Thief (9 page)

“But I am,” I said, and we stood looking at each other in the parking lot light.

“Jesus,” was all he said, and then I was walking away from him.

Something in me felt fragile as I turned— my back felt tight— but I kept going, first toward the casino and then to the opposite
end of the parking lot where I’d parked. The band had one more set to play, I knew, but I’d heard enough. Seen enough.

When I got back home and pulled up beside the cabin, I wished I’d left a light on for myself. I felt a little empty, deflated
somehow. Once I got inside, though, everything was just the way I’d left it: the jar of Merle’s peonies on the table, the
quilt neatly covering the couch. And then I wasn’t empty or sorry. I was glad to be alone. I knew it wasn’t the waiter I wanted,
it was the idea of a man I wanted. His kiss, his mouth on me, the wing of his collarbone and the pouch of his balls. But I
didn’t know the man I wanted, and my wanting didn’t make him real.

After I washed my face and got in bed, I stayed up a long time reading. The air was so warm and moist I only needed the sheet
over me, and I was glad not to be working over the waiter’s body in the heat, dipping my head to suck his cock or taking him
up into my cunt. Back at the casino I thought it was odd that I didn’t want to bring him home, but now that I was back here,
it wasn’t surprising at all, and I found myself remembering something an old friend had told me a long time ago.
If you can’t go to bed with someone who’s read a good book
, she said,
just go to bed with a book.

Still, I knew I had come close to fucking Dallas, though whether
out of loneliness or the need to prove I was a participant in life, I couldn’t say. I’d been doing it all my life, and I probably
would have done it that night, too, except that I had one thing to keep me from it, and that was the stack of Breville’s letters
in my nightstand. I knew that if I came home alone and was lonely, I could stay up and write to Breville about how I felt,
and in a few days I’d get an answer back. I would always get an answer back.

So if I needed another example of how Breville’s words absolved me, I had it that night as I fell asleep in my tattered old
nightgown after reading a hundred pages of
Bleak House
instead of lying awake all night beside a man I didn’t know.

Breville’s letters were my safety net.

THE NEXT TIME
I went down to Stillwater, Breville had the trustee take another photo of us in front of the blue backdrop with our arms
draped loosely around each other’s waist. It was a nicer photo than the one on the day of our first visit— my eyes were partly
closed in that snapshot— and I wanted Breville to keep it. But he insisted I take it.

“I don’t have another thing I can give you, Suzanne,” he said, there in front of the burly, Polaroid-toting trustee. “Please
just take it.”

“All right, then,” I said. “This one’s mine.”

When I got home I studied the photo, and no matter how I tried to remember it was a picture of Breville and me in front of
a wall at Stillwater state prison, that detail would not stay in my mind. We looked like any other new couple. Nervous, perhaps,
arms lightly looped around each other, neither of us sure we should hold the other closer. But exactly like any other young
couple. Where I was blond, Breville was dark-haired, but that seemed to make us complement each other. Although I thought
Breville was the better-looking of the two of us, the picture flattered me, too. It showed my long hair spilling over one
shoulder, and there was something lively in my face that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was there in
Breville’s face, too. And that’s how the next stage started, with me writing about what I saw in the photo and cautiously
trying to describe my attraction to him.

“Your face pleases me in a way I wasn’t expecting,” I wrote that night back at the cabin with the Polaroid in front of me.
“But more than that, I like how your expression changes over the course of time we spend in the visiting room. Your look grows
softer as we sit together, as does your voice. Maybe that is why this second photo is better than the first: because you have
become more yourself around me.”

Breville wrote in his letter back to me:

Wow, you flatter me. I don’t know how to even respond to the things you say. I don’t think anyone has ever seen me the way
you do. It makes me happy in a way I can’t describe. As for you, I don’t understand why you have ever had a moment’s doubt
about your looks. From how you described yourself in your letters, I was expecting someone who was plainer, homely even, to
be honest. But you are a looker, a beauty, and a natural beauty, at that. I hate it when women wear too much makeup. I hate
to see it caked up on their skin. Your beauty is genuine. It all just adds to my impression of you.

