The Intruder (6 page)

Jake looks at his wife, curiously. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

“So the one I saw today wasn’t like that,” says Dana. “This John Gates.”

“Mom, pass the broccoli, will you?” says their son, Alex, who has long red-streaked hair and wears a blue-and-white checked flannel shirt.

When people ask Jake if he’s married, he usually says “real married.” Here he is in the dining room of his new Upper West Side town house with his boy and the most beautiful woman who’d ever agreed to have dinner with him. It’s just recently that he’s been able to slow down enough at work and enjoy the life they have together. If he hasn’t quite arrived, he’s just a station or two away.

“They say once someone’s been out on the street six months, you might as well forget them,” Dana goes on. “But this guy Gates has only been out a few weeks.”

All right, what’s up here? Jake wonders. There’s definitely an agenda. He looks at the empty fourth chair at the far end of the table and listens to the sigh of traffic on Riverside Drive.

“Dana, why are we talking about this?”

“Because I think I can help this man,” says Dana, who wears a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants. “But Rod and the other supervisors are bitching up a storm about me seeing him at the clinic.”

“Well, can I offer my advice in this area, which is probably worth nothing?”

Jake can see from the vertical line on his wife’s forehead that she’s already made up her mind. It’s the same look she had when she announced she was going to go to grad school instead of continuing to try and have another child.

“All right, let’s hear it.”

He rubs his hands together like a wrestler about to step out on the mat. “What I think is that people who’ve been out on the street—whether it’s a week or a year—are not like you and me,” he says. “I represented a lot of these hard-luck guys at Legal Aid and let me tell you, almost every single one was a complete scumbag. If someone’s been at the bottom of the pile long enough, he doesn’t care about playing fair. He just wants to get his hooks into you.”

He sees his little speech has only deepened the line between Dana’s eyes. Oh well.

“Jake, I want to ask you something,” she says. “Why was it okay for you to start off your career working with people like that, but it’s not all right for me?”

“Because you don’t have to work with scum. You can afford to pick and choose. We have a little bit of money now, remember?”

“Yes, we do. But it’s not money I made.”

Aha. Now we’re zeroing in, Jake thinks.

“Jake, you remember how much time you spent on the securities fraud case last year and how you were so jazzed you couldn’t go to sleep most nights?”

“Yeah, sure.” It was one of the few times a corporate case was as exciting as criminal defense work.

“Well that’s what I want.” Dana leans toward him with her chin on her fist and her lips slightly parted. The same expression she has when she’s hungry or horny.

“You wanna lose sleep?”

“No.” She sits back and pours herself a glass of Australian chardonnay. “I want to feel that way about my job. I want to work two nights a week at the clinic.”

Bingo. So that’s the subtext here. They’re not talking about some crazy homeless guy. They’re talking about changing the terms of their marriage.

“Can I be excused?” asks Alex, who’s been sitting across the table, eating broccoli and yogurt while flicking hair out of his eyes.

“Yeah, sure. . . . No, wait.” Jake stares at him. “What’s that you got in your nose?”

Flick, flick. “It’s a ring.”

“What are you, kidding?”

“No, it’s a nose ring.” Two index fingers part the streaked hair.

Jake drops the piece of fish he had raised to his lips. “You telling me you got your nose pierced?”

The kid already wears a gold stud in his left ear.

“I went with Paul Goldman to a place on St. Marks this afternoon.”

Jake looks over at Dana, wondering why this is the first he’s heard of it. “What are you gonna do if you have to blow your nose? It’ll come out three ways.”

“Lisa likes it.”

“You gonna wear it to school?”

“I can take it out.” Alex starts to demonstrate, but his father waves him off.

“Jesus, you get another one of these things, we’ll start calling you Tackle Box.”

“Cool,” says Alex.

“Remind me to talk to you later.”

The boy starts to go upstairs.

“Hey, wait a second, you’re forgetting something,” Jake says.

Alex stops and returns to the table. His father puts his arms around him and gives him a hug.

“You’re still my guy, all right?”

“All right.” The boy looks both embarrassed and pleased when Jake half-stands to kiss him on the cheek.

“Love ya.”

