Thief (3 page)

In the same letter in which I told Breville he would have to
accept my terms, I asked him a question about his description of the rape he’d committed. A couple of sentences in particular
disturbed me. It was odd, perhaps, to focus on a couple of sentences when everything he wrote was so disturbing, but there
was one detail of his crime I felt I had to understand.

I wrote, “You told me that when you got inside the house in South Minneapolis, when you watched the woman come into the room
and ‘saw part of her breast’— that that’s when you ‘decided to rape her.’ Yet how can that be? If you had been a different
kind of person, you would never have made that decision. Don’t you see? The decision was in you for longer than that moment.
It was part of you. Maybe it only came out that night in South Minneapolis, but it would never have been able to come out
if it hadn’t been somewhere inside you already. It was part of who you were. It’s like what people do when they are drinking
and say something awful, and then they claim, ‘Oh, that was the alcohol talking.’ They pretend it wasn’t really them. But
it is them. It is perhaps the truest representation of what is inside them. Just as your actions that night in South Minneapolis
were a true representation of you. How could you have made the decision to rape in an instant? That violence was inside you
then, and, I believe, is still part of you today.”

After I wrote that, though, I wondered about the truthfulness of it. Part of me believed people revealed their true selves
when they drank because so many of their inhibitions dropped away. I knew it was true for me: nothing I did or said when I
was drinking surprised me. The crudeness of my behavior might embarrass me, but I knew it was my own personality asserting
itself. Yet the opposite was also true. How many times had I drunkenly spent the night with a man, fucking him with enthusiasm
and desire— only to be grateful to see the door close on him the next day when I was sober? The fuck and the intimacy had
been genuine, but so were my daytime thoughts of retreat. Sometimes my desire for solitude
was so strong I couldn’t even last a night with a man. If I was the one staying over, I might leave in the early morning hours,
stealthily, or after making some excuse about why I had to get home.

In fact, the contrast between daytime and nighttime thoughts was what prevented me from taking half relationships and weekly
assignations seriously. What I wanted at night was sometimes entirely unrelated to what I was willing to contend with day
to day. And I knew other people must feel the same. If they didn’t, Etta James wouldn’t sing about wanting a “Sunday Kind
of Love.” So maybe I was wrong about Breville. Maybe he wouldn’t have committed the rape if he hadn’t been drinking.

I walked outside then. To clear my head and to get away from the circle my thoughts had made.

Earlier in the morning it had rained, hard, and the gravel road still showed pocks and ribbons. I’d only walked a little way
when I saw something crossing ahead of me, small and low to the ground. When I got to the place, I looked in the grass and
saw a salamander. Not much bigger than a finger, it stood still long enough for me to study it— a dark, moist thing with tiny
spots and beads for eyes— and then it disappeared into the tall weeds. I walked all the way to the north end of the lake after
that. At first I was thinking about Breville, but in a while I wasn’t. In a while it was just me out on a cool morning walk.

When I got back to the cabin, I printed out my letter as it was and signed it. I didn’t use any closing, just my name, the
only thing to appear in cursive.
Suzanne
. The walk had made things plain again. It was one thing if drinking made you want to screw a goodlooking and willing stranger,
and quite another if it made you break into a woman’s house and rape her. And so I reminded myself that Breville was the criminal,
not me.

A FEW DAYS LATER
when I went to pick up my mail, I saw Merle standing by the mailbox at the end of his drive. The cabin I was renting was
on a portion of his land and had no separate street address, so I shared Merle’s mailbox. A couple of times he walked down
to the cabin with mail for me, but since I’d been writing to Breville, I’d been trying to beat him to it. Not today, though—
today I’d been in the water, and the water was so cool and pleasant I’d just gone on swimming and swimming.

“I believe it’s all for you,” Merle said. “I only got the paper.”

He handed me the pile of envelopes with Breville’s letter on top. I didn’t know if Merle had seen the return address or not,
or if he’d been able to decipher what a letter with a Stillwater address and long number meant— and I didn’t know that I cared.
Still, I turned the pile of mail in my hand so the address was facing down.

