Break and Enter (4 page)

LATER. TIME HAD PASSED
and Peter could not remember his cross-examination of Morgan’s witnesses nor what his thoughts had been, except that those thoughts had circled back to Janice. He wanted to get out of his suit and felt sleepy in the dry, hot air of the courtroom. He would call Janice in the evening to find out where the hell she was hiding. Judy Warren’s father was watching him, and he worried suddenly that he’d missed something. From habit he scribbled notes on the pad while floating in and out of attention, relying on his instinct to follow the rhythm of drama, even a drama so worn and ritualized and predictable as a third-rate murder case. But the case was airtight. Morgan had nothing. The office had been scrupulous about the discovery procedures, not only because it was the law, but because the more you told the defense attorney about the stuff you were digging up on the defendant, the sooner he would angle toward a faster, potentially lenient resolution, usually a negotiated guilty plea. Morgan, who was now summarizing the defendant’s movements on the night of the murder, was going for
complete acquittal; it was a real waste of city resources. Deputies, support personnel, court reporter, court officers, and judge; each case that went to trial cost the taxpayer hundreds of dollars an hour. Peter would have preferred someone who knew the courts, an ex-A.D.A. perhaps, who, in the face of the overwhelming evidence, would have pled guilty pragmatically and never taken the case to trial. On the other hand, it would be another conviction. Peter was thirty-six and three on homicide, one of those three lost on changed testimony, one on a runaway jury, and one on his own stupid evidentiary mistakes—not that he kept score, which, of course, he did, and not that he saw himself running for public office, which, of course, was always a possibility.

Then—already—it was past five o’clock, and the judge told the jury not to discuss the case with anyone—no smart criminal lawyer ever assumed they all complied—and they filed out. The spectators stood up. The victim’s family, drained from hours in court, floated toward the exit, a day farther from the death of their Judy, a day closer, Peter hoped, to some sort of emotional release. Usually he chatted with the family about how things were progressing, but he was too tired now to talk with them. And felt guilty about it. He spread his papers on the table and searched for his calendar. It was under the black-and-white glossies of Judy Warren’s corpse.

He rode the elevator down, pulling even further into himself, too tired and anxious about Janice to nod again to the detectives and cops in City Hall. Outside, he headed home, his loneliness made worse by the empty beauty of the dark office buildings with their random patterns of lighted windows high above the street. The new towers kept going up, sheathed in granite, glass, and metal. It used to be that by custom the immense statue of William Penn, the patron Quaker of Philadelphia, looked over all buildings in the city from atop the clock tower of City Hall. In a plain hat—his curling hair falling to his shoulders—waistcoat, knickers, and buckle shoes, Billy Penn could see everything in the city he founded and designed and loved. This was no longer true.

THEIR TOWNHOUSE STOOD ON THE SOUTH SIDE
of the two hundred block of Delancey. It was a narrow street, with two-and three-
story brick homes, none newer than the early 1700s. Tourists who had tired of the Liberty Bell or Independence Mall often wandered down it, taking pictures, marveling at how well preserved the street was, how
historical
it felt. Peter had heard them on Sunday mornings, outside the window, reading the dates of the houses aloud, wishing
they
lived there. Janice had loved the shutters painted bright black, the worn granite steps, the iron railing and antique bootscrape set into the old brick sidewalk. And so had he, for this small, lovely street and their house on it had suggested an order and happiness, a certain classic domestic perfection. The area, the oldest in the city, contained some of its most expensive residential real estate. That he and Janice owned the house was testimony to their ability to work together. He had done all the restoration work, tearing up linoleum, sanding floors. They had been extremely lucky, buying just before the real-estate boom at a decent interest rate, but still sacrificing vacations, restaurants, and a car for several years to pay the mortgage, which was still sizable. Even now, on a combined salary of eighty-two thousand, they had more or less signed their life away on this house. But, oh, what satisfaction they had enjoyed, walking home from a movie or dinner down the quiet street, the soft light of gas lamps hinting that they had reached a point of near perfection, an aesthetic culmination of their desires—security, happiness.

