Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

Once, about a year ago, in the car as we drove along the back roads to one of Jeremy’s swim meets in the next town over, I said to Laura that she and I were like a couple of oxen hitched together, yoked, and that when we had first come out of the stable, no one had known how much work we were good for. As it had turned out, we had accomplished plenty; we were a good team. (We had met when I was still working for Amalgamated Gas and Electric, and she and I had endured periods of tight budgets and some of the terrible economies that can break a marriage.) She was of course offended by my remarks. Oxen? Yoked together? Not a kind analogy. Not very romantic. Her womanly honor was offended.

I’m not stupid. I know that no wife wants to be compared to an ox.

Laura, by the way, is now a collector and dealer in contemporary and classic quilts. I hadn’t known about quilting and the system of sales and trading in women’s quilts until I met her, but she knows all the networks, African American and white, and she knows all the collectors and the great artists of quilting. She has spent a lifetime learning this trade and learning this art. She loves the work and as an agent takes very little for herself.

In any case, I don’t see what is particularly romantic about a married couple raising their children and getting from day to day, and I said so in the car that afternoon. I made my case. The ordinary business of diapers and fevers and broken bones and drafty rooms and lost socks and schedules on the refrigerator door takes the shine off everything for a while. Women understand this better than men do. Why should any marriage with kids be starry-eyed? Romantic heat may start the process off, but dutifulness and pure stubbornness keep it going. Romance — this is my personal view — is a destructive myth after the age of nineteen. Most people give it up, and they should. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been a great poet, but he had an aversion to raising the children he sired, and he avoided them, and they suffered; you can look it up.

Girls swoon over Jeremy. They can see that he’s a practical boy and will be a pragmatic man. Once he’s married, he’ll be steady. He’s a great prospect. Reliability is sexy. Of course, having good looks like his sweetens the whole deal. They attend the swim meets to see him in his Speedo, these girls, avid. They smile to themselves. Their eyes are wide and glistening.

But on that day, Laura was angered by what I had said. She went into a sulk, and even though Jeremy won his event with a personal-best time, she wouldn’t speak to me on the trip back home. It was the ox simile, I’m sure.

On the particular evening when Michael had enrolled himself into the Queer Nation, and my wife and I were having one of our ordinary after-dinner clean-ups — me doing the taxes, and Laura, my wife of almost two decades, rinsing the dishes in our suburban home in New Jersey — Laura jerked her head up with a sudden recollection and said, “Oh, by the way. Someone called.”

“Who?”

“Someone I never heard of. Said his name was Jerome Coolberg. Who’s that, Natie?”

Someone should have complimented me. Only five seconds passed before I said, “Nobody. Well, somebody, from…grad school days. Did he leave a number?”

Yes, he did.

LAURA AND Ihave had our own share of shadows. We’ve been lucky but not that lucky. For years we were poor. I’ve already mentioned this. When the quilting business was flat, Laura worked as an administrative assistant. I took a second job teaching a night class for immigrants, English as a Second Language. Then there was the accident.

When Jeremy was six years old and Laura was driving him home from day care, she hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street downtown. She had been adjusting the radio to get a better station, and Jeremy had been yelling, and she was distracted. Baby Michael was home with me. This guy was where he shouldn’t have been (no intersection and no crosswalk), but Laura didn’t see him, and the impact of the car threw him several feet into the air. He went unconscious for an hour or two, had a concussion and multiple fractures, and was in the hospital for over a month. He turned out to be one of those litigious Americans, a real bastard, a pain profiteer. Also an electrician and a drunk, but his alcoholism didn’t get into the trial. He sued, of course. It’s true that Laura hadn’t had her eyes on the road, and it’s also true that our Chevy needed brake work. Our insurance was paid up, thank God, but the whole process went on for a couple of years. We were destroyed in some of the ordinary ways, and when it was over, you couldn’t find either of us for a while; we had become vague and insulated. I could feel internally the parts of myself that had dried up and withered. Laura said I looked like a tree hit by lightning. I never said to her what she looked like. When lawyers stay calm but keep on talking to you and won’t stop, it’s as if they’re screaming and screaming.

But we’re lucky. We got over it. Our next-door neighbors have had the whole menu. Their daughter ran away a couple of times, mismanaged a major cocaine addiction, and was turning tricks in Atlantic City by the age of sixteen. She even had her own pimp. The parents were nice middle-class Americans, churchgoers. They didn’t know what was happening to them, or how it had started. Poor American parents: so easily confused. This same daughter got herself enrolled in a recovery program, emerged from it, began cutting herself for fun, then ran away again, this time to San Francisco, where she resumed her career in prostitution. This time she refused help. She accompanied her pimp/ boyfriend on a drugstore holdup, was caught and jailed. Her brother, inspired by her behavior, developed a liking for Vicodin. He started stealing prescription pads. He earned his own jail time. Etc. Two kids in the slammer. The father commenced drinking, and why wouldn’t he? Catastrophe is contagious. Everyone knows stories like this.

My point is that middle-class life in this country seems to be operating on a contingency basis. It can change on you at any moment. They can pull the rug out from under you. You can be thrown into the street without appeal. Your furniture is carted away; your clothes are tossed on the front lawn; your children are ground up by a crazy commercial culture. Catastrophe lurks; ruination prospers. As the guy in that movie said, Ask people for help, watch them fly .

I went into the den and gazed down at Coolberg’s phone number. The numbers in that particular combination had a terrible frightening appearance to me. My hands were shaking, and of course I didn’t want to go back there, into that world.

ULTIMATELY I WAS REMOVEDfrom Buffalo, but the stages of my breakdown have a montage-like quality to them, and by now they’re mixed up with what I have dreamed. My memories of those events were adulterated by the nightly visitations from those people and occasions after the major scenes were over. A sorcerer ruled my imaginings. The music of Mahler served as the background audio sound track. My visitors walked through walls toward me the way Marley’s Ghost seeped past the door on his errand to Ebenezer Scrooge. My dreamcallers carried their deadness around with them. Chains clanked. I can’t sort out what actually happened from what didn’t, and I can’t get the dreamstuff out of the narrative. Even though I don’t think about that time period often anymore, it accompanies me. My soul was mortgaged. I paid it off through regularity, routine, and hard work, until it was mine again. My history is what it is. Anyway, my crisis occurred decades ago, and I have a life to get on with. So I apologize now for this reconstruction, which is only an outline, a foggy sketchy thing, and for its necessary unreality. Also for its fragmentation. I don’t perceive the beauty in brokenness these days, though I once did. But I can acknowledge its truth.