As Alex leaves the room, Jake puts his hands up to the sides of his head and pretends to scream.

“Twenty years I busted my ass to get out of Gravesend and go to law school, and here my son pierces his nose and my wife wants to bring bums into the house.”

“I don’t want to bring him into the house,” Dana says. “I want to see people like him at the clinic.”

“Yeah, I know, I know.” Jake fumbles with the air as if he’s trying to pull words out of it. “It’s just, I’m feeling like we’re finally getting things the way we want them after we’ve worked so hard. I just don’t want to upset anything.”

“So who’s upsetting anything?” She looks around like somebody’s tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m just talking about spending a couple of late nights at work, like you do. I’m not really helping people during regular hours. Face it. Alex is grown up and he doesn’t need me the way he used to. The house is basically coming together. And it’s not like we have another child around keeping us busy.”

Jake looks down. Sometimes that empty fourth seat at the dinner table seems like a broken promise between them.

“I’m sorry about that, babe,” he mutters. “I think about it all the time.”

“Well, don’t blame yourself.”

“The thing is, I do blame myself.” He studies the side of his fist. “Maybe if I hadn’t been working so hard, we could’ve started trying for another kid earlier.”

Then perhaps they wouldn’t have gone through the ectopic pregnancy and the series of miscarriages that made the doctors tell them to stop trying.

“We still could adopt,” she reminds him.

“Ah, neither of us . . .”

“. . . has the heart for that. All right, fine,” she says. “I never complained.”

“Sometimes you complained.”

“Well I never complained as much as I felt like complaining,” she says, finishing one glass of wine and pouring another. “At any rate, it’s fine now. I’m working.”

“So what do your supervisors say about you seeing more people at the clinic?”

“They went apeshit, as you would say.” Dana rubs the back of her own neck as if she’s still tense from the argument. “They were saying it would set the wrong precedent for all the other social workers on the ward. ‘Bad juju’ is the phrase they kept using.”

Jake sighs. “Why can’t you set up a private practice and start seeing people with nice middle-class problems? You know? Like frigidity or fear of commitment. The worried well. I even heard about a partner at a white-shoe firm the other day who’s got a bran addiction. He can’t stop eating bread ...”

“Look, Jake.” A thin smile plays on her rosebud lips and she puts her bare feet up on the table. “You’re good at fighting and defending people. I’m good at taking care of them. I took care of my mom when she had cancer. Then I took care of my father and my brothers after she died. And when Alex had encephalitis, I took care of him too. That’s my calling.”

“I know. I just hate to see you stick your neck out for a bunch of. . .”

“. . . skells.” She frowns. “Are you saying you don’t want me to do this kind of serious work?”

There’s that other look of hers. The one that says: If we’re going to have an argument, I’m going to outlast you.

Jake reaches over and massages the bottom of her left foot. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

If anything, her work has given them something to talk about at a time when other marriages run out of gas.

“It’s just, you know, it’s New York City, hon,” he says. “I hate to think about you coming home late at night.”

“We didn’t have to buy this house,” she says, batting a stray hair out of her face like an intrusive thought. “Five hundred thousand dollars down would’ve bought us a lot of land in Rowayton and we wouldn’t have had a mortgage hanging over our heads the rest of our lives.”

“Yeah, and then I’d get bitten by a tick the first weekend and come down with Lyme disease.” He squints at a plume of soot over the fireplace—just what he needs, another contractor to deal with. “There’s no safety anywhere.”

He’s long since accepted the fact that he’s addicted to the rude shuck-and-jive of the city. New York is where he’s triumphed. Where else could a poor Jew from a housing project end up borrowing enough money to buy a million-dollar town house with an $8,000 chandelier over the dining room table? The nicest light fixture in his parents’ two-room apartment at the Marlboro Houses was a cracked bowl with three dead flies in it.

“This is where I want to be,” he says.

“All right, so I’ve accepted that.” Dana flexes her left foot three times. “And now I’m asking you to accept this is what I want to do for a living.”

He leans over and kisses her on the lips. “I love you.”

Upstairs, Alex is blasting an old Jimi Hendrix tape and playing along on his 1959 Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. The long sustained notes and feedback swells sound like loud tears coming through the concrete.

