Housebreaking (10 page)

“Have you done this before?” he asked.

“What, had sex in someone's father's den?”

He laughed. “You know what I mean.”

“This is a first.”

“I'm your first affair?”

“Yes, Benjamin.”

“Why me?”

“Because you're irresistible. Now stop fishing for compliments and let me enjoy the glow.”

He laughed. “So you weren't faking?”

“Very funny, mister.”

After a minute or two, with the logs cracking and hissing, he grew uncomfortable with the silence. “So what are your plans for Thanksgiving?” he asked, making his salesman's small talk.

“We're staying put this year,” she answered. “We usually go to Andrew's parents' house in Longmeadow, but they already canceled. His father's not feeling well, apparently. It would have been awkward anyway.”

“Why? Your husband still acting weird?”

“There's that. But I've got other trouble now: my daughter. She's giving me the silent treatment.”

“What happened?”

She sighed. “Yesterday she disappeared after school. She didn't even bother to call to say where she was. I waited up all night. She showed up in a taxi at six o'clock this morning, stoned out of her mind. This afternoon I found a stash of prescription pills in her closet. God knows where she gets them.”

“What did you do?”

“I flushed the pills down the toilet. That's why she's mad at me, if you can believe it. I invaded her privacy, she says. I don't know what to do with her.”

“Try grounding her. That always worked with mine. She hated being trapped in the house.”

“What would she want with OxyContin?”

“We smoked grass. Nowadays kids like the designer stuff.”

“I never should have let her go to school in New York City. She always had a wild streak and that certainly didn't help. All those years, all those lessons—and she gets away from home for ten minutes and forgets everything.”

He shrugged. “They have to learn it for themselves. Otherwise, it's like doing their homework for them. It just doesn't sink in.”

“How old is your son?”

“David? He's twenty.”

“Tell me about him,” she said, her gaze lost in the fire.

“He's a great kid. Athletic, smart. He looks a lot like me, actually. He and I haven't talked much lately either, ever since Judy and I announced the divorce. But that's normal for David. He's always been quiet. When something's bothering him, he keeps it bottled up.”

She was silent.

“You're not falling asleep, are you?”

She shook her head. A moment later, he felt her body trembling.

“Is something wrong?”

The tears flowed down her cheeks.

“Hey. What is it?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Was it something I said?”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

“What, then?”

Between sobs, she said, “Just leave it alone.”

He raised up on his elbow. “No, tell me. I want to know.”

He felt her body tense. Finally she said, “Something bad happened, a year and a half ago. I'm not over it. I'll never be over it.”

“Were you . . . raped?”

She wiped her eyes. “No, nothing like that,” she said, her voice changing. “Why would you think that?”

“I was just asking—”

“This isn't Twenty Questions, okay?” She exhaled derisively. “Jesus, Benjamin.
Were you raped
?
”

She got up suddenly and began searching for her clothes.

“I'm sorry if I said the wrong thing.”

She shook her head. “I told you, I don't want to talk about it. I can't talk about it. So please don't ask stupid questions. Don't try to find out—” She pulled on her sweatpants and stuffed her bra and underwear into the pockets. She whirled around, looking for her sweatshirt. “I was raped in college, if you must know. I know what that feels like, okay? And I wish—I
wish
—that was it. I'd take that any day. I would
pray
for that.”

She called for her dog. The malamute appeared almost immediately, pulling the leash after her. “I'm happy to talk about that. I can tell you all about the senior guy who got me drunk and locked me in his dorm room. There's a story for you. Very original, right? We can have coffee and I'll tell you what it felt like.”

She turned, and he said, “Audrey.”

“What!”

“Don't go.”

She stopped in the doorway, her back to him. She rubbed her brow for a few long seconds and finally turned. “It's past eight. I have to go. I have to get back to my family.”

“Okay. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. Being with you, fucking you, that's all I want, okay? That's what I want from you. I don't want a fucking therapist, okay? Are you good with that?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Fine then.”

