Yet something real had happened between us. It had happened when I wrote about my rape and when he wrote back, and it happened every time I sat across from Breville in the visiting room, when his dark eyes met mine. It was not just the understanding I gained from Breville about my own rape, though he had given me insight, and it was not just sexual tension, though that flowed like a current between us, and it was not just the strangeness of the prison in Stillwater, though I knew myself well enough to admit I found the place powerful in its foreignness and danger.
It was something more complicated in its details, and no matter how long I looked at it, I could not get a clear picture.
Because of Breville, I’d been forced to think about what happened between people as they came together, the lines negotiated and crossed, the boundaries declared and transgressed, the mix of offering and taking. For instance, I liked men who took certain things without asking, like kisses and particular intimacies— and who would never dream of making other presumptions, such as wanting me to go to their church or have their children. I didn’t generally like rough sex, but once in a while I did, and I always liked men who kissed hard and expertly. There was a cocksureness I desired in a man, a crudeness that pleased me, but there were a thousand ways for that to go wrong, just as there had been when I was sixteen.
And while it seemed impossible at thirty-three to describe any decision I made as a teenager as a choice, I knew that I was, at sixteen, capable of intense feeling and thought, and the night I was raped, I did make a choice. I wanted something from Keil Ward: attention, hard but tender kisses, excitement— a fuck. If he had just been who he seemed to be, if he had just given me the things I was looking for, the night would have turned out differently, as my story now would be different.
That was why, even though I had allowed Breville to convince me of the randomness of the rape, I could never fully lose the feeling that I was somehow complicit. Not in the lie that led up to the rape or in the savagery that was worked out on my body, but complicit because I had been seeking something that night. I was not like the woman Breville had raped in South Minneapolis, innocently asleep in my bed, assaulted by a stranger. And yet— and yet— the thing I had been seeking, the thing I had consented to, was entirely different than what had taken place. I had been willing to fuck and be fucked by Keil Ward that night, but I had not been willing to be raped. When I thought of that, the picture would go upside down again.
But that was what I meant by complicity.
Whatever my life had been in the past, it now was entirely my own choosing— a result of my tastes and predilections, my abilities and incapacities. I didn’t know what I wanted from Breville anymore. I didn’t know if the cowboy was some odd kind of soul mate or just another misfit. I didn’t know if any of it even mattered. None of it was anything I could live my life by.
Since I couldn’t push the events of the day from my mind— not Breville, not Merle’s news of the fire or the phrase he had used to describe the man who set it, that he wasn’t in his “right mind”— I gave up on floating. Instead, I swam as hard as I could, American crawl, a hundred strokes out and a hundred strokes back, again and again. And after a while I couldn’t think about anything except the dark water and the moon, my own breathing, and the beating of my heart.
31
“I FUCKED UP, SUZANNE. I’m sorry.”
Those were the first words Breville said when the prerecorded message from the prison phone system finished playing.
“If I’d have known you were coming down here, I would have got up and gone to work no matter how sick I was. I swear to God.”
“I know that,” I said. “What was wrong?”
“I had a headache in the morning, so I didn’t go to my job. They put you on lockdown when you don’t report for work. I should have just gone.”
“It’s all right.”
“I just made myself sick with things. I feel like I’m losing my way.”
“Are you still upset over what your counselor told you? About us?”
“That. That and the appeal,” he said. “But I always lose my balance. That’s what Gates tells me.”
“Why do you feel like you’re losing your balance?”
“I’m not focused on my life in here. I get caught up in things out there and things here start to go wrong.”
“How can you not think about things out here?” I said. “You’re in prison and you want to get out.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice. “My life is in here. I have to keep from getting caught up.”
“What are you caught up in?” I said. “Are you caught up in me?”
“You. Trying to get this appeal going. It makes it harder. I don’t know if you can understand. If this appeal doesn’t go through, I’ll be thirty-four by the time I get out.”
“It’s a long time,” I said. “But thirty-four isn’t old.”
“You’ll be forty,” he said. “Do you think of that?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’ve thought of it, but I don’t go around thinking of it.”
“Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. That’s good. I wish I could do that.”
We were both quiet for a moment— not too long, or the system would cut us off — and then I said, “Would it be better if we weren’t in contact?”
“That’s exactly what I don’t want.”
“But if it makes your life harder—”
“Better. Better and harder,” Breville said. “But it’s my problem. I didn’t mean to trouble you with it. Let’s change the subject. Tell me what’s going on with you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Today I had an interview for that job I applied for.”
“Did you get it?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’ll give it to you,” Breville said. “You know they will. Who are they going to find who’s better than you?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t have the job yet. And if they do offer it to me, I still have to decide if I want it.”
“But you told me you wanted a change from your old job.”
“I did. I do,” I said. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the truth. I never told Breville about Richaux, or why I’d come up north. I never told him specifics about any of my old relationships, but I never told any man I was involved with about his predecessors.
“Well, then, you’ll have a change,” Breville went. “You’ll be up there for good.”
“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 sai
d 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.
32
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 d
rove 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.
33
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.
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