Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

