Big Swiss(25)

OM:?Were you single at the time?

FEW:?Yes. I spent a lot of time alone, but I was rarely lonely because I like my own brain.

[PAUSE]



“Ask her why she likes her brain,” Greta said, fascinated.


OM:?Was it unusual for you to have dinner with a stranger?

FEW:?Not at all. Earlier that summer, an old man in a wheelchair asked me out to dinner, and I accepted. We had a nice meal at a nice restaurant. He told me about his life and his dead wife and then I never saw him again. I’ve always liked those kinds of encounters.

OM:?Which kind?

FEW:?Brief, random, spontaneous.



“Meow,” Greta said.


FEW:?This guy wasn’t in a wheelchair, obviously, but it still seemed pretty low-stakes.

OM:?Even though he’d spent years in prison?

FEW:?I figured he’d been convicted of a white-collar crime. Like tax evasion. He didn’t seem dangerous to me. He didn’t even seem like an adult man.

OM:?Why, was he small?

FEW:?No. We were the same height, but he probably outweighed me by fifty or sixty pounds. He was only childlike in a social sense.

OM:?So, you met him at the restaurant for a low-stakes steak.

FEW:?I was twenty minutes late. He was already seated and eating bread. It wasn’t a trendy place, but it was upscale and crowded. Booths, not tables. Good linen. Dim lighting. I’d never eaten there, but it was clear Keith had been there many times. I imagined he usually ate alone, or with some other woman, because the hostess seemed startled by my presence. As she brought me to his table, I could see her trying to work out our relationship in her head, and deciding that Keith was my father. And, as I watched him eat bread, I realized that he did in fact look like my dad—they had similar noses and the same huge hands. Their hands were nearly identical. I was easily distracted by this kind of thing at the time, and I remember staring at his hands for the rest of the evening and feeling surprised when they reached for mine across the table.

OM:?He tried touching you at the table.

FEW:?He wanted to hold hands toward the end of the meal. But he was mostly so wrapped up in his own bullshit he barely looked at me, and he didn’t ask me a single question about myself. It felt like watching a very long audition. The acting was atrocious, mine included. I’m not good at playing the passive female.

OM:?He told you why he went to prison.

FEW:?I got his version, yes. He’d been locked up at Dannemora, and was I aware that Dannemora had a beautiful church? No? Well, it was called the Church of St. Dismas, the Good Thief, and had been built by inmates. Keith noticed that the prison needed new furniture and so he took it upon himself to write a letter to the warden—handwritten, of course, and god, how he wished he still had that letter! The warden was so incredibly moved by Keith’s letter that he called Keith to his office, and did I realize what a big deal that was? It almost never happened. The warden said Keith’s letter was the best he’d ever received. Not only was it beautifully written; he was blown away by Keith’s drawings and immediately granted Keith permission to custom-build industrial furniture for the prison. What would Keith need to carry out his vision? So, Keith gave the warden a list of materials and the warden promised he would find the funding somehow, and, long story short, Keith built fifty tables and a hundred desks for Dannemora, and he got to be outdoors while everyone else was inside, and he got to carry a Walkman! And, best of all, he got to wear shorts—shorts! Can you imagine? It was totally unheard-of. And then, after the project was complete, which took years, he became a teacher at the prison, but first he had to take an exam, and he scored higher on this exam than anyone in the entire history of the prison— “But why were you in prison?” I asked him.

“Stalking,” he said, after a silence.



OM:?Oh god.

FEW:?Yeah. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it. There was another long silence. Finally, I asked him who he stalked. Was it a celebrity? “My ex-wife’s new friend,” he said. “This cunt named Linda.”

It took a second to sink in. “Your wife left you for a woman,” I said. “You must have been upset about that.”

“Yeah, but I barely touched her.”

“So it wasn’t just stalking.”

“Aggravated assault,” he said. “It sounds worse than it is. I just took her for a ride and tried to reason with her.”

“About what?”

“I wanted to see my kid,” he said. “We were only gone twenty minutes.”

“You did eleven years for twenty minutes?”

And he impatiently explained that he’d had a gun in the car because some of his clients were in the Mafia, and it was supposed to be three to six years, but something about a hung jury? And planted evidence? I don’t know. It seemed credible to me at the time, but I was very ignorant about the legal system. I asked him how old he was when he went to prison, because that seemed important, and he said he’d been in his twenties, like me.

“I just turned twenty,” I said. “I’m not ‘in my twenties’ yet.”

“Okay, well, I’m only forty,” he said.

I remember looking closely at his face while he smiled at me. He looked at least fifteen to twenty years older than forty, but he didn’t have any gray hair and his teeth were very white.