Pickpocket

SHE SITS in a movie theater watching French people pass on the screen in black and white. It’s Bresson’s film, Pickpocket. It’s a Bresson festival, in fact. Just moments ago she didn’t know who Bresson was. She just wanted to get inside a dark, air-conditioned theater. To escape Sixth Avenue’s summer assault for a couple of hours. The garbage and noise, the heat flexing from the subway grates with the trains’ passing roar like the breath of a rancid giant. The next film on the festival’s marquis outside was Bresson’s Diary of a Country

Priest, which sounded, really, like—why would you want to sit through that?

This suggested something sexier, but now she’s not so sure. Her father hated Catholics, said you couldn’t trust them, which was funny coming from him, he was such a lying Episcopalian, the women in his life, each a lie, gathering like a swarm of lies, little sand flies growing plump with their evidence, nipping at the piecemeal of their family until all the substance of its love was gone, until at the dinner table she and Mom and Dad looked like