The Intruder (23 page)

Kids. The truth was the kids were just background noise to him. Blurred reflections of a misconceived union. Two more things he
couldn’t control. That made him feel trapped. No wonder he felt happier sometimes beating people over the head with baseball bats and crowbars. At least then they’d do what you want. You had some control over them. It was his biological imperative. To dominate.

But now he has this divorce to think about. He couldn’t believe it when Nita served him with papers five months ago and asked him to move out. The
infamia!
At least he’s been able to keep Carmine from finding out about it so far, since Nita’s covering for him. No one else in the family has ever even thought about getting a divorce. ‘Til death do us part. Isn’t that what it says? That means you stay together until you kill each other. But then Nita had the nerve to say, “I’m sorry, Philip. I just can’t do this witchoo anymore. You need help.”

He needs help? She’s the one needs help. What the fuck was the matter with her? Didn’t she understand she couldn’t just leave him? It wasn’t that he ever wanted to fuck her again. But she belonged to him. The kids too. No one else could have them. In fact, he’d just as soon see them all dead before he’d let another man move into the house and take his place.

He veers off the LIE and takes the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway south to Sunrise Highway. Barry Manilow breaks through static on the radio. “I Made It Through the Rain.” Guilty pleasure floods Philip’s bloodstream like pure sugar. His other dirty secret: unlike other guys in the crew, he prefers Manilow to Sinatra. Somehow Manilow understands what guys like Philip have been through. What it’s like to be rained on.

He decides to go by the wife’s house again and see what she’s up to. Hell, it’s just three, four miles from the Gateway Motor Lodge where he’s been staying in Merrick and he has a right to know what’s going on with her. More than a right: an imperative. He’s not just some stalker. He was married to the bitch.

As he pulls in across the street on Andrews Lane, he barely takes notice of the red Caprice that’s been following him for a couple of blocks. He’s too busy looking at the strange car in the driveway.

A blue Chrysler. His blood begins to make noise. Has she let another man move in already? Philip can’t believe it. He’s already killed someone this week. Is he going to have to do it again? He reaches for the bat in the backseat.

36

Jake
can’t quite get comfortable in bed. He turns to the right, but there are three sharp creases under his side. He turns to the left, but the pillow is too hard.

His thoughts keep going around like clothes in a dryer. He’s going to be implicated in a murder. Someone’s going to find out. A man’s dead because of his actions. Probably two men. He feels sickened. What could he have done differently? He flips onto his back and his stomach starts to growl.

These are the hours when a man adds things up and tries to justify the life that he’s lived.

“What are you thinking about?”

He freezes. He hadn’t even realized Dana was awake.

“Nothing.”

“You’re never thinking about nothing.” She brushes his left temple with her fingertips. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on or are you going to make me guess?”

He sits up and looks at her in the dark. She seems somehow smaller and more vulnerable, nestled in the sheets.

“I think I’m gonna get a beer,” he says. “You want anything?”

She looks at him as if she knows something that he doesn’t. She says nothing.

He gets up off the bed, wraps a towel around his middle, and starts to go downstairs. From the landing above, he hears Alex
making a sound on his guitar like a monkey being strangled and smells incense burning. Incense. It makes him think of Earth Day in Central Park and old Iron Butterfly records. Has his sixteen-year-old son become a pothead on entering eleventh grade? The temptation is there to burst through the door and question him like a hostile witness. But what good would that do? If he finds nothing, Alex’s wellspring of resentment will be replenished for years to come. My father, what an asshole. Better to move on right now, and find another way to come back to it.

He continues down the stairs to the first floor, some of the steps groaning and sinking suspiciously under his feet. The last thing he needs is another contractor to fix the treads.

He comes off the last step and turns left across the wide hallway with the newly finished parquet floors. From the kitchen ten feet away, he hears a sudden scuffling noise. He stops. Someone is there. Moving across the wood floor, brushing against the stove. Has Philip come back?