She went out the front door, the dog trailing her. After she left he stared at the fire in a sort of daze.

* * *

HIS SON
called back later that night. Benjamin roused himself off the couch, where he'd fallen asleep. The fire had gone out; a few embers were glowing a faint pink.

Yukon raised his head off the rug and gave Benjamin a look that seemed to say,
Why are you disturbing me?
The dog was not accustomed to being awake so late at night, and neither was Benjamin. He shifted on the couch, wincing. His groin felt sore; he hadn't used those muscles in a while.

“Hi, David.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” Benjamin said. This didn't seem like the right time to tell him about Leonard's stroke. “Why do you ask?”

“You called so many times.”

“You're not very easy to get ahold of.” On the other end of the phone, Benjamin heard car horns, loud voices. “Where are you?”

“Heading back to the dorm.”

This was his son's habit, when he did deign to call—to talk during his walk across campus between classes or, like now, after leaving some party late at night. Their conversations lasted the time it took David to reach his destination, usually no more than a few minutes.

“Has your mother mentioned anything about Thanksgiving?”

His son didn't answer. The silence went on for so long that Benjamin thought he'd lost the connection. “Are you there, David?”

“Look, I don't want to be referee between you and Mom anymore. I'd rather stay down here in the dorm over Thanksgiving if it's going to be like that. The weather's better anyway. I don't need this shit.”

“Whoa. Where did that come from?” Benjamin had assumed his son had accepted his and Judy's separation with his usual apathy toward all things parental.
It's fine, Dad. Whatever.
“What's your mother been telling you?”

“God, Dad. Did you hear what I just said? I don't want to be the fucking Ping-Pong ball.”

“Watch your language.”

“Listen to me for a change and maybe I will.”

“I'd like to see you kids over Thanksgiving, like a family.”

“A family. That's a joke. We're not a family. You took care of that.”

“
I
did? Did your mother say that? That I was the one who asked for a divorce? Well, that's a lie—”

“Will you stop already? Are you even halfway listening?”

His son slurred the last few words, and Benjamin realized he must be drunk. “Look, David. I know it must be rough on you and Sarah—”

“Yeah, thanks for thinking of us. That's really awesome of you.”

“I'd like to talk to you about this stuff in person. You
are
coming home for Thanksgiving, right?”

“Yeah, sure. Can't wait.”

“Good. We'll—” he began, but his son had hung up.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY
Benjamin got up late. It was a cold, gray Sunday, a few days before Halloween. He felt sluggish, as if hungover. Perhaps he was—a sex hangover, all that ecstatic effort expended on Audrey Martin, and her sudden meltdown afterward. It didn't help waking to an empty house, with no sounds of life but the boiler growling in the basement. There had been a certain comfort in coming down to a warm kitchen, even if it was only his father, making toast and eggs.

True, Leonard had seemed more like himself yesterday. But he'd grown tired so quickly, his face assuming that stricken, baffled expression. Without his false teeth, his cheeks seemed sunken. Benjamin hadn't even realized his father had false teeth, not until he saw him lying in the hospital bed, this aged, toothless version of Leonard.

Cruel, how the body changed, failed, the inexorable march toward deterioration. He'd had a vision of his father in his mind for so long—his golden self, a man in his forties, tossing Benjamin footballs. How had he failed to notice his father's changing face? His mother was gone nearly two years now, and his father was going, it seemed. Benjamin himself had been lucky to avoid illness, to reach forty-four without a hitch. A few of his friends had already succumbed to cancer and other diseases in their prime, victims of some cruel cosmic crapshoot. Was that all he could expect of life, a falling away of everything that had once made up happiness? A slow decline? Putting loved ones in the ground, watching children drift away? The Greeks had a saying, Benjamin had learned from the History Channel:
Count no man happy until his death, for no one knows what the gods have in store for him.

