We kept driving down the block and I looked back to see if any of the adults had stepped out into the street to watch us, to catch a license plate number. But no one had. It had all happened so fast no one from the group of people standing outside the house seemed to understand how close we’d come to hitting the girl. It seemed no one else saw the girl reach out and push the car away.
We continued down that street and the next and the next, and Richaux eventually found someone to buy his dope from. We came back to my place and as he smoked and I drank, Richaux berated me just to draw attention away from himself. I didn’t care. It was like he wasn’t even speaking to me. I knew I should have left him before— after the time he shoved his foot between my legs instead of using his hand or mouth to help me come, for instance— but I’d kept waiting for things to get better, or for a new phase to start. But the day we almost hit the girl in my car, trying to buy his dope, well, that was the day I decided to quit. What ever else I’d done in my life, I tried to limit the effect of my actions and the chances I took. If I was careless, I tried to be careless only with my own life.
Richaux called many times after that, but I always let the phone ring. And before he could figure out that I really meant it, I was gone. I parceled out my things to Julian and Kate for the summer, and I planned to parcel myself out in September when school started again, until I found a new place to live. The truth was, apart from the externals like disconnecting the phone, it was the easiest thing in the world to leave Richaux. His stories had grown old a long time ago, and I was sick of his bullshit and bored by his dick.
In that sense I didn’t need the summer so much to heal as I needed it to gather strength and move on, like a summer thunder-storm. And it had been my plan to spend my vacation alone, sorting through things, figuring out what it was I really wanted in my life, like my friend Kate said I needed to. She was the one who actually came out and said, “I want so see you with a marriage and a mortgage around your neck.” As crude as it was, I understood what she was saying— she wanted to see me with something real. And to a degree I knew she was right. Sometimes everything about how I lived seemed to be some kind of half-life.
But my resolve to spend the summer on my own, contemplating and reflecting— well, that seemed to have shifted, and what ever it was I was doing with Breville, I knew he certainly did not fall into Kate’s category of worthwhile men who might have something to offer me as a partner in life. Nevertheless, I kept telling myself, I had extricated myself from the situation with Richaux, and if the only way I knew how to do it was by disappearing entirely from my old life, so be it. I had gotten the job done, and now my life was my own again. Only I could determine what I wanted it to be.
17
AFTER BREVILLE AND I started writing more intimate letters, I bought a new dress to wear when I went to see him. It was long— the guards wouldn’t let you into the visiting room if your skirt was too short— but it was red, and it had a keyhole neckline.
That neckline was something. The dress had a little band-collar that buttoned at my throat, but from the base of the collar, down over my breastbone to where the line between my breasts showed— that was all open. The oval opening wasn’t even that big, but because it was surrounded by fabric, it gave the feeling of something being bared.
Breville liked the dress. He told me as soon as we sat down in the chairs.
“Holy, Suzanne. How much did it cost?”
“Sixty bucks,” I said.
He made a small whistle and sat shaking his head at me. I didn’t want to tell him that sixty dollars was nothing for a dress, that the Paris perfume I was wearing cost more than that, or that if I’d wanted a nice dress instead of a trashy acetate one I’d have to spend much more.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said instead, and I sat across from him and let him take it all in, from the keyhole neckline down to my gold shoes.
That day we sat talking about the different cities we had seen or lived in, but really, we watched each other the entire time.
“I liked New York while I lived there,” I told him. “But when I left I was ready to leave.”
“The one time I was there I got lost,” Breville said. “I took a train somewhere and it went the wrong way. I walked back to Port Authority.”
“How far did you walk?”
“A few miles. I was carrying a suitcase, too, so I was sweating like a pig.”
“How old were you?”
“Eighteen. Our senior trip.”
I told him a story about my father, about the time he had applied for a job after he got out of the ser vice after the Korean War. The job advertisement had said there would be a typing test, and so my father had lugged his own typewriter to the interview, not realizing until he arrived at the office that the company would provide its own typewriters for the test.
“His arms were so tired from carrying his typewriter he couldn’t take the test,” I said.
Breville laughed a long time at that, and when he was done laughing, he slouched down in his chair and stretched his legs out on either side of my gold shoes. I could feel him all around me, and I could feel how, even though we were talking and laughing and enjoying each other’s company, there was another level to what was going on that had nothing to do with our stories, but rather to do with watching each other and the keyhole neckline and Breville’s legs stretched out on either side of mine.
“Did he ever get the job? Your dad?”
“He went back the next day and took the test,” I said. “I don’t remember if he got the job or not.”
“You should ask him,” Breville said. “Ask him and tell me.” There was nothing intimate in what we were saying to each other, nothing intimate at all— and yet everything between us had that feeling. Everything. It didn’t matter if I was talking about my dad, or about how I used to like to lie on the roof and look up at the pink Brooklyn sky— every detail was personal, charged. I can’t explain it. Yet even though I knew something was happening between Breville and me that day in the visiting room, and that everything we said that day was itself as well as more than itself and other than itself, it wasn’t until we were saying goodbye that I understood how much had been traded back and forth between us. The guard monitoring our bodily contact for illicit exchanges could watch for a packet being passed from hand or mouth to shirt collar, but there was no way to monitor the real exchange that happened when Breville and I touched that day.
