Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “What do you do, Peter?” she asked, charming him out of his distraction. “You still haven’t told me.”

  “I’m a priest.”

  She laughed, looked at his hands.

  “C’mon.”

  “I’m a butcher.”

  “Somewhere in between?” She lit a cigarette, watched it burn, then sucked on it deeply. He hated the smell of cigarette smoke, wondered why people insisted on killing themselves. But it was human nature to be self-destructive. Cassandra watched him. As on the court, he felt she knew his moves, and was willing to play any version of the game he could come up with.

  “I’m an Assistant D.A. for the city,” he told her. “My current specialty is homicide. I worked my way up through assault and the rape unit.”

  “Sounds messy. Maybe righteous, too.”

  “Yeah. I used to think the work was important. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Burned out?”

  “Every prosecutor, almost, burns out sooner or later. For me it’s the grief,” he said, just wanting to tell it to anybody, and maybe piggybacking his own grief over Janice onto others. “You look somebody in the face and you see they knew the victim all their life and loved them and then some idiot comes along and—like we had an old guy who was a retired firefighter, worked as a security officer for a little extra money, and some kid with a machete can’t get past the caged security area and so he kills the old guy and leaves. Doesn’t even take his wallet. Sometimes you do the best you can to get the guy put away for a long time and some fine point of law stops us from getting the verdict we seek. You try to explain to the family. It pisses me off. No, it just makes me tired.”

  “You don’t look tired.” She smiled. Her nose bent at the tip again and despite his feeling of guardedness, his instinct to distrust, he liked her. She was being perfectly obvious, just perfectly obvious.

  “Well, I feel it. Worn down. I’m not cynical, just have that eroded feeling, you know? You got babies being killed when a drug deal goes bad and the shooting starts, the kid’s on the sofa—stuff like that. It’s beyond tragic, it’s stupid, absurd. If we could get the fucking handguns outlawed, that would be half the battle. Anybody can buy a gun in this town, anybody, anytime. Or a semi-automatic assault rifle, for that matter.”

  “How?”

  “Go to a street corner and stand around for a few minutes. Or any bar in town, or places down by the river. Your favorite deli probably has a fence going.”

  “You like this job?”

  “I can sleep at night. I do an honest day’s work.”

  Confessing his thoughts to a stranger wasn’t something he usually did. There was, however, no one else to talk to now. “I figure I have to decide in a year or two if I’m a company man. Once that happens, you start to move into the upper management. I’ve got seven years on the job.”

  “Do you want to stay?”

  “Who knows?” He wasn’t quite ready to tell her what he wanted. “What about you? What do you do?”

  “I’m at First Philadelphia Bank. Ten years.”

  “Hey, that’s where I bank. You have ten years’ worth of authority?”

  “No, more like twenty, unfortunately,” she told him.

  She was, Cassandra said, Vice President for Operations. She appeared genuinely unimpressed by herself, and this intrigued him. He wondered what the price of her success had been—not every woman wanted to get married and have kids, so maybe it was something else. They talked further about climbing the managerial ranks, the constant assaults on her authority from above and below, her mentoring of younger women, the tiresome corporate code of dress and behavior, the office warfare for bonuses and raises. Cassandra spoke in complete sentences with precise objectivity about the structures of the bank corporation; she would be quite adept at dictating letters. He realized, in an accidental way, that she was probably quite rich. And yet, ultimately, her career seemed like a faraway land of passionless stratagems and manipulations and hierarchies into which she had ventured on a long, dry tour of duty. Her voice held no enthusiasm for the hours or the responsibilities. He wondered if she might be a bit lonely, and as the wine eased his own tensions, he saw a fleeting look of quiet desperation in her eyes, and it answered his own current emptiness. They were strangers, and yet, he suddenly believed, he knew just who she was. By the time dessert was served, he had slipped easily into his questioning role, careful to appear interested, even more careful to maintain the conversation at a distance from any possible mention of Janice. And yet, while striving to do this, he again sensed Cassandra knew what he was doing.

