Lies She Told(43)

Her hair is piled atop her head in a messy bun. She looks like Officer Colleen, but every dark-haired petite woman would look like her at this distance. A man saunters from a back room. He buttons a shirt over his boxers. The way he does it, elbows high, hands down, screams my husband. I’ve seen him do this same act thousands of times. Shirt secure, he strides into the living room and grabs what must be his suit pants off the back of the couch. He jostles his legs inside, hopping to pull the tailored trousers over his firm backside. She turns in the chair to face him and the window. Her legs are spread like how a man would sit on a horse. She’s trying to get him to stay. Sharon Stone style.

I watch him as though he’s an actor in a movie and not my husband and the father of my child. The window is a television set. What I am seeing isn’t real.

He walks back toward the breakfast bar and reaches past her naked torso to a neighboring stool. A jacket waves in the air. He flings it over his shoulder, as though posing for a magazine. She stands, hands on her hips. He kisses her on the forehead and heads to the door. She follows him, brushing his side. Her walk is half sexy, half angry. I’m reminded of a cat scratching against a leg. They disappear. A moment later, she returns to the kitchen. Alone.

He must be coming down the stairs. I walk away from the streetlight and the chain link fence, pressing my back against the temporary wall around the left side of the construction site. The ambient light from the building in front of me is still too bright. He’ll see me. I hurry along the temporary wall, papered with fliers for street fairs and unknown bands, until I see a door. The wood has been kicked in near the knob.

I open it and slip inside. Immediately, I stumble on something. My knee lands in the dirt, saving my face. Beneath my foot lies a broken combination lock, pried loose, apparently, from the smashed door.

I pick myself up and walk, more carefully, back toward the chain link fence, pitching my weight forward to keep the heels from pinning me to the dirt in the construction site. As soon as I get there, the door opens across the street. Jake exits. He looks over his shoulder, as though he senses me watching, before jogging down the avenue. I can imagine the need for his hurry. He hopes to find me asleep so that he can claim to have come in around midnight. Working until 12:00 AM or even one can go unquestioned. Two AM demands an explanation. What excuse has he prepared if I’m awake? Will he claim to have nodded off on his office couch?

I watch him through the fine metal mesh, crouching, waiting until he rounds the corner before standing back up. Beating him home isn’t possible. Moreover, I don’t want to. Let him wait for me for once.

A shuffling noise sounds behind me. Too soft to be human. Maybe a rat. Maybe a robber trying to sound like a rat. Whoever broke the lock might be living here. Hiding here. Homelessness swells in the city during the summer. People leave wherever they managed to find shelter during the winter months and return to NYC, where the constant flow of tourists provides plenty of marks for beggars. There’s probably a group of men here, all of questionable mental health, getting high. They won’t appreciate my infringement on their party.

I scan the ground for something with which to defend myself should anyone come near. A board. A hammer. Metal catches the moonlight a few dozen feet to my right. I hurry toward it, hoping for something pointy. It’s a beam of sorts, far too heavy to lift. Behind it, covered in what appears to be pulverized ceramic, is something skinnier. I wrap my hands around its gritty exterior and yank it from the construction debris. It’s a pipe, curved like a scythe, the kind that might have once joined a sink drain to the indoor plumbing. Armed now, I retreat to the broken door, prepared to take a swing at whomever might come near.

No one does. I step back out onto the sidewalk and cross the street to Officer Colleen’s building. A multitenant intercom is bolted to the brick beside the entrance. Only half of the ten slots have names on them. C.L. is scrawled across a label in what appears to be a sharpie next to a number sign, a 1, a letter D, and a fat gray button. I assume the letters are her initials. None of the other names start with C.

My finger hovers over the buzzer. I want to talk to her, reason with her, appeal to her sense of justice. Surely she can understand how awful it is to be a new mom, home with an infant, while your husband spends half the night with his girlfriend. She can’t really justify her actions. She’ll have to admit that whatever feelings she has developed for my husband don’t trump my claim to him as his wife and the mother of his child. She’ll let him go.

What if she won’t let me up?

Music penetrates the door. Someone is having a party inside. The music is live. Lots of drums. A garage band jamming in one of the semiconverted loft spaces, most likely. Brooklyn’s underground music scene is literally underground. Again, I stare at the buzzer menu. “Flying Free” appears to own the entire basement level. Either someone had hippie celebrity parents or it’s a private venue.

I hit Flying’s buzzer, and the door unlocks. No one asks for a name, despite the fact that there aren’t any visible cameras to check whether I’m an armed gunman. The fact that I know the location of the party is, apparently, good enough. I pull back half of the double steel door and walk up a narrow staircase.

Each landing opens to hallways with heavy, factory doors on one side. Tribal drums pound from the basement, louder than the house music at any club. Guitars screech. I ascend the first flight, my speed fueled by the rhythm reverberating up the stairwell. Normally, my thighs would burn from the effort of running up stairs. Yet I feel nothing except my determination to make my husband’s lover see reason.