Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “Such as?”

  “Come on, Peter. Don’t be coy.” Mastrude shook his huge greasy head in judgment. “You deal in drama every day.”

  This was true. City Hall was six floors of defendants arguing against the codified system of destinies, saying that it was not possibly they who stabbed the boyfriend, not they who broke into the warehouse or held up the convenience store, that their back property taxes owed were a mistake, or, in a slightly different form of argument, saying that yes, they beat and mugged five elderly people but that circumstances should ameliorate their fate, that if they pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine and not to the charge of selling it, they would finger the guy who distributed it. Or, if they were granted immunity for selling school-district heating oil to slum landlords, they would testify against the guy who doctored the city books and took the kickbacks. Plea-bargaining, necessary to keep the bodies moving through the system, was nothing more than disagreeing with the fate one knew one had constructed for oneself.

  “You know, this is the thing—look.” Peter laughed, watching Mastrude’s waiting expression. “I believe the world is a good place and that most people are good. I do really. But then you have to be realistic, even if it hurts. You take the average guy out there, you can tell him that, say, if he does not quit beating his girlfriend every Saturday night, then pretty soon she’s going to get angry and call the cops. You can tell him that if he keeps it up, he’ll get picked up for aggravated assault. You can tell him this. I’ve seen it. People like to think that destiny is a question of intelligence and occupation, and upbringing. You know, that specific social norms will determine the outcome. I don’t believe it. The point is—of course, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know—you can tell and tell and tell a person how they are fucking up, and the fact remains so often that they won’t believe you, or they will believe you but they won’t change—” He had an idea. “For example, look at you.”

  “Me?” Mastrude frowned in surprise.

  “You’re fat as a goddamned house. The blood is probably squeezing through your arteries one molecule at a time, and you know what you could do to change that. So yes, I agree with you, more than you know. I could even sit here and tell you all this and act as if I were above this activity, and yet not be. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what makes you worried?”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “It depends on whether you care.”

  “I care, but there are other people who care about you.”

  Peter hoped his remark about being fat hadn’t hurt Mastrude. “Why do I feel like we no longer are acting like client and divorce lawyer?” he asked.

  “Because we aren’t.”

  Mastrude told his secretary to hold his calls. “I don’t live for my work.

  I hate splitting people up—I’d rather help put them back together. But I recognize it happens and that I can’t change the script of the marital tragedy, so to speak. So I help guys like you get back on their feet and heal and learn. Get it right the next time. To help a person mold the mess of their life back into something happy and worthwhile—that’s an ideal to me. Ideals have a way of clarifying priorities. My priorities are to help people get on.”

  “That’s why I wanted to be a D.A.,” Peter jumped in. “I thought I would help—”

  “Aaah, come on,” Mastrude complained. “Being a prosecutor fit a lot of your other needs. Power, intrigue, knight on a white charger, the whole package. You’re no better than the rest of us. Don’t you see that?”

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “I’ve never met her, but let me make a guess, based on my own experience. By helping others she reenacts the process of her own healing—”

  “Yes, but so—”

  “Listen to me, you’re younger and more naive than you know.” Mastrude scowled. “I blew it once, too. I truly screwed things up. And she asked for a divorce. Not because she gave up on me, but because the natural strength of her character, her continued … adherence to an ideal gave her the ability to move on. I didn’t learn any of this until long after the fact. But I got lucky. I met another woman, more attractive in some ways, less attractive in others. But she was a good woman, same high ideals. I cared for her. I forced myself to forget my first wife. I got married again. I was happy, for several years. My second wife and first wife even became friends. They went to that trouble for me. My second wife accepted my children. One day I flew to Chicago for a conference on some point of law that no one cares about. After the main speech I went to the hotel bar to think. I called my wife on the phone and she was a little down and I didn’t want to listen to it. We talked, and I said the easy things you say when you’d rather not be bothered. I hung up, probably despised her a little for being down. Then I met a woman there, started talking. She was very sexy and in retrospect I see she thought I had a lot of money. Women can be stupid that way—it comes from lacking their own resources and opportunities. So, she made me feel good. Lots of men cheat because they think they’re unhappy with their wives. Other men cheat for no good reason other than they’re a little bored. When life is easy, your morals get fat. We went to bed. She was goddamn good in bed. I figured she’d disappear, that it was a temporary deviance. I remember lying in bed not a minute after I’d finished the sex figuring a way to ease this woman out of my life. Even as I kissed her I was thinking about how to dump her. But it didn’t happen that way. She slipped her business card into my suitcase. Perfectly natural. I’m not blaming her at all. She was acting freely and so was I. My wife unpacked my suitcase when I came home and asked about it. I lied, said something about a prospective new associate at the firm.”

  “Did she buy it?”

  “Yes, though maybe not in her heart. Then a couple of months later, the woman called my office. She was in town for the afternoon. We went out and had drinks, went to a hotel. I used the credit card. My wife kept our finances. I was working too hard and didn’t remember to intercept the bill. Or maybe I wanted to be caught, relieve the tension. She didn’t need to ask why I was staying in a hotel in my hometown.”

  “My problem is not fidelity.”