He headed out into the morning with Yukon, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head. Somewhere on the next street, someone was bouncing a basketball in a driveway; there was the solitary sound of the ball and the occasional thud against the backboard. A wonderful, lonely sound. Otherwise the street was quiet, the houses still, a ghostly morning.

Back when he was young, there had been packs of boys and girls running around the neighborhood—playing kickball in summertime, touch football in autumn, sledding in winter. Then, an
only child
had been rare, a condition worthy of pity and suspicion. Now it seemed like almost all
the kids who lived on Apple Hill Road were
only children
. What joy was there in shooting baskets by yourself?

Yukon veered on the Pearlmans' lawn, sniffing and marking their rhododendrons. Well, Benjamin still thought of the house as the Pearlmans', but the place had been bought and sold twice since they'd lived there. Benjamin knew none of the “new” families on the street: nameless couples glimpsed now and then in their driveways, unloading baby seats from the backs of vans or SUVs. A generation had passed since his boyhood, like an ocean liner making slow distance into the horizon.

The white-brick house at the top of the street had once been, some 150 years ago, the house of the orchard keeper, who oversaw the terraced rows of apple trees rising up the hillside toward the mountain beyond, green, lush in season, inviolate. The farmhouse at the bottom of the hill had been the only other dwelling, then, before the tractors came to plow and dig for the coming subdivision, sometime in the early 1950s. If Benjamin closed his eyes he could summon the street the way it had been in his youth.

From those days, only Betty Amato and Franky DiLorenzo remained. Everyone else had moved away or died. Betty Amato kept Benjamin up-to-date with the news of her kids. His old friend Timmy was a bachelor who taught literature at a community college in New Jersey. He'd published a thin collection of short stories, available in paperback only, which Benjamin had seen selling online for ten cents. Benjamin and Timmy had been inseparable as kids, but they'd gone to different high schools and grown apart. Now, for some reason, Benjamin always felt awkward around Timmy when he saw him over holidays, even if they only spoke for a moment. Odd, that awkwardness. He didn't know where it came from, because as kids, he and Timmy had spent nearly every day together, usually just the two of them, playing basketball in the driveway or listening to records in his room, as silent as monks.

He wondered what his old-time neighbors might say about him. How did Benjamin Mandelbaum appear to the local gossips? They would say that he'd screwed up his marriage, that he'd moved back home with his dad because he had no place else to go, that he was selling his father's Cadillacs, as they'd always known he would. Everyone had known how Benjamin Mandelbaum would turn out—everyone but himself.
Photographer
, he'd said in high school whenever anyone asked what he wanted
to do with his life or, more embarrassingly,
deep-sea diver
, even though he'd only taken a single course one spring holiday in Florida. Deep-sea diver! How absurd that notion seemed to him now, when Mandelbaum Motors had been his destiny from the beginning. Was it foolish to fight against the course of his life, now that it was half-gone, to break from the inevitabilities he had come to accept as his own?

He headed back inside. All those images from his childhood were as clear in his mind as the afternoon sky, but they were nothing. Shades and specters, misremembered, half-forgotten. His youth was gone, the people who had meant everything to him then had been usurped, replaced, removed. He'd known this, of course; he'd kept track of the passing years, registering the comings and goings of the calendar, like anyone else. But somehow it hadn't sunk in. He'd made a mistake, he felt now, moving back into his childhood home, unearthing these memories. The past, like a grave, was better left undisturbed. Here he was, forty-four years old, back in the house where he'd grown up, alone on the spinning earth.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING
, while driving down his street, Benjamin saw Audrey Martin in her driveway, getting into her car. A girl stood by the passenger side with a backpack slung over her shoulder, waiting for Audrey to unlock the door. As he drove past, the girl turned and squinted at him. Then she raised her right hand and gave him the finger. Benjamin glanced away from her, shocked. Did she do that to every passing car?