Thief (10 page)

We turned one corner and a bunch of people were standing outside a house on that warm May day. Richaux kept peering out the
window at the people— it was his old neighborhood and he thought he might know someone. He should have stopped the car if
he was going to look as long and hard as he did, but that would have been against all the rules of our covert, dope-seeking
mission. He never saw the girl running out into the street.

I realized we would hit her as the front of the car came nearer to the place she would be. What’s it called— trajectory? The
place where the girl would be if she kept running. And she did keep running because she didn’t see him or the car. She didn’t
even look. She was a kid playing a game, running after a friend.

I screamed Richaux’s name. Without looking or thinking, he slammed on the brakes and we both lurched forward. My face came
close to the glass and what I saw was this:

The girl never stopped running. She put one hand on the hood of the car and pushed it away. That’s what it looked like. I
saw a bare arm ending in a left hand, and the hand pushing off the corner of the car, right above where the headlight would
be. The hand and arm pushed off , and the haunch of the girl’s leg followed. For just a second she looked toward us, through
the windshield and into the car. Then she kept running, in front of the now-motionless car. My car.

After the girl’s arm and haunch and the side of her face disappeared, I turned to look at Richaux. He looked surprised.

“I just heard you and slammed on the brakes.”

“Jesus Christ, didn’t you even see her? Were you even looking?”

“I just told you,” he said. “And for Christ’s sake, don’t be de-pressed. Be happy.”

“Be happy?”

“Be happy I didn’t hit her. It could have been a tragedy and it wasn’t.”

“You’re a fucking tragedy,” I said. I should have also said,
And I am a fucking tragedy because I’m here with you
, but I didn’t. Yet it was how I felt.

We kept driving down the block and I looked back to see if any of the adults had stepped out into the street to watch us,
to catch a license plate number. But no one had. It had all happened so fast no one from the group of people standing outside
the house seemed to understand how close we’d come to hitting the girl. It seemed no one else saw the girl reach out and push
the car away.

We continued down that street and the next and the next, and Richaux eventually found someone to buy his dope from. We came
back to my place and as he smoked and I drank, Richaux berated me just to draw attention away from himself. I didn’t care.
It was like he wasn’t even speaking to me. I knew I should have left him before— after the time he shoved his foot between
my legs instead of using his hand or mouth to help me come, for instance— but I’d kept waiting for things to get better, or
for a new phase to start. But the day we almost hit the girl in my car, trying to buy his dope, well, that was the day I decided
to quit. What ever else I’d done in my life, I tried to limit the effect of my actions and the chances I took. If I was careless,
I tried to be careless only with my own life.

Richaux called many times after that, but I always let the phone ring. And before he could figure out that I really meant
it, I was gone. I parceled out my things to Julian and Kate for the summer, and I planned to parcel myself out in September
when school started again, until I found a new place to live. The truth was, apart from the externals like disconnecting the
phone, it was the easiest thing in the world to leave Richaux. His stories had grown old a long time ago, and I was sick of
his bullshit and bored by his dick.

In that sense I didn’t need the summer so much to heal as I needed it to gather strength and move on, like a summer thunder-storm.
And it had been my plan to spend my vacation alone, sorting through things, figuring out what it was I really wanted in my
life, like my friend Kate said I needed to. She was the one who actually came out and said, “I want so see you with a marriage
and a mortgage around your neck.” As crude as it was, I understood what she was saying— she wanted to see me with something
real. And to a degree I knew she was right. Sometimes everything about how I lived seemed to be some kind of half-life.

But my resolve to spend the summer on my own, contemplating and reflecting— well, that seemed to have shifted, and what ever
it was I was doing with Breville, I knew he certainly did not fall into
Kate’s category of worthwhile men who might have something to offer me as a partner in life. Nevertheless, I kept telling
myself, I had extricated myself from the situation with Richaux, and if the only way I knew how to do it was by disappearing
entirely from my old life, so be it. I had gotten the job done, and now my life was my own again. Only I could determine what
I wanted it to be.

