The Intruder (14 page)

They honeymooned in Atlantic City. Checked into the Marriott in Absecon and realized by dinnertime that they were outclassed. Surrounded by shipping executives with golf clubs. They checked out by nine and went to stay at the Econo-Lodge near the boardwalk. By Saturday morning, they’d spent all their money at the slots and blackjack tables and were heading back to the Bronx. By six o’clock, they were holding hands and drinking Jack Daniel’s at the Dispatch. All they’d ever wanted was to be together anyway.

They had Shar six months after they were married and the walls of his chest moved back to make room for his enlarged heart. From just looking at her in the incubator he could tell she’d inherited her mother’s restless spirit and generous soul. He began to see himself in a different way. As a family man. With dreams of moving out of their cramped apartment on Bailey Avenue and buying a house in Woodlawn. He began moving up the ladder at the MTA. From cleaner to clerk to conductor to motorman within five years. Double shifts and no drugs. Except for the odd amphetamine to stay awake and the occasional joint to cool down after work. This is the Allerton Avenue station. Watch the closing doors. Every weekend in Van Cortlandt Park with Shar and Margo. Pushing her in the stroller and later teaching her how to catch the ball like Danny Cater. She looked like a fairy princess and wrestled like a Seminole alligator. She liked trains, so he bought her a set of Brio train tracks. Sunlight through the trees. The memory of love.

God made everything.

God took my mother.

God made me suffer. God made me lonely. Then God gave me you, to make up for it.

The molecules shift. She waves to him from across the street. The light turns red. The screech of brakes. He tries to reach her.

She died in his arms.

He knew it couldn’t last. It was all a dream. The rest of his life was the harsh reality. After Shar was gone, everything fell apart. Even his marriage to Margo. They couldn’t bear to be together anymore because they reminded each other of what they’d lost. He kept working for a year but he was empty and broken inside. It was just a matter of time until he ended up back out on the street. He was living in a house without foundations.

They give him Ativan and he sleeps for a while. Soon the images begin to slow down. Birth, school, work, death. He awakes to the hum of fluorescent lights. By the time he moves on to his first dose of Haldol, the world starts to make a dreary sort of sense again. A kind of pressure builds up with sobriety. It nags and then threatens to overwhelm him. He’s alone, he tells himself, and utterly bereft in the hash he’s made of his life. Waiting to die from the disease spreading inside him.

The hospital is intolerable. Too many rules, too much order, too much time to recognize the world for what it is. As soon as he gets out, he decides, he must get high and stay high until his vital functions give out.

After forty-eight hours, the lawyer from Mental Hygiene Legal Services comes to see him in the dayroom. A rerun of
Bewitched
is on the TV.

“You can stay here or I can help you get out,” says the lawyer.

“Help me get out.”

19

What’s the matter, don’t you have a cleaning girl?”

Philip Cardi’s face appears through the bars of the front gate.

It’s three days after the fruit-throwing incident and Jake is still finding little pieces of peach and plum tucked into the corners of the hallway. He puts down the mop and opens the gate.

“Our friend, the bum,” he says with a sheepish smile. “He got a little wild the other night.”

Philip looks at the bucket and Jake’s yellow rubber gloves. “Every time I see you, you’re cleaning up after him.”

“Seems that way, doesn’t it?”

Jake’s going to have to fire the cleaning lady, Esmeralda. She sits around all day, watching the Weather Channel and Pay-Per-View movies. He gives Philip a check for fixing the glass in the front door.

“What’s this?” says Philip. “I told you I’d do it for free.”

“I insist.” Jake nudges him.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Come on, let me give you a tour.”

He leads Philip down the hall past the living room and into the dining room. It feels good, showing somebody from the old neighborhood his beautiful house. Not in an
ain’t-I-hot-shit
kind of way. More like:
Hey, look, one of us regular shmucks off the street made it.

But instead of following him right into the dining room, Philip hangs back in the doorway, checking out the oak table, the Louis XIV chairs, and the chandelier. Jake hesitates, wondering if maybe he has been acting a little too much like an ostentatious fuckhead.

“What is that?” says Philip, pointing at the chandelier. “Cut glass?”