After I kissed Breville’s cheek and he kissed mine, we stood holding each other in front of the guard for the few seconds permitted. As we pulled away from each other, Breville traced his hand— the one the guard could not see because our bodies blocked it— down the small of my back and over my ass and along the out-side of my hip. The whole thing probably took only two or three seconds, but it seemed much longer as it was happening. I felt the weight of Breville’s hand against my skin, but I also felt the heat of his hand. The thing seemed to burn, and the places where he touched me seemed to burn.
It was only my imagination, but the burning went on even after I exited the huge front doors of the prison, and as I slowly walked the leaf-filled blocks to my car. Certainly the risk was real: Breville could be sent to the hole for the wrong kind of touch in the visiting room, taken off the good-behavior wing where he had his own cell, a TV, and a morsel of control.
The burning sensation stayed with me as I got into my car and for a good many miles of my drive back north. And if it was laughable when I said that Breville did not seem like a rapist, this next statement will be laughable, too: that day was the first time I knew Breville could hurt me.
18
WHEN I FINALLY TOLD JULIAN I was driving four hours back to the Cities every week to go to Stillwater, he told me I was crazy.
“I thought you went up to that cabin to get away from this,” Julian said the day I stopped by after visiting Breville. The way he waved his hand as he said “this” took in the sound of the traffic drifting in the w
indow as well as the glass of bourbon he had in his hand. And he was right: when I left on the last day of school, I broke my lease, disconnected the phone, and left no forwarding address or number. As much as I could, I disappeared.
“I did want to get away,” I said. “But visiting here is not the same as living here.”
“And now you’re involved with a convict,” Julian said. “Why do you always have such a taste for shit?”
“I’m working through something,” I told him. And there was nothing he could say to that.
Still, I knew better than to say anything about the Paris perfume, or the keyhole dress, or the sexually explicit letters I’d begun writing Breville. There would have been no way to explain those things to people, or to explain that it was exactly because Alpha Breville was a rapist that I was interested in him. He’d helped me understand my own rape, and there seemed to be some kind of symmetry to the attraction. At first it seemed perverse, and then it became more and more logical. Who better than Breville to understand me?
Usually I did the drive to and from Stillwater in a day. It meant eight hours in the car, but it was hard to mix my visits to Breville with anything that had once been my life in the Cities. One Friday, though, Julian persuaded me to stay overnight in Minneapolis; he was seeing someone new, and I could have free run of his house as long as I spent some time with his needy cat.
As I was leaving the prison that day, I gave Breville Julian’s number so we could talk after our visit. And since each call could only last ten minutes on the prison phone system, Breville called me over and over. During the third call— a luxury we never had when he was calling long-distance and I had to pay the exorbitant collect rates the prison phone system charged— Breville told me he wanted to ask me something and that he’d been wanting to ask for a long time.
“Shoot,” I said.
“If I call back, could I hear you, Suzanne? Can you do it so I can hear?”
I thought for a second of how every prison call was recorded, and how it was Julian’s number that would be on the record, and then I thought about my last letter to Breville in which I’d written, “I bought my first vibrator when I was twenty-one, right before I moved. It’s a hundred times easier than using my hand. My favorite way to masturbate is to lie perfectly still. With just the ball of my vibrator humming on my body, I force myself to relax. I try to take as long as I can, relaxing my muscles for as long as I can. When I can’t hold off any longer, when I finally do let myself come, my entire body spasms because the orgasm is so strong.” Was I really at all surprised when he asked if he could hear me come?
“Let me at least get myself ready,” I said.
“Sure, sure,” Breville said. “I’ll call you back in five. Or do you need longer?”
“Just a little longer,” I said.
After I hung up the phone, I went and got a pillow from the sofa. I didn’t want to masturbate in Julian’s bed— that seemed unforgivable, and somehow beyond the line I was willing to cross— so I took off my pants and lay down on Julian’s floor. The cat kept circling around me. When Breville called back, my fingers were already wet.
“I didn’t think I’d get to hear that for a long time,” Breville said when I was done.
His voice was husky, and he sounded softer than I had ever heard him sound. It all made me think of how he’d spent the last seven years.
“Don’t say I never did nothing for you,” I told him.
“Didn’t you do it for you, too?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell Breville it was fake. I hadn’t meant to fake— I had been masturbating, but I just couldn’t come on the hard floor, holding the phone to my head, and hearing the cat walk around me. It was too much pressure. The act was ridiculous and felt hollow to me, like something out of a bad movie, but I’d still wanted to do it for Breville. Something in me wanted to do it, even if it was pretend.
“Sure,” I said. “I always look out for myself.”
I never told Julian what I had done. I just added it to my list of exclusions and lies.