  “In a literal sense you’re right, in a larger sense you’re wrong,” Mastrude said. “I’m talking about a process of revelation, not moral bookkeeping. See, for our society to cohere, we have to realize that uncontrolled energy is disorderly—so, human energies must have forms. Marriage is a form. One can be indiscriminately sexual but not indiscriminately responsible, see? Irresponsible sexuality—like all these poor girls getting knocked up at fourteen because they don’t know what the hell else to do with themselves, even when they know about birth control, that undermines society, not to mention their own lives—I know you know this, but I want you to apply it to your own life. Fidelity is the discipline of sexuality—you choose sexual responsibility. I know there are other aspects to what I’m saying—that some marriages really do go bad, and that gay people can be joined together, too—but in the main what I’m saying is true. When you decide not to fuck around with other people, you also preserve your vow, not only to your wife, but to society, to the people you wanted to sleep with. Let me tell you, when people start cheating they get very confused, because there is no form for cheating that we understand instinctively. Men and women who are married are united with their community, assuming they don’t cheat. That sounds like I’m preaching, but I’m not, I’m just reminding you that people exist in communities of one degree of cohesion or another, and whether they know it or not. The community used to be married, in a sense. That’s what we’ve lost, that’s what people half remember and wish we still had.”

  Peter sat recalling the look on Janice’s face as she backed naked out of the door to the bedroom: a moment of watching oneself being mutilated, knowing that in that very second one’s heart was dying, at least for now. She had been betrayed too many times already: by her father, by her mother, who not only didn’t protect her from her father but also abandoned her thr
ough suicide. How was it that all of his energy and time—years of his life—had led to a moment of betrayal? He looked at his watch. Was this worth it? Was he capable of learning anything?

  “What I’m suggesting is that fidelity is more than sexual. Maybe if you consider the question of fidelity, you’ll see—”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Peter hollered, filling the room with noise. “I was faithful to my wife! God fuck it all, Mastrude, you have your head up your ass or what? I want to be faithful to her. She left me.”

  “Because of a lack of fidelity—of some sort. Not just sexual. Why are you being so deliberately dense?”

  Peter glared, yet felt confused.

  “I’m saying that if you understand what you did not do, then perhaps you will let go of her more easily, and search for another opportunity to achieve fidelity.”

  He sat in silence. Put this way, his feelings for Janice seemed small and worthless, the pitiful strivings of an emotional dwarf. It scared him to think that after all these years, in some way, he had never touched her.

  “I don’t pretend I taught you anything,” Mastrude whispered.

  He had to get out.

  “How do you feel?” the big man went on. “Ready to let your wife go, let this divorce happen?”

  Peter stood. He wouldn’t pay Mastrude’s bill, not for this.

  WHEN HE RETURNED TO HIS OFFICE, the bad news awaited him. Johnetta Henry’s blood type was BB. The blood all over the coat in which Carothers had been arrested was entirely his own, type O. There were further breakdowns of the blood type possible—technically, everyone had blood nearly distinct from everyone else, but the crude tests showed that Peter still did not have any evidence directly linking Carothers to the homicide of Johnetta Henry.

  This was discouraging and it meant that Mrs. Banks might actually know what she was talking about. He imagined trying to put her on the stand. A defense attorney, someone like Morgan, for example, might very well be able to confuse her, get her to garble her information. She seemed to understand Johnetta’s situation quite well, yet she lacked such basic information as the identity of the father of Tyler. He couldn’t even be certain of what had happened in the restaurant. She’d left voluntarily. He had no idea who the two men were. It could be a family matter, unrelated to her talking with him. But how to find her? He didn’t want the detectives to know about Mrs. Banks, and things were too hectic for him to do the work.

  But he knew who could. Cheryl Yeager was like a lot of law students who did internships with the office: She was ambitious, extremely hardworking, and smart. But unlike most of the other interns who passed through the office, she was black. The murder of Darryl Whitlock meant something extra to her; more than the other interns, she understood what he had achieved. She was a quiet, solemn young woman who thought more than she spoke. Her father was a doctor and her mother an English professor at Swarthmore College. When Peter had interviewed her the previous fall, she had told him that she doubted that she wanted to become a prosecutor; in fact, the reason she wanted to intern in the office was so she would know how the prosecutor’s office worked so that she could successfully defend suspects. Peter had been impressed by her honesty and suspected that she would do a good job. Within a week of her arrival, she had proved herself so adept that Peter no longer had much opportunity to use her skills; too many other prosecutors already had claimed her time. But when he had had a particular job to get done that had to be done right, he gave it to Cheryl Yeager. This he did with the task of finding Mrs. Banks. Cheryl wasn’t likely to discuss her work, and even better, Hoskins would not be interested in such a low-ranking member of the office. He wouldn’t even see her.

