Charles Baxter: The Soul Thief

They introduce themselves. They are both graduate students, both looking for the same mal-addressed party, a party in hiding. In homage to his gesture, she takes off her footwear and puts her arm in his. This is the epoch of bare feet in public life; it is also the epoch of instantaneous bondings. Nathaniel quickly reminds her — her name is Theresa, which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French, or otherwise foreign — that they have met before here in Buffalo, at a political meeting whose agenda had to do with resistance to the draft and the war. But with her flashing eyes, she has no interest in his drabby small talk, and she playfully mocks his Midwestern accent, particularly the nasalized vowels. This is an odd strategy, because her Midwestern accent is as broad and flat as his own. She presents herself with enthusiasm; she has made her banality exotic. She has met everyone; she knows everyone. Her anarchy is perfectly balanced with her hyperacuity about tone and timbre and atmosphere and drift. With her, the time of day is either high noon or midnight. But right now, she simply wants to find the locale of this damn party.

Again the rain starts.

Nathaniel and Theresa pass a park bench. “Let’s sit down here for a sec,” she says, pointing. She grins. Maybe she doesn’t want to find the party after all. “Let’s sit down in the rain. We’ll get soaked. You’ll be the Yin and I’ll be…the other one. The Yang.” She points her index finger at him, assigning him a role.

“What? Why?” Nathaniel has no idea what she is talking about.

“ Why? Because it’s so Gene Kelly, that’s why. Because it’s not done. No sensible person sits down in the rain.” She salts the word “sensible” with cheerful derision. “It’s not, I don’t know, wise. There’s the possibility of viral pneumonia, right? You’d have to be a character in a Hollywood musical to sit down in the rain. Anyway, we’ll arrive at the party soaking wet. Our clothes will be attached to our skin, and we’ll be visible. ” She seems to inflect all her adjectives unnecessarily. Also, she has a habit of laughing subvocally after every other sentence, as if she were monitoring her own conversation and found herself wickedly amusing. Together they do as she suggests, and she takes his hand in a moment of what seems to be spontaneous fellow feeling. “I can stand a little rain,” she says quietly, fingering his fingers, quoting from somewhere. She leans back on the park bench to let the droplets fall into her eyes. To see her is heaven, Nathaniel thinks. No wonder she wears a flak jacket. They wait there. A minute passes. “Boompadoop-boom ba da boompadoopboom,” she sings, Comden-and-Greenishly.

“Look at that,” he says, pointing to a building opposite them. Through the second-floor window of a huge run-down house, the party that they have been seeking is visible. The nondifferentiated uproar of conversation floods out onto the street and makes its way to them in the drizzle. To his left, he sees a bum standing under a diseased elm, eyeing them. “That’s it. That’s us. There’s the party. We found it.”

Theresa straightens, squints, wiping water from her eyes. “Yes. You’re right. There’s the place. What a wreck. I hope it has a fire escape. Hey, I think I see that kid, Coolberg,” she says. “Right there. Near the second window. On the right. See him?”

“Who?”

“Coolberg? Oh, he’s a…something. Nobody knows what he is, actually. He hangs out. He has some grand destiny, he says, which he’s trying to discover. On Tuesday last week he was going around saying that art is the pond scum on the stream of commerce, but on Thursday he was saying that art is not superstructural but constitutes the base. Well, he’d better decide which it is. He changes his mind a lot. He’s a genius but very queer.”

“Queer how?”

“Well, in the good way,” Theresa says. She thoughtlessly puts her hand on his thigh and strokes it. “Maybe he’ll tell you how he’s being blackmailed. That’s one of his best stories. Come on,” she says.

After standing up, she twirls around a lamppost and then dances barefoot into the street, neatly avoiding a car before managing a splashing two-step into a puddle, holding out her sandals as props, a serious Marxist hoofer, this girl, and Nathaniel, who can’t match her steps with his own, is stricken, as who would not be, by love-lightning for her. He follows her. The bum stays outside under the elm, watching them go.

In the apartment doorway everyone gets it. “You’re soaked! That is so cool. This is very MGM, you two. Did you just kiss out there? Standing up or sitting down? Do you even know each other? Did you just meet? Are you guys in a Stanley Donen movie or a Vincente Minnelli movie? Have you been introduced? Do you need to be? Do you want to dry off or is that soaked look a thing that you’d like to keep going for a while? Want a joint, want a beer? The beer’s in the kitchen and there’s more out on the fire escape unless someone stole it or squirreled it away. Why not sit down right here, on this floor? There’s whiskey if you want it. Is Marcuse correct about repressive tolerance or is ‘repressive tolerance’ another example of the collapse of that particular and once viable Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung nonsense? Buying off the masses with material goods? Well, everyone knows the answer to that question. Don’t stand out there. Come in. Dry off. Join the party.”

They do come in, they do attempt to dry off with kitchen rags, they drop their sandals in a pile of sneakers and boots and sandals by the door. Almost immediately, while Nathaniel is recalibrating his emotions in relation to the woman he has just partnered across the street, she disappears into another room. Holding a beer bottle (he has misplaced the six-pack that he himself had brought — perhaps it is still out on the bench in the park and is now being consumed by the elm-bum), he damply threads his way through the corridors of the party, long dreamlike hallways of grouped couples, trios, and quartets. His clothes stick to his skin. The smell of dope and cigarette smoke, the pollution produced by thought, mingles with the aroma of whatever is cooking in the tiny kitchen, where a whitish semi-liquid chive dip has been laid out on a gouged table, bread crusts of some sort piled on a plate nearby, and after he leans over for a bite of whatever it is, Nathaniel stops, pauses, before a disembodied conversation about Joseph Conrad’s Eastern gaze on Western eyes — the novelist is treated with friendly condescension for writing a variety of Polish in English that mistakes particularity for substance — a conversation that transitions into the weekend’s football game and the prospects of the Buffalo Bills. Someone in another room is singing “Which Side Are You On?” in a good tenor voice. Soon, having wandered in front of a phonograph, he hears, first, Joe Cocker, and quickly after that, Edith Piaf, the turntable being of the old-fashioned type with a spindle and a stack of LPs slapping down, one after the other, a vinyl collage, “ Non, je ne regrette rien, ” followed several minutes later by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, out of tune as usual, playing “Open Country Joy.”

The party carries with it a mood of heady desperation held in check by the usual energies of youth. When Nathaniel looks at his friends, they remind him of puppies in a cardboard box. What is Nixon, what is Vietnam, what is double-digit inflation and mounting unemployment and a life with no prospects compared to a woman sitting on a broken sofa with a guy whose beard hair is still unassertively spawning, the two of them arguing about The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ? Can the middle class fall outside of history, and, if it does, will actors take over public roles? Sure they will. They already have.