Thief (2 page)

And then a letter came. And I could tell by the heft of it that Breville had decided to tell me his story.

I didn’t open the letter the way I often opened my mail, right there at the mailbox, or walking the gravel road back to the
cabin— I waited until I got inside. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to read in the bright June sunlight that Breville
was a drug dealer, a thief, or convicted of some kind of assault, or maybe I already felt too secretive about the correspondence
to begin reading on the public road. All I know is that as I opened the envelope, I tried to ready myself for what I might
find. Yet when I started thinking that burglary would be a more acceptable crime than, say, assault, the idea of preparation
seemed silly. What ever Breville had done, it had been serious enough to land him in Stillwater, and no amount of rationalizing
on my part would change that.

Breville began by thanking me for the opportunity to tell me about himself and then apologized for taking so long to reply
to my request.
It took me a while to write back because I don’t like to think about the details of my crime
, he wrote.
But, yes, you are right, you have the right to know.

At nineteen, Breville said, he was a thief and a drinker, “a user and an abuser.” He took any drug he could get his hands
on, though he preferred alcohol and marijuana because they were the
easiest to get. His only idea of a good time, he said, was when he could get wasted. One night when he had been out drinking
and partying with friends, he decided to break into a house in South Minneapolis because he wanted more money.

I was only going to steal what I saw through the window. A TV and a stereo. I didn’t think anyone was at home. But when I
got inside the house, the woman who lived there heard me. She came out into the living room to investigate. I didn’t see or
hear her at first but then she asked me what I was doing. She was wearing just a robe and I saw part of her breast. That’s
when I decided to rape her. I didn’t plan to do it but, I did it.

Breville went on to say that he believed he would not have raped the woman if he hadn’t been drinking that night, but he said
he also realized that was no excuse:

I was a different person when I was drinking. Crazy. But that was also part of my crime, or at least part of my sickness.
I have been sober for seven years, in a 12-step program. But I doubt I would have changed at all if I hadn’t been sent to
prison. I’d be out there running the streets. Or maybe I’d be dead. I don’t know.

Breville told me he received more than the mandatory sentence because he pled innocent to the rape and showed no remorse.
Even though police found some of the woman’s possessions in his apartment the morning after the rape, he thought he could
beat the charge because his lawyer told him there was no DNA evidence.

I was in denial then about my crime. But I did it. I raped that woman. That is my crime. If you do not want to write me again
I will understand. I will more than understand.

After I finished reading Breville’s letter, I let the pages drop to the floor. I didn’t do it to seem dramatic— there was
no one there to see the gesture. I dropped the pages because I didn’t want to hold them anymore. Breville had sat in his cell
writing the letter— for days, if what he told me was truthful— and now the pages were here in the kitchen of the cabin, and
I didn’t want to touch them. I didn’t want that proximity to Breville. I didn’t even want to see his handwriting on the cheap
notebook paper.

The letter stayed on the floor for days. I walked past it at first, and then I pushed it under the kitchen table with my foot.
I told myself not to think about it, but I did think about it. I thought about it when I was swimming, and when I lay on the
dock, reading or writing in my journal. I thought about it when I talked in the yard with Merle, the old man who was renting
me the cabin for the summer, and I thought about it as I drank my morning coffee under the birch tree. And what I thought
was that the whole thing was a colossal joke, some ridiculous trick the universe was intent on playing on me. I place a personal
ad in a paper and a rapist responds. But in a while, that idea passed, too, if only because I knew the universe wasn’t particular
enough to single me out. In one way, what had happened was an ugly sort of co-incidence, but in another way, it was predictable
enough. One lonely person placed an ad, and another lonely person had answered, and who else could be lonelier than a rapist
in Stillwater state prison?

Days after receiving Breville’s letter, I picked it up and read it again. Not because of some sick impulse, as Julian would
say, but because I thought maybe the letter represented a different kind of chance— an opportunity, if you will. I picked
the letter off the floor because I thought maybe Alpha Breville and I had something to say to each other. I had been raped
when I was sixteen, and he had raped when he was nineteen.

