The Soul Thief (3 page)

In the room five people glance at Nathaniel, their expressions ranging from indifference to curiosity. Two people whisper to each other near the bookcase, and, closer to the doorway, Theresa and Coolberg and an albino dwarfish man sit together on the floor by the bed. They share a beer, the bottle moving around from hand to hand. The albino gets up to leave. A certain intimacy at once falls between Coolberg and Theresa; they have the appearance of unindicted 18

c h a r l e s b a x t e r

co-conspirators who share a complicated system of signals—

lifted eyebrows, glances, finger flicks—all seemingly worked out in advance. Coolberg glances at Nathaniel, and Theresa says, “Well, look who’s here. It’s Nathaniel. My soaked twin.”

“Hello,” Coolberg says. “Oh, yes. You’re Nathaniel Mason.

I’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re perfunctory things.

Sit down.” Theresa pats the floor next to her. Nathaniel notices a small puddle of water under her jeans. From the rain. Soon a small puddle of water will form under himself, as he drains onto the floor.

Nathaniel gamely lowers himself to their level. Coolberg smiles at him menacingly. Years later he will realize that Coolberg’s first words to him consisted of a false claim, followed by a command, a pattern for their friendship, and that this charade was acted out in front of Theresa, who, like an accommodating audience member, encouraged the show.

Once again, and equally thoughtlessly, she puts her hand on his—Nathaniel’s—leg. Coolberg sees her do it. “Nathaniel, you’re so
cute
when you’re wet,” she says. “You’re flagrant.”

“What is this, the state fair?” Coolberg asks.

Nathaniel takes in Coolberg’s face, stricken by a kind of internalized warfare. In one moment he appears to be a sickly child in a room through whose one window a winter sun shines in, briefly, at twilight, giving the child the farewell gift of its fading rusty light on the snow; in the next moment the expression diagnoses itself, disintegrates, and recombines into one of all-encompassing sympathy, before it turns bewilderingly into an Asia-Minorish sedulous gaze from one of the booths at the bazaar. The eyes miss nothing, but they are spectacularly dead.

“I don’t know anything about you,” Nathaniel says.

“Except what people tell me.”

t h e s ou l t h i e f

19

“Oh, what do they tell you?” Coolberg asks, delightedly, mockingly, dolorously, sweetly.

“See, that would be telling. What do you do, when you’re doing things?”

“You’re quoting
The Prisoner.
‘That would be telling.’ As for me, I do everything,” Coolberg says, clumsily lighting up a Lucky.

“Guys, guys!” Theresa interrupts, very pleased to pretend that the two men are engaged in combat rather than verbal trickery, as she looks around the bedroom for an ashtray.

“I do everything,” Coolberg repeats. And then he starts singing.

“I’ve made a path

as a polymath

that no one else has trod!”

Theresa perks up. “
He’s made a path as a polymath that no one else
has trod!
” She gives a whoop of laughter. “Siggie, you’re so Broadway.”

Who is Siggie? Coolberg ashes his cigarette into a beer bottle. These are juvenile tiresome antics; the anxious high spirits have a depressing effect.
To hell with these people,
the vodka says to Nathaniel, whereupon he stands up. He feels a bit unsteady, like a bird on a branch whipped by winds.

Being upright is a continuous struggle. There must be others at this party to whom he can talk about something, or nothing. He experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness. He could go back to wherever he parked his car, drive home to his empty apartment, and then read until sleep takes him over just before dawn. In all-out verbal gamesmanship, he will be seriously overmatched here. He can’t keep up with these people. Half the time, he 20

c h a r l e s b a x t e r

regards himself as a hayseed among city slickers. A sudden heavy hayseed loneliness envelops him, as it often does at parties, like the onset of an illness. His limbs feel weighted down, and objects take on the burden of hopelessness. The other faces at the party look as if they had been painted on the sides of balloons, and from the books on the floor he thinks he hears an angry buzzing like the sound of insects.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” Coolberg asks.

“No,” Nathaniel says, having forgotten what the “it”

refers to. Then he remembers. “Oh, it’s all right. By the way, who’s Siggie?”