  “Which means,” she was saying after he had asked her about her specific duties, “that when you use your little bank card in any of our eighty-six Philadelphia locations or four hundred affiliate locations, I’m responsible, ultimately, for making sure we get a computer record of the transaction and you get a printout receipt, the cash you ask for, and nothing less or more.”

  “Especially not more” he frowned mockingly. “Mustn’t get more than we ask for.”

  “What are you asking for?” she asked, staring boldly at him.

  “I’m asking you to drive me home because your Audi is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the subway.”

  “It might not be any safer.”

  It took them ten minutes to get to Society Hill, about half the usual time. Cassandra stopped the car in front of his home on Delancey. All the windows in his house were dark and he was aware of the statement this made about his life. He smelled the new leather seats of the car, wondered how much a bank vice president made.

  “Did you plan this?” Peter asked, feeling like a small animal snared in a trap.

  “Yes. But I think you know that.” Her voice was frank. “I saw you at the club a week ago, with another man, and I checked the court reservation book and decided to be around the next week when you showed up. It was just luck that you were alone.”

  “Seems pretty unusual, for a woman,” he said.

  “Does it?”

  He had no answer. They sat silently. Then she leaned over and kissed him. He tasted the cigarette in her kiss, and he felt ashy himself, small, needing to be held badly. She put her arms around him.

  “You were banging that ball around so hard, with such”—she searched for the word, laughed whisperingly next to his ear—“with such angry contemplation that I knew I wanted to get to know you. I wanted to know who was inside that face.” She kissed him again. He smelled her perfume and their wine and felt confused, yet pushed it along, moving his hands over her, worrying that he appeared stupid and thick-fingered. She was the first woman beside Janice he had touched in over a decade.

  “I like you, I like you very much,” she said, slipping her hands beneath his jacket and rubbing his chest. “I like how big you are.” He looked at her, figuring she was five or six years older than him, maybe more. How much more, goddammit? Women could be brilliant at concealing their age. Women over thirty-five lose their jawline, the skin starts to drop from the bone. He looked down, shamed. But he liked it when she kissed him. He heard her whisper, “I want to come inside, Peter.”

  His head was heavy with wine as they floated through the house. He didn’t turn on any lights, barely bothered to wave an obliging hand here and there, not really saying anything. “Kitchen, dining room, den, there’s a small backyard.” Cassandra’s perfume invaded the rooms. Despite his dizziness from the wine, he guiltily made a mental note to air out the house the next day. Professional criminals leave no evidence. Cassandra took his hand and asked him where the bedroom was, and he appreciated her forwardness; it was not crass, but honest and matter-of-factly accepting that he was too tired and too ambivalent to be coy. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom and felt the two hours of racquetball in his legs. Cassandra used the bathroom. He left the light off in his bedroom and began to undress, tossing his underwear with his foot toward the laundry hamper, now overflowing. Strangely, he didn’t feel especially self-conscious and
this worried him. He was supposed to be worrying about getting it up, and instead he half-wished Cassandra would dematerialize like Kirk or Spock being beamed somewhere on Star Trek and he could just go to sleep. He had a load of work to do, and Hoskins, the man with balls as big as City Hall, was always looking for any indication that you were slacking off. He couldn’t afford to be doing this. Maybe Cassandra would confess to a divorced husband, kids. They’d talk and he’d whisk her out the door. He wouldn’t tell her about Janice. Keep that part inside. To cover the silence of his apathy, he asked her when she returned, “How many people under you at your job?”

  She was sitting on the side of the bed, fumbling in her purse. “What? I’ve got four hundred people in my department.” She threw her purse to the floor. “Peter, I didn’t bring any contraceptive. I honestly didn’t expect…” She looked at him. “I hope tonight you’ll understand.”

  “That’s fine. That’s okay.”

