Break and Enter (10 page)

In the locker room, he pressed his hand to his forehead, smoothed back his hair, and bent close to the mirror. His hairline was holding out, and no gray yet. Hell’s bells, he was a young man, thirty-one is
young,
guys still play pro sports at thirty-one. He undressed and weighed himself naked. The digital readout said 202, twenty-two pounds heavier than he’d been at the end of high school, twelve pounds heavier than the end of college, four pounds heavier than the end of law school. Not bad for six-foot-two. He wondered if he could still dunk a basketball, could still experience the lovely light scratch of the rim as his hand jammed the leather ball through, then dragged over the metal on the way down. Penn Charter against Episcopal, 1976 Inter-Academic League Championship. P. Scattergood, starting forward, five for nine from the field, one for two from the charity stripe, six rebounds. A good contribution to a losing cause. He still had the yellowed three-inch
Philadelphia Inquirer
column somewhere. He tied his court shoes, gave a quick hoist to his jock, and wished Berger weren’t on the Amtrak to Harrisburg.

He found an exercise mat and stretched the way he used to when he had time to exercise properly. With mirrors in front and behind him, he saw a million diminishing versions of himself—saw the fat creeping around the thighs and belly, the ass sagging ever so slightly. Berger kept his weight down but he did it the illegal way. Peter carefully worked each muscle group in his legs, stretched his back, neck, and finally his shoulders. He rolled over and did twenty-five push-ups and then fifty sit-ups. The loud exercise music filtered into his veins.

Minutes later, on the racquetball court, he was enjoying practicing his shots—crisp, triple-ricochet shots that came off the front wall nearly impossible to return, center-of-court blasts, and tactical, dead-dropping touch shots—when a face, a woman’s, appeared in the small observation window. He was unable to see the face well; the woman—not Janice, unfortunately—stood a foot away from the window, a porthole of thick polyurethane scarred from errant racquets and slightly opaque. But it was a woman’s face in the window, he could see that, and she was watching him.

He was tempted to open the door and inquire if she was looking for someone, but some small irritation kept him stroking the ball as if he had not seen her. He’d dealt with people all day and his voice was ragged
from talking. He concentrated on his shots. Once, digging the ball out of the back corner, he saw her eyes draw back from the glass.

The racquetball court was simplicity itself. Four white walls, a wooden floor, one man with a stubby racquet and a blue rubber ball. Simplicity. Smash the fucking ball. All the tactics and strokework were an overlay on the sheer pleasure of powering the ball as hard as he pleased. He settled into the stroke rhythm, working up a good sweat. Berger tended to be slow at times and to jabber between serves to catch his breath. Hit the ball. Peter would give the closing argument the next day, then wait for the conviction and sentencing—most likely first degree—and meanwhile be prepping the next case. Ball. Hoskins pissed him off. The worst kind of friendliness—Peter didn’t know whether to trust it. At the same time, Hoskins had been pressuring the hell out of him lately, being overly intrusive about his strategy—ball—crowding his judgments with pointed questions in the weekly meetings, as if he doubted Peter’s competence. Ball. It was hard to tell with Hoskins, though—sometimes his abuse was a form of affection, a vote of confidence.

Hit the fucking ball—now. And then there was Janice and the marriage slain by an overworking husband and a wildly insecure wife. Get it, ball. When she’d moved out she was beyond anger, cool and tough. Ball. Mouth tight and determined. Three suitcases, her papers, some kitchen utensils, as much stuff as could fit in the Subaru. Ball. She hadn’t called a lawyer, and didn’t know where she was going that night. Ball. The next day they found an apartment for her. He didn’t blame her, completely. After months of hellish arguing, something—ball—had quite obviously snapped her slender faith in the two of them. Perhaps it had been—ball—his obsequious, impossible promises that he would revamp his entire personality. Ball. She had not been cruel, ever. Livid, certainly, and even—ball—ugly, but never cruel—ball—and even to the end, constantly—ball—reaffirming—ball—that she loved him, which made it all the more—ball—difficult.

The face was back. He snatched the ball out of the air and turned to the door. A woman in shorts and a black T-shirt stepped into the court holding a racquet. Her eyes were dark and her hair swept low across her forehead. Her belly was flat, and her breasts sagged fully against her narrow torso.