“You must be quite a swimmer to stay out as long as you do.”

“I don’t swim very fast.”

“Still. Most people around here don’t swim. Just kids. Adults lose the knack of it.”

“Do you swim?”

“I did until a few years ago,” Merle said. “Now I just feel the cold.”

If he’d been younger, perhaps I would have felt odd standing there and talking in my bathing suit, my towel wrapped around
my waist, my hair streeling down my shoulders. I could feel him watching me, taking me in, but I didn’t feel funny about it.
He was my father’s age and he seemed to treat me carefully, with some sort of distance or respect— I couldn’t quite tell which.
In any case, I didn’t feel uncomfortable or exposed standing there with him, and I saw as clearly as I saw the lake in front
of me that he wanted to go on talking to me in the sunshine.

“Do you miss it?” I said. “Swimming?”

“I miss it. But I miss a number of things,” he said. “And I still enjoy watching the lake as much as I ever did. Did you hear
the wolves the other night?”

“Was that what it was? I thought maybe they were coyotes.”

“We have those, too. But no, that was a wolf pack. You hear them only once in a while.”

“Well, I did hear them,” I said. “They woke me up.”

“I was awake already. It’s a grand sound.”

“It was. That’s a good word for it.”

“Well, enjoy the lake and the day,” he said then, turning to go, as if he knew he was keeping me. “It’s a plea sure to see
someone swimming.”

“It’s a plea sure to be here. Thanks for renting the cabin to me.”

He waved his hand. “You’re paying me. I’m the one should be thanking you.”

But the truth was he was hardly making any money off me. If he wanted, he could have rented the place for much more than what
he was charging me because that’s how it was in summer— resorts
charged $1,000 a week for rustic cabins. But I figured Merle wouldn’t have rented to just anyone. I’d gotten the cabin by
placing an ad in the local paper in which I tried to make myself sound responsible and appealing:
Quiet schoolteacher seeks small cabin to rent for summer. References available.

“It isn’t much of a place,” Merle told me somewhat gruffly when I called him on the phone. “It was never meant to be fancy.”

Yet after just a few minutes of talking, he invited me up to take a look around, and in another couple of minutes he said,
“Well, if you find you like it, it’s yours. What would you think of five hundred dollars?”

I hadn’t thought things would move so quickly, so I was taken off guard. “I know it’s a more than fair price,” I said. “But
I can’t afford that much a week.”

“No, I meant five hundred a month. I don’t want to be greedy.”

That’s how we sealed the deal. The sense I got from talking to him on the phone was quickly confirmed when I met him. He was
renting to me because he wanted another person around. Not company— he was too private for that— but a presence. Someone to
watch from the window or see out by the mailbox.

It was a tenuous and temporary role— the kind of relationship I felt comfortable in. And if part of it meant standing and
talking once in a while in the sunshine, in my bathing suit, I didn’t care.

I took Breville’s letter down to the dock to read. I could have read it in the privacy of the cabin, but this day I didn’t
want that. I wanted to read it out in the sun, with my feet dangling in the cool water. I didn’t know why, but it seemed to
matter at that moment to have everything out in the open. Maybe I felt stronger that way.
I’m not sure I can explain any better than I have how that night happened, and not because I don’t want to
, Breville wrote.

I would do anything I could for you. But I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, and the best way I can describe it is to say
that when I saw that woman, I made the decision to rape her. In some ways my actions are still a mystery to me. But if you’re
asking if I ever had dreams or fantasies before that night of raping a woman, I can say no I did not. But nothing about that
night is crystal clear to me. I was drunk and high and not in my right mind. All I know for certain is that I remember seeing
her standing there in a bathrobe, and I saw part of her breast, and the decision was made. It’s almost like my body made it.
But if I could do anything to take it back, I would. And maybe it’s like you say, the decision was in me all along. I know
I was a hell-raiser and always getting into fights, so yes, I had violence in me. I will admit sometimes I feel like I don’t
know how to take responsibility for my actions because I don’t even know the person I was that night. But, it doesn’t matter.
I was the one who committed the crime. And I accept your terms for friendship. Or maybe we are not friends, maybe it is the
wishful part of me saying that. But, whether or not I am your friend, you can count on me to be yours, even if I never hear
from you again.