  “I can still get pregnant, even at my very advanced age, and we certainly don’t want that.”

  She found a hanger in his closet and hung up her wool suit. He noticed the veins on the back of her thigh.

  “That’s okay.” He went over and kissed her but did not enjoy it. “We can work around it. Pardon the euphemism.”

  Meaning a blowjob. It had been particularly long since Janice had been in the mood for that, had pulled the pleasure from him, instead of having him force it out. They began to touch each other, and Cassandra pushed her tongue into his mouth and quickly moved her hands downward. He tried to reciprocate but his fingers were blind, stumbling over unfamiliar flesh. He remained abstracted, watching himself. He had purposely not washed the sheets since Janice left, maintaining the comforting familiarity of stray hair, old perfume, dried stains. The bedroom and whole house had quickly become a museum, with him as curator, guide, and until now, sole visitor. Cassandra’s hand grasped him tightly, making him feel his own pulse. He wondered about diseases, take your pick: the traditional ones, the harmlessly incurable, the curable yet aggravating ones, the incurably fatal. He wanted to assume Cassandra was honest enough to tell him if she had some ugly viral evil floating around inside. But his work told him that you could rarely trust anyone completely.

  “I need to ask you a question,” he began, sitting up. “It’s no reflection on you—I’d ask it of anyone in this situation.”

  “You want to know if I’m clean,” she told him. “I can see that. It’s okay. I’m being straight with you.” She stared at him. “Everyone’s afraid,” she said.

  He was just drunk enough that he didn’t have to consider all the meanings of this statement.

  “In that case, I have an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “About how we could still—”

  “You have something? For you?”

  Her high-voiced abruptness disturbed him.

  “No. But I’ll be right back.”

  In the bathroom, with the wine making his head feel as if it were set on well-oiled ball bearings, he fumbled under the sink. There was a lot of Janice’s old stuff in a basket. She’d left it, probably forgotten it. Archaeological layers. Her hard contacts case, from before she got soft ones. Perfumed soap, the paper wrappers stained, Robitussin cough formula, outdated prescriptions, orphan hairpins, then what he was looking for—her old diaphragm. When she’d moved out, she had taken her new one and in her haste and tumult forgotten this one, unused in three or four years, and certainly of no use to Peter. It was stained, dusty even. He held it up to the light to see if any light came through. No. He ran water in it, and found no leaks. In the mirror he looked white, scared. His cock, hard as a broom handle a minute before, had wilted sleepily. It was nearly two A.M. He had to be at work in six and a half hours. He couldn’t even remember the case. Temporary insanity, so many cases. Summary? Waiting for a verdict? Voir dire jury selection? He was tired of interviewing people. Do you, sir, have any religious, moral, ethical, or conscientious objections to the death penalty such that those objections would prevent you as a juror from imposing the sentence if the defendant is convicted of murder in the first degree? His ancestors, the Scattergoods, black-hatted Quakers who helped to found the city on principles of peace, tolerance, and profit, would twist in their graves—six feet deep in the small, crowded cemeteries in the old meeting houses around the city—if they knew their descendant enforced the death penalty.