AFTER BREVILLE AND I
started writing more intimate letters, I bought a new dress to wear when I went to see him. It was long— the guards wouldn’t
let you into the visiting room if your skirt was too short— but it was red, and it had a keyhole neckline.

That neckline was something. The dress had a little band-collar that buttoned at my throat, but from the base of the collar,
down over my breastbone to where the line between my breasts showed— that was all open. The oval opening wasn’t even that
big, but because it was surrounded by fabric, it gave the feeling of something being bared.

Breville liked the dress. He told me as soon as we sat down in the chairs.

“Holy, Suzanne. How much did it cost?”

“Sixty bucks,” I said.

He made a small whistle and sat shaking his head at me. I didn’t want to tell him that sixty dollars was nothing for a dress,
that the Paris perfume I was wearing cost more than that, or that if I’d wanted a nice dress instead of a trashy acetate one
I’d have to spend much more.

“I’m glad you like it,” I said instead, and I sat across from him
and let him take it all in, from the keyhole neckline down to my gold shoes.

That day we sat talking about the different cities we had seen or lived in, but really, we watched each other the entire time.

“I liked New York while I lived there,” I told him. “But when I left I was ready to leave.”

“The one time I was there I got lost,” Breville said. “I took a train somewhere and it went the wrong way. I walked back to
Port Authority.”

“How far did you walk?”

“A few miles. I was carrying a suitcase, too, so I was sweating like a pig.”

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen. Our senior trip.”

I told him a story about my father, about the time he had applied for a job after he got out of the ser vice after the Korean
War. The job advertisement had said there would be a typing test, and so my father had lugged his own typewriter to the interview,
not realizing until he arrived at the office that the company would provide its own typewriters for the test.

“His arms were so tired from carrying his typewriter he couldn’t take the test,” I said.

Breville laughed a long time at that, and when he was done laughing, he slouched down in his chair and stretched his legs
out on either side of my gold shoes. I could feel him all around me, and I could feel how, even though we were talking and
laughing and enjoying each other’s company, there was another level to what was going on that had nothing to do with our stories,
but rather to do with watching each other and the keyhole neckline and Breville’s legs stretched out on either side of mine.

“Did he ever get the job? Your dad?”

“He went back the next day and took the test,” I said. “I don’t remember if he got the job or not.”

“You should ask him,” Breville said. “Ask him and tell me.” There was nothing intimate in what we were saying to each other,
nothing intimate at all— and yet everything between us had that feeling. Everything. It didn’t matter if I was talking about
my dad, or about how I used to like to lie on the roof and look up at the pink Brooklyn sky— every detail was personal, charged.
I can’t explain it. Yet even though I knew something was happening between Breville and me that day in the visiting room,
and that everything we said that day was itself as well as more than itself and other than itself, it wasn’t until we were
saying goodbye that I understood how much had been traded back and forth between us. The guard monitoring our bodily contact
for illicit exchanges could watch for a packet being passed from hand or mouth to shirt collar, but there was no way to monitor
the real exchange that happened when Breville and I touched that day.

After I kissed Breville’s cheek and he kissed mine, we stood holding each other in front of the guard for the few seconds
permitted. As we pulled away from each other, Breville traced his hand— the one the guard could not see because our bodies
blocked it— down the small of my back and over my ass and along the out-side of my hip. The whole thing probably took only
two or three seconds, but it seemed much longer as it was happening. I felt the weight of Breville’s hand against my skin,
but I also felt the heat of his hand. The thing seemed to burn, and the places where he touched me seemed to burn.

It was only my imagination, but the burning went on even after I exited the huge front doors of the prison, and as I slowly
walked the leaf-filled blocks to my car. Certainly the risk was real: Breville could be sent to the hole for the wrong kind
of touch in the visiting
room, taken off the good-behavior wing where he had his own cell, a TV, and a morsel of control.

