The Intruder (13 page)

He wrings his hands and mashes his teeth together, as if he’s suddenly in great pain.

“So what do you think, Father? You think my daughter’s dead because of what I did? There’s gotta be a connection, right?”

The priest moves his hands around, as if he’s trying to conjure comfort out of the night.

“I don’t know,” he says finally.

“Well sometimes that’s what I think. That he’s punishing me. By giving me the virus. But then other times I think it’s somebody else who’s responsible and I just want to hurt them. So what do you think?”

“I think you need to talk to someone and then I think you need to look inside yourself and ask God to forgive you.”

John G. turns his head and looks back at the steam rising like a white exclamation point from the hole in the street. He thinks about what can build up underground.

“You’re telling me God’s inside me?” he says. “I gotta go someplace and . . . think about this.”

In other words, if he doesn’t get high within the next five minutes, he’ll start tearing his own skin off.

“I don’t suppose I could borrow some money,” he asks the priest. “I’m good for it. I swear.”

“You’ve still got my wallet.”

“Oh yeah.” John looks down at the black billfold in his hand and takes out fifteen dollars. “That all right?”

“I can handle it. But do me a favor, will you?”

“What?”

The priest reaches out with smooth, marble white fingers. “Stop by and see me sometime. Okay? I think we might have a lot to talk about. I’m very interested in this business about the molecules.”

“Oh yeah, sure thing.” John returns the wallet and starts walking
away backward, as if trying to escape the watchful eye of God. “And thanks, Father. You’re a lifesaver. I’ll come by and pay you first thing next week.”

The priest gives out a heavy dubious sigh, like an exhausted steam engine. “Go in peace,” he says.

17

Bob... Bob ... It’s not that kind of thing, Bob. They want you to serve on the School Construction Board. It’s a dollar-a-year job. If it’s money you want, go join some corporate board with Kissinger and have your meetings in Vail. This is goddamn public service.”

Jake is on the cellular phone with his old friend and client Bob Berger. Dana sits on the edge of their bed, brushing out her hair and watching the news.

All of a sudden, a voice shouts from the street below. “Repent, you sinner! Damnation awaits you!”

“What the hell is that?” says Bob Berger, who’s calling from Pound Ridge. “It sounds like you got the Red Army outside your window.”

Jake goes over and pulls back the drapes. John G. stands in the middle of the street, arms akimbo and face contorted.

“Jesus is angry!” he cries out. “The army of Christ is marching.”

Jake drops back the drapes and starts pacing around the room, his mouth tight with fury. “Ah, it’s just some bum.”

“Now I know why I moved.”

“Take the job. And give my love to Scotty and Brenda.”

The line goes dead, but as soon as Jake puts the phone down it purrs again. Dana’s friends Rick and Marjorie Baumgarten wanting
to know if they’re still on for dinner at the Gotham Bar and Grill on Friday.

“Tine,” says Jake.

“YOU WILL NEVER REACH THE KINGDOM OF HEAVENNNN!!” John G. shouts up from the street. “JESUS WON’T FORGIVE YOU FOR LAYING WITH THE WIFE OF ANOTHER MAN!”

“That’s it,” says Jake.

He puts the phone down and goes to get his sneakers from the closet. “I’m gonna go down there and fuckin’ kill him right now.”

“Jacob, sit down,” his wife says. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Well, what am I supposed to do, Dana? Call the police again? He’ll be gone by the time they send a car and back an hour after they leave.”

There’s bashing and rattling downstairs. Jake goes over to the window and sees John G. trying to lug a shopping cart up the front steps of the town house.

“HEY, get away from there, you sonovabitch!” he yells down.

“Stop that. What’s the matter with you? He can’t get in. You sound like a nut shouting at him.”

Jake turns on her. “Doesn’t it bother you that this bum attacked our son?”

“Of course it does.” She suddenly looks like a solemn schoolgirl. “It makes me furious. It makes me want to kill him too. But what would that accomplish?”

“Let me tell you something, Dana, sometimes a little force goes a long way.” He bends down to tie his sneakers. “My old man used to beat my mother into a hospital bed twice a year and then complain about the bills. But after I got a little forceful with him there weren’t any more trips to the hospital. Understand?”