19
BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT to get too caught up in Breville, or perhaps because it was summer and I had time to dally with whomever I wanted, I placed another personal ad, this one in the Bemidji paper. I could have picked up someone at the Royal or some other local bar if that’s all I was looking for, but it wasn’t. I wanted something more than just a drunken fuck, and I thought that a person paying to answer an ad would have at least that much invested.
A cowboy visiting friends in Blackduck answered, and I called him at the number he left. We seemed to have little in common, though. After he told me the story of how a horse had kicked him in the knee at the Cody rodeo— bad enough to put him on crutches— we had trouble just keeping the conversation going. But when I tried to get off the phone, he said, “Now, don’t go and hang up yet. You’re like E. F. Hutton. You talk and I’ll listen.”
He was making an effort, it seemed, so I decided to give him a chance, and when I showed up at the appointed time at the Paul Bunyan statue in Bemidji, right beneath the horns of Babe, I was glad I hadn’t been put off by his manner. The cowboy stood six-five, with blue eyes and jet hair. His shoulders were broad and his hips were narrow, and not even his crutches or hobbling could take away from his handsomeness.
“So, you weren’t kidding about your knee,” I said in those first flustered seconds after shaking his hand, when I was still taking in the good-looking whole of him. “Are you seeing a doctor?”
“I’ve been doctoring myself,” he told me. “Ibuprofen and beer.”
We sat by the water and again he told me the story of the horse kicking him in Cody. After that, he confessed to me that he was nervous about the date.
“I had a few beers before I came here,” he said. “Liquid courage.”
“Would you like to go have a drink now?”
“No, no,” he said. “I had them at home. It’s cheaper than drinking in a bar.”
And of course that told me a couple of things, but I didn’t let any of it register in my face.
When some teenage boys walked by, laughing and talking loudly, I looked away from the cowboy for just a second and drew my purse a little closer to my side.
“You don’t need to worry about that as long as I’m here,” the cowboy said. “I don’t let anyone bother a woman, even if I am on crutches.”
We sat talking about his trip out here, and he told me about the dog he lost in Cody after the rodeo. He had the dog so well trained it didn’t need a leash, and when he’d gone into a bar, he felt safe leaving the dog in the back of his pickup.
“If he left, it’s because someone took him,” the cowboy said. “He’d never leave on his own. When I bought steak, I’d buy one for him and one for me.”
“Did you look for him?”
“I gave up after a day.”
“Do you remember the name of the bar where you were? You could call.”
“I remember,” the cowboy said, looking out over Lake Bemidji. “I should. I should call.”
“What was your dog’s name?”
“Bear. But I called him Bud Dog for short.”
I didn’t say that Bud Dog was longer than Bear. I knew what the cowboy was saying, and I knew he missed the dog.
I guess we’d talked long enough then, or long enough for the cowboy to decide he liked me, because he looked back at me then and invited me up to his friends’ house in Blackduck.
“Bob and Thrace can grill us up some steaks,” he said, so politely and gravely I knew I wasn’t supposed to take him up on the offer.
“If you like, we could drive back to my place and I could fix us some dinner,” I said, though I knew I had next to nothing in the house and was no cook, even on my best days.
“Well, that sounds nice, too,” the cowboy told me. He was measured as he said it, so maybe the relief I thought I heard in his voice was all in my imagination. But that’s what I felt— relief over not having to mee
t his friends and gain their approval as well as his.
We made the long drive back to my cabin, with the cowboy following me in his old blue pickup. When we stopped along the way to get beer in Emmaville, I walked over to his vehicle before I went into the store. “So, are you sure you like me well enough to come all this way?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like you. Do you need me to lick your fingers?”
He sounded petulant and I didn’t know what I’d done to break the bantering mood we’d established by the lake, but I chalked it up to what ever pain his knee was causing him. When I pulled out of the parking lot of the Emmaville General Store, the cowboy again fell in line behind me.
By the time we got to the cabin, it seemed he had lost his impatience.
“I guess you only date guys who are as tall as you are,” he teased when we got to the low-hanging branches of the jack pine by the cabin door. At five-four, I had no trouble scooting under the limbs, but the cowboy not only had to duck but also bend at the knee. On crutches and one good leg, it was awkward.
Inside and seated, though, with a beer in hand, he again became handsome and charming, telling me one story after another. He was named after an archangel by his Jehovah’s Witness parents, whom he’d run away from when he was thirteen. He once swallowed a bullet on a barroom dare. Another time, to prove a point, he jumped in the Kern River with his boots on and fully clothed. Just a couple weeks ago he stitched up his own leg with needle and thread when he got cut in the woods, helping his Blackduck friend with some logging.
“And once I put my finger through someone’s windpipe because he was hurting someone,” the cowboy said. He then told me the story about hearing a woman screaming for help in the parking lot when he lived in Denver. A man was assaulting her and the cow-boy pulled the guy off . Since the cowboy didn’t have any kind of weapon with him, he punched the attacker in the face and then punctured the guy’s windpipe with his finger.
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