Thief (17 page)

“I can come down to visit.”

“How can you do that when you’re working?”

“The weekends,” I said.

“You know what makes me sick? It just makes me sick to think that you came all the way down here yesterday and I missed you.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“It was a waste for you.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Things happen. I’m just glad nothing’s wrong. And I don’t want to make your life harder. I’m sorry if
I’m doing that.”

“No, no,” Breville said. “You make me want to try for things. Things I can’t get. But it’s up to me to find the balance. I
have to learn not to lose focus on what I’m doing in here. This is my life. I can’t let myself get carried away.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s all just too much.”

“It’s not too much. It’s what I want. It’s what I want in ways I can’t hardly say.”

“Could you write it to me?”

“I’ll try. I’ll try to do that.”

“I’ll try, too,” I said.

“You don’t have to try. Don’t you get it? You’re perfect. I’m the one who has to try.”

“Everyone has to try,” I said.

The fifteen-second warning tone sounded then.

“Write to me,” I said.

“You write to me, too, Suzanne,” he said. And then the line cut off .

After I hung up, I thought about what Breville had said about losing his balance, about how he was getting too caught up in
things other than his life in Stillwater. When he said it, I thought he must be joking, because what kind of life did he have
in prison? But of course he did have a life there. What ever his days were like, they contained interactions, relationships,
negotiations, tensions, activities, periods of boredom, as well as expectations met and unmet— just as my days did, just as
anyone’s did. What I heard him say was that his focus on things outside of Stillwater produced a kind of conflict for him,
and made it harder for him to be in the place he occupied and would occupy for the next seven years. In certain ways his relationship
with me was positive, but in other ways I made his life more complicated and took away from his ability to live his life in
prison.

There was a part of me that found it incredible. Ludicrous, even. Breville did not have to worry about paying for rent or
car insurance, he did not have to keep clothes on his back or food in the fridge, he did not have to pay bills except the
one he could pay for his local telephone calls. Certainly his life was filled with stress and violence, but on another level
it was completely removed from the pressures other people dealt with on a daily basis. Yet who would willingly trade their
pressures for the ones Breville faced? As crazy as what Breville had said first sounded, I had to accept that just as I had
a rich and full existence outside of my calculated, constricted relationship with him in the visiting room, he, too, had a
complex life right there in Stillwater state prison.

I don’t know why it surprised me so much to realize that— he’d given me enough glimpses. There were the dinners he cooked
for himself and other men on the wing, his friendship with Gates, the associate’s degree he earned in prison college classes,
the things he did in his spare time. One day when we were working to find
things to talk about in the visiting room, he told me that in the last week, he’d read
Get Shorty
and watched
Little Women
on TV.

“
Little Women
?” I asked.

“Sure. It was a good story.”

The conversation surprised me, and I liked that. I liked both the surprise and the potential it made me see in Breville.

He’d done the same thing tonight— surprised me. I knew I was older than he was by seven years— we’d talked about it a couple
of times, but I hadn’t realized how much it was on his mind. Maybe I discounted it because I blithely believed what he told
me when the issue came up, that age didn’t matter to him, and that I didn’t look my age anyway. Or maybe I figured he didn’t
have the widest range of women to choose from, sitting there in Stillwater state prison, and that he should be happy I was
involved with him. To night, though, I realized Breville did think about it. It was part of his calculations and it somehow
mattered to him. Maybe he just had the myopia of someone in his twenties who believed everyone age forty and up was old— I
didn’t know. But what ever Breville thought about our respective ages, the conversation made me realize he thought about a
future with me.

But I did not think about a future with him.

AS IT TURNED OUT
, what ever Merle heard or did not hear from the cabin the nights I spent with the cowboy didn’t stop him from offering to
rent me his house when I got the job at the local school. He was going to Arizona that winter with all the other snowbirds.

“That way I won’t have to worry about this place,” Merle said. “You’d be here to keep an eye on things.”