“You have a partner?” There was a husked-out sexiness to her; what remained implied what had been, and she had lost that slight layer of flesh that keeps a woman soft-looking. Instead, she appeared burned away to a tough and stringy essence. He noticed her arms hung easily at her side and were corded with muscle. Wide in the shoulders, almost bony.

“No.” Peter waved her in and wondered if he would have to pansy the ball so as not to embarrass her too much.

“You serve first.” She faced the front wall. “I’m warmed up.” She stood on her toes, with her knees bent, leaning forward and swinging the racquet back and forth in concentration.

Peter thought for a moment. Medium-hard serve, something that would force her to react but would give him enough time to get to center court. He bounced the ball and gave it a good whack. The ball jumped off the front wall right at the woman. With a graceful yet quick stroke—a chop, really—she sliced a tight backhand, and the ball grazed the side wall, touched the front wall, and dropped dead, unhittable.

“I’m Cassandra.” She touched him on the shoulder with her racquet. “Nice to meet you.”

She won the first game 21-16. Cassandra had certainly played a lot of racquetball. She knew all the angles and anticipated the ball. But, he muttered to himself, he had the speed and power and the youth on her. He would serve now with all his strength, and try to whisk tough low serves into the back corners where she would have to scoop them out, giving him a chance at the kill shot.

They started the second game, and he felt the sweat really coming now, the deep breathing. His legs felt full of striated strength, his right shoulder pumped large. He gave his all to each shot, scuttling quickly into position, blasting, slicing, cutting the ball, anything to get the angle. Cassandra moved assertively across the court. At 15-15 he dug her serve out of the backhand corner and looped a drop shot off the wall. She got to it and swung a bit too hard on a drop shot of her own. Sprinting toward the front wall, he figured on a low blast that would pass her on the forehand side before she had a chance to reach it. He set up and blasted, knowing full well she could not return the shot. The ball exploded off the front wall. He turned to admire its placing, and as he spun his head,
a speeding blue circle appeared inches away from his eyes, and then, before he knew it, he was flat on his back, his head ringing, the blood high behind his eyes. His forehead stung.

“Hup.”

She stood over him and helped him up. Her grip was strong.

“How in fucking hell did you get that shot?” he said.

She did not answer and they stood before each other in the white-walled box, breathing deeply, skin flushed and sweaty. Peter looked down into Cassandra’s face. A pumped, sweat-gleaming vein snaked over her temple. She had a thin, sharp nose, and her mouth was set with devouring intensity; her face was that of a person who had outlasted many others. Cassandra swung her racquet back and forth unconsciously.

“I think we may be out of time,” he said, checking his watch. “My hour’s nearly up.”

“I bought the next hour.” When she smiled, the tip of her nose bent.

“Ah. You like racquetball.”

“I like you.”

Her thigh muscles lifted as she walked to the back of the court.

On the third point of the third game, while lunging at the ball, Peter knocked Cassandra to the floor, hard.

“I’m sorry.” He was uneasy at his sudden violence. “Here, let me help you.”

“I’m fine.” She jumped back to her feet. “Go. I’m ready.”

She won the game.

In the fourth game he decided to resort to strategy—pure strength was not working. Try to force her into his rhythm. But she caught shots before they bounced, halving his time to react, and knew what it was he wanted to do and was able to do it just that much more. If he carved deadly touch shots, she carved them back, only a slice more accurately. If he countered with wicked ricochet shots, then she used them, too, weaving a blue blur around him in the white box. She possessed deadly accuracy. She was doing everything he was doing, and she could do it better, and exactly when she wanted. With practice he might get to be that kind of player, but not soon. It took years to be able to achieve this devilment with the ball.

They began a long rally and worked closer to the front wall until they were lunging desperately for each shot, slapping the ball as hard as they could, back and forth—lunge, dive, slice—unrelenting, moving only on reflex. He threw himself into the game, trying to crush the ball with each stroke. He sensed Cassandra adapting to his higher level of intensity. He madly flailed his racquet and slammed himself from wall to wall while she coolly maneuvered each point. He gripped the racquet handle with both hands like an axe and waited for the serve. At 19-17 in the fifth game, her lead, there was a knock on the window. A couple stood ready outside the court. The time was up. Cassandra turned to him. She was hardly winded.