We were two sides of a coin.

ONCE I DECIDED
that Breville and I might have something to say to each other, I could not stop thinking about the idea. If he could tell
me why he had raped, maybe I could somehow make sense of the one ejaculation that so transfigured my life. His crime became
the very reason to write back to him. Yet I knew the letter I wrote would not be the one he hoped to receive.

“You must be the unluckiest of people to have chosen my ad to respond to,” I began. “I was raped when I was sixteen years
old, one week before I turned seventeen.” Then I told him some of the details of my rape and how it had affected me.

I never dated blond men, because my rapist was blond. I couldn’t stand certain smells, because my rapist’s hair and breath
had been foul. I had a hard time sleeping beside a man, even if I was in an intimate relationship with him, because I could
not let myself relax. I never entirely lost the feeling of dirtiness and infection, perhaps because I had, in fact, been infected
with gonorrhea and herpes. I described in detail for him the ulcers and scarring and how, in some fluke, I had spread the
virus to one of my eyes and almost lost vision there. I told Breville I still carried a sense of shame about the whole thing,
even though it had happened seventeen years ago.

“I cannot say my life was derailed by what happened,” I wrote. “I think I have had success in spite of it. But I think about
the experience almost every single day, and I sometimes wonder who I might have been if it hadn’t happened. I would guess
you had a similar devastating effect on the woman you raped. She probably tries to pretend you don’t exist— you are not even
a person to her. But when she does think of you, I’m sure she hates you as much as I hate the man who raped me. To me, he
is a useless piece of shit littering the earth.”

I wrote the letter in a fever of remembering and anger, and when I sent it off , I suppose there was some kind of catharsis.
But mostly I just felt upset by the old memories and overwhelmed by emotions. Still, I thought it was good that I had written
the letter, and that some of my anger had come out. It had been freeing to say some of the ugly things I wanted to say. I
said to Breville what I hadn’t been able to say to my rapist. My rapist— what a phrase. I mean the man who raped me, he of
the festering cock.

As days went by and I received no response, I became sure Breville would not write back. I couldn’t blame him. Even if he
were the loneliest person in all of Stillwater state prison, I couldn’t imagine anyone welcoming that kind of rage into his
life, and I was nothing if not filled with rage. Sometimes friends saw small flickers of anger and impatience in me, but almost
no one knew about the uncontrollable fits I sometimes had. Sometimes I beat my bed with hangers or broke dishes or phones.
From the outside, my actions might have appeared comical, but the feelings behind the out-bursts weren’t. However, most of
the time my anger didn’t translate into any action at all. When I didn’t live up to my own standards, when I mishandled a
decision, or even when something happened over which I had little or no control, I turned my anger inward, against myself.
Even when I thought I’d come to the end of it, after I’d gained some crucial insight or felt peaceful for a long time,
something would happen and my fury would return. Circle back into my life.

That destruction and depression was part of what I wanted to work out. If I had an audience— not friends or a therapist but
someone real and deserving of anger— maybe it would make a difference. Maybe the thing that was inside me would finally find
a different and worthy target. Breville was not my rapist, but he was someone’s rapist. Not mine but someone’s.

When Breville wrote back a week later, he told me it had been hard to read my letter, and that he had stopped a few times
and put it away. But he also said he felt obligated to read what I wrote, believing it was part of his fate:

By listening to you, I learn how my crime probably affected the woman I hurt. I thought I understood before but, reading your
letter I see I didn’t. It’s not that I didn’t know what I did was serious but I didn’t understand the half of it. I didn’t
understand the anger she must feel or maybe I didn’t want to understand. Suzanne, if I can somehow make things up to you or
be of some use to you, then I will be doing something.

