Housebreaking (5 page)

As he thumbed through the albums, Leonard lingered over pictures of Myra, so vivid in her prime: Myra in her tennis whites at the club, racket in hand; Myra on the beach in Sarasota, reclining on a lounge chair; Myra in ski pants at the foot of the mountain in Stowe, leaning on her ski poles.

He pulled another stack of photo albums from the bottom shelf, breathing heavily, pushing aside board games and poker chips, coughing on the dust. He opened their honeymoon album, covered in white leather:
Bermuda, Summer of 1959
. He'd taken these pictures with his Hasselblad 1600f with its eighty-millimeter lens, a camera he'd bought in Paris a few years after the war. The photographs were three-inch squares. The negatives, nearly as big, were contained in an envelope, taped to the back cover of the album. Leonard had always been well organized with his hobbies.

There was Myra, twenty-seven years old in a white bathing suit outside the cottage they'd rented on the grounds of the Black Angus Hotel, posing Hollywood-style, one hand behind her head, hip cocked. Every night they dined at the same small corner table in the hotel restaurant. “We'll have the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,” she would tell the waiter. “We're hungry people.”

His beautiful Myra, so young, so full of life. How proud he'd been, walking arm in arm with her through the hotel dining room. “You're a lucky man,” the waiter had confided to him one night. Lucky, indeed. Leonard could see the joy in his face in the final photo in the honeymoon album, slightly out of focus: Leonard grinning, his eyes narrowed to slits against the sun. He had the woman of his dreams, with a lifetime ahead of them.

His eyes watered. The loss was nearly unbearable. How could he express it in words? When his neighbor Betty Amato called to check on him, when she asked how he was doing, he would always say the same thing:
Not very well without Myra. Not very well at all.
He missed her every hour, every day.
I know, Leonard
, Betty would say,
I miss her too. I miss her so much.
That would start him crying again, and Betty would say,
But you can't dwell on it. You have to move on or you'll make yourself sick with grief.
Move on? How could he tell her that there was no possibility
of moving on? That there was nothing left for him, no life without Myra? She couldn't understand. Neither could Benjamin or Sissi. For them, life was about looking ahead, about what would happen next.

There was one final photo album. Leonard flipped absentmindedly through the pages, and there it was, the shot of Terri Funkhouser. He'd almost forgotten he was looking for it. In the picture, she was posed exactly as he'd remembered—standing tall and proud in a flashy red dress, cocktail glass in hand—but she was younger than he'd thought (barely into her twenties, by the look of her), and Leonard had forgotten the other person in the photograph, with her arm curled around Terri Funkhouser's waist: Myra herself, wearing a short black cocktail dress and pearls. How young they seemed, the two women staring into the lens, unsmiling. He removed the photograph from its cellophane sheath and turned it over:
Summer solstice party 1963,
Myra had written on the back.

Leonard carried the photograph to his desk in the hallway and dialed Terri Funkhouser's number. Benjamin had gone outside; Leonard could see him through the front window, standing on the lawn, talking to some woman—the new neighbor, he guessed, who'd moved into Eleanor Hufnagle's house. Just as well, Leonard figured. He wouldn't need to keep his voice down. He hadn't told Benjamin about his outing with Terri Funkhouser. Benjamin might find it disloyal of him, calling another woman. But Leonard only wanted to tell her about the photograph and offer to send her a copy. It would be a quick phone call, before his son came back inside.

She answered immediately.

“I've got a picture of you,” he said.

“Not from last night, I hope.”

“From 1963. It's you and Myra at a cocktail party on the patio in my backyard. You're wearing a red dress.”

“Dick bought that dress for me at Saks. I told him it made me look like a streetwalker, but he insisted.”

“Myra has her arm around your waist.”

“Myra was lovely. I always envied her those almond eyes and her figure—so trim, not falling out everywhere like you-know-who. You had the pick of the litter, Len.”

“I did. I did.” This started him crying again, though he tried to hide it by clearing his throat.

“Don't get weepy on me. I told you last night, I can't stand that sort of thing.”

“I'm surprised you can remember last night.”

“Of course I remember. Did you do what I asked? Did you call your doctor?”

“My doctor?”

“
Viagra
, Len. The little blue pills.”