“You know I hate it when you talk like that.” Dana leans over and props her head up on her right hand. “It makes me think you’re still this angry violent guy inside.”

A long silence begins. A vein pulses near his left temple. For years, he was an unguided missile looking for a target. But being married to Dana has changed him. Somehow she’s helped him
make peace with the world, at least for a while. Still there are moments when the distance between them seems as great as the distance between her parents’ house in Stamford and the streets of Gravesend. The moments always pass, but she can never really know what it was like growing up in a housing project.

“It’s just talk, babe,” he says quietly, standing up.

“I know, but he’s sick. You can’t get so pissed off that it poisons you.”

“I still have to protect my family.”

“Of course, but you’re not trying to fight your way out of Gravesend anymore. You don’t have to settle everything with your fists. He’s going to go away eventually. Don’t make the repair worse than the problem. Our life is good now.”

He puts his head against her chest, listening to her heartbeat. Long ago, he discovered he couldn’t really sleep unless she was next to him, so he could hear the rhythm of her breathing. The bond of love.

“Our life
is
good,” he says. “That’s why I don’t want anything to happen to it.”

“I know.”

“THE VIRGIN IS CRYING!!!” John G. calls up from the street. “SHE KNOWS YOU’VE STOLEN A LIFE!!”

On the floor above, Sonic Youth is making dirty, skronky music in Alex’s room.

“Maybe I could try talking to my supervisors again,” Dana says. “Maybe they can talk to somebody at Bellevue about having him brought in for forty-eight hours’ evaluation.”

“And what if they let him go after that?”

“Then we’ll have to think of the next thing.”

A story comes on the news about a deranged homeless man slashing a woman and her dog in Central Park with a pair of scissors.

“And meanwhile we just wait until somebody seriously gets hurt?”

There’s a loud clang on the gate downstairs. Jake goes to the window and sees John G. on the front stoop, his right arm cocked back like a baseball pitcher’s.

“Oh shit, he’s trying to break in,” says Jake.

“Don’t worry. The gate’s locked.”

“What about the inside door?”

Dana looks stricken. “I thought you locked it.”

“I thought you did.”

Wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, Jake bolts from the bedroom and goes rushing down the stairs. As he reaches the bottom, he sees the front door has been pushed open and the only thing between him and John G. is the locked wrought-iron gate. Fifteen feet away, John G. appears divided into sections by the bars like a figure in a cubist painting.

He reaches into the shopping cart, pulls out a piece of rotten fruit, and hurls it through the bars at Jake.

“Body of Christ,” he says.

WHAPP! A half-eaten plum whizzes past Jake’s face and smashes into the framed Picasso print at the end of the hall.

Jake ducks and bangs his head on the wall. Dana calls to him from upstairs, asking what’s going on. John G. throws an old pear at Jake.

“Body of Christ.”

The pear hits Jake on the temple and juice dribbles down into his ear. It’s like some new postmodern humiliation ritual: getting pelted by rotten fruit in your million-dollar town house. The only way he can stop John G. is if he moves out into the open part of the hallway and lunges to close the front door.

“Blood of Christ!”

A peach hits him straight on the chin as soon as he steps out.

“Goddamn it,” he mutters, putting his hand up to his face to inspect the damage.

John G. howls and punches the bars with his fists, oblivious to the damage he’s doing to his knuckles. Even if the police were to come and arrest him right now, Jake thinks, the charge would only be a misdemeanor for vandalism.

“Baby, please come back! I can still make you happy!”

With one more lunge, Jake manages to reach the oak door and slam it shut. His shirt and shorts are completely soaked in putrid fruit juices. One way or another, this must stop.

From outside, John G. roars one last time.

“BABY, PLEASE DON’T SLEEP WITH ANOTHER MAN!”

18

This time when the cops come for John G. they give him a choice: Rikers or Bellevue. Rikers is thirty days, minimum. He pictures a thousand Larry Louds in cages next to him. Yo, yo, I think I got the virus, man. Bellevue is two or three days on the mental ward, max.

“Take me to Bellevue, you motherfuckers. I’m not responsible.”

He’s brought in the morning after the fruit-throwing incident and immediately sedated. For the first few hours, his mind drifts. He keeps seeing parts of his life playing over and over like scenes from an old movie.