The burning sensation stayed with me as I got into my car and for a good many miles of my drive back north. And if it was
laughable when I said that Breville did not seem like a rapist, this next statement will be laughable, too: that day was the
first time I knew Breville could hurt me.

WHEN I FINALLY TOLD JULIAN
I was driving four hours back to the Cities every week to go to Stillwater, he told me I was crazy.

“I thought you went up to that cabin to get away from this,” Julian said the day I stopped by after visiting Breville. The
way he waved his hand as he said “this” took in the sound of the traffic drifting in the window as well as the glass of bourbon
he had in his hand. And he was right: when I left on the last day of school, I broke my lease, disconnected the phone, and
left no forwarding address or number. As much as I could, I disappeared.

“I did want to get away,” I said. “But visiting here is not the same as living here.”

“And now you’re involved with a convict,” Julian said. “Why do you always have such a taste for shit?”

“I’m working through something,” I told him. And there was nothing he could say to that.

Still, I knew better than to say anything about the Paris perfume, or the keyhole dress, or the sexually explicit letters
I’d begun writing Breville. There would have been no way to explain those things to people, or to explain that it was exactly
because Alpha Breville was a rapist that I was interested in him. He’d helped me
understand my own rape, and there seemed to be some kind of symmetry to the attraction. At first it seemed perverse, and then
it became more and more logical. Who better than Breville to understand me?

Usually I did the drive to and from Stillwater in a day. It meant eight hours in the car, but it was hard to mix my visits
to Breville with anything that had once been my life in the Cities. One Friday, though, Julian persuaded me to stay overnight
in Minneapolis; he was seeing someone new, and I could have free run of his house as long as I spent some time with his needy
cat.

As I was leaving the prison that day, I gave Breville Julian’s number so we could talk after our visit. And since each call
could only last ten minutes on the prison phone system, Breville called me over and over. During the third call— a luxury
we never had when he was calling long-distance and I had to pay the exorbitant collect rates the prison phone system charged—
Breville told me he wanted to ask me something and that he’d been wanting to ask for a long time.

“Shoot,” I said.

“If I call back, could I hear you, Suzanne? Can you do it so I can hear?”

I thought for a second of how every prison call was recorded, and how it was Julian’s number that would be on the record,
and then I thought about my last letter to Breville in which I’d written, “I bought my first vibrator when I was twenty-one,
right before I moved. It’s a hundred times easier than using my hand. My favorite way to masturbate is to lie perfectly still.
With just the ball of my vibrator humming on my body, I force myself to relax. I try to take as long as I can, relaxing my
muscles for as long as I can. When I can’t hold off any longer, when I finally do let myself come, my entire body spasms because
the orgasm is so strong.” Was I really at all surprised when he asked if he could hear me come?

“Let me at least get myself ready,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” Breville said. “I’ll call you back in five. Or do you need longer?”

“Just a little longer,” I said.

After I hung up the phone, I went and got a pillow from the sofa. I didn’t want to masturbate in Julian’s bed— that seemed
unforgivable, and somehow beyond the line I was willing to cross— so I took off my pants and lay down on Julian’s floor. The
cat kept circling around me. When Breville called back, my fingers were already wet.

“I didn’t think I’d get to hear that for a long time,” Breville said when I was done.

His voice was husky, and he sounded softer than I had ever heard him sound. It all made me think of how he’d spent the last
seven years.

“Don’t say I never did nothing for you,” I told him.

“Didn’t you do it for you, too?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Breville it was fake. I hadn’t meant to fake— I had been masturbating, but I just couldn’t
come on the hard floor, holding the phone to my head, and hearing the cat walk around me. It was too much pressure. The act
was ridiculous and felt hollow to me, like something out of a bad movie, but I’d still wanted to do it for Breville. Something
in me wanted to do it, even if it was pretend.