“Yeah.” Jake looks surprised. “You into antiques?”

“I like to look once in a while. That must’ve cost, what, ten thousand?”

“Something like that.”

Philip whistles, impressed. His eyes settle on the white mantel over the fireplace. He goes over to give it a closer look.

“So I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”

“Who?”

“Your guy. The bum.” He glances back at Jake with a tough mouth and eyes as clear as marbles.

“Yeah, my wife, she made a call. They’ve got him locked up at Bellevue.”

“Hey, that’s great,” says Philip. But something flat and cold in his voice tells Jake he’s either skeptical or disappointed. “I hope they keep him there. I think the fuckin’ guy stole a hammer from my truck last week.”

“Yeah, well, he’s asked for a hearing tomorrow to get out. So I’m gonna go see if I can lend a hand by offering my alleged
expertise.
“Jake smiles self-effacingly.

“Good luck getting the system to work for you.”

Again there’s that look that’s hard to read. Eyes downcast, mouth slightly puckered. Jake wonders if he’s fallen in Philip’s estimation by letting a woman get involved.

“Hey, is that Bob Berger?” Philip asks, turning his attention to a framed picture of Jake and Bob in tuxes on the mantel.

“Yeah, you know him?”

“A friend of mine did some contracting work for him a few years ago. Seemed like a good guy. He paid for the dry-wall, at any rate.”

“Bob’s a piece of work.”

Philip reaches up and touches the soot smear over the picture. “Yeah, you definitely got carbon leaking,” he says, switching gears.

“So what’s it gonna take to fix it?”

“I don’t know.” Philip shrugs. “Could be something or it could be nothing. You might have a bird’s nest in your chimney or a problem with your boiler.”

“Does this mean we’re going to have to start chopping into our walls?” Jake asks.

Five thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars. He tries to remember how much money they have in the checking account. But it’s not so much the amount; it’s the principle of spending more money on this place, instead of salting it away for Alex’s college fund.

Jake knew the house wasn’t perfect when they bought it, but he didn’t mean for it to be a full-time fixer-upper. He could imagine Bob Berger saying, “Tell that Jew to put the soldering iron down before he hurts himself.” Jake can handle the minor home repairs himself, but when it comes to major improvements, he’s a lawyer, not a carpenter.

“You’re going to have to keep an eye on this,” says Philip. “The one thing you want to be sure of is that the repair isn’t worse than the problem. You have a nice house. You don’t want to fuck it up just to get rid of a minor obstruction.”

A minor obstruction, thinks Jake. That’s a good way to describe this John G. It’s the same thing Dana was trying to tell him about yelling out the window. Don’t make the repair worse than the problem.

“So you know anybody who could handle the job?” he asks Philip.

“I could give it a shot.”

“You sure?” Jake feels a ripple of envy; he wishes he could do more things with his hands.

“Yeah,” says Philip, checking his watch. A Rolex, Jake notices. Pretty ritzy for a regular contractor. Maybe just a knockoff. “I don’t have time right now, but would there be somebody around to let me in early next week?”

Jake considers the options. Esmeralda, the cleaning lady, will be history by Monday. That means he’ll either have to hang around the house himself to let Philip in, when he’s due in court all week, or have to arrange for Alex to do it—a dubious bit of responsibility for a teenager. Besides, he shudders to think what Philip would say if he saw the boy’s nose ring. What the hell. Philip already did a good job fixing the glass in the door; the handyman over on Broadway charges $25 an hour and does squat. Jake feels that he can really trust this guy. Hey, he’s from the old neighborhood.

“I’ll get you a set of keys,” he tells Philip.

20

Jake is just settling into the witness box the next afternoon when John G.’s lawyer rises and points to him.

“Your Honor, I object to this man’s presence,” says Steve Baum, a young former probation officer with a discolored patch of skin on his left cheek.

Jake has to stifle the urge to answer. He’s never been in a Mental Hygiene hearing before. The hospital courtroom looks about the same: the judge sits up on a bench flanked by the American flag and a sleeping court officer. But there are subtle differences. For one thing, all the lawyers and the defendant sit at the same long table before the judge. For another, Jake is the one testifying today, instead of cracking the whip as an attorney.

