Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“Oh, that? I’m sick in love with the Virgin Mary,” she says unsmilingly. “She’s my girl. I’ve been in love with her since I was ten years old. She came to me in a dream and said my name out loud. She’s not an idea. She’s real. I saw her face on the wall inside a movie theater, just before the lights went down. She exists. I’ve danced for her. She’s a fact in my life.”

“A movie theater. Like Max Jacob.”

“Who?”

“Max Jacob. He was a French poet, pre — World War II. Jewish. He saw the face of Jesus on the wall of a movie theater, and when it happened a second time, he went to the Fathers of Zion, an order dedicated to converting the Jews. At his baptism, Picasso served as his godfather.”

After dinner, he washes up, reads, and she takes a long bath in the claw-footed bathtub before she goes out to drive for Queen City Cab. On those nights when she isn’t working, she emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and she lies down with him on the mattress where he has been reading Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, a book whose ecstasies already seem dated and stale. Tonight, he puts the book aside. Together, naked under a comforter, they gaze up at the ceiling from which are suspended Jamie’s birds and blimps. Above the art and to the side, a ceiling fan rotates languidly.

“You know,” she says, “you’re kind of sweet, but I’ll never know why I got involved with you.”

“Because you thought I deserved it. You said so. You initiated this. Anyway, it’s not really involvement.”

“Oh, really? I have sucked your dick. That’s intimacy, isn’t it? Still, I guess you’re right. And I suppose I did start this, didn’t I? That’ll teach me. Why did I do that?” She drapes her left leg over him. Her thigh has a dancer’s taut muscular symmetry. “But you’re a delay. You’re just a man. You’re temporary. ” She smiles at the ceiling. “You understand me. That’s the danger part. It’s like I’m Nixon, and you’re my Haldeman.”

“Don’t think so. You’re not Nixon. No woman can be Nixon. Not possible. He’s one of us.”

“Okay okay. But you know me and the sum of me and you seem to know what I want,” she says in a friendly growl. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever known who did. It’s unfair.”

“That’s right. I do know. You want to fly away.”

“Right. And I want another girl,” she says, “to fly away with me. Not you. I can’t fly away anywhere with you. With you, I’m grounded. Men are beasts of the ground.”

“Uh…you sure about that?”

“Absolutely. You’re all creatures of the mud. You can’t help it. I know this feels weird. That desire I’m supposed to have for you? I don’t have it. I sometimes wish it were there, but it isn’t.” She waits. “I sort of love you anyway, but a girl can’t go on doing charity work for a mud-beast forever.”

“See, the thing is,” he says, “you can treat me as hypothetical. That’s an adjective that guy Coolberg uses with me. Hypothetical this and hypothetical that. You haven’t met him, but—”

“Oh, yes, I have,” Jamie announces, her hand drifting down his chest. “He came a few days ago to the People’s Kitchen and struck up a conversation with me.”

“This was when?” Nathaniel has a sudden flushed sensation.

“Last week, I think. He asked me about working there, like he was planning on joining the collective. I couldn’t remember seeing him before. He’s friends with your other girlfriend, right? The real one? The one you’re cheating on, with me? Theresa? The straight girl with the great tits, the high IQ, and the ironic knowing smile?” There’s an accusatory pause. “Anyway, he asked me all sorts of questions about me. And you. Funny that I forgot to mention that I saw him. He seemed to know that you and I had this…well, I don’t know, okay, this hypothetical thing going. He was curious about everything. He’s a collector of facts, I guess. And so he told me a little bit about himself.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Actually, no, I don’t.”

“Well, he said he grew up in Milwaukee, until his family moved to New York, an apartment on West End Avenue. Didn’t you live in Milwaukee, too? And New York? That’s quite a coincidence. Anyway, he said he has a sister who was in a car accident and is mute. That’s a shame — I felt bad for him. He said his father died when he was quite young, of a stroke—”

Nathaniel sits up quickly. He feels cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, and his chest heats up. “Wait! What? He said what?”

“You heard me.” She looks over at him. “What’s the matter?”

For a brief moment, Nathaniel looks down at his shape under the comforter, as if some part of him is no longer there. Where his right foot should be, nothing. Quickly he scrambles out of bed and rushes into Jamie’s bathroom. His stomach has been seized with a sudden twist of electric current. He is afraid that he may be having a heart attack. A metaphysical nausea instantly converts itself into physical nausea, and he leans over the toilet bowl, staring downward. The seizure feels like a heart attack located in his gut. Maybe, he thinks, a heart attack can strike anywhere in the body. You could have a heart attack in your brain.

Jamie appears in the bathroom doorway, as naked as he is. In the midst of his nausea, he admires her legs. They are solid; they will not disappear on her. They will continue to hold her up, and maybe she will hold him up. “Nathaniel,” she says, “what’s going on?” She approaches him and puts her arm around him as if to support him, to keep him from falling.

He glances down to see if his right foot still exists. It does. It has returned. This is crazy, he thinks.

“That’s not his life,” Nathaniel says. Anger arrives belatedly. “The stroke, the mute sister, Milwaukee, New York — that’s all mine. That’s not his. It’s my life.”

“He’s claiming your life?” Jamie asks. “That’s preposterous.”

“Okay, yeah, I know. But that’s what he’s doing.”

“Are you feeling sick? Are you okay?” In the mirror’s reflection, Jamie’s face shows high-level concern, her dazzling eyes signaling that she’s at home and the lights burn brightly. At this moment, when Nathaniel sees her face reversed in the mirror, he thinks that Jamie is the most beautiful woman he has ever looked upon, even though she is not beautiful. He is having another Gertrude Stein moment. She is beautiful although she is not beautiful.

“I have to go,” Nathaniel tells her. On her bathroom mirror she has stuck a little decal that says WATERFOUL OBSERVATION SITE. In the bathtub is her collection of yellow rubber ducks and ducklings and orange shampoo bottles. The bathroom smells of primal girl. One of her metal dirigibles hangs from the bathroom ceiling. Jamie’s little tchotchkes constitute a conspiracy of the hapless and lovable and airborne.

“Can’t this wait?”

“I mean, it won’t. No, it can’t wait,” he says, his verbal confusion adding to his rage. Something must be done. He feels like pulling down a few window shades and tearing them into small bitter pieces.

“Why did he do all that? Why does he want your life? Is he in love with you?”

Nathaniel says nothing.

“I bet he’s in love with you.” She stands behind him and reaches around him to lean her head against his shoulders. “I’m sort of worried about you.” She waits while Nathaniel notices that “sort of”—must everything she does be qualified? — and she touches him on the chest. “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Little whiffs of physical desire are making their way from her toward him, little fugitive hetero longings. In the mirror, her eyes bore into him and her brow is furrowed. Maybe his current psychic crisis energizes her. His sudden suffering makes her want to bed him down. But it’s his suffering she wants to have, to lay her hands on, not him.