Thief

by Gibbon, Maureen

  We were two sides of a coin.

  3

  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.

  4

  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.

  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.

  5

  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 dolla
rs?”

  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.