In a perverse way, the volume is thrilling. It pleases Jake that his son has a room bigger than the apartment he grew up in, with more than $5,000 worth of audio and computer equipment. Though there are still money struggles ahead, he loves giving Alex things he never had. Spending cash, love, and a kind of ease that comes from not being worried all the time. It makes Jake feel that something’s been accomplished in this life.

“So you’ve already made up your mind about this thing with the clinic, huh?” he says, turning back to Dana.

“I’m going to start off seeing John Gates and a couple of other people twice a week on a volunteer basis. I wouldn’t back down to Rod and the rest of them.”

Jake looks bemused. “And did you just want to hear yourself talk about it?”

“Yes, I suppose I did.”

He throws up his hands. “I guess that’s one of the three basic differences between men and women. Women like to talk out their problems without necessarily hearing a solution.”

“Interesting.” She finishes what’s left of her wine. “What’s the second difference?”

“Women have more shoes.”

“And the third?”

“You come upstairs, you might find out.”

They start to make love.

Jake rubs Dana’s back for a few minutes, and then pulls off her T-shirt from behind. They stand, front to back, as he eases off her sweatpants and panties and then removes his own clothes, so he can lose himself in the smoothness of her body.

In the mirror on the open closet door, he sees a stocky, hairy Jew nuzzling this beautiful blonde woman and wonders what that guy did to deserve such luck.

“Let’s take a bath,” Dana murmurs.

She goes into the bathroom and starts the water. He follows her in and she stops him at the door a moment, listening for the sound of Alex on the phone upstairs with Lisa. That ought to keep him occupied for an hour.

When the tub is half full, they get in together, watching the water level rise dangerously. They are face-to-face and Dana climbs onto his lap, straddling him. He starts to move into her.

“Is this all right?”

“I think I can manage,” she says, guiding him in deeper.

She begins to moan. The inside of her is like a warm bath within the bath. She throws back her head and arches her back, as droplets of water slide down her breasts. Twenty years of marriage and he still wants her as much as he did that first night he saw her at a college party. He’s never been seriously interested in another woman. Other partners at the firm would complain about what happened to their wives’ bodies after childbirth or
would acquire younger, trophy wives after the first models reached a certain age, but Dana has only grown more sexually attractive to Jake with the passing years. His desire for her hasn’t diminished; it’s deepened and developed character and contours. Maybe it’s his familiarity with her body. Her velvety skin, her long legs, the dimples just above her buttocks, the sound she makes when he licks her nipples.

Or maybe it’s just that they’ve been through so much together. Every small wrinkle and strand of gray hair can be traced back to a memory he shares with her.

Twenty years of marriage. It began for both of them as a refuge from an unhappy childhood. But over the years it evolved into something infinitely more intense and mundane. They’d survived major and minor resentments, periods of neglect, meaningless flirtations, and near breakups. They’d sustained themselves with small mercies, selective memories, and hard-won tolerance. And after two decades, they were both amazed to find there was no one else they’d rather sit next to on the bed, watching television and paying bills. It was love, but it was also more than love; it was a life.

He thrusts into her again and she folds herself around him, arms and legs across his back. A perfect fit. Why would he want anything else?

“The bed,” she says, standing and drying off. “I’m getting pruny. Let’s finish on the bed.”

He picks her up and carries her unsteadily out of the bath and into the bedroom. He drops her onto the white down comforter and they finish making love in a wild improvisational frenzy, with Dana flipping her husband over and riding astride him, arms out, eyes closed, hair whipping around like lashing rain and then finally pouring down the front of her face like a waterfall.

She sighs and shudders and rolls off him. Jake looks over at the mirror on the open closet door.

The image is not altogether familiar. In the past, he’s seen himself as a fighter, an outsider, the Jewish kid trying to get by in a tough Italian neighborhood, a lonely boy shooting baskets by himself, the object of his father’s rage and his mother’s comfort,
the despised Legal Aid lawyer, the struggling Brooklyn son striving to make his way through the brutal city. But now the angle has changed and he sees himself slightly differently. For a fleeting moment, he sees a man who is happy.