It doesn’t seem fair. Jake’s not ready for him. He should have called the locksmith. He backs up several feet to the antique brass umbrella stand by the front door. He feels around for a sturdy umbrella. Not one of those $3 Korean jobs you buy from Senegalese peddlers on Broadway. But a good solid $45 number from Saks with a maplewood handle. He grabs it and comes back toward the kitchen cautiously.

The sound becomes more and more distinct. Nails scratching the marble countertop near the sink. He stands in the doorway and flips on the light. A large black-brown rat is standing by the dishrack. He stares at Jake with dark beady eyes. His long yellow fangs are bared and his belly quivers. Daring Jake to enter. Like the kitchen is already his domain. He gives a razory little squeak and rears back on his hind legs. Jake feels the towel slipping off his middle and dinner rising in his esophagus. The umbrella isn’t going to do him any good. He moves slowly to the right, toward the cabinets Dana recently had redone. Where they keep the pots and pans.

The rat creeps up to the edge of the counter, its forefeet pawing the air. Considering which part of Jake to sink its teeth into
first. Just seven feet of kitchen floor separate them. Jake saw rats make much longer leaps at the Marlboro Houses. Mr. Colangelo from upstairs spent a week in the hospital with bites on his right ankle. Jake opens the cabinet door carefully and takes out a long-handled cast-iron skillet. The rat cocks its head to the left, as if it’s curious about what’s going to happen.

Alex’s music curdles and squeals upstairs. A garbage truck rolls by outside. Four years of law school, ten years slugging it out in private practice, a lifetime trying to get out of Gravesend and trying to get Gravesend out of his mind, and still he has rats in the kitchen of his million-dollar town house. He suddenly lunges with the skillet. The rat backs up quickly and throws itself against the tiled wall, unable to find the hole it entered through. Jake brings the skillet down hard, smashing a primrose-bordered teacup, but the rat dances out of the way with an excited squeal. It hides behind a Williams-Sonoma dish like a sniper in a World War II movie. Then it peeks around the side, ready to jump at Jake.

There’s no hesitation now. Jake swings the skillet again, smashing the plate and the rat. The rodent teeters to the right a bit, like its sense of balance is impaired. But Jake doesn’t trust the injury. He attacks once more, slamming the rat with all his might, crushing its skull into the counter, so it will never threaten him and his family again. Three more shots just to be sure. Then he stands back to see what damage he’s done. The rat lies flat, its paws outstretched, brackish dark blood oozing from its sides and its skull. The pink marble countertop around it is dented and chipped where Jake struck it with the skillet.

He turns and sees Dana standing behind him in the doorway. Staring at him as if he were the intruder. He lowers the skillet but before he can say anything, she turns and goes back upstairs.

37

Philip walks across the front lawn, limbering up his shoulders and taking practice swings with the baseball bat. Is he going to give Nita and her new boyfriend a beating first and then ask questions, or the other way around? He hasn’t made up his mind. He just knows that if he finds another man there he won’t be responsible for the carnage.

For some reason, the revolving sprinkler is going. Throwing ropes of water into the night air. Bitch.

Suddenly a light flashes behind him and a voice over a loudspeaker says his name.

He turns just as two Nassau County police officers come rushing at him and force him face-first down into the crabgrass. Soil and pesticides fill his nostrils. He looks up and sees he’s surrounded by five cops. A malevolent surprise party. Two of the others wear NYPD uniform shirts. The fifth’s in plain clothes. As big and round as a beach ball, he is. With a face as black as Flip Wilson’s. A fucking
mulignan’,
for crying out loud. He sits down on Philip’s stomach and shoves the gun right in his face. Now Philip knows affirmative action has gone too far.

“You’re under arrest, asshole,” says the cop. “You fuckin’ move, I’ll blow your damned head off.”

Philip looks up and sees Nita and the kids watching him
through the living room window. Those same forlorn expressions: Our daddy’s done it again.

He doesn’t want them to see him like this, yet when Nita draws the curtains, he feels angry and abandoned. Fucking bitch. Just wait until he finally gets home.

38

The next morning John G. shows up at the Interfaith Volunteers Center, a crumbling old town house just off Broadway with chain-link gates over the windows.