“Sigmund Romberg. The composer of
Blossom Time.
”

Theresa reaches for Nathaniel’s hand. “Don’t leave,” she says. “Sit? Please? Here, beside me?”

Perhaps she likes him. Maybe she’ll heal him of his solitude. And then, as if he had been reading Nathaniel’s mind, Coolberg says, “You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish. We’re all making this verbal clatter. We cluck our thick tongues . . .

and speak oh so very politely. Aren’t you cold? Your clothes are soaked. Theresa’s, too. Did you take a shower together?

Fully clothed? Why would anyone
do
that?”

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

What was his question? Nathaniel can’t remember it. He sits down again and leans his damp self against Theresa. She is as warm as a radiator filling with steam.

3

Two or more hours later (Nathaniel does not wear a watch on principle—he refuses to be a slave to any clock), still damp, and now thoroughly bleary with alcohol, behind the wheel of his rusting dark-butterscotch-colored VW

Beetle, Nathaniel maneuvers around the streets of Buffalo in an effort to take Coolberg back to his apartment and Theresa back to hers. When Theresa asks him whether he’s drunk and thus unfit to drive, Nathaniel shouts proudly,

“I’ve been driving drunk since the age of sixteen.” He must shout. No intimate conversation has ever been carried on in a VW Beetle; the motor’s chain drive creates too much commotion for reflective conversation. Talking in such a car is like orating into the surf.

At a street corner, as they stop at a red light, Nathaniel sees a woman standing and staring at him mutely. No doubt the look she is giving him has nothing behind it, no intention beyond curiosity. And yet he feels accused. These people follow him around.

The implementation of the favor that he is performing has grown complicated: Coolberg lives farther away from 22

c h a r l e s b a x t e r

Nathaniel’s apartment than Theresa does, but it is essential that the boy genius be disposed of quickly in case Theresa wants to prolong the evening. Meanwhile, Coolberg has taken up the subject of solitude again, quite loudly. “You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

Theresa suddenly barks a command from the tiny backseat. “Stop making speeches,” she shouts over the noise of the engine. “Stop quoting. You don’t believe that! That’s not you.”

Coolberg laughs. “Nothing is me.” He looks over at Nathaniel with a boyish expectancy. “Nathaniel, I liked what you said about polio and iron lungs.” Nathaniel tries to remember what he has said about that subject. He doesn’t recall having any opinions about polio. “Let’s talk again. Let’s go to Niagara Falls or something. Have you ever been to the falls at night? The gods come out there in the dark. Really, they do. Or we could go to the Mirrored Room.” The Mirrored Room, by Lucas Samaras, is a well-known fixture of the local art museum. In this room, the floor, ceiling, and walls are made of mirrors; the body dissolves there. “You can let me out right now,” he says unexpectedly. “This is my place. I’ll call you.”

The building outside of which they have stopped is yet another Buffalo structure, a large upstate New York house on a tiny lot, the front lawn so small that it could be mowed in two minutes. Nothing separates this house from the one next to it except a driveway. The neighborhood is cluttered and congested with houses; in this jungle of domiciles, trees have been forced out, to live elsewhere. Coolberg scrambles out of the car and walks in a slouching ramble toward the front door. Nathaniel would like to see him enter the t h e s ou l t h i e f

23

house—he is not completely sure that Coolberg actually resides here—but in the meantime, Theresa has clambered into the front seat and has closed the door.

“Onward and upward,” she says, smiling briskly, as she loosens the rubber band from her ponytail so that her hair drops onto her shoulders. She puts the rubber band in her mouth and chews it as she fluffs out her hair. Suddenly she looks very naked.

Nathaniel drives to the end of the block. “Where to?” he asks. “Want to come back to my place?” With some effort, he creates a likely scenario. “We could talk. I could make scrambled eggs and coffee, and we could watch the sun come up.”

Theresa smiles, amused by him. “No, not tonight.” She touches the back of his neck in a seemingly tender gesture, though it feels more like a tease than affection. “I’m too gone. I’m much too gone to have breakfast with you.”