He looks over at John G., ten feet away, resting his head on his arms. A thrift shop tweed jacket is draped over his shoulders and a skinny tie is wrapped around his neck.

“Your Honor,” says the lawyer for the hospital, Robin Hamilton Jr., the son of a famous TV and movie comic. “We feel Mr. Schiff is uniquely qualified to give testimony today. Not only is he a member of the bar and a part of the community, he’s the one Mr. Gates has been harassing.”

“So what?” says Baum, thrusting his hands deep into his jacket pockets. “He has no standing in this courtroom.”

Judge Eugene DeLeon, who’s been distracted writing a note to
himself, looks up and fixes Baum with a beaky stare. “You wanna disqualify this witness?”

“What he has to say has no relevance.” Baum stands. “He’s not a doctor. He’s not in any position to judge whether my client is an imminent danger to himself or to anybody else.”

“All right, all right, let’s get a couple of things straight,” says DeLeon, a cantankerous former prosecutor with a face like a paper bag that’s been crumpled up and smoothed out again. “Mr. Schiff is known to the court as an officer in good standing.”

He nods, silently acknowledging that Jake kicked his ass righteously the last two times they were in state court.

“However, I have to agree with you, Mr. Baum, that what he has to say in this context is of limited value.”

“But—”

“Sorry, partner.” He casts his rheumy eyes over at Jake. “You’re gonna have to step down off that horse.”

The back of Jake’s neck starts to hurt. He wants to stay and argue. In hundreds of his own cases, he’s accepted the jocular give-and-take between judges and lawyers; you win some, lose some. It’s a different feeling, though, with the safety of his own home and his family on the line.

As he leaves the stand, he glances over and sees a
New York Post
opened to the horoscope page on the judge’s table. One of the entries is circled in red and the word “Good!” is written next to it.

Jake’s butt does not rest easily in the spectator section.

Dana is called in next. She comes in through a side door, wearing an olive skirt and a beige linen jacket. She smiles briefly at Jake before she takes the stand and gets sworn in. John G. stares up at her intently, as if she were his opponent in a child custody fight.

Robin Hamilton Jr., who has his father’s bulging eyes and pronounced Adam’s apple, runs through his questions quickly and perfunctorily. Jake wonders if this is his first case. Dana still manages to make a strong argument for Gates staying in the hospital.

“He obviously has a substance abuse problem,” she says, “but we haven’t really had a chance to assess the rest of his needs.
He’s not doing well on the street. He’s seriously decompensating. Maybe with the right medication—”

“Objection,” says Steve Baum. “The witness is not a doctor. Why’s she testifying as an expert?”

Hey, that’s my wife, Jake thinks. On the other hand, he’s right. As a psychiatric social worker, Dana is not qualified to prescribe drugs.

“Well do you think Mr. Gates belongs out on the street?”

“I think he’d benefit from an extended hospital stay,” says Dana.

“Okay, I haven’t got any other questions.” Hamilton sits down. The man was born to throw in the towel, Jake thinks.

Baum rises slowly for the cross-examination, studying the loose-leaf binder in his hands. He doesn’t seem like a young man, Jake notices. He moves with too much gravity. There’s an air of bitter preoccupation about him, as if he’s constantly reexamining old wounds and arguments.

“Ms. Schiff,” he says. “I gather from your notes here that Mr. Gates was your client. Is that correct?”

“After I saw him in the ER, I agreed to see him at the outpatient clinic,” Dana answers in a composed voice.

Before she can go on, Baum is on to the next question. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Well. . .”

“Do you see any of your other patients from the emergency room at the clinic?” A singed left eyebrow goes up. The patch on his face is a skin graft, Jake now realizes.

“No, but—”

Baum cuts her off again. A lawyer’s trick that Jake’s used a hundred thousand times himself. Get them to dance to your rhythm.

“Well, so you agreed to see Mr. Gates on an outpatient basis because his prognosis for recovery seemed so good.” Baum waves the book at her. “At least that’s the story according to your handwritten notes. Right?”

Dana starts to blush and stammer a little. “Well, well, that was before—”