Inside, the smells of urine and strong ammonia vie for supremacy. A tall black man with a long scar across his bald head meticulously mops the checkered linoleum floor in the hallway. He works in long straight streaks so that exactly half the floor is wet and half the floor is dry.

John G. studies his work cautiously before deciding to step on the dry side.

“Hey, goddamn it, what’s the matter with you?” the man with the scar on his head snaps. “Can’t you see I just got done with that side?”

John G. just stares at him with his mouth hanging open, not sure where to step next.

“Ah, just go on ahead,” the man snarls in disgust. “Shit.”

John G. edges past him and goes looking for the center’s director, Elaine Greenglass. He finds her in a surprisingly clean office at the end of the hall. A short anxious woman behind a tall stack of files. She has fine Latinate features and billowing black curly hair, which she seems intent on pulling out one hair at a time with her left hand. Her right hand lies on her desk, having its nails painted red by a sallow girl with a silver ring through her left eyebrow.

“What’s the matter?” Ms. Greenglass asks suddenly, not giving John G. a chance to introduce himself.

“Nothing.”

She puts on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “I’m sorry,” she says, all twitches and flutters. “I thought you were one of the regular residents. I was worried there might have been another stabbing.”

Stabbing. Hospitals. Blood transfusions. John G. starts thinking this might not be the place for him.

“It wasn’t a resident that got stabbed,” says Ms. Greenglass quickly, seeing his hesitation. “It was two security guards who got in a fight and stabbed each other. We’re looking for another company.”

She stands up to welcome John G. into the room and the girl with the ring through her eyebrow departs.

“Are you one of the people who came in through our outreach program?” Ms. Greenglass asks tremulously.

“I have a card.”

He searches his back pockets for the tattered and crumpled card Dr. Wadhwa gave him at the hospital.

But the card is no longer there. He looks down at the floor. Black-and-white linoleum squares. The pattern starts to give him trouble. He looks back at Ms. Greenglass.

“I need a place,” he says.

“Okay!” She tugs on a clump of hair.

His eyes flick over to two small posters taped to a rusting green file cabinet.
DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE!”
And
ONE OF THESE DAYS I GOTTA GET MYSELF ORGANIZISIZED!!
It’s as if Ms. Greenglass is using the posters to admonish herself, and John G. feels like he’s interrupted a personal conversation.

“Did the volunteer explain the rules?”

“I didn’t see any volunteer.”

“Well I can fill you in.” She pulls out a form. “We’re a not-for-profit organization specializing in helping the mentally ill and substance abusers.”

“Then I’m your man,” John says.

She twists another ringlet of hair around her left index finger.
“If you’re accepted, you’ll be expected to participate in five NA meetings a week and two encounter groups a day, including self-esteem sessions. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Uh, I guess it’s okay.” John G. feels himself break into a cold sweat. He hadn’t realized there’d be this many rules.

“I also must warn you, some of the men don’t do well in a structured setting.” Ms. Greenglass takes her glasses off. “They start to decompensate when they stop using their regular drugs.”

Part of him wants to turn on his heel and leave right now. But the other part reminds him he doesn’t feel safe on the street anymore. Who knows if he’ll run into the guys with the baseball bats again?

“So do you think you might be interested in being here?” Ms. Greenglass asks.

John G. notices she’s wearing a pair of gold earrings shaped like ram’s heads. Nothing ostentatious enough to get them torn off her earlobes on the subway, but tasteful and probably expensive in a quiet way. He wonders if she’s another rich lady slumming it with volunteer work or if somehow she’s making good money off this.

“I’d want to know if I can have my own room,” he says suddenly.

“Well first you have to make it through the interview process.” Ms. Greenglass grimaces in distaste, leaving lipstick stains on her upper row of teeth. “Generally speaking, we prefer to have the men bunk five or six to a room. We feel it gives them a chance to reinforce therapeutic values.”

An elderly man with a whiskery nose and stubby fingers barges into the room, wearing a blue
Don’t Ask Me 4 Shit
T-shirt.

“Do I know you?” he asks John G.