They own no dogs; the maid sleeps out. The catches on the windows are those old-fashioned brass ones, butterfly locks. No alarm system or fancy security. He memorized everything Nick had to tell about this job. He pulls on black cotton gloves, soft and close like ladies’ gloves. The porch is just like Nick described it, screened in, running the entire back length of the house. He mounts the brick steps slowly, slits the screen and opens the door. Listens. These small pauses set him apart from second-story guys he knows, take time away from the seven minute in-and-out rule. But he ain’t never been caught. He pulls a roll of masking tape and a straight-edged knife from his jacket pocket. Nick said the easiest window opens into a bathroom off the front hall. Two over from the back door. Quickly the taped asterisk takes shape—corner to corner, up and down. He always varies the pattern, uses different width tape. As he hits the window sharply, once, in the center, it splinters and holds. He folds the sagging shards of glass outward toward him, loosens more from the caulking, and puts them on a wicker table. Once more he listens—not taking Nick’s word for everything. He hopes the sound wasn’t loud enough to wake the sleeping couple eleven rooms and two floors away.
Her husband is asleep—finally. His back is to her, his right shoulder high, and now his breathing has slowed to a steady pace like some temporarily regulated clock. She has been lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, her silence a lullaby for him. Now she lifts her arms lightly from the bed, readjusting the blanket, placing more folds between them. She thinks of her husband as the mountain range to her lower plain in their nightly landscape. She flexes her fingers, her toes, stretches her legs until her tightness leaves, absorbed by the bed. She feels an energy at night that she cannot use by day, moving around this house with too many rooms. If she were alone—in some other, smaller place—she would live at night. Who else is up at this time while her husband dreams of receptionists and waitresses. Should she buy twin beds, electric blankets, or a divorce attorney? Or new garbage cans to void those damn raccoons!
His wife thinks he is sleeping. He knows this by the way she begins to move, gaily adjusting the sheets, a puppet released to life. He dislikes being able to fool her so easily, and sometimes he varies his breathing just to feel her freeze—he hopes, into an awkward unnatural position that hurts. But usually the game bores him, he’d rather sleep. He sleeps better with his girlfriend, Nan, when they finally go to sleep after making love, after a last nightcap. “What an old-fashioned word,” she said. Nan will be listening to NPR, propped up in bed with three or four books, cigarettes, ashtray, crackers, nail polish, cotton balls, a miniature magnetic chess set, a hair brush. Nan lives on crackers—wheat thins, water biscuits, Akmak. She likes to brush her hair as she watches TV though it makes him nervous. He is ahead of her in games won at chess. Barely. He hears a noise somewhere near the library or patio. Raccoons again. They have both heard it he can tell.
Carefully he removes the remaining shards of glass from the window’s edge. Then he twists, first to put his head and arms through, then his shoulders. He can’t see a thing. The room smells too sweet. His stomach heaves as he dives slow motion toward the sink. His belt pings softly against something, his hands find the sink’s edge, the curve of the toilet seat. He balances unevenly for five seconds while he drags his legs across the windowsill. Finally, he lowers himself to the floor, which he has taken for granted. He sits on the soft carpet, breathing hard, and lets his eyes adjust to the light. Then he pulls a nylon stocking over his head, stretching it out near his eyes, pushing back his hair, raising and lowering his eyebrows. He stands to squint into the mirror at a face even his own mother couldn’t finger. Next he locates the back door, leaving it open and ready for a fast exit.
What will Cola think if she buys twin beds, or say to friends, trains of cleaning women going home to Chicago’s South Side. Friends who pass the talk on to “their women” as they call them. She herself hears a lot of gossip this way, making Cola a sandwich for lunch in their particular reversal or roles. Cola has five children to her own two, and a husband she gives a weekly allowance – to keep him coming round to see the kids. They both know—but don’t say—what else for. She considers getting up to read, write letters to the children, an old roommate from college, or Betty Ford—”was the face lift really necessary”—but she never does. She is more aware of herself at these times than any other. It might have something to do with the thin nightgown she wears, her breasts loose and flat. Sometimes she lies perfectly still and tries to feel the silk against her stomach, her thighs. She regrets that her mind’s eye has no picture of herself naked as a young woman. Instead she sees herself dusting, folding laundry, shopping for wedding gifts. She would like to do her own cleaning again.
For the hundredth time he wonders where he will go if he leaves. What will he take from this house as perfectly arranged as a stage set. He has not yet said “when” even to himself. Nan has given him a deadline, but he knows he’ll let it pass. He stopped counting deadlines—they and the bright cheerful women who make them after an elegant dinner or as he is about to turn off the bedside light are all gone. But the children are gone too and that was the deadline he made himself when they were still in high school and he slept in spite of the punk rock music seeping under their doors. Then, the woman was Francine—he thinks, but isn’t sure. He doesn’t know this woman next to him any more. She reminds him of the sad aging ladies who sell the perfume and lingerie he buys for Nan. She could be the owner of a smart mauve boutique, or an efficient travel agent, glasses dangling on a gold chain. Should he suggest this. Sometimes he is surprised to see her across from him at breakfast, as if the maitre d’ has doubled up on tables. He is having more and more trouble sleeping next to her. What does she want? As in Freud’s “What do those women want?”