Inside, Peter sorted through the mail. Bar association stuff, a flier from the Pennsylvania District Attorney’s Association, the United Way, alumni mail from Penn, Visa and American Express bills, a mail-order catalog for Janice, a letter from Bobby, who had opted out of the East Coast mentality and become a geologist in Arizona. Married a beautiful woman, too. He set his brother’s letter aside for a time when he could enjoy it, and continued flipping through the stack. One of the hunger organizations had gotten his address. All of those outfits bought mailing lists—lawyers were supposed to have plenty of cash. They didn’t know about underpaid A.D.A.’s. He ripped the envelope open and read the computer-personalized appeal:

Next to this was a picture of a starving boy, maybe four years old. His head was huge, his arms like sticks and his belly swollen balloon-big. On the reverse, it said:

He looked long at the photograph, wondered what it was like to starve to death, and resented the manipulation. He tore the return envelope in half and went through the rest of his mail. Should he put his coat back on and walk to South Street, maybe troll through a couple of bars, act the lonely fool with some cosmetically florid executive secretary?

He called Janice at the new number and she answered.

“How’s business?” he asked, searching for neutral territory.

“We got three more women today. One was a police referral. So,” she sighed, “we’re full, but with two discharges tomorrow. A couple of the women were fighting over what their children could watch on television.”

“Tiring.” His attempt at sympathy.

“Yes. But we got the state grant renewed. I’m encouraged.”

“All this other stuff between us is wearing you down.”

“Yes,” she said dutifully, not allowing his sympathies to register. “Peter, I need some more money.”

“I get it coming and going, don’t I?”

“We agreed—”

“I agreed to be coerced into agreeing that you can’t stand me.” This was nasty but felt good.

“All you’re doing is proving I was right.”

True. He was tired of her being right. He was even more tired of agreeing that she was right when in fact, in the mud of his soul, he believed he was right.

“I’m sorry,” he said more kindly. “When shall we meet?”

“I don’t want you to come to the apartment.” A pause. She had made some mistake. “No, we better meet.”

“I’ll come over.” She had moved to one of the apartment complexes not far away. He hated them, big ugly towers that overlooked the Delaware River, products of poor 1960s urban planning that clashed entirely with the neighborhood of Revolutionary-era architecture. But the towers were near enough so he and Janice could visit and talk to each other during the separation, and far enough away that she felt autonomous.

“Let’s meet in town,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

“My office?” He knew Janice wouldn’t go for that. She’d been up to the seventh floor and remarked each time how dirty the place was, the coffee stains on the floor, the tiny cramped offices where the staff worked, the boxes of papers and files stacked in hallways and along office dividers due to lack of space and funding. Neither did she like the detectives walking around with pistols in shoulder holsters, belt holsters, ankle holsters, even stuffed into the back of their pants.

“You know how much I hate your office,” she said.

“So why don’t we meet in your apartment? I can bring some more of your stuff if you need it. I spend so much time downtown I feel like a subway rat.”

“You, a rat?” she teased.

“I said that so we would be able to agree that I was an evil, dirty, scummy rat of a guy and then you would see how agreeable I actually am.”

“We can have breakfast, at that little place off Chestnut.”

No apartment summit meeting. No fledgling pride at her new environment (the cost of which they were splitting, so it ran him an extra five hundred dollars a month), no intimate discussion about their problems with the possibility of a bedroom finale.

“Peter?” Janice sounded exasperated. “Eight o’clock?”

“Okay. Janice, why can’t we just—”

“Because we
can’t.
I don’t want to go into it. You need to hear me. You’re more interested in your work than in me—”

“That’s not true. Janice, the issue is—”

“The issue is
not
my past, Peter. You’re so quick to make that the cause of our problems. You don’t love me,
Peter. You think you love me,

you
feel
love, but you don’t act it, you don’t do it. You promised me change and for a while I believed you. I don’t believe anymore. I know I have problems, but I think you have a lot of things to process.”

Process.
Fast food was processed, due application of law was, God knew, processed, but not love. Janice’s use of the word—entirely conscious and a professional trademark—was a way of keeping him at a distance.