I read Breville’s letter through a few times sitting down there on the dock, and then I tucked the thing under my towel so
it wouldn’t blow away. Yet even after I lay down on the hard boards and pillowed my head on my arms and drifted in and out
of sleep, I kept thinking about Breville’s words. It wasn’t lost on me that, in Breville’s position, any letter, even one
filled with anger and insults, might be a welcome variation in the day. In that sense, as long as I kept on writing, I was
giving him something he wanted. But it seemed to me my letters were serving as some kind of penance. Breville took what ever
I wrote to him— took it and told me it was good for him— and that somehow disarmed me.

Maybe it was the combination of that thought and being down by the water, daydreaming and sleeping in the sun, but after a
while I began to feel a kind of forgiveness. I don’t mean that I forgave Breville for raping the woman in South Minneapolis,
or that I forgave Frank L—— for raping me.

What I mean is I began to forgive myself for being raped all those years ago.

By reading Breville’s account of the rape, I’d come to understand something about why I’d been raped at sixteen. In his letter
Breville said he had intended only to steal, but when he saw the woman standing there, he decided, just like that, to rape
her. He claimed he never would have done it if he hadn’t been drinking, but what ever the rationalization, it was clear his
decision to rape had nothing what ever to do with the woman. When I realized that, I understood for the first time that my
own rape had nothing to do with me. I had been the random focus of someone else’s decision, but the decision had nothing to
do with me.

Which is to say: I was raped for no reason.

I USUALLY CALLED JULIAN
in the early evening— after he had time to slough off the day but before he headed out to a movie or for drinks with friends.
Sometimes he ate his dinner while I talked to him, since he told me that was what he missed most about me: the two of us sharing
a swordfish dinner on the terrace of our favorite Greek restaurant.

This night as he ate, I wanted to tell him what was going on with Breville, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Instead I told him how I’d been sitting on the dock that afternoon, dangling my feet in the water, when I felt a tiny tap
on the bottom of my foot. It was so gentle it didn’t startle me, and when I looked down, I saw a painted turtle lazily swimming
and floating through the water.

“I think he was napping,” I said. “I think he just drifted into my foot.”

“Aren’t there any groups you can join up there?” Julian said. “Any people you can meet?”

“I don’t want to join a group. What do you mean?”

“The only person you talk to is that old man. Aren’t there any Greens you can get to know? Some nice bleeding heart liberals?”

“So funny. I bet you could go onstage with that humor,” I said. “Do I sound lonely?”

“I think you’re getting isolated.”

“That was the plan,” I said. “I’m an introvert. If I don’t have to make small talk with people until I’m back in the teachers’
lounge, it will be fine with me.”

I could hear Julian’s fork go down on his plate, and, in a little while, a match striking and then an inhale. It made me miss
him.

“Okay,” he said, exhaling. “Maybe I’m wrong. But I think you need to connect with some people.”

“All right.”

“Go out to lunch with somebody.”

“All right already,” I said. “I know you’re right.”

But when I hung up the phone, I doubted I would do any of it. Maybe I was isolated, but I was also tired of people— I always
was when the school year ended. Right now I was more interested in the herons and the felty way their wings sounded, or how,
on some mornings, I made myself walk the gravel road around the lake until I found a feather on the ground. It never took
long, and I always seemed to know just where to look.

That was what I had to talk about, or maybe it was all I wanted to talk about. I wasn’t ready to tell Julian about Breville,
not when it still felt too hard to explain to myself.

Even though Breville showed me my rape happened for no reason, I think it was inevitable that it did happen. Given who I was,
even from an early age, it was probably inevitable some harm should come to me.