I was as surprised by Merle’s offer as I had been by the job offer itself. I didn’t have any of my school clothes up at the
cabin, so I’d dressed for the interview in jeans and the nicest blouse I could find at the Pamida store in town, and the director
of the program had talked to me for about forty-five minutes. I was offered the job the next day. To make an offer so quickly
based on such a short interview made me figure the place was desperate, or that the guy wanted to make a decision and get
on with his summer. But something in me wanted to give the job a try. The position was at an alternative program for at-risk
students, and if the place really was a safety net for kids as the director claimed, I thought it might work. During the interview,
the director kept saying, “Our bottom line is kids,” and I figured if everyone was as sincere or as innocuous as he seemed
to be, I’d be just fine. Or at least fine enough.

“Put it this way,” Merle said. “You’d be doing me a favor by staying in the house.”

“I haven’t said yes to them yet.”

“But you’re going to, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Well, I usually leave for Phoenix around October fifteenth, but maybe this year I can go a little earlier. I could head out
at the end of September. How does that sound?”

“If I do say yes, I can stay here,” I said, nodding back at the cabin. “It won’t get that cold.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“So I’ll bring all my quilts,” I said. “Don’t change your plans on my account.”

“No one’s changing any plans,” Merle said. “I do what I please. Besides, it’s one way to get a woman into this house.”

He looked away as he said it, but then he looked sideways at me from under the Kubota cap.

I thought of all the times he’d stopped to talk to me when I was in the yard or down on the dock. At other times, though—
when he saw me with a book or notebook, or when it looked like I was dozing down by the water, or if I was sitting off under
the trees at the side of the cabin having a cup of coffee in the morning— he kept on his walk, not stopping or even slowing.
He never once intruded. After one storm, when a couple of trees had fallen across the road, he drove down to the cabin as
soon as the worst lightning had passed to make sure I was all right. Of course, I thought. Of course. I thought of him as
an old man because he was retired, but he was probably seventy at the most. Old enough to be a father figure— or not.

“You’re good to me, Merle,” I said then. From his face I saw it was the right thing to say.

When I told Julian the news that night, he said, “Why do you want to bury yourself alive in the north woods?”

“You know I need a change.”

“I thought you were getting a change this summer.”

“It was a trial run. Now I see it’s the right thing.”

“So, I guess I’m stuck with your sofa in my basement.”

I said, “I promise I will come and get my shit.”

“Actually, I sort of like having a sofa in the basement. I can sit down there while I’m doing laundry.”

“Then I give you the gift of that sofa,” I said. “You know there’s a board broken in the back of the frame. I broke it when
I fucked Richaux on it.”

“You couldn’t screw him in your bed?”

“He liked to be able to watch TV while we did it.”

“Jesus,” Julian said, laughing. “Too much information.”

“Seriously, I want you to think I’m doing the right thing. And I want you to be happy for me.”

“I am happy for you. I am happy about what ever makes you happy. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“Just wait, in a year you’ll be married to a logger,” he said, and I could hear him inhale on a cigarette. “Then you’ll call
me up crying when he hangs a dead deer in your backyard or tracks mud on your kitchen floor.”

“Julian.”

“You’ll get tired of those north woods types. I know what I’m talking about.”

And he did. He hadn’t always been Julian, and he hadn’t always lived in a bungalow in Edina. Forty-five years ago he’d been
born on a farm in Bagley, Minnesota, and named Lyle. One of six kids. If anyone knew the art of transforming, he did.

“I’ll see you soon,” I said. “I’ll clear everything out of your house but the sofa.”

“Absolutely,” Julian went. “Pencil me in after your convict.”

“I will,” I said. “I love.”

“I love, too.”

I wrote a letter of resignation to my old school that night, and the next morning I drove to town, to the post office, to
send it by registered mail. And that’s how I stepped free of my old life in the Cities, or the concrete box, as Merle called
the place.

THE NEXT DAY
a letter came, and I could see from the date it was out of sync. Breville had written it days ago, right after our last visit
together, before the night he’d been so distraught, and before I’d driven down to Stillwater and been turned away by the guard.
In the letter Breville said he wanted to apologize for what he’d asked me the last time I’d come to see him. At first I didn’t
remember what he’d asked, but I kept reading and I remembered.