“We didn’t get to finish.”

Outside the court, Cassandra picked her towel off the waiting bench and wiped her forehead.

“That was
good,”
she nodded.

“Where did you learn to play so well?”

“Tennis is my base, though it’s such a different game.”

He found himself staring at the corrugations of muscle in her forearm. “Did you play a lot of tennis?”

“Enough to pay for business school way back when.”

“You were pro?”

“A couple of years. Best I did was the quarterfinals at Forest Hills. A freak string of tournament victories. I was ranked something like one hundred and eighty-sixth in the world that year, my zenith.” She laughed, revealing receding gums and extensive dental work.

“What happened at Forest Hills?”

“Chrissie Evert, who was a
kid
then, burned the panties off me, that’s what. I couldn’t match her ground strokes. It was over in forty-nine minutes. I decided to go to business school full-time, and that was the end of the tennis.”

He responded with an appreciative silence.

“Hey,” Cassandra said without hesitation, putting her hand tightly on his shoulder. “Let’s have dinner.”

She suggested a small place ten blocks away, and numbly he said that was fine. They’d meet outside the locker rooms in twenty minutes, which was enough time, he decided, for him to grab a few minutes in
the whirlpool. There he rubbed his forehead and tried to enjoy the swirling, bubbling heat that surrounded his body. The whirlpool was near the club pool, and a man and a woman splashed in the shallow end, laughing and surreptitiously nuzzling under the water. Apparently the man’s foot was between the woman’s ankles. Their desire depressed him, and he sank down into the water, thinking of Janice.

What had happened to her so long ago lived with him. If it was possible to be driven by a wrong done to another, then he had been driven, and for a long time now. Each time he prosecuted a crime, it was, in a private way, done for her, because the man who had hurt her was free. Secretly he believed himself to be lazy and selfish; Janice had provided him the righteousness he had needed to face down one criminal after another. Without her, his ire ebbed.

He hunched lower until only his head was above the steamy, frothy water of the round pool. For a confused moment he felt as though he were within his own churning cranium: a head within a head, the mind endlessly looking at itself endlessly looking at itself. But soon he felt limber and momentarily relaxed, his body rubbery and pink, his thoughts cooked out.

Before stepping into the shower, he lingered before the mirror, mentally subtracting the slight softness at his hips, flexing his stomach muscles to test for definition. He continued his inspection. His shoulders were firm, his legs in excellent condition. No way would he end up screwing this woman tonight, he thought; she had too much class and he probably wasn’t interested. He tested his stomach again. In his junior year in high school, a million years ago, he had once done four hundred sit-ups holding a twenty-five-pound weight behind his head. He could fuck like a machine when he was seventeen.

Peter showered, picked at his nose in the mirror, toweled off, dressed. The odds were infinitesimal that Janice might be in the restaurant Cassandra had picked. It would be too expensive for her current condition, unless some guy were taking her out. He felt guilty for having dinner with Cassandra, and blamed Janice for it—a convenient psychological device, he realized. On the other hand, he need not feel guilty, since all it
was
was a dinner. If Cassandra were some sweet young fox, he might be getting some mileage out of his guilt. He was glad he wasn’t very strongly attracted
to her—physically, at least. He looked around, feeling vaguely miserable. Men came into the locker room in their overcoats and suits, stripped themselves, and became pale, blobby boys in shorts and T-shirts. A few men, in much better shape, were obviously cruising. He could tell in a lot of small ways, from two decades’ experience—the locker-room code: Basically, one didn’t
present
oneself to another man. But the rest, just regular guys like himself. How many had cheated on their wives?

Cassandra waited for him outside. She had changed into a blue wool business suit and carried a slender leather briefcase.

“You look like you make more money than I do,” Peter said.

“Probably.” Her eyes were bright. “So I’ll buy dinner.”

THEY REACHED THE RESTAURANT
in her car. What he really needed to do, he decided, was go home and prepare for the summary argument. The waiter appeared and Cassandra ordered.