides to go by the wife’s house again and see what she’s up to. Hell, it’s just three, four miles from the Gateway Motor Lodge where he’s been staying in Merrick and he has a right to know what’s going on with her. More than a right: an imperative. He’s not just some stalker. He was married to the bitch.
As he pulls in across the street on Andrews Lane, he barely takes notice of the red Caprice that’s been following him for a couple of blocks. He’s too busy looking at the strange car in the driveway.
A blue Chrysler. His blood begins to make noise. Has she let another man move in already? Philip can’t believe it. He’s already killed someone this week. Is he going to have to do it again? He reaches for the bat in the backseat.
36
Jake can’t quite get comfortable in bed. He turns to the right, but there are three sharp creases under his side. He turns to the left, but the pillow is too hard.
His thoughts keep going around like clothes in a dryer. He’s going to be implicated in a murder. Someone’s going to find out. A man’s dead because of his actions. Probably two men. He feels sickened. What could he have done differently? He flips onto his back and his stomach starts to growl.
These are the hours when a man
adds things up and tries to justify the life that he’s lived.
“What are you thinking about?”
He freezes. He hadn’t even realized Dana was awake.
“Nothing.”
“You’re never thinking about nothing.” She brushes his left temple with her fingertips. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on or are you going to make me guess?”
He sits up and looks at her in the dark. She seems somehow smaller and more vulnerable, nestled in the sheets.
“I think I’m gonna get a beer,” he says. “You want anything?”
She looks at him as if she knows something that he doesn’t. She says nothing.
He gets up off the bed, wraps a towel around his middle, and starts to go downstairs. From the landing above, he hears Alex making a sound on his guitar like a monkey being strangled and smells incense burning. Incense. It makes him think of Earth Day in Central Park and old Iron Butterfly records. Has his sixteen-year-old son become a pothead on entering eleventh grade? The temptation is there to burst through the door and question him like a hostile witness. But what good would that do? If he finds nothing, Alex’s wellspring of resentment will be replenished for years to come. My father, what an asshole. Better to move on right now, and find another way to come back to it.
He continues down the stairs to the first floor, some of the steps groaning and sinking suspiciously under his feet. The last thing he needs is another contractor to fix the treads.
He comes off the last step and turns left across the wide hallway with the newly finished parquet floors. From the kitchen ten feet away, he hears a sudden scuffling noise. He stops. Someone is there. Moving across the wood floor, brushing against the stove. Has Philip come back?
It doesn’t seem fair. Jake’s not ready for him. He should have called the locksmith. He backs up several feet to the antique brass umbrella stand by the front door. He feels around for a sturdy umbrella. Not one of those $3 Korean jobs you buy from Senegalese peddlers on Broadway. But a good solid $45 number from Saks with a maplewood handle. He grabs it and comes back toward the kitchen cautiously.
The sound becomes more and more distinct. Nails scratching the marble countertop near the sink. He stands in the doorway and flips on the light. A large black-brown rat is standing by the dishrack. He stares at Jake with dark beady eyes. His long yellow fangs are bared and his belly quivers. Daring Jake to enter. Like the kitchen is already his domain. He gives a razory little squeak and rears back on his hind legs. Jake feels the towel slipping off his middle and dinner rising in his esophagus. The umbrella isn’t going to do him any good. He moves slowly to the right, toward the cabinets Dana recently had redone. Where they keep the pots and pans.
The rat creeps up to the edge of the counter, its forefeet pawing the air. Considering which part of Jake to sink its teeth into first. Just seven feet of kitchen floor separate them. Jake saw rats make much longer leaps at the Marlboro Houses. Mr. Colangelo from upstairs spent a week in the hospital with bites on his right ankle. Jake opens the cabinet door carefully and takes out a long-handled cast-iron skillet. The rat cocks its head to the left, as if it’s curious about what’s going to happen.
Alex’s music curdles and squeals upstairs. A garbage truck rolls by outside. Four years of law school, ten years slugging it out in private practice, a lifetime trying to get out of Gravesend and trying to get Gravesend out of his mind, and still he has rats in the kitchen of his million-dollar town house. He suddenly lunges with the skillet. The rat backs up quickly and throws itself against the tiled wall, unable to find the hole it entered through. Jake brings the skillet down hard, smashing a primrose-bordered teacup, but the rat dances out of the way with an excited squeal. It hides behind a Williams-Sonoma dish like a sniper in a World War II movie. Then it peeks around the side, ready to jump at Jake.
There’s no hesitation now. Jake swings the skillet again, smashing the plate and the rat. The rodent teeters to the right a bit, like its sense of balance is impaired. But Jake doesn’t trust the injury. He attacks once more, slamming the rat with all his might, crushing its skull into the counter, so it will never threaten him and his family again. Three more shots just to be sure. Then he stands back to see what damage he’s done. The rat lies flat, its paws outstretched, brackish dark blood oozing from its sides and its skull. The pink marble countertop around it is dented and chipped where Jake struck it with the skillet.