He locates the silver in the dining room to retrieve on his way out. He pulls open the usual shallow drawer and the forks and knives gleam dully like rows of fresh dead trout. Then he returns to the pantry, where the maid’s stairway opens onto an upper landing which leads to the second floor, to the master bedroom where the woman keeps her jewelry. He has memorized the floor plan sketched by a nervous Nick over a couple of beers at Tandy’s. The other guys left them alone when they moved to a booth, carrying their beers and Nick’s first sketch on a napkin. You can always tell when someone is planning a job, the way they lean together, taking the beer slower than usual, and you know to leave them alone. No one says this, it just happens. But he and Nick can’t go on much longer, been four years already—Nick, the inside man giving inspections on insurance riders, sitting in the living rooms of the rich, taking notes about rings and things while drawing the floor plan in his head. Shit—forgetting to mark the uncarpeted stairs. He’ll have to take it slow up the sides.
What will she do? She feels divorce coming like unreported bad weather, even though her husband has been giving her cheery predictions each of the past eight years she brought it up. Divorces have left two friends with large empty malevolent houses, looking for work in a young woman’s world of Olay. Could she get thin again? She isn’t fat but curves seem to have gone to the wrong places like misdirected traffic. She has stopped hoping for car accidents, a coronary as her husband straddles his most recent girl friend who, she knows, wears Chanel # 5. It was the dream that did it—when they were selling the grand piano a year ago. Even now she shivers, sending ripples across the cover of the bed as she recalls that early morning dream before dawn. A man’s voice, rough like some mechanic’s voice, said “I just killed your husband. You owe me ten thousand dollars.” Finally, she woke sweating and wet to the shrill sound of the phone across her husband’s empty side of the bed. She answered the fifth ring, terrified, but hoping, wondering where she would get the money. But it was some early shopper who wanted to make sure the piano was his. Her disappointment turned petulant as she told him, “You’re too late.” She was shaking as she hung up the phone—alone, still married to a man probably very much alive. Wait. That squeak—like Cola on the stairs?
He resents her relaxed movements when she thinks he’s asleep. He himself lies here tense, missing Nan, finally drifting into a dense exhausted sleep where he dreams of moving into his first apartment, an orange U-haul and four drinking friends to help. His wife—and Nan—are both waiting for him. The apartment has one bedroom but two kitchens, although neither woman cooks. He practices saying, “I want a divorce.” But he would have to turn to her. Even now, even thinking it, his back feels vulnerable. When he sleeps with Nan, she curves around him, her knees behind his, her stomach breathing him to sleep. He pictures her large bed where she does everything, reads, eats, polishes her nails, studies chess books, talks to him on the phone. During their first month he insisted on the formality of the couch for at least cocktails, but she sat so stiffly, as if she were still at her drafting board, that they were soon back on her bed, pillows propped against the headboard. It is the only detail of their affair, this cave-bed, that he has kept from his shrink. Cracker crumbs everywhere like a sandbox. Crunching—the springs like that squeak on the stairs.
Next the landing and then another short set of stairs. Big houses amaze him, like living in a hotel—everything so far away from the kitchen, a room for this, a room for that. At last he stands at the entrance of the bedroom, adjusting to this new light, letting his face cool beneath his nylon mask, turning his head from side to side. He listens for the sound of breathing in sleep. Two figures in the bed—one turned to the far wall, the man; one flat on its back, the wife. The dresser is long and low just inside the doorway wall, the jewelry box on the far side. Maybe some things in the middle drawer. “Put your purse away,” he is always telling his own wife. He can hold his breath for one minute thirty-five seconds last time Nick clocked him. He checks for shoes, stuff in his path and starts across counting as he moves past the threshold of his fear. He never uses a light.
She knows what she heard even before she sees a man appear in the doorway. She lowers her eyelids to slits, pulls air in and out of her lungs to mimic sleep. Her hand is within inches of her husband’s hip but she can’t move, can’t bring herself to touch him. Slowly the shadow slides across the wall, its back to the bed, searching for her diamond ring. The four carats so large she never wears it. What else—her emerald brooch, the long rope of pearls from her mother’s graduation. No, not the pearls, she wants to cry out. I was mother’s little girl.
It was a slight change in the tone of light. He knows there is someone else in the room. Sighting down the rifle of his legs he brings the man into view. His breathing practice from countless nights keeps his body under control. He wishes he had a gun. Should he call out, reach for a lamp, or phone, alert his wife by groping for her hand? But she is awake, surely she sees the figure. If she knew he lies awake beside her, it would be more evidence of his cowardliness. Her jewelry is only so much furniture anyway—just smaller.
They are both sleeping, he checked that, but there is something different about the way they sleep that nags at him. As if they have been forcibly tucked in, both coiled side by side, head to toe. He moves down the dresser searching for the box. Going after three pieces listed in the rider Nick copied from the office files. A big diamond—maybe three, four carats—an emerald pin, and pearls. The pearls are lying out as if they’d just been worn. He slips them into his pocket to waiting folds of cotton gauze to muffle sound. Next, the wooden box. He bends slightly to see more clearly. Still counting—at ninety-five seconds he will have to leave to breathe. The pin. Into his pocket. The ring—should be in the jewel box cause she doesn’t wear it much, Nick said. And there it is, must be four gorgeous carats. Ba-by. Into his glove and he turns to go. “Kill him,” a voice whispers. Slowly he turns to the bed, not believing his bad luck. […]
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Pamela Painter is the author of five story collections, and co-author, with Anne Bernays, of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Five Points, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, New Flash Fiction Review, among others, and in numerous Flash Anthologies. Painter’s flash stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on the YouTube channel, CRONOGEO, and her work has been staged by WordTheatre in Los Angeles, London and New York. Painter’s newest collection of stories is Fabrications: New and Selected Stories from Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Intruders of Sleepless Nights” originally published in Ploughshares.