The Uninnocent (26 page)

Good, she thought. Now he can set the mousetrap.

THE ROAD TO NAD
Ě
JA

I
KNEW
I
LOVED
L
YDIA
when I stole her ring. How she cherished that pretty object, cameo of a stag carved in bloodstone and set in gold. The stag's haunches had been rubbed to the palest pink—she always worried the face of the stone with those nervous fingers of hers. I wondered how many other fingers down the centuries had fondly touched that talisman, as I hid it in a small leather pouch and pulled the drawstrings tight. Then I thought,
Listen, ring, nobody owns you now
.

How Lydia cried! I was so harsh with the concierge at the seaside hotel, threatened to call the authorities, demanded that the maid be brought in so I could question her myself. Yes, I was enraged, my heart was burning, while next to it in the breast pocket of my jacket the ring raced and pulsed, like a little eel chasing its phosphorescent tail in the surf beyond our window.

This has always been the way with me. I take things. And the unhappiness Lydia felt for weeks after the disappearance of her ring made for some of the most exquisite joy I have ever known. She wept, she stormed, she despaired. She needed me, and I consoled her. It was the crowning gesture of a short courtship, my theft, and was, I believed in my heart of hearts, purifying for her. I never made the mistake of offering to get her another ring. That would have been crass. Nor did I patronize her with the sermon that toyed at my tongue, pled to be spoken as we made our way from Italy to Spain, the sermon about renunciation. Whenever a few days passed without any mention of the theft, I did allow myself subtly to reintroduce it into our conversation. “I wonder if we ought to hire somebody to snoop around the hotel where you lost your ring, and see if that maid is wearing it.” Lydia thought this was a wonderful idea, and when I was sure she approved, watching the light of hope come back into her pale green eyes, I hesitated, brushed my hand over my lips, and shook my head no. “Why torture ourselves about it?”

Lydia's ring was not, of course, my first theft. Far from it. Indeed, the pouch in which I kept it was once the property of my grandfather. He used to house his antique fob watch in it, and though it had been the watch that motivated my theft—silver with a face white as a full moon—I liked the pouch as well. It has served as a faithful hiding place for other little objects over the years.

My activities as a taker have always been steeped in a purpose more meaningful than mere acquisition. Taking from those one knows is easy, from those one adores easier yet, in many ways more desirable, more evocative. What my friends and relatives once owned, what was precious to them, was so available to me as to almost force me into possessing it. In the act of assuming possession I was subtly transformed, and whatever had been the relationship between me and that person was transformed too. We were brought closer by the absence of their treasured object. By lifting Lydia's ring or Grandfather's timepiece I had created an opening, a gap through which I might better have access to their hearts. What time was it? “Seven thirty-three, Grampa,” I'd answer, checking my own cheap wristwatch. It never failed to bring a gentle smile to his lips, and up into his lap I would go, and my dear grandfather would praise me, and my grandmother would say, “You're such a fine young boy.”

Theft, in other words, has always been for me an act of fostering love.

When my grandfather passed on—this was how we had to put it in our family, “passed on,” like there was somewhere to go—it was everything I could do to keep from giving in to the idea that the poor man ought to be buried with his fob watch. He never found it, and he'd looked long and hard. This was the first time I ever considered returning something I had taken. Being well advanced in my ways—no one in my immediate family and few among my friends hadn't given up something to my growing cache—it was a disconcerting moment, a moment of truth. I was twenty when he died, and still living in his house as I had done ever since the death of my mother and father.

My parents lost their lives on their way to a family gathering, all dressed to the nines in the wreckage, Christmas presents strewn everywhere so cheery and colorful that I, who was six at the time, couldn't resist opening one of them while I waited in the backseat of the car for the men to finish sawing through the cold, crimped metal to set me free. I have an intense and perfect memory of the wrapping paper on the box. A plum-cheeked, merry Santa, working in his shop surrounded by elves. A ledger that listed who was naughty and nice on his cluttered desk. The blue snow falling outside his windows, casting light through the room full of toys. Above all, that big bag of his, by the door, brimming with presents he was going to give to children around the world. The good children, that is. And I was a good child, I didn't cry when they finally got me out. I hugged the baby doll I'd found in the box tight to my chest and made sure it was warm, too, when they put a blanket over my shoulders. Glass was being broken behind me, and the saw was singing again. The man wouldn't let me look.

I moved in with my grandparents after the accident, and they were caring toward me. My grandfather continued to work past the age when most men retire, to help support me and send me through school; to make sure I was dressed as well as anyone and could participate in those activities in which boys, as they got older, liked to involve themselves. I loved going to the movies, I enjoyed reading comics, especially those where the superhero had a secret life, a dark side. I owned a .22-caliber rifle and went out into the woods with friends and shot small game—squirrels, skunks, even the occasional snapping turtle. After I took my grandfather's watch, it was I, as I've said, who would have to tell him what time it was. My grandmother was always after him to buy another, but he refused because he kept thinking he had misplaced it somewhere in the house.

“It'll turn up,” he said. As right as my grandfather was about so many things in life, he was not right about that.

Parentless though it was, I can't say my childhood was bad. Still, I announced one morning, having helped myself to some of the brandy Grandmother kept in a breakfront for special occasions, my intentions to leave school, and to leave the country. I was restless and wanted to wander. There wasn't much my guardians could say. I knew that in March of the following year I would have access to my inheritance. So I packed my belongings, withdrew what savings I had in the bank, and kissed my grandmother good-bye. Grandfather's fob watch came with me.

