Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“Okay, I’ll talk to you,” Nathaniel says, turning the volume down, and both Coolberg and Theresa sigh with relief.

“So. How did you like the gods?” Coolberg asks.

“Would you stop with this talk about the gods, please? They were roaring,” he replies. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”

“Oh, hypothetically, it doesn’t make—”

“‘Hypothetically.’ That’s an interesting word, considering what we just did. Hypothetically, I could have just died. Hypothetically, you could have just witnessed my drowning. Both of you. You’re really hypothetical, Coolberg. I’ve noticed that.”

“But we’re students. With students, everything is hypothetical. Besides, we didn’t witness your drowning. We tried to—” Theresa begins.

“And if you had seen me go,” Nathaniel continues, “if I had disappeared, what then?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “If we had seen you go, we would have been very sad. We would have presented the world with the grim face of tragedy.” His elegiac tone of voice seems distant, avuncular, ironic.

“Sad? Jesus. That’s not much,” Nathaniel says. They drive for another ten minutes until they enter the outskirts of Buffalo. As if he had been thinking about word choices all that time, Nathaniel says, finally, “‘Sad’ isn’t much of anything. I hate that word.”

“But there’s more,” Coolberg continues. “I wasn’t finished. You should let me finish. If you had disappeared, if you had died, we would have…we would have become you. We would have taken you on. We would have turned into you. ” He waits. “ You would have lived in us. ”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nathaniel says. “Theresa, do you know what he’s talking about?” Theresa shakes her head. “See? Theresa doesn’t know either.”

“When a person dies,” Coolberg says, “the survivors take on the features of the deceased. The most eccentric traits are acquired first — tics, stuttering, shakes of the head. That’s how grieving works. The living reimagine themselves as the one who has gone missing. I would have taken you over. That’s what we would have done. I guarantee it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Theresa says.

“Oh, I never do that.” Coolberg laughs.

FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS,as Buffalo descends into winter, Nathaniel often finds himself in one of two sets of arms: Theresa’s or Jamie’s. He does not, for now, think of himself as a hypocrite or a two-timer.

His love for Theresa happens to be contaminated by his doubts about her vaguely empty character. Still, he can’t resist her nervous wit, or her catlike purring when they make love, or the sheer force of her physical attractions — her narrow waist, her perfect breasts, the knowing smile. As for Jamie, he has never been involved with a lesbian cabdriver before. Who has? The relationship, such as it is, follows no logic. The outcome is predictable. The situation bubbles on its surface with a comic pathos they both recognize: Please kiss me typically followed by Do I have to? Well, all women feign indifference, he believes. That’s their scene. Courtly love requires that men must be educated through rejection, patience, and gift-giving.

Jamie’s physical apathy toward Nathaniel gives her a certain distance about his needs, all needs, the human comedy of neediness, including her own. Indifference to him makes her into a wise guy. She is unsullied by any desire for him, and yet…With her, there are always those ellipses.

Standing on a kitchen stool near her refrigerator, replacing a bulb in the overhead fixture, he tells her, “Uh, you know, Jamie, I’m kind of falling in love with you. I’ve been dreaming about you lately.”

“Oh,” she says, “you are? You have been? And…where did that come from? That’s an odd…” She tilts her head at him in silent inquiry.

“Yeah, I know,” he tells her, screwing in the bulb and flinching when it suddenly goes on.

“Because…well…this is awkward,” she says, “and…um, impossible, though not…heartrending yet…but…yes, certainly impossible…”

All the ellipses, the negative space around her responses to him — how could he not notice them? He lowers himself to where she has placed herself, near him. She touches him tenderly on the shoulder in thanks.

“I thought I would break my neck,” he tells her. “If I fell off that stool, I mean.”

Because what else is happening is that on certain other evenings when he lies on the floor of her little studio, surrounded by molded geometrical objects she has fished out of junkyards and altered and made beautiful with her blow-torch, he gazes up at the quasi cylinders, metal Möbius strips, and Styrofoam tetrahedrons hanging by wires and string from the ceiling, and he finds himself aroused and shaken by her talent, her vision of airworthy topological surfaces. Surely, somewhere in the United States another cabdriver is making skeletal flying machines out of Styrofoam and discarded plastic and junked metal, but he doesn’t know where. Only here, on the Niagara Frontier, is such a gifted woman perfecting her art.

So out of masculine dutifulness and the tribute that love pays to accomplishment, he cooks dinner for her, elaborate three-course concoctions. He prepares the meals like a servant, a slave to love; he does not eat much himself, being enamored. A man in love cannot eat, keyed up as he is for a long journey. He listens to her disquisitions about the soul of materials, the mysteries of negative space, the genius of Giacometti and of David Smith, and the plotlessness of her interestingly fucked-up life, a life she claims she would not trade for anyone else’s. In return, she lets him hold her in preprogrammed ways on certain predetermined nights, and on occasion she takes pity on his luckless erections. Is she beautiful? He hasn’t always paid attention to that; her physical appearance seems irrelevant to his infatuation.

If she loved him the way a woman loves a man, she’d be jealous of Theresa. Or so Nathaniel likes to think. What interests her more (she claims) is Nathaniel’s futile love for a lesbian sculptor, herself, and his nonsensical love for a blandly intelligent Marxist would-be academic and ironist. These are bad options. She remains intrigued by his waffling, his male duplicity. He is a case study in the problem of the masculine. For the time being, she has suspended her interest in other women, so that she can observe him unimpeded. She asks to hear what Theresa is like in bed, and when he starts to inform her, she abruptly refuses to hear the details. Sex between him and Theresa empties their souls of content, so she claims. Surely he can’t be considering a vanilla life with such a trifling female, this…cipher.

Nathaniel lies on Jamie’s mattress on the floor, watching her as she works. Clad in overalls, she taps and hammers away at the head of a small metallic bird. She applies percussive techniques at the workbench and then seems ready to use her fiery equipment to weld another wing onto the bird’s torso until she decides that two wings are probably enough. On other evenings she assembles and disassembles rhombic dodecahedrons, meditating aloud on their shape, humming along to the radio or keeping up a monologue on arcane geometrical matters. Did Nathaniel know that Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone fame, once designed an elaborate flying contraption built out of small tetrahedron cells? No, he didn’t. Or that Bell invented a man-lifting kite, the ancestor of parasailing devices? No.

She keeps up three or four projects at once. Dinners prepared by Nathaniel bake in the oven as she turns her brooding attention to a football-shaped piece of metal, perhaps a blimp or dirigible of some kind, meant to hang somehow in the air. Music from the radio: Bartók’s second string quartet — clangorous Magyar scraping and sawing, sul ponticello wiry screeching, a Mitteleuropean racket perfect for a sculptor’s studio — snarls its way out of the speakers into the air, keeping the blimp suspended. Around seven on the nights he is permitted to stay, they eat dinner, and one particular evening over lamb chops he asks her why she’s a Roman Catholic.