He sees himself as a Patchogue boy growing up in the Bronx. The crumbling tenements and apartment houses gray and frightening as old elephants. The dusty churches and stale Communion wafers. Yankee Stadium and the el tracks. Just about the only white boy in the bleachers on Westinghouse Take an Underprivileged Kid to the Ballpark Day. The kid next to him saying Danny Cater could figure out his batting average by the time he ran down the first baseline. The smell of lavender in Aunt Rose’s living room and overheated plastic slipcovers on the furniture. Instead of his mother’s patchouli and cigarettes. The memory of love.

He remembers when he first started running away. Right after the time he messed his pants at the museum. He became the Hooky Kid. His truant officer must’ve carried his picture around in his wallet. Let the nuns slap somebody else for a change. There he was. Playing tag at the auto graveyard near Highbridge Park. Sneaking into afternoon games. Riding the subways all day. The A train was the best. The tracks ran right over Broad Channel going out to Far Rockaway and on rainy days water pelted the windows and threatened to wash the cars away.

By high school, he was hardly showing up at all; the only book he read all the way through was Dante’s
Inferno.
Nuns, football players, algebra nerds, the rough gang hanging out at lunchtime. He couldn’t identify with any of them, couldn’t relate to any of the symbols of success or failure. Perhaps the capacity for homelessness had always been within him. “I wash my hands of you,” said Aunt Rose. “You’re as bad as your father.” Whoever that was. She shipped him off to the foster homes. Long silences and leftovers for dinner. He hunkered down inside himself and learned never to show how scared and lonely he was. It was only later he realized that the families took him in because they got extra money from the state for each foster child who lived with them.

It didn’t matter, though. He was a full-time runaway by then. Spending all his time at the second-run movie houses on Forty-second Street. Continuous showings of
Alien
and
Death Wish 2.

Sometimes he’d fall asleep and the movies and his dreams would blend together.

He reached twenty with a good-sized heroin habit. A guy he knew from the movie theaters introduced him to the clubs downtown. Elgin, he called himself. An educated middle-aged white guy with an accent from somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. All he ever wanted was a hand job in the balcony. In return he took Johnny G. to the Mudd Club and Tier 3. And introduced him to the kind of people he’d never met before. People who thought it
was romantic that he had a heroin habit. They were older and they had money. He was poor and an addict, but who cared? He was riding through the drugs on a burst of youth.

Looking back, he remembers the music better than the people. “Too Many Creeps.” “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” “All your life, all your life, you’ve been a loser all your life.” Everyone had a habit there. Within a month, he was standing in a line behind a tenement on Eldridge Street with a bunch of other skinny scraggly white guys. Waiting for a black dealer with a medicine-ball-sized belly to give him his package so he could shoot up. A hundred dollars a day. In the afternoons, he’d shoplift from grocery stores and mug the occasional old lady for the money. Felt bad about it too, a hangover from the early years in Catholic school. At night, he’d dance and try to forget it at the clubs. Until finally, he realized no one else was shooting up and he was the only one left dancing.

He got busted on Delancey Street for possession and did thirty days on Rikers. It was enough to sober him up. Sharing cells with old scags and Maytags. He went back to his aunt at the Webster Houses on his hands and knees. Age had softened her heart. Through the cousin of a friend she helped him get a job with the maintenance crew at the Transit Authority. When the drug arrest didn’t show up on the computer search, he told himself there was a God.

A whole new world opened up to him. Work. Earning money. Having something to show at the end of the day. He discovered his own capacity for pulling himself together. He started studying the real estate ads, looking for an apartment to rent. And he met Margo.

Of course, she was too good for him. She wore muslin pants and peasant blouses and took classes at Hunter. And had a cupboard full of herbal teas with names he couldn’t pronounce. She was working at the DMV but studying to be a nurse. A good-hearted Irish Catholic girl from a Sunnyside family. He met her dancing
in front of a jukebox at a bar called the Dispatch in Kingsbridge, where transit workers used to hang out. Ernest the conductor had been trying to pick her up for months without any success. But she gave John a smile she’d been keeping to herself for years. No one in her family could figure out what she was doing with a lowlife like him—though her da was a drunk and her sister was a junkie, mind you. They made each other happy for a while. Especially in bed. She’d offer her perfect peach of an ass and let him take her from behind. The ride of his life. Better than the A train even.