Lydia and I met in Rimini, sitting adjacent to one another at an outdoor café on a mild Adriatic summer afternoon—but I'd been overcome with an odd expectancy, as I walked through Paris earlier in the spring, that someone important was near me. I remember thinking this just when the police swept through the crowd of May Day rioters, clubs and shields above and before them. As I was running toward the cathedral, carried by the anger and panic of the antiwar mob, I swear I saw someone catch Lydia by the shoulder and pull her down right in front of me. I tripped over her and her assailant.

She has since said that nothing of the sort happened to her. Still, I wonder; when I later showed Lydia the scarf I'd snatched from this woman's neck during the melee—not, of course, revealing how I'd come to possess it—Lydia said, “That's strange.” Turns out it was identical to a scarf she once treasured, this scarf I'd fondled in the darkness of Notre Dame, where so many of us lingered until the rioters were dispersed or arrested, the fires outside were extinguished, and the island was restored to calm.

Now, the Tempio Malatestiano—without a doubt the greatest work of architecture to be found in the seaside town of Rimini—is cloaked in marble stripped from another cathedral on the same coast. Sigismondo Malatesta's masons, in need of materials to sheathe the brick facades and having no access to Tuscan quarries, sailed up the coast to the Byzantine port of Classe, where they raided the Sant'Apollinare for all its clean exterior stone. Half a millennium later, the Sant'Apollinare still stands naked on the sandy flats north of Ravenna, and the Tempio still wears its stolen emperor's clothes. Quiet sarcophagi, circled by harmless, lazy bees, line the temple's length outside, sheltered from the rain under its crumbling eaves.

She told me the story about the building's maker, did Lydia, standing under those very eaves. To her it was a parable of “greed and madness.” It was “a rape still unavenged.” I suggested that, to me, this was an appropriation, an example of Renaissance expediency in its purest form, and was not surprised when she stared at me with one of those quizzical looks I adored, and asked what was I talking about?

Was my ensuing silence too a kind of expediency? Or was I just being lazy like those black-and-yellow bees that one by one alighted to sleep on the warm marble lids of the ships of death that majestically flanked us where we conversed? What was I to say when, goaded by this silence, she launched into a diatribe about the evil souls of thieves? “I think we should bring back the punishments they used to have for burglars, where they cut off the hands of men who steal.” Who was I to disagree?

We were married in March the next year. A day so overcast that a sky spangled with a hundred suns could not have pierced the green and black clouds that stretched out across the earth. (Green for her eyes, black for mine?) March was the month I was born, March will be the month I die. Aptly named, March. The month of deliberate movement, of marching into whatever might lie ahead.

Our wedding night was sentimental, affectionate. The wind that wrapped its damp arms around the room, once more in Rimini, in the very hotel we'd stayed at before, didn't dampen our spirits. It only invited us to wrap ourselves tighter in one another's arms, and we obliged, and I took nothing from Lydia that night but her intimacy.

The things I have stolen over the course of the years have always been, of necessity as well as of preference, small in size. Because I have archived the objects I've taken, it has been practical that they not occupy much space. Until recently, my life was not burdened by their secret presence in it. I have never so much as kept them under lock and key. My custodianship would, I knew, inevitably come to an end sometime. I'm not so dour a man that the theft of my cache would fail to strike an ironic note. The thief robbed; who wouldn't find comic justice in it? I mean to say, I am aware of the tenuousness of ownership—I know we cannot ultimately
own
. We're just caretakers in this life, isn't that the euphemism?—death being the only real landlord, the real holder of the
real
estate. If someone took my talismans away from me, I always thought until recently, “So be it”; the purpose, as I have said, was satisfied in their original removal.

Why then did I decide to do what I have done tonight? My answer: I was following my heart. In my experience, instructions from the heart are far more explicit and far less easy to follow than instructions from the intellect. The intellect can tell us what we ought to do, can speak to us with our own sham voice, can reason and cajole. The heart doesn't bother with such nonsense. In that regard it collaborates with death, where language stops cold—where the words “no more” or “not to be” or even “terror” are changed into sound waves that weave forever outward, unheard by ears, not responded to by voices.

Though sentimental, perhaps, Lydia was no fool. After the small extravagance of an overseas honeymoon, we settled where I'd grown up. I bought from my aging grandmother her house and furniture and established her in a comfortable room off the kitchen on the first floor. And while I would have been content to live frugally, and idly, on the interest earned by the balance of what my parents had left me, Lydia had grander plans. How animated she was as she described to me and Grandmother her dream of raising a family. Side by side on the front-room sofa we two sat as Lydia paced the kazak rug, and I would wince whenever my grandmother rolled her silvery, balding head forward and clicked her tongue with approval. What all this meant, of course, was that I was sent out to work.

I can't say I initially resented the responsibilities I began to incur on behalf of Lydia's dream. No; for a while I was content with my decision to be married, and was happy enough to have come back home after those years of wandering. What did worry me was that the novelty of marriage and the imperatives of responsibility began to pervert my own routine. Miss it as I might, my resolve to steal had abated. Days, months, seasons passed without my making a single addition to the cache, and I realized I'd lost what I discovered, in the full-blooded impudence of youth: the perfect way to people's hearts. Denied, I felt myself slowly atrophy into an indifferent worker, a sullen spouse, a distant grandson. However stifled I felt, however lethargic, I was not so blind as to remain unaware that my family and friends were treating me differently than they once had. I fought it, this feeling of isolation, and somewhat in desperation made the petty theft of a coffee mug from a fellow employee at the office. Waste of time. She merely brought in another.