Authors: Colin Harrison
Fucking good question, Peter thought.
He seems almost to despise the work. What stupid irony; he worked so hard to get there, and gave up so much to work for the D.A. I remember one night when I was home early and looking for the checkbook in the den and I came across a stack of his work files, just papers he had thrown on his desk the previous evening—between the two of us and our work, I sometimes think this city is one of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. So much suffering. I guess he didn’t need the files at work that day. It was a trial prep report. I remember I felt curious. I opened up the file and saw this photograph of the young girl they found in the trainyards out by 30th Street. The one who was found under the pile of railroad ties. She and her boyfriend had been arguing, the boyfriend drinking. He killed her, hid the body, was arrested after being questioned. I remember standing in the den thinking that
this
is the kind of stuff Peter has to deal with each day and he brings it into the house. How can a man think about this stuff and also be thinking about love and raising kids?
Sometimes I try to touch myself but it seems so uninteresting, so
pathetic.
We always thought no matter how badly we fought that it would bring us back together. We could be screaming at each other and it was as if we were actually
preparing
to make love, the anger becoming incredible until either we destroyed each other or made love, which sometimes was the same thing. Foolish. We tried to fill up the emptiness of the other time by getting in bed. The thing I finally understood about Peter was that we underplayed his sexuality. He softened himself, so not to threaten me. I think it scares him. I think he doesn’t understand his own urges. He used to say that one reason he loved me was that I let him go someplace and come back safely. That state where it was all just in one direction, where he couldn’t think. I sort of understand—I translate to my terms, just that warmth all over, feeling so full. But sooner or later the sex goes. It has to.
More sad truth blasted from the coal mine, chunking its way to the surface for him to inspect, the faulted facts on which he’d been standing. Peter put the journal aside. He’d tried to hug Janice and kiss her and she would go rigid in his arms, like a high-school girl terrified of getting pregnant. He got tired of reaching out and stopped trying to warm her up. That had only made things worse. And as for Janice thinking that he was scared of his own urges—well, he had to hand it to her, she knew him down to the cells in his marrow. Yes, so often he needed either to have sex or to break something or fight. That’s why he loved being in court.
You were allowed to fight,
to escape from all that pacifist Quaker stuff! The combat was verbal and stylized and played within rules, but you were still fighting, fighting to put somebody away, fighting to soothe the victim’s family. And just fighting for the pure pleasure of disagreeing and slicing up the other guy and generally scaring the shit out of the defendant. How pleasurable it was to fight, to push against an invisible wall of existence, the searching that is sex, just pushing and shoving and trying to drive toward whatever was on the other side … He glanced at his watch, decided to read a few more pages.
I’m 30 and Mother had a miscarriage at 33. It happened in her bed—she only mentioned it once. I see young mothers and I just
want
that baby. Almost a hurt.
Wednesday: The house is coming along. The carpenters rehung the windows on the first floor today. They had to pry out the sides of the frames and get at the long heavy iron weights inside the wall that make it easier to open the windows. The furnace is still not working very well. Tomorrow the plasterer comes. It’s exciting to re-create a house. It makes leaving Delancey Street easier. I just feel small and contained and autonomous here, here amongst the starkness.
The police electrician came today and wired the house for the police call button. The one at the other house gets used maybe five times a year. But we made a few changes. Instead of in the living room, we’re putting the button in the upstairs office, which is my bedroom for now. It’s done with the phone lines, somehow.
Thurs.: I weigh 118 pounds. The carpenters are men. We wanted all female crews but it turns out that getting work at the best price means we should hire a contractor who has a crew of men. The foreman’s name is John Apple. He has a marvelous beard, reminds me of a pirate. I trusted him immediately and asked him if he knew the purpose of the renovation. He said he guessed it. I told him to please not inform his crew, and he said this was fine. I wish we could just keep the location an absolute secret, but that’s impossible.
Friday: Today a woman came in. We did the intake. Twenty-four, never finished high school. Three kids. Kept saying she wanted to return to her boyfriend because she loved him. In the past I’ve tried to give a non-directive response in such a situation, though inwardly thinking the guy is probably a jerk, and hoping she would see that. But today I felt for her. I wanted to cry for her and for myself and for all the screwed-up, best-intentioned love that chokes so many hearts. Why is it hard? I’m not stupid
or insensitive. I’m strong and good and Peter is a good man and would give me anything and it didn’t work.