He wrote:

I could see from your reaction you were mad when I asked about it. I don’t blame you. I don’t think I would like it much if
I was a girl either. It must be a guy thing, wanting to see that hidden part of a woman’s body. When one girl shaved it for
me in the past, what I liked about it best was seeing her lips. I knew they were called that, but I didn’t really get it until
I saw them, until they were bare. I just wanted to run my fingers and mouth over them all day! But I will be honest with you,
I do think about you that way and I wonder what your body looks like and what it would feel like. I hope you can understand,
you are the woman in my life. I already know those “lips” would be as pretty as the ones
you brush against my cheek every time you say hello and good-bye, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking you if you’d ever
done it. Sick, I know. You come all the way down here and that’s how I talk to you in that room. But my sex life is a fantasy
life right now and you are my fantasy, Suzanne. I want to know everything about you. What you look like when you sleep, what
you look like there. Sometimes that’s how I get through the day here, picturing it. Honest to Christ I hope I’m not making
things worse by saying that, but it’s the truth. Do you think you could ever be interested? Do you think it could ever be
exciting to you? Because I would love to think of you that way.

I had started reading Breville’s letter the way I usually did, walking the gravel road back to the cabin. But when I got to
that part, I stopped. My body heated up and I felt light-headed. I felt like I could hear Breville saying the words to me,
as if I could see his face as he said them. I stood on the edge of the road until I finished the letter.

Once I got inside the cabin, I took off my clothes and dug through the bathroom drawer for all my pink razors. I felt like
I was shaking, and I was still light-headed. I couldn’t explain it. Other men had talked about it before, but I always told
them off — I didn’t like the bare, little-girl idea of it. Yet here I was, nicking my fingers for Breville.

Breville.

I propped the mirror against the dresser, but it was still hard for me to see what I was doing. I started with the scissors,
but I was up to the razor part now, pulling the skin taut with one hand and scraping with the other. My neck ached from bending
over, so I stopped for a second and wished he could see how much trouble I was going to. As soon as I thought of him, though,
I got the hot, quick feeling all over again, and I kept on.

When I finished the job, my skin felt tender— no doubt from all the scraping, but also because my protection was gone. I felt
raw inside my panties, and my jeans seemed like armor when I pulled them back on. Even inside my clothes, I felt too present
in the world. I walked around for a while, trying to get used to the feeling, but after a bit I gave up. I took off my clothes
again and put on my softest nightgown. The cotton was a comfort. But I understood what Breville meant about how soft the skin
was. It was softer than anything I’d ever touched.

It’ll grow back
, I told myself. And I let myself sleep.

The sun was low in the sky by the time I walked down to the dock to swim. For a second I wondered if the water would make
the shaved place between my legs burn, but nothing hurt when I slid down into the water. After a few moments, I realized what
I should have known all along: lake water never stung or burned, not even when I opened my eyes underwater and looked up to
the sky. There wasn’t anything in it to burn. The water was clean enough to drink, though I never had, except for the stray
mouthful I swallowed when a boat wake hit me or I stuttered through a swimming stroke. If anything, the lake water soothed
me. So I swam out until I was over the deepest part— eighty feet down to the bottom, if the maps were to be believed— and
then I turned to float.

There were no boats, or at least none that I heard when I tilted my head back and let water fill my ears. I kept my back straight
and held my arms out at my sides at first, but then I let my body go limp. My arms and legs drifted down slightly, and it
seemed like I was half sitting and half lying in the water. When I floated like that I couldn’t ever get over the feeling
that the whole lake was holding me up— all five and a half billion gallons of it. Even though I’d gone through the trouble
to look up the size of the lake and calculate the
gallons, the number didn’t get at the feeling I had when I floated, which was the sensation of being held up by a great, dark
thing, something that went on for a long, long time. It was like floating in the night sky and the Milky Way galaxy.