Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“That’s crap,” Nathaniel says. “Sumerian texts? Please.” An implausible detail: it takes decades to learn how to read those texts. Nathaniel’s knees are shaky. Drops of perspiration appear as if by magic on his forehead, and unbidden tears spurt into his eyes. What if something were to happen to Jamie? What if these two sociopaths enacted…one of their fictions on her?

“I’ve got to go,” he says, taking off toward his car.

Behind him he hears Theresa shout, “My sweatpants. They’re in your car!”

What is the expression? Clothes make the man.

“ I made you so beautiful, ” the wind says. “ And you didn’t thank me. ”

JAMIE IS SLEEPING.She may even be sleeping with another woman. Anyway, she is not answering the phone.

Nathaniel waits for a day and then shows up on her doorstep, ringing ringing ringing the doorbell until she opens the door and says to him, “What happened to you ? You’ve got bags under your eyes. Were you up all night? Well, come in.”

She shepherds him into the tiny kitchen, takes off his jacket, which she hangs on a wall hook, and sits him down close to a little metallic duck standing guard on the counter. He tells her that he hasn’t eaten today, he hasn’t been able to eat at all, much less sleep, so she pours him a glass of milk and in silence makes him a quick cheese omelet, which he picks at.

“Your teeth are chattering, and you’re not chewing,” she says. “You’re trembling the food up.”

“Right. I know.” His fork rattles against the dinnerware.

“What’s going on? It’s getting late. I have to go to work.”

“It’s never been later than it is now,” he tells her. He reaches across the kitchenette table and takes her hand. Jamie has a strong woman’s hand, and he touches her fingers one by one, precious humanity, beloved warmth. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“I love you.” He squeezes her fingers. “I’ve been in a fever. I love you with all my heart. I know it’s hopeless and crazy, but, uh, I have to say this right now, this minute, this second. I love you, and I’ve just realized it these last days, and everything else is irrelevant, and now I have to tell you. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t think. ”

“You do? You did?” There’s no mistaking her surprise, but at least she doesn’t indicate amusement at statements of helpless emotion. A practical woman, she takes his plate and begins to rinse it in the sink. “What do you mean, ‘last days’?”

“What? Oh, Jamie.” He likes saying her name, so he says it again. “Jamie. Sit down. Please. Forget about the dishes. Sit down.”

“Okay.”

“Dear,” he says. “Darling.” He’s not used to talking like this. The language of love and endearment seems hopelessly outmoded to him. Using such idioms is like walking into a dusty Victorian bedroom where cheap chromos of nymphs and cupids hang on the wall. The side tables and overstuffed armchairs have been degraded from years of abuse. Still, it’s all he has. If he doesn’t say what’s in his heart, he’ll die.

“What’s come over you?” she asks. She’s wearing her usual work-at-home outfit: t-shirt, bib overalls, tennis shoes, and now a red flannel shirt on top of everything, for warmth in the underheated apartment. She has a few flecks of metal in her hair.

“I was up all night last night. I couldn’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about you. This is really love. I’m sure of it now. I’ve been doing inventories of you. I’ve done a checklist. I think about your sculpture, your dancing, your good heart. Your hands. Your eyes. Your hair. I think about you over at the People’s Kitchen. I think about your soul. Your soul! Listen to me. But I can’t help it. The more I think about you, the more…the more I hunger for you. I even love it that you’re a lesbian.”

“Jesus, Nathaniel.”

“I know. I know. This is really uncool. But I want someone who’s messed up the way you are, and your eyes, and your everything, I want it all. I know you don’t think you’re beautiful and maybe you’re not, but I think you are. It’s the way you talk when you’re talking, and it’s the little sculptures on your windowsills, and the fact that the world is okay because you’re in it. It’s everything about you. It’s the way you smell. It’s the odor of your soul.”

“How’s that?”

“You smell clean,” he tells her. “Like the soap of heaven.” He waits. Her hand in his hand has relaxed a bit, and he holds her palm over his so that he can caress her fingers. Even at this moment, making a complete fool of himself, he recognizes that this is really love, because he could caress her fingers forever. Time would cease. Nothing now, or ever, would present itself as what he would rather do than this.

“I don’t know what to say,” she tells him.

“I know that.”

“I’m not pretty.”

“I don’t care,” he announces proudly.

“I’m attracted to other girls,” she insists. “Your father would spin in his grave if he saw me coming home with you.”

“Oh, let him rotate,” Nathaniel says, in a freeing rush. “Please, honey,” he says, “don’t ever let anything happen to you.”

“I’m not planning on it,” she laughs, pulling her hand away. He takes it again.

“This is desperation you’re witnessing,” he says, gripping her. All at once, the thought occurs to him that what he’s expressing is not love but hysteria, rising out of his own emptiness. He is in the grip of inflated speech, exaggeration, all the insincere locutions of opacity and self-deception. He is becoming, he feels with sudden queasy recognition, like a character in a plot dreamed up by someone like Coolberg. Nevertheless, he goes on, believing that he can explain himself, as his language veers further out of his control, as if he were behind the wheel and the steering had failed in the car — a dirt road, a tree straight ahead of him, an accident resulting in the loss of speech. “I’m a desperate man,” he says, the words coming out of his mouth unaccompanied by inflections. “Oh, I love you. I can’t say it enough. My dear, you’re the one.” Appalled by himself, and triumphant, he waits for her response.

This time she does pull her hand away firmly. “No, Nathaniel,” she says quietly. “Nathaniel, I am not the one. Listen to yourself.”

“You are. You are, you are, you are.”

Sometimes he was insisting what he was sure about and when he was sure about it, he could not stop himself from insisting because it was the thing that he was knowing and by knowing this thing he could be correctly insisting and not stopping what he was telling and saying and telling again and again and again by really knowing. Why did Gertrude Stein continue speaking to him? Why would she not leave him alone? She loved women, too; that was why. She understood.

“I’m not. Really I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. You’re deluded. Listen: I can’t love you the way you love me. A woman has to love a man all the way down to the root. Otherwise, it’s the usual disaster. A true marriage exists between bodies and souls. And I can’t — I can’t love you that way. I like you. I even love you sometimes, for a man, for what you are. I gave you my bed to lie in and my body, too, because you deserved it. You needed a buddy in bed, and that was me. You’re a good man, maybe the best I’ve known. But we just slept with each other and liked each other a lot, and that’s not love. That’s an arrangement.” She waits. “Did that other girl give you an ultimatum?”