Had another dream about Mother last night. Following her along a path and trying to keep up. I was young. I remember the espadrilles she used to wear in the summer and the shoulderless summer dress with the big square pockets. I loved that dress. I could bury my face in that dress. I wanted so much to hold her hand. I reached out but her hands were so small I couldn’t hold them. It was like they were far away even though I was almost touching them. I called to her. Mother turned around on the path and looked at me. Her face was perfectly made up, a mask. I always thought Mother was beautiful and now she was so beautiful it hurt me. I said something to her and I could see she was trying to talk. But her face was
stuck
—I could see the face under her face, I could see her weeping and the contortedness of her brow and yet I was looking at a perfectly calm smile at the same time, like those trick 3-D pictures that flick back and forth. She opened her mouth, to speak, I thought. She stuck out her tongue and there was a razor blade sticking in it, straight up and down. She looked at me. Did she hate me? Then she pulled her tongue back in and smiled at me. Eyes crinkling, lips pursed daintily, hating everything so prettily. I woke up feeling confused, scared. I looked out the window until the streetlights went off. I do miss Peter.
Saturday: John Apple carried a heavy trash can outside today. He was wearing only a T-shirt and heavy work pants. I like the way his armpit hair stuck out from under his shirt and was sweaty-wet. I started a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Scattergood this evening but I couldn’t finish it.
Sunday: One of the women at the shelter ran into her estranged husband in front of her child’s schoolyard and he pulled her into his car. She jumped out at a traffic light and pulled her daughter out of the car. A taxi cracked into the car and the child suffered a concussion. The father drove off when the police came and now the child is in University Hospital and her mother is in the
shelter, more or less hysterical. All because some jerk yanked her into his car. Today 450 calories. Wasn’t hungry.
Monday: Almost called Peter last night but told myself why? What is the point? We’ll just rehash. Maybe there’s a chance for us, but for now I’ll continue to go ahead with the divorce. I guess.
Tuesday: Last night was such an amazing time that I want to get everything down before I forget. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly—
This
was what Peter had worried about. Janice’s handwriting was small and unusually controlled, which meant, he knew, that she was writing slowly and thoughtfully.
—I was in the kitchen, just back from my run and had taken my sweatpants off. I was sweaty. John came downstairs from the second floor and said, “Miss Scattergood, I’d like to show you something.” There’s something boyish and shy about him. I was all hot from my running and I felt sort of self-conscious in my shorts. He didn’t seem to notice. Maybe I was noticing him. Probably. His back is so wide. I’m used to Peter’s face, which is so fine and sharp. But John has a simpler kind of face, kinder looking, actually. He looks at me and I can tell he feels kindly toward me.
We went downstairs, me first. I felt sort of sexy in my shorts. Don’t usually feel that way. John said he’d found something in the basement he wanted me to have a look at. We went downstairs and he took his flashlight over to a big stone oven built into the wall. He said that often the old houses had an oven in the basement. The chimney system was attached to the chimney of the fireplace above, in the living room, he said. In winter the heat of the oven would rise and warm the house above. In the summer, the basement was a cooler place to work. He made me lie down inside the oven and look up. He opened the flue and I could see a tiny square of daylight very high up. So it was a working oven. Then he told me to look at the
back
of the oven. I did. He
removed two bricks from the oven wall by slipping a screwdriver between the cracks. You would never know the bricks lifted out. Behind the bricks were hinges. They were only a little rusty. He told me to push on the wall. I did and nothing happened. Then he pulled the flue lever next to the oven and told me to push again. I did. The wall swung back and there was a little dark room. You could fit maybe three people in there, all curled up. I asked how they could breathe and he said there was an air vent that went to the upstairs closet. He said the flue was a fail-safe system so that the wall could only be opened when no fire burned in the oven. No one would build a fire without checking the flue, and if they did build one with the flue shut, the fire would draw poorly, not burn, and fill the basement with smoke. Then somebody would open the flue. I said who in the world would build a fake back to an oven? “The Quakers who smuggled slaves,” he said. I told him that my former husband was a Quaker. John said he didn’t realize I was divorced. I said I’d been divorced a year. He said he didn’t mean to be asking such personal questions. Actually I didn’t mind letting him know I was sort of available. I don’t really think of myself that way. John asked me what my ex-husband did. I just said he worked in Center City. We got back to the oven—the neighborhood used to be a mercantile area and, of course, back in the early eighteen-hundreds, the city was run by the Quakers. I knew all this but didn’t say much. The neighborhood was close to the river and that’s where many of the merchants originally lived.