“For goodness' sake, Terri. You're not serious.”

“Of course I'm serious. It'll be a nice change for you. Don't underestimate the benefits of a good lay. You'll feel twenty years younger.”

“Don't talk like that. Dickie will hear you.”

“Dickie's out with his shiksa. And he wouldn't care anyway. He wants us to be friends, remember. This whole thing was his idea.”

“You and Myra.” He sighed, holding the photograph a few inches from his face. He'd left his reading glasses in the den. Somehow it made him feel closer to Myra, seeing her together with Terri. “The two of you. You look like movie stars. I'll show it to you.”

“When?”

“Soon. Soon.”

“Get the pills first. But you have to be able to do five push-ups.”

“Push-ups? What are you talking about?”

“The doctors won't give you the pills if they're worried about your heart. They don't want you jumping into bed and having a coronary, which is what happens sometimes with old devils like yourself. So they'll ask you to do five push-ups before they'll write a prescription.”

“That's nonsense.”

“Trust me, Len. I've been through this before. You did push-ups in the Army, right?”

“Navy.”

“Then it'll be no problem for you.”

She fumbled the phone, and a moment later the line went dead. Leonard shook his head. Barely past noon and she was drunk again. The way she talked, she had to be drunk. Or maybe just teasing. Didn't she know that he hadn't been with a woman for twenty years? And a woman other than Myra for how long—fifty years?

He went back to the den and slid the picture of Myra and Terri Funkhouser into its cellophane holder. Then he gathered the photo albums,
got to his hands and knees, and stacked them on the bottom shelf in the closet. He sat on the rug, resting for a few moments.

Five push-ups! Could she possibly be serious? He hadn't done push-ups since his Navy days, but back then they'd performed marathon sessions, one hundred at a time, more. Leonard was fit. A bit hunched, the years weighing on his back, but not overweight; he'd never been overweight, never smoked, never drank as much as the others—Terri Funkhouser, Myra, Bob Amato; they'd poured it down like water. He had always been the one to drive them home. He'd played golf every Sunday at the country club during the season, competing in tournaments well into his sixties, until at last he'd torn his rotator cuff to shreds slicing a three wood.

Leonard stretched out on the rug. Good thing Benjamin couldn't see him now. How could he explain these gymnastics? He took a deep breath and pushed himself off the floor.

“One,” he said aloud. “Two. Three—”

He felt it coming, a welling up, like a storm rising.

He never reached five.

* * *

SOME MINUTES EARLIER
, sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper, Benjamin had glanced up to see the dog through the kitchen window—an odd sight in suburbia: a malamute trotting up the street without leash, without master.

He'd seen the dog before, tied to a tree outside the old farmhouse, roaming the lawn on a thirty-foot line:
her
dog.

Immediately, he jumped to his feet. Like any good salesman, Benjamin Mandelbaum knew when to seize an opportunity. He grabbed a turkey leg out of the refrigerator, picked Yukon's old leash off the hook by the kitchen door, and hurried outside.

He whistled. The dog turned toward him, both ears raised. When Benjamin tossed the turkey leg onto the lawn, the dog ambled over to inspect the offering, and Benjamin reached out and snapped the latch onto its collar.

Gotcha.

* * *

FOR THE PAST MONTH
, since he'd moved back into his father's house, Benjamin had kept a sort of vigil. Each morning on his way to work he would linger at the stop sign at the bottom of the street to inspect the
farmhouse. Most days there would be a workman's truck or van parked in the driveway, sometimes a whole fleet—plumbers, landscapers, carpenters, painters. On his way home, he would examine what they'd accomplished during the day. The row of tall pines along Mountain Road was cleared, the logs and stumps cut up and removed, the brush fed into a wood chipper. A fresh coat of paint was applied, the house a soft gray, the shutters barn red. The split-rail fence rose up from where it had fallen.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, he'd gotten his first glimpse of her, walking her dog up the street. He'd squinted. There was the red hair, down to her shoulders. Yes, it was her, it was
his
Audrey Martin, he knew in the first instant. That night he'd pulled out the yearbook again. In addition to her senior picture, there were three other shots of Audrey Martin: a candid of her lying on a blanket on the senior green; the group photo of the gymnastics team with her kneeling in the front row; and the cast picture from the spring musical, with Audrey dressed in leather pants as Sandy in
Grease
, wearing too much makeup. He wondered where her life had taken her since Goodwin, and how she had ended up living on his childhood street. They had expected so much of her; she had everything—talent, beauty, intelligence, athletic grace. (Not to mention that fine ass.)