  THE HOSPITAL’S VISITING HOURS ENDED at five o’clock, so he couldn’t see his mother again. But he retrieved his car from the parking garage and headed toward his parents’ house. Maybe he could eat a meal with his father, talk some. He pressed the gas, angry again suddenly, angry as usual. How obsequious he had been with Mastrude. What the situation needed was control, not half-assedly swinging a flashlight around the caverns of the psyche! The way he’d been letting Hoskins push him around made him sick. He, Peter, should be eating guys like Hoskins for lunch! Control! Clap and the world freezes, waiting for the next command. Why didn’t he have it? Just wrap your fingers around whatever it was and hold it and know you had it. He wanted Janice back, and he wanted to control her emotions so that she would be fucking happy and satisfied for once. He really wanted to control the fact that she had a shitty childhood—yes, he’d really like to rewrite history and get all the bugs out of her development so that she would come out happy and perfect like he wanted her to. He’d like to control good old John Big Dick Apple, too, maybe show him who the hell was boss. What would have happened if Cassandra hadn’t been in his bed? Had he missed by so little, missed another forty years of life with the woman he loved because he let someone use his house key?

  There was no car in his parents’ driveway. He opened the front door with his own key and had just stepped into the living room when the phone rang. He answered the closer phone in his father’s den. It was Bobby.

  “You’re home? I was sitting here and thought I’d call and check how Mom is.”

  “Dad’s out. I just walked in. You know about Mom.”

  “Dad said not to worry.”

  “Well, don’t,” Peter said, hoping to calm his brother.

  “Carol was examined by another obstetrician. She’s right on the weight-gain curve.”

  “That’s great, Bobby.”

  “I’m scared of only one thing.”

  “Birth defects?”

  “No. Yeah, well, of course I’m scared of that, too.”

  “What’s scaring you, then?”

  “Seeing her in such pain. I hear that no matter what kind of crap you learn in the childbirthing class, it’s still a lot of screaming and crying and—”

  The line changed hands.

  “Don’t listen to this,” came Carol’s sweet voice, laughing. “The pain will be a pleasure. I’ve waited years for this.”

  “God, I hope so, Carol.”

  “How’s Janice?”

  “I never see her anymore.”

  “Poor Peter. You’ve always been so dependent on Janice.” Her laughter tinkled in the phone again and he understood again why his brother found Carol so attractive. “Tell her I said for her to come home and give you a back rub.”

  “Okay,” he whispered.

  “Here’s Bobby.”

  “So everything’s okay back east? Everybody’s okay?”

  “Don’t worry, Bobby. Just think about the baby.”

  He hung up and settled back into his father’s armchair, hating himself for lying to his brother, knowing it couldn’t be any other way. He would rather lie than be shamed. The chair smelled of his father. How many times had he watched his father hunch over his desk writing out figures in pencil on legal pads? Now the papers and bills seemed discouragingly familiar; he was gaining on his father, reducing the distance between them, knowing now what it was like to write out check after check each month for years at a time, watching the bank statements, keeping medical records in order, a Rolodex of phone numbers, stock newsletters, insurance forms, loan agreements, pension reports, credit-card bills,useless warranties for household appliances, stacks of canceled checks in case the IRS descended. He pulled out his father’s middle drawer: keys, stamps, pens, a few letters, paper clips, a broken garage door opener, a faded matchbook, random family photographs. These papers once enclosed a mystery about his father, proved he served as the intermediary between the real world and the insular space of family.

  He noticed his parents’ checkbook and idly picked it from the papers on the desk. He flipped to the beginning of the register and noted a series of repetitive entries for gas, food, insurance, and so on. His mother wrote nearly all the checks, and yet each week his father would total the balance, which usually fluctuated around three thousand
dollars. Each entry was flagged at the end of the month, as his father compared their record against the bank’s. It had been this way for years, a steady harmony, literally a system of checks and balances that promoted trust and stability.

  He flipped further and saw Janice’s name.

  There it was, written matter-of-factly in his mother’s handwriting. A check for ten thousand dollars, written four days prior. A deposit of the same amount was written in next, indicating that monies had been deposited into the account for this very purpose, probably from a savings account. The date corresponded perfectly with Janice’s decision to be independent of his income. He flipped through every page of the register and found no more record of payments to Janice. The pattern of entries—simple numbers, simple words—was reestablished as if nothing had happened and all was normal, not as if his parents were helping their daughter-in-law leave their son, betraying him as he had never been betrayed before.

  He retreated, perhaps from shock, into the cold analysis that had stood him in such good stead and which had destroyed so much of his life. He would have to consider the motivations of three individuals in their decision to individually and collectively deceive someone they loved. He assumed Janice and his mother had communicated. Janice, out of pride and a sense of what was right, would not call his mother. His mother had asked about Janice repeatedly and then, as was her character, decided to contact her independently, perhaps calling her at the women’s shelter during the day. Janice would not ask for money, but she would be frank with his mother. His mother would never probe him for details of his separation, in respect for his privacy. If Janice had decided to leave him, then his mother would assume, in her respect for Janice’s character, that this was a considered, intelligent move. His mother would know that Janice would not do such a thing rashly. As an assertive and intelligent woman, she would have a keen sense of Janice’s needs and expectations. She therefore would decide to support Janice, with the understanding that if the divorce were to occur, it might as well happen as smoothly and easily for all involved. No hard feelings, make the transition to the next phase of life. Perhaps meaning, I apologize for what my son has done to you.