“It’s a matter of prioritizing what you care about, Peter,” she said, speaking as if she were talking to a four-year-old. “When you don’t want to talk and do things together, that’s emotional deprivation. If you want to work and be a hermit, fine. But I need—”

“I thought you didn’t want to get into it.”

“We’re better than this. Okay, see you tomorrow at eight. Bye.”

She hung up.

He stood there and let the words drift out the room, his mind attempting to figure out how Janice had evaded him. One thing about sticking your hands into everyone’s shit each day, you learn how people operate. Probably it was all part of dismantling a marriage: You begin to cultivate secrets, new regions of yourself, let old elements die off. He called the number at Janice’s apartment, hoping he was wrong. He wasn’t. A click, a whir, and the death tone of disconnection:
“The number you have reached has been—”

His wife, with whom he had last unhappily made love a month prior, had moved out of her new apartment and he didn’t know where she was.

THE BAD TIME CAME
when he was ready to sleep and set the alarm. Janice had always woken early and meditated downstairs and then awakened him. He was never good at waking, because he never got enough sleep. He set the radio to KYW-1060, all news. Janice hated all news. “How can you make love at night and then wake up to all news?” she used to ask him, back when they made love each night. “It’s too
hard.”

“Well, we’re hard people,” he had said.

“You’re the one who’s hard.”

He flicked off the light and swam through the sudden darkness to the bed. Under the covers, he felt a little more of eleven years’ worth of
Janice leak out: the last year of college together, she at Penn on scholarship, he on the parental ticket, then living separately, then shacking up—his parents had been relaxed about it—then marriage in the three-hundred-year-old Quaker Meeting his family belonged to, saying their vows in the simple pale room with their friends silently watching.
In the presence of God and these our friends I take thee Janice to be my wedded wife.
He had been faithful, made a decent living, been a good lover. But he had overworked himself and been too tired on Sundays to go out for a picnic in Fairmount Park when she suggested it, and he had shown only a shabby interest in her struggle to define herself. He’d been noncommittal when she brought up children, not because he didn’t care, but because increasingly he’d felt like such a failure with her. Janice had looked to him for the elemental affirmation her parents had never given her. After all, he was the one from a good family, the life of privilege. He’d enjoyed advantages that made him believe his needs were not as significant as hers, which was a good thing, for she had been unable to reach beyond her own decimated family history. She had needed to
feel
loved and hadn’t found it. Not in him, not in herself. He seemed only to torment her through his deficiencies; and so he had started to withdraw, dry up a little more each year. Janice was increasingly flush with the social-work jargon; sooner or later, he’d long hoped, she’d stop looking for issues in their marriage to “work on,” like a mechanic tinkering with an engine, and realize he was a regular, decent guy who loved her in a mundane, unconditional way. Was that so bad?

Wondering where the hell she was, he rolled around the bed in frustration, then forced himself to lie flat on his back. It was impossible to remove the sensation of bed from the sensation of her. His penis, trained dog that it was, hardened. He lay beneath the blanket giving it a bit of incidental attention, thinking about how Janice used to kiss him and jump up from bed to go put in her diaphragm and on her way to the doorway he could see that little sweet curve right inside between her thighs, and while she was in the bathroom he would loll around the sheets letting the day disappear, feeling swollen and satisfied and happy. She’d come back in, with the faint medicinal stink of the goop, and even this smell was mildly aphrodisiacal, by association. She’d never gone on
the Pill, although her gynecologist had suggested it. Peter and Janice used to fight good-naturedly and then not so good-naturedly about who would buy the fat white tubes of the stuff. He hated some of the looks he got doing it. Janice thought his buying it was “sharing.” The least
he
could do, considering all the mess
she
went through. She was right, yes, but still it embarrassed him. He was tired of being slimy afterward and had always half-consciously resented her for not using the Pill. It seemed like cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to purchase birth control you hated to use, though the irony was, of course, that it was Janice who wanted children. Finally one Saturday morning he’d driven to a drugstore and bought twenty large-size tubes, hoping he would get Janice to clam up that way and not have to buy any more stuff for maybe three years, figuring about thirty pops to the tube. She had only smiled.