Things might have remained there and innocent enough, but I pushed things further along in my next letter. I want to be clear
about that: I was the one who pressed on, not Breville. I knew I was opening a door, but I wanted to open it— or maybe I just
couldn’t stop myself from opening it.

“I like to kiss,” I wrote. “And I like kisses that are a combination of hard and soft. When I kiss a man, I start out by keeping
my hand by his mouth, and I touch his lips with my fingers as I kiss him. I make him keep his eyes open and sometimes I keep
mine open. I start and stop kissing him many times. It takes a long time
before I touch his lips with my tongue, and when I do, the touch is light. Not that I don’t like deep kisses, too. But there’s
a time for them, and I want to build up to it.”

By writing that way, I told myself, I wanted to be honest about who I was, emotionally and sexually, but of course I knew
it was more than that. I wanted to excite Breville.

This was what Breville wrote back:

Suanne, Suzanne. The way you describe a kiss is the best thing I think I have ever read. I’ve read your letter about fifty
times now, and each time I read that paragraph, it sends shivers through me as much as it did the first time I read it. I
don’t know if anyone has ever kissed me the way you describe. Maybe I was just too impatient to let a woman kiss me that way.
I can see that now, but I don’t think I could have understood it at eighteen or nineteen. I thought I was in charge of everything.
Now I can see how stupid I was, just another of the many ways.

When I read that, it took a moment to sink in that Breville was not talking about things that happened three months ago, or
six, or even a year ago. He was writing about the way he used to kiss when he was still a teenager because that’s how old
he’d been when he was incarcerated. He’d told me inmates and visitors used to be allowed to kiss on the lips in front of the
visiting room guards, but even those kisses would have been quick pecks. So Breville had gone seven years without really kissing
a woman. When I stopped and thought about that, I felt chagrin at having raised the issue, and I could only wonder at the
sorrow Breville must have felt, no matter what else my words provoked.

“How do you stand it?” I wrote in my next letter to him. “How do you stand not being able to kiss or touch? What do you do
with your sexuality?” I thought for a while before I wrote the next
sentence because I didn’t know if I wanted to ask the question or get the answer. But then I thought,
No, Suzanne, you have to ask.
So I wrote, “Have you found any kind of homosexual release? I can understand if you would have.”

Breville wrote:

I was wondering when that would come up. It’s okay, though, I know it has to. You ask how I stand not being able to touch
anyone. Well, it is impossible to stand. You can’t stand it or, at least I can’t, so I bury it. I bury it and I bury it. And
once every couple of weeks I have a date with Rosie. That’s a prison joke that you probably won’t get— Rosie is my right hand.
Ha, I thought I might as well tell you. I put a towel over a certain portion of my door for ten or fifteen minutes and I masturbate.
We are allowed some magazines in here, and I sometimes use those. As far as the rest— I know some people turn to homosexuality
in here. In certain parts of the prison at certain times, that’s all there is. The inmates are like animals. All you can hear
is guys yelling, “Wump, there it is.” That probably makes you sick— I know it does me. It’s one of the reasons I worked so
hard to get on this wing, the good-behavior wing. One of my closest friends here is gay and has AIDS— Gates. You’ll probably
see him sometime in the visiting room. I don’t hold it against him, and he is the truest friend I have here. But as for me,
it holds no interest. I don’t have one homo-sexual bone in my body. I don’t mind answering any questions you have, but if
it’s all the same to you, I’d rather hear about your sweet kisses than think about the options I have in here with the faithful
Rosie. I hope you don’t mind that I try to make a joke about it, otherwise it’s too depressing.