He turns and sees Dana standing behind him in the doorway. Staring at him as if he were the intruder. He lowers the skillet but before he can say anything, she turns and goes back upstairs.
37
Philip walks across the front lawn, limbering up his shoulders and taking practice swings with the baseball bat. Is he going to give Nita and her new boyfriend a beating first and then ask questions, or the other way around? He hasn’t made up his mind. He just knows that if he finds another man there he won’t be responsible for the carnage.
For some reason, the revolving sprinkler is going. Throwing ropes of water into the night air. Bitch.
Suddenly a light flashes behind him and a voice over a loudspeaker says his name.
He turns just as two Nassau County police officers come rushing at him and force him face-first down into the crabgrass. Soil and pesticides fill his nostrils. He looks up and sees he’s surrounded by five cops. A malevolent surprise party. Two of the others wear NYPD uniform shirts. The fifth’s in plain clothes. As big and round as a beach ball, he is. With a face as black as Flip Wilson’s. A fucking mulignan’, for crying out loud. He sits down on Philip’s stomach and shoves the gun right in his face. Now Philip knows affirmative action has gone too far.
“You’re under arrest, asshole,” says the cop. “You fuckin’ move, I’ll blow your damned head off.”
Philip looks up and sees Nita and the kids watching him through the living room window. Those same forlorn expressions: Our daddy’s done it again.
He doesn’t want them to see him like this, yet when Nita draws the curtains, he feels angry and abandoned. Fucking bitch. Just wait until he finally gets home.
38
The next morning John G. shows up at the Interfaith Volunteers Center, a crumbling old town house just off Broadway with chain-link gates over the windows.
Inside, the smells of urine and strong ammonia vie for supremacy. A tall black man with a long scar across his bald head meticulously mops the checkered linoleum floor in the hallway. He works in long straight streaks so that exactly half the floor is wet and half the floor is dry.
John G. studies his work cautiously before deciding to step on the dry side.
“Hey, goddamn it, what’s the matter with you?” the man with the scar on his head snaps. “Can’t you see I just got done with that side?”
John G. just stares at him with his mouth hanging open, not sure where to step next.
“Ah, just go on ahead,” the man snarls in disgust. “Shit.”
John G. edges past him and goes looking for the center’s director, Elaine Greenglass. He finds her in a surprisingly clean office at the end of the hall. A short anxious woman behind a tall stack of files. She has fine Latinate features and billowing black curly hair, which she seems intent on pulling out one hair at a time with her left hand. Her right hand lies on her desk, having its nails painted red by a sallow girl with a silver ring through her left eyebrow.
“What’s the matter?” Ms. Greenglass asks suddenly, not giving John G. a chance to introduce himself.
“Nothing.”
She puts on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “I’m sorry,” she says, all twitches and flutters. “I thought you were one of the regular residents. I was worried there might have been another stabbing.”
Stabbing. Hospitals. Blood transfusions. John G. starts thinking this might not be the place for him.
“It wasn’t a resident that got stabbed,” says Ms. Greenglass quickly, seeing his hesitation. “It was two security guards who got in a fight and stabbed each
other. We’re looking for another company.”
She stands up to welcome John G. into the room and the girl with the ring through her eyebrow departs.
“Are you one of the people who came in through our outreach program?” Ms. Greenglass asks tremulously.
“I have a card.”
He searches his back pockets for the tattered and crumpled card Dr. Wadhwa gave him at the hospital.
But the card is no longer there. He looks down at the floor. Black-and-white linoleum squares. The pattern starts to give him trouble. He looks back at Ms. Greenglass.
“I need a place,” he says.
“Okay!” She tugs on a clump of hair.
His eyes flick over to two small posters taped to a rusting green file cabinet. DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE!” And ONE OF THESE DAYS I GOTTA GET MYSELF ORGANIZISIZED!! It’s as if Ms. Greenglass is using the posters to admonish herself, and John G. feels like he’s interrupted a personal conversation.
“Did the volunteer explain the rules?”
“I didn’t see any volunteer.”
“Well I can fill you in.” She pulls out a form. “We’re a not-for-profit organization specializing in helping the mentally ill and substance abusers.”
“Then I’m your man,” John says.
She twists another ringlet of hair around her left index finger. “If you’re accepted, you’ll be expected to participate in five NA meetings a week and two encounter groups a day, including self-esteem sessions. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Uh, I guess it’s okay.” John G. feels himself break into a cold sweat. He hadn’t realized there’d be this many rules.
“I also must warn you, some of the men don’t do well in a structured setting.” Ms. Greenglass takes her glasses off. “They start to decompensate when they stop using their regular drugs.”
Intruder Page 18