  He fumbled around and found the twisted tube of diaphragm gunk. The note was still on it. I KNEW YOU WOULD LOOK. Now it was his turn for fun. Ha. With determined squeezing, he forced out barely a teaspoon. Enough? No wonder women hated smearing this goo around with a finger. It better be enough. The uterus may be imagined to be approximately the size of a pear. Ancient rape testimony from the medical examiner. Half the women in the office wanted babies; it was all they ever talked about. The diaphragm spread an arcing barrier of death. The next case involved a defendant with a long bookie record. He’d shot his neighbor in the back of the head. It appeared to be a love triangle. If he picked the old black women for the jury, they’d hang the guy high and dry—they were very tough jurors, those Sunday-morning Evangelical screamers who didn’t put up with bullshit street jive. White middle-class women could go either way. On the other hand, the black women often knew how capricious and unfair the police were and, understandably, resented the system that crushed so many of their men. America, in so many ways built upon the back of the black man, continued to exact costs. If he, Peter Scattergood, hadn’t had every single fucking advantage in the world, then he too might be some wretched drugged-out, jobless, mind-blown coke fiend, scuffing a living selling stolen needles, courting AIDS and all the other evil that was killing everybody. He stood in the harsh light before the mirror, spreading and respreading the white goo. Janice wanted to have kids, dreamed of it, and he was ambivalent—they’d eliminated hundreds of little Janices and Peters with thousands of dollars’ worth of birth control, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. You turn thirty, you know how to prevent kids better than how to have them. Maybe if he’d let Janice have children, she’d have stayed with him. Maybe, yes, but would it have been right? Some little dark-haired baby girl bouncing on his knee. Daddy! It was a godawful crime they had never had kids. Would have made his parents happy, too. Janice, I don’t know why I’m doing this right now. She would have natural childbirth, he’d sit there and hold her hands, watch her face strain. It would scare all hell out of him to see Janice in such pain. He had been a goddamn coward all along—he had to find her and talk to her in person. Soon. He could get a trace on the number she gave him, but the phone company required a court order and that was a guaranteed impossibility. Too slow. He wondered if old black women screwed old black men. Black women ran the grassroots Democratic political machine, the north wards. The money came from the state organization; with good weather and two dollars per voter, the machine was very effective. The new Mayor had all of them in his pocket, he was smarter than the last one, knew how to organize the women who needed some outlet for all that occupational frustration. The women who screwed old black men in North Philadelphia who kept their undershirts on and a bottle under the bed. Be good to me, Mama. This called bumping the stump. And right now, in the dead of winter, small rooms in a big city. Sure, everybody fucks everybody.

  “Peter?” The voice came from the bedroom. He had no idea whose it was. He returned to the dark.

  “I thought you’d disappeared,” Cassandra mused affectionately. “What were you muttering in there?”

  “Hold out your hand.”

  She did.

  “It’s—” he began.

  “No explanation needed.” She felt it with her fingertips. There was an appraising silence as she tested its size, then she gave an amused laugh. “It’ll do.”

  He sat down on the bed.

  “You mind if I smoke first?” she asked a minute later, using a tissue to wipe her hands.

  “Go ahead.”

  “
It relaxes me.”

  A match flared in the dark, brightening the gaunt edge of her cheekbone. Her eyes watched the tobacco brighten. He hated cigarette smoke.

  “How much do you smoke?”

  “Not enough to damage my health. Just now and then.”

  “Right.”

  “Now listen to me,” she said with grave amusement, wrapping a ropy arm around his chest, pulling him toward her, “most women, and I mean practically all, would never, ever do what I just did. Most would consider it a foul act.”

  “Do you consider it a foul act?” he asked the pin light of her cigarette.

  “Yes,” she exhaled. “But being alone is a whole lot worse.”

  They began to move. He did not feel the surge of sexual curiosity one is supposed to feel when beginning an affair; instead, for the first time in his life, he experienced the sensation of holding one woman while fervently trying to trick himself into believing that it was another.

  IT WAS LATER. He rested his head on her breast, his cheek against her skin.

  “I’m going to rub your back.” She blew in his ear. He had to admit she was more affectionate than Janice, for whom affection had become a balance-of-trade commodity. He remembered sleeping side by side angrily, two people hating each other, lying quietly within themselves, feeling a vast distance of inches between them. Cassandra, on the other hand, seemed genuinely unselfish. First-time courtesy? He’d been out of circulation for a long time. What did he really know about the manners of the American sexual marketplace in the waning years of the twentieth century? He was only some poor slob whose wife had just left him. Cassandra’s hands moved across his shoulders, kneaded his spinal column. She rubbed his back, his rear, the moist, tufty no-man’s-land between his ass and balls, his hamstrings, the back of his knees, and his calves.