I didn’t have any experience with most of the things Breville described, and yet his words made me wonder. If he was friends
with
Gates, it would seem he had some open-mindedness about homo-sexuality, and if that was true, why would he deny himself that
option, especially under the circumstances imposed by Stillwater? Maybe I had it wrong, but I also got the feeling that Breville
was telling me what he believed I wanted to hear, the way he did when he wrote me his first letters and told me about his
12-step program. But if what he said about his sex life in prison raised doubts in my mind about his honesty or actual experiences,
all the better. I knew he was damaged, and I also knew what ever kind of friendship I was forming with him was a reflection
of my own damage. But it was all up front. I didn’t have any illusions about what I was getting into.

I couldn’t claim that about any number of men I had dated in the past. I hadn’t really known my college boyfriend Phillip,
who decided when he was seeing me that, in fact, he was bisexual; one morning he let himself into my dorm room and climbed
into bed with me, cooing about the “difference” between my skin and that of the man he’d just spent the night with. I hadn’t
known the South African with whom I’d found such sexual bliss but who then claimed ancestral spirits were warning him against
me, or the crazy Russian émigré who struck me in the breasts after he woke from a terrible dream, or the amorous young lawyer
who got my telephone number one night at a club but who turned out to be terrified of me on our subsequent date— apparently
because he realized in his sobriety I had bigger tits and hips than he remembered or believed he was attracted to.

And not Richaux. I certainly had not known what I was getting into with Richaux, who was the main reason I had to come north
this summer. Last year he bewitched me with his stories of vision quests and his scars from sun dances, but over the winter
he’d turned bullying and mean, withholding everything from me, including his tongue in my vagina. In the end, though, I left
him, not for something he did, but for something he almost did.

With Breville there would be no nasty surprises, and if there were, all I had to do was stop showing up at Stillwater state
prison, where Breville would be safely locked away for another seven years. There was always that safety catch in the back
of my mind.

Yet if there quickly came to be something sexual between Breville and me, something entirely different began to develop, too.
It showed itself in the visiting room the last time I’d seen him, the day we took the good photo. It was getting close to
the time I knew the guards would call the end of the visit, and neither Breville nor I could think of anything to say to fill
the time. The silence wasn’t embarrassing or uncomfortable, though— we were some-how just content to sit there in the chairs,
looking across the aisle at each other.

“Do you know what song I think of when I think of your name?” he asked me lazily, as if we were someplace altogether different,
just passing the time together.

“What, are you going to tell me I take you down to the river?” I said, meaning to tease. “Or that you want me to give you
Chinese tea and oranges?”

“No, no. But you’ll probably laugh anyway. I shouldn’t even tell you.”

“Now you have to tell me.”

“All right. I think of that old song, ‘Goodnight, Irene.’ ”

“ ‘Goodnight, Irene’?”

“It’s an old-fashioned song, but you make me think of it. Your name is old-fashioned.”

“It’s a pretty song,” I said. “It wouldn’t be old-fashioned if someone modern sang it.”

“I change the words to it anyway. Instead of ‘Goodnight, Irene,’ it’s ‘Goodnight, Suzanne.’ It’s ‘Goodnight, Suzanne, goodnight,
Suzanne, I’ll hold you when I can.’ ”

There in the visiting room at Stillwater, with the other inmates
and their visitors sitting not far from us, with the guards monitoring everything, Breville quietly half sang and half spoke
the words to me.

“I do hold you when I can. I hold you here,” he said then, and touched one finger to his forehead.

I didn’t know what to say or do. I was so taken aback I couldn’t think. So I said, “I’m moved. I mean, that you think of me
that way.”

“Always.”

When we embraced in front of the guard’s station that day, Breville held me as long as he could and whispered into my hair,

Goodnight, Suzanne.
And even though it was daytime when I left the prison, I felt like it should have been night, all because of that song.

RICHAUX DID A DOZEN THINGS
I should have left him for, but as I said, I left him for something he did not do. Or, to be clearer, for something he almost
did.

He had no idea who he would buy from this particular day. His regular dealer was out of town, but he figured if he drove around
he’d see someone who looked likely. I shouldn’t make it seem like he was alone— I was there in the car. But it was his weed
and his high we were seeking. I was happy enough with the vodka I had at home.