A silver cigarette box. A crystal ashtray. Three oil paintings and one watercolour. They had not seen the thief. What did he like? And want? And suddenly I remembered whatever I owned that was of value was upstairs. Perhaps he still was upstairs. My entire body had become paralyzed, deadened by the clear picture I would face in the emptiness of the three rooms above my head. Study, library and bedroom. I thought of women: of women arriving home in the dead of winter, dead tired because they chose no man’s company and despised every man’s love, deciding to live alone, and discovering that their practice and philosophy of independence is now violated by the presence of a man whom they cannot see but whose violence their gender can imagine; and if they had carried their view of the newspaper articles about women, nothing in their purse, a whistle, a knife, even a gun, nothing could wipe away that first raw effrontery of molestation; and if it was so with me, how curdling, how cruel, how chauvinistical, using their own words for us men, could it be? The fear, the paralyzing fear made me feel weak, made me begin to choose my weapon and my manner of facing this situation; making me silly in the face of the unknown but knowing danger, of this disgrace. My limbs refused to function. There was no weapon. There was a shoe. There was a broom. There was an iron pipe taken down from holding up the suits in a spare closet. But it was in the cupboard in one of the three rooms above my head, and I could not remember which. The fatigue and the confusion about counting books, of remembering their exact number, as if I was making an inventory before selling them, and there were more than two thousand of them; the possibility of replacing many of them, rare and first editions; and many signed by their authors, most of whom were already dead; and my private and confidential files of correspondence in which, not anticipating theft and burglary, I had been expansive with risks about the truth and candor about women friends; and frank about men and women whose privacy and confidence were the conditions in which many of the letters had been written to me, signed in the boldness of their affairs and gifts: flesh, kindness and kind; and the small photograph of a woman framed in a silver oval frame who did not come from Mexico, and which I had bought the week before, at the most expensive store in this city that specialized in silver. And one photograph of a woman, somewhere now, framed in a brass frame which I had bought the day before from an Indian store near the Bloor subway station that specialized in junk from Canada that was not completely destroyed nor disfigured in fires, in the surplus stock garnered after billowing flames had engulfed the merchandise. The woman in this brass frame was the wife of a second-hand dealer. Suppose the thief, not knowing, and not knowing value and irony from villainy, mistaking brass for gold, should fence the frame in the same second-hand dealer’s store, and see the autograph of his wife, and trace the handwriting to my door! This frame was priced at one dollar and ninety cents. All this raged through my mind like the waves of fire that had licked the merchandise in the vast warehouses in the cold suburbs of Scarborough and Pickering, where the warehouses are larger and from where the oval pure-brass frame had been rescued; all this occurred in two uncounted seconds of complete cowardice and fear that I would face this exposed nakedness slipped away by a thief who mistook brass for gold, and despised pure silver. Perhaps his hands were dirty. Perhaps his fingernails had crescents of squirrel’s droppings under them. Perhaps. He was a complete stranger. And he would be dressed in blue jeans. His jeans were no longer blue. They were faded in the crotch. In the ass. And at the knees. And the back of the knees. They had walked through manure, and in the paths passed and trodden over by squirrels, and now the cow manure I had placed in the garden, not reckoning with the squirrels. And if he had scaled the fence before the snow fell, he would have touched the same plants as the squirrels had eaten; and had jumped and had scampered out of the range of my water-pistol gun filled with ink and poison; for those squirrels had tormented me all summer long, leaving behind their almost indistinguishable tracks in the beds they had devastated. In the garden, in the snow left undisturbed, and lying on its white blanket are the leaves of the maple tree, not rotting on that part of the raised patio, which looks like a thick, uneven carpet.
And throughout the house, over the Persian carpets, he has walked, has touched and evaluated with his smeared hands, all this done in the privacy of his treasured intrusion is the smell of his desecration. The man had probably kept his battered Adidas for speed for escape with agility and lack of detection. He was free to evaluate the arrangement of the life he smiled on, as he planned and carried out his robbery of my privacy. So, I continued up the short flight of stairs to the first room on the second floor, to face this man of whatever size, whatever colour, whatever arms, whatever age, and with no weapon in my hand. I was prepared to die.
“Don’t play hero and get yourself killed protecting money in a till that doesn’t belong to you,” the policeman said.
“Don’t make the mistake of disturbing a burglar in the act and get shot. It can be replaced,” the bank manager said.
“Your life is worth more than a few possessions,” the woman in Miami would say.
“Your home,” the policeman said, “is your goddamn castle. If a man breaks in, you can kill him, and ask questions after. But kill him first.”