“We don’t have to do anything,” he says, not wanting to sound desperate. “We don’t have to have a meal together.”

“Take a right here,” she tells him, pointing at a streetlight up ahead. He signals a turn and follows her next instructions for another minute or so. Someone half a block away shouts or screams. City sounds.

“I want to call you. I want to see you again. Is that okay?”

“I guess so.” She sighs. “Just not tonight. We should be . . . I don’t know,
alert.
If I ever sleep with you, I want to be stone-cold sober. Besides, I already have somebody.” She takes out a slip of paper from her damp flak jacket and writes down her phone number. “Even though he’s not important and can be disposed of, I’ve got him. He’s not here, but he
is
somewhere. He exists, I mean. He has a residence. Anyway, I haven’t thought through the whole monogamy thing”—she shouts over the noise of the motor—

24

c h a r l e s b a x t e r

“so I don’t have a position on sleeping with you. Yet.” She puts the slip of paper into his shirt’s front pocket. “Do you have somebody? You’re so cute you should never be alone.”

In the noise created by the VW’s acceleration, the question seems loud and rhetorical, unanswerable, and a bit mean-spirited, coming from this beautiful woman who twice (or was it three times?) placed her hand on Nathaniel’s thigh.

Does Theresa enjoy creating desire in him just to see herself doing it? To establish that she herself is unmoved? Like a laboratory scientist? Or a sleepy cat with its prey? That she can cast spells, that she is powerful? A rash of questions.

He therefore does not answer her inquiry about whether he has someone because the answer is “No, not now,” and those words are not the ones he wishes to utter as he shifts into second gear, sober from the intensity of loneliness and arousal and late-night animal longing. His hands are sweaty and he can’t think straight, and he feels sick with alcoholic lust, damp clothes, desolation, and maybe even neon-lighted love. Right now he would sleep with anything beautiful, if only beauty would sleep with him, this beauty or any other.

“Up there,” she says. “I’m up there.” They have found themselves on Hertel, and she points to an ice-cream shop, Lickety Split. Her apartment, she claims, is located upstairs from the ice cream and the service people who scoop it and the customers who eat it. All day, Nathaniel imagines, she inhales the smell of waffle cones. That’s what he smelled on her earlier: confectionary scents, cream and sugar spackled all over this girl.

“Good night,” whispers Theresa, giving him a peck on the cheek. Then she touches his face under the cheekbone with her finger, a kind of mini-caress. It feels like a depth charge, coming from her. “I’ve wanted to touch you in that spot all night,” she confesses.
This is unlawful,
Nathaniel thinks,
the
t h e s ou l t h i e f

25

carnival style, the show-biz way she touches me.
He reaches over to lay a hand on her, but she has maneuvered out of reach.

“Give me a call . . . or something.”

She glances down as she shuts the car door, and Nathaniel can see her grinning to herself privately, as if she liked him once upon a time, hours ago; but for him to return that smile through the car window, the minimal effort invested in
any
facial expression, hardly seems worth the trouble. It would require optimism and a heroic spirit. He would have to hire a crane to lift his mouth into a grin. The entire evening has turned into a dead battery. It doesn’t matter what you hook it up to. Nothing will go anywhere because no motor will start.

In the light of the car’s high beams, he watches Theresa, accessorized with her flak jacket and her shiny tin medals of Lenin, her homage to the material world, skip up the sidewalk to her building, enter the front door to the foyer, efficiently take out a key, and make her beauty-pageant progress inside. A horrible thought: She is not drunk or tired at all. She’s just had enough of him.

4

What would Gertrude Stein say about this evening?

For a long time being one being living he had been trying to be certain
that he had known what he was doing standing and sitting where it was
raining, and when he had come to be certain that he did not know and could
not know that he was doing what he was doing with another who was also
magnificent and living, that was the time he was certain that he would be
driving to where he was concluding this evening and other evenings, and he
certainly was driving, and anyway everyone agreed that he was driving to
where he alone was concluding and sleeping.
Occasionally Gertrude Stein explains his life to him, for the relief. She has accompanied him at odd moments ever since he heard her recorded voice one afternoon on the car radio as he was driving around doing errands.