Get to it, Janice,
Peter thought, hating her for her need to recount every detail of what could only be a seduction, pained by and admiring of the earnestness and care with which she lived. He heard noises downstairs but kept reading.
He said he’d recommend that he brick up behind the oven then, not brick up the trap wall but behind it. I said that was fine, keep the wall so we can look at it, but make sure the rats stay out.
Later after all the workers had left, John knocked on the
door. He had a bottle of wine and a bag of groceries and said he wanted to make dinner for us. Also he had brought a kerosene space heater and showed me how to use it. The house will be warmer now! He had gotten some fish and vegetables from the Italian market. So I said yes and we made dinner.
I told myself I wanted nothing to do with any men for six months at least, maybe a year. Janice, a fool for love. John and I went to bed. On my crummy narrow mattress and it was the most romantic thing in the world, just the two of us and a bare room and the wineglasses on the wooden floor. I did everything I could to please him and I liked doing it. Afterward he slept on the floor next to me, using his pants as a pillow and with one arm draped over my back. I really didn’t sleep much. I think he’s about twenty-six. Younger. I lay there with one hand on my breast. The light came into the room about five o’clock. The walls lightened and the shadows moved over John’s back. He slept very still. Peter always plays basketball in his sleep. John lay there so peacefully, so beautifully. About six o’clock, John woke. We made a joke about the painters, how they would lose faith in me. He understood and slipped out before they came. My world is different now. Things change, spin forward, happen. I’m learning. I’m free—
“Find what you needed?” a voice hollered up the stairs.
Peter quickly tossed Janice’s journal back into the spot where he’d found it and darted into the bathroom. He flushed the toilet.
“Yeah, they changed the float valve—the thing that cuts the water off,” said the painter he had spoken to earlier. He pretended to inspect the old porcelain toilet, and, leaning over, saw his face reflected in the water and read the words
AMERICAN STANDARD.
“Looks good,” Peter stalled, his universe rearranging itself inside his head. “Let me ask you about the carpenters. You’re around during the day. Are they overcharging?”
The painter liked being asked a question of expertise.
“Well, they could work harder, if you know what I’m saying. The foreman hangs around, could do more. But they’re doing a decent job. You see the floors downstairs yet?”
He needed to escape.
“Please show me,” he responded weakly, remembering to get his briefcase from Janice’s room, even stealing a last superstitious look at the bed as if it were a place somebody had died or where a terrible accident had occurred. They clumped downstairs and he inspected the tightness of the floor, heard how each board had been hammered in. He looked at his watch in front of the painter, and said he really had to see another property. He walked casually through the front door and fled.
WHEN PETER RETURNED
to the office, he had a stack of calls and fax reports waiting for him. “They got that guy,” a detective from North Philadelphia hollered on the phone. “That guy Carothers isn’t going anywhere now.” The information had come in sudden bits and pieces, and Peter stacked the reports on his desk in chronological order: Late the previous evening, a Kensington police stakeout team had observed four armed men knock over a supermarket. They waited in an old van parked forty feet from the store’s bright windows and watched the men drive up, get out, walk stiffly in, and draw shotguns on the surprised checkout tellers who were running their registers for the shift total. The police watched as the store manager was pistol-whipped before opening the store safe. As planned, the stakeout team called for backup, and three cruisers converged on the holdup team as they exited the store with the night’s cash receipts. The police ordered the men to halt. The men opened fire, blowing out the van’s windshield, and ran to their car, an ancient rust-eaten Lincoln that concealed a well-tuned V-8. The police returned fire, and one man was hit in the buttocks. He hobbled to the getaway car, was kicked aside by his compatriots, and fell to the ground when the car lurched away. The police followed the car, which overshot a turn and crashed against the brick corner of the local African Baptist church. The three men escaped on foot. Meanwhile the stakeout team summoned an ambulance and began attending to the wounded man lying on the oily parking lot. This man was Wayman Carothers, who only six hours before had been released from custody.