At the top of the stairs, I waited. I listened. And I panicked. The thief is still in the house. I heard a car speed by. I wished I was outside to hail the car and bring the driver in. And I heard the slush of snow pelted against the tires as it sprinkled the sides of the car, and splash back onto the road. And then I heard the night, and its lateness, and the noise of sirens at the corner of the street, patrolled after hours by prostitutes in pairs; and I could feel the darkness outside come right into the house, just as the thief had done, and it changed the nature of everything around me. I grabbed the balustrade firmly, to steady my consternation and my fright, and I remembered once more the four warnings against disturbing thieves, including the advice and determination to kill him first. Was this thief a woman? Is a woman ever a thief?
But with what? What would I use? What piece of wood, stick, chair-round, could I dislodge in time, in defence, in offence, and strike the fucker down? In my pocket was the small metal implement I used for cleaning Peterson pipes, and peeling MacIntosh apples. It has a knife with no sharpness to its blade, and a pick that can drive a very small hole into a cube of ice. I hear foot-steps. Slow, creeping, cautious, casing footsteps. Thieves, I was told, are tougher than ice. And cooler, too. And then I knew. I knew where the footsteps were coming from: the neighbour on my left was too cheap to pour pink insulation into the wall between us, to keep out her groans and moans and ecstasy from her cat, dog, pet and animal, companions . . .
I fixed my eyes on the man coming towards me. Dundas Street is filled with women going for dim sum for lunch on payday. He is dressed in faded jeans. The jeans are no longer blue. There is a hole in the ass. He has just turned against the wind to light a cigarette. There are holes at the knees. He wears running shoes. And from the short investigating distance, I can see Adidas printed in the battered, shapeless shoes barely recognizable. He is walking as if he is about to jump and dump a ball into a basket. He wears a light-weight windbreaker over his pale blue V-necked sweater. His hair is long and stringy, and I want to believe it is dirty. And his hands move nervously. “You can tell a thief is a thief,” my mother always said, with the conviction of a judge, “by his fingers and his hands. A thief is a light-finger son of a bitch, so the hands and fingers of a thief are always moving, looking for something to take up. That’s how you can pick out a thief from out of any crowd.” This man is thin. His arms are long, and as he walks they do not swing in the natural rhythm of his walking. And his hands are shaped and carried in that manner I knew and came to recognize from my mother’s certainty, a deduction more popular and more applauded in a land of thieves where I was born: thieves and politicians, more popular than Sherlock Holmes, knowing a thief by the way he holds his hands. This is my man. My thief. The man who entered my house. So
, I accused this young man of the theft, although I did not know him, had never seen him before: but he walked with his hands in that way my mother told me about.
And my accusation turned to dislike, to hatred, to profound animosity, to discrimination for all the men I saw on the street who were wearing jeans and sneakers and long hair. I remembered the hippies, and the blame they bore for the way they dressed. I remembered the flower children, for I was old enough to have seen them on the streets, in the fields and in the clover of rock concerts, and had smelled the flowers they carried in their hands that had painted circles with “love” advertised in their palms and on their chests. But I hated this man’s long hair most. And I was sure that every man on this crowded street, so dressed, this afternoon, was a thief. I wondered how much this man had felt when he had touched, when he ran his fingers over the things in my home that afternoon? I wondered if he had wiped that act out of his mind the moment he had fenced the things he took. I had not discovered one item that he took. But I knew that he must have taken something. So, was the theft committed in the afternoon? At the moment I was raising the third glass of wine to my lips and welcoming my friends of twenty-five years past? Was it in the daytime? Or in the darkness of night? The snow left no clue of his movements. His entry into my house was like an undressing of a person against his will; against her will, and he had stripped this person naked, of his privacy and of her privilege; and he was the only living being in this city who could break the husband’s heart that his wife’s photograph was in the arms of another man he did not know, framed behind glass that had no glaze, in an oval frame that had escaped the tongue of fire and matrimonial conflagration.
I walked faster, caught up to this man and walked behind him, like a detective on the positive point of identification and arrest. The man stopped. And I stopped too, looking foolish, feeling foolish, as his shadow. He crossed the light. And I crossed too. If I had a gun, even though this man was not inside my castle, he would be dead. But all that happened was that I almost bumped into him. I was feeling foolish.
“I beg your pardon,” I told the man.
The man did not respond, say sorry, or it’s no problem. My mother always told me that a thief has no blasted manners. The man had not turned, had no acknowledged the excuse, did not apparently want to show his face. For he knew me from my photographs in my home; but did not know that I knew. I was looking also at his fingers. Yes, it was like an undressing of a woman without her consent. It was done with distaste. He had stripped her naked, ripped away her privacy and her silk panties, molested her private parts and her privacy. He had smudged her innocence. And had thrown the sacredness of her privilege, to keep her body within her power of consent and of disapproval, out through the window. I was sure this was the man. I walked behind him, shadowing him. The wind came and smoke curled from my Peterson, and the bright lunchtime afternoon turned to London, and I became Sherlock Holmes in a fog of thickened London crime, tracking down my man.