When I first read that, I felt a kind of righteousness, but the feeling quickly changed. I didn’t believe Breville understood
how a cock could be like a knife, or how quickly and carelessly and violently he had changed a woman’s life. I didn’t think
he could understand— he was the perpetrator and the penetrator. I began to wonder if his letter wasn’t all just bullshit,
the result of learning the right things to say in his prison 12-step program.

I thought of not responding, but it seemed like my duty to
confront him. Even the confiding way he’d used my name in the middle of the letter— as if we were friends or intimates— bothered
me. I wanted to repel and ridicule him, so I began my reply with no salutation, just his name and a comma. “This is a piece
of paper,” I wrote. “How stupid to think anything you read or write in a letter can make up for what you did to that woman
in South Minneapolis. I suppose you are a step ahead of the man who raped me because you at least are serving time for your
crime, but there is no way to bring the score back to nil. You can’t do anything for me or with me to make up for your crime.
Nothing. There is no trading on sorrow.”

It again took Breville several days to respond, but he did reply. In this letter, he told me he understood he could never
erase the past or his crime.

But if I dwell only on that it means I can’t ever change anything. You may not believe this because you don’t know me but
I have changed from the person I was when I raped. I’ve had choices to make in here about how I serve my time and I’ve tried
to make good ones. I work as much as they permit me. I take college classes and one day I hope I can work with troubled kids,
the kind I was. I’m clean and sober. I know you are saying what choice do I have? But I do have a choice. You can get drugs
in here if you want. I choose not to. I can’t change the past but I am working to change the future. I do not want to live
the way I lived before. Even if your letters are harsh to read they are good for me, I know. I do not ever want to be in denial
again about what I did. I think I have caused you enough pain by making you think about a terrible time in your life and I
would understand if you didn’t want to write back. But if you choose to write to me again, I will be grateful. I know I have
nothing to offer you, except maybe to give you someone to hate.

I didn’t know what to believe when I finished Breville’s letter— I didn’t know what to think anymore. I put the handwritten
pages down on the kitchen table and walked outside, into the sunlight and down to the water.

But even as I swam, I kept thinking about Breville’s last phrase—
to give you someone to hate.
It seemed like a self-immolating thing to offer, and impossible, but it made me think of how seldom anyone offered me anything.
I didn’t mean friends— Julian loved me, and so did Kate, and I felt their love and friendship in real and tangible ways. But
men? Even when one offered me something, I knew he wanted something in return. And yet Breville seemed to be offering something
for nothing, and something I needed, because even when I did understand where my anger came from, the understanding still
didn’t give me any control over it. Maybe I did need someone to hate.

If it turned out Breville was lying, that he did want something in return, I would be free to walk away. To continue or not.
He couldn’t show up at my house or job, he couldn’t call me— I held all the cards. I was free to work out what ever I could
on him. And that was what I wanted: to take out on Breville what I couldn’t take out on my rapist and what I had been taking
out on myself all these years.

I wanted to use Breville.

INSTEAD OF WITHDRAWING
as Breville thought I would, I told him I would continue to write to him as long as I felt able. “I feel like I still have
questions to ask you. But when I decide to stop writing, you’ll have to accept it,” I wrote. “I owe you no explanation.”

Perhaps it was ridiculous to insist I was in control— after all, Breville was locked up in a maximum-security prison. But
the ability to stop things was essential for me. There certainly had been times a man called it off with me, but when I was
the one to end a relationship, I always did it in a complete way, breaking off all contact. When I broke the lease on my apartment
and came up north, Richaux, my ex, had no way of finding me. He would have created every possible scene if I had let him,
and by leaving as I did, I’d avoided all of that. Julian was convinced I had an addiction to dangerous men, and I could not
deny it, but I did not let any man work out his inflated notion of himself on me. If I sometimes had to uproot myself and
begin again, at a deficit, then I did. Contrary to what Julian thought, the line I would not cross did exist. So if I chose
to go on writing to Breville, it was exactly that: my choice. I did not do anything I didn’t want to do.