Stone Junction

her, but to literally have her life put in your hands. Literally. If her pleasure is the answer, your task, as Krause put it, is “to provide the riddle.”’

That evening, Oriana, her reddish-gold hair spilling over the pillows, arms flung wide, gave much more explicit instructions on where and how she wished to be touched – everywhere and any way she could imagine. At the height of her pleasure, Daniel imagined she was touching him, and for a long spinning instant lost all distinctions between their skins. Afterward, his hands felt like globes of light. But when Oriana, still flushed, began kissing his fingertips, asking what his pleasure was, he said he’d like to wait.

Oriana bit his middle finger gently. ‘So Willie told you to keep your pants on, huh? He’s such a purist.’

Daniel said, ‘It’s not really that. In the past, I’ve only been able to be with a woman once.’

‘What do you mean be with? That you could only come once a night?’

‘Once, period.’

Oriana was interested. ‘Then you can’t get it up again for her, ever?’

Daniel nodded.

‘Not even a little tremor of a twinge?’

‘Nothing.’

‘These ladies knew what they were doing?’

‘They were extremely desirable, and remarkably patient.’

‘So what do you think is going on?’

‘I don’t know. It could be from an injury. A tiny sliver of metal was once blown through the right front quadrant of my brain.’

‘Good Lord! What happened?’

‘It’s complicated, Oriana. My mother was killed in an accident and I almost was, too.’

‘Oh honey,’ Oriana said. She took Daniel’s hands in hers and pressed them to her face.

Daniel felt a tear against his palm. ‘Don’t cry,’ he asked her. ‘Please?’

Oriana flung his hands off her face and sat up on the bed, facing him. ‘Fuck you,’ she spit. ‘I’ll cry when I feel like crying.’

Daniel fell in love. He told her, ‘I want to wait to have sex with you because I’d rather have a future than a past.’

In reply, she embraced him in her bare arms. ‘Any time and all the time you want.’

Every Thursday evening Daniel was a brilliant student, but the rest of the week he was dunced by distraction. His mind wandered over Oriana’s lush and astonishingly responsive body. Willie’s mind was as interesting as Oriana’s body, but not nearly as provocative.

Nonetheless, over the next three months Daniel learned to disable fifty different alarm systems and pick almost any lock that could be opened with a key. As they entered the fourth month of instruction, Willie introduced him to combination locks. At the first week’s session, Willie made him sit for two hours blindfolded, ears plugged, wearing thick gloves before allowing him to attempt the simplest $3.95 combination lock. As Daniel twirled the dial, Willie coached him. ‘Feel inside the lock through your fingers. As if they were root tips seeking water. Feel for the slightest drag, the friction between molecules. Trust your fingertips. They are closer than your brain, far less busy, and immensely less complicated. You need to open this lock to see yourself, and as Edgar Davis Dodds said, “Freedom resides in being equal to your needs.” But first you must comprehend the difference between necessity and desire.’

Daniel wondered if he merely desired Oriana or actually needed her.

‘Daniel,’ Willie scolded, ‘is that a pretty sunset you’re watching up there on Jupiter?’

Daniel went back to work on the lock.

That night Daniel got some homework – a cheap combination bicycle lock. It was locked. When he returned it the next evening open, he received two locks to take home. Willie promised they’d begin the field-work portion of their study when he could open twenty at home overnight.

Willie scouted the first few jobs, and put Daniel through his paces, from disabling the alarm system to locating and opening the safe. Soon Daniel’s responsibility expanded to include scouting and planning. They made about one field-trip a week, or about as often as his visits to Oriana. Daniel had suggested to Willie early on that he thought working with Oriana twice a week would be doubly helpful. Willie said he was sure it would, but that he couldn’t afford it. Oriana, when Daniel asked if he might see her more often, had claimed that the pleasure center in her brain would fry shut if she saw him more than once a week.

Daniel, with Willie’s guidance, opened twenty-three safes during his apprenticeship. To Daniel’s utter dismay they never stole anything. The rule against theft had been firmly established on his first job, a dentist’s wall-safe in Tiburon.

‘Put it back,’ Willie hissed.

Daniel thought Willie was kidding and didn’t even pause as he stuffed the sheaf of bills and an ounce baggie of cocaine into his jacket pocket.

‘Daniel,’ Willie roared, ‘did you fail to hear me or fail to understand? Put it back. We’re practicing.’

‘Be serious,’ Daniel pleaded. ‘If we get busted, is that what we tell the cops – it’s okay, officer, we’re just practicing.’

‘We don’t tell the cops shit, ever. And we don’t steal unless it’s necessary. And we harken to Salinius’s observation that “the great enemies of honor are greed and convenience.”’