The man quickened his step. I quickened mine. The man slid between the slower moving pedestrians. I tried the same thing, and when I did I was blocked and barricaded by a group of Chinese men carrying cameras, looking like tourists, looking for sights to take a snap, and moving and not looking. One tourist caught me in his sights. The man melted into the crowd.
And I was now tense and angry, and I pushed innocent people out of my way, including some Chinese who were not carrying cameras.
“Hey!” a woman shouted at me. “You purse-snatcher! Hey!” she screamed, over and over.
I slackened my pace of pursuit, and tried to look innocent and not like a purse-snatcher. And then I saw the man, standing at the corner, waiting for the lights to change, talking to another man, sharing a secret; and then he handed the man something he had taken from his pocket. He turned his back towards the man, sharing his secret; and the man bent over, cupped his bands, and the thief cupped his too, and when I draw abreast of the two of them, the man had borrowed a cigarette from the stranger who was lighting it.
“You’re late for your class in Psych,” the older man was saying.
“Yeah,” the thief replied, ”that’s why I’m breaking my ass to get there.” And he moved away in the direction of the downtown campus of Ryerson Polytechnical. Students could be thieves, I said. Graduate students can be even better thieves.
I stood and watched him fade into the thickness of the Chinese carrying cameras, and other pedestrians with purses and handbags over their shoulders, who were moving slowly, watching this man move like a cat in his Adidas, watching the grind of his tight faded jeans which had two holes in the seat, watching him move his fingers round the cigarette in that way and precise manner my mother had warned me about thieves, and other light-fingered people.
I was reluctant to return to my home. Cowardly against possibilities. I was fearful that in my absence the thief had, like lightning, struck twice. And it made me numb. But more than this feeling of despair mixed with resignation, was my relief at having succeeded in releasing myself from the burden of possessions, breaking the former tie of ownership and the responsibility that goes with it, and I became uncaring about either the damage or the loss of things I had left in my home. “Your life is more valuable.” I heard it over and over, this good germ of advice. But then I reasoned that if all istaken, if another thief, the man who had given the cigarette, were to behave uncharacteristically like lightning, would I not have to spend time, which I could not afford, replacing these things? And how was I going to repeat the comfort and the job, duplicate them, and put back the sense of acquaintanceship I had had with all the possessions which adorned my home? I was in two minds. Because I could see the sense of regarding possessions as objects, things, burdens, appendages; and placing upon them, with the sense of possessiveness, the seal of value and the elixir of beauty. It was not so much what the price of the object was, as the pleasure and the aesthetic meaning of that object. I was still standing. And the crowds of Chinese tourists moved around me, as if I was a statue in the island of flowers on University Avenue, as if I was a stone in a stream and the water was going around it, to get to the mouth, and leaving in the detour an accumulation of weeds and straw and moss; and then ignoring my encumbrance and going about its way, as if there was no encumbrance at all; and not all of them were Chinese and not all of them carried purses and handbags on their shoulders. I was at the junction of the area called Chinatown and Bay. More young men wearing jeans that have lost their blueness, and in running shoes which slopped from the fashion of beating the newness out of them to make them look old and fashionable, were in the street. How many of these? Which of these? Any of these? I needed a drink. I felt weak. I needed two drinks. I needed to clear my head, and drown my anxiety about thieves in a few dry martinis, straight up, and with four olives, for nourishment.
I entered a neighbourhood bar. It was not my neighbourhood. It was not my bar. My neighbourhood has no bar. It was not the bar I usually drank at, on the penthouse floor or roof of a hotel in the less light-fingered section of the city. So, in this bar I was uncertain where to sit: whether to perch on a stool at the long black-topped shiny bar where the waiter had false teeth and false hair, the two of them protuberant and conspicuous; or take a seat at a table off the bar and large enough for four persons, and whether the waiter would feel he was out by three potential tippers; and whether he could see his reflection in the bottles lined like toy soldiers in front of the mirror, and notice that his hair was on wrong. I was experiencing a loss of self-esteem, a bout of uncertainty about things I used to be sure of, that the break-in of my home was causing; I was feeling that I was a marked man, that anyone on the street was able to look at me and see a mark on my forehead which said, here is a man who is to be stolen from, who is to be molested, and who can and should be molested again, since he has already been molested, whenever and by whoever chooses to molest him. I could imagine the mark on my forehead. It was seen by everyone but myself. I felt like a refugee mus
t feel: bearing his heart and his history of his own country with forked words of persecution, in order to convince complete strangers who do not know his country and have never read his history and who sit in judgement on his claim that his brothers were torturing bastards. This man seeking refuge has to do two things. He has to paint of picture of degradation of almost all his native institutions, including his brothers and sisters. And he has to hope that this portrait of his country given to unschooled judges does not engulf him himself into the same pit and picture he has painted of his country, and that they might not see him separate from the degradation of the place he lives. But I did not think that this was the case with me. I was simply a marked man. A hit.
In this City Page 17