He closed the yearbook, distracted. A Pavlovian reaction of sorts had occurred, almost against his wishes, the same thrill that had seized him every June in high school on the day they handed out the new yearbooks, smelling of ink and glossy paper. He had a hard-on. Did the other boys do as he did, race home and flip from one page to the next, gorging on images of Wendy Brewster and Wendy Yelton, the girls' soccer team photo? Back then, it had offered more excitement than
Playboy
or
Penthouse
, the intimacy of knowing the girls in the photos, even if they weren't naked on a hay bale. He'd turned on his laptop and lowered the volume so as not to wake his father in the next room. He hadn't had sex in more than a month, the longest period of abstinence of his adult life. Maybe
abstinence
was the wrong word—did abstinence include jerking off every other night, a forty-four-year-old man tiptoeing downstairs to do the laundry so his father wouldn't find his soiled boxer briefs? It was pathetic, he knew. Likewise, this infatuation with Audrey Martin. She was someone's wife now, his high school dream girl long gone.

So far being single wasn't what Benjamin had expected. Since Judy kicked him out, he hadn't gone on a single date. His social life amounted to a stop at Starbucks on his way home from work, where he'd smile at the young woman who handed over his decaf latte. “Would you like your receipt, sir?” To her, he was another middle-aged man, an automaton in a blue suit. Once in a while the pretty barista would come out from behind the counter to sweep the floor or refill the condiments, wearing low-cut jeans under her green apron, a black thong peeking out. The vision caused a hollow in his gut, a desperate longing as sharp as an ulcer. Was this pain going to last indefinitely? Would he be a seventy-year-old codger, alone and unhappy? How could he meet someone new in this town? No matter where he looked, his attentions were inappropriate. He lived in a town populated by married people and their minor children. The trio of schoolgirls studying at the big table in their uniform of blue jeans and Uggs: They were younger than his daughter. The woman with the Coach bag, waiting impatiently in line: Her ring finger sported a hefty diamond.

During all the years of his marriage it had seemed that single women were everywhere, in stores, restaurants, on the streets. Where had they gone, all those possibilities? At the dealership, an accountant came into the office twice a week to do the books. She was in her late thirties, her hair pulled back, usually dressed in a skirt and a silky blouse. Her arrival in the morning—the click of her heels on the tile floor of the showroom—caused a sort of primordial explosion in his brain, obliterating the possibility of higher thought. But she was off-limits, like the secretaries and saleswomen. He'd learned that lesson ten years earlier, when one of the senior salesmen got the company involved in a sexual harassment lawsuit, costing their insurance carrier a $200,000 settlement. (The fool had been obsessed with one of the female mechanics. He'd left obscene notes in her locker and messages on her home answering machine for six months.) Two hundred thousand dollars! The figure had sent Leonard into paroxysms. “She had to sue? She couldn't say to him, ‘Go fly a kite'?”

During his marriage, Benjamin had engaged in two affairs, and both times Judy had caught him. The first was Annika, nineteen and free-spirited, the Dutch au pair. She'd arrived at their doorstep, barely proficient in English, impossibly beautiful. This had been Judy's idea, hiring an au pair, something she thought rich people did. One afternoon she walked
in on the two of them in the guest room, smoking pot naked, with a Swedish pop song that was big that summer playing on the tape player. (Later, whenever the band's sole hit played on the radio, Judy skewered him with an “Oh listen, they're playing your song.”) She sent the girl back to the agency and relegated Benjamin to the very same guest room for the next six months. A trial basis, she called it, contingent on his attendance at couples' therapy twice a week. He went along with it—six months of regret and desperation, anxiety and self-recrimination—until he finally won Judy's forgiveness. Deep down, he saw the fault as partly hers, for her betrayal with the fireman, although he hadn't justified his actions that way to Judy. Still, he'd had his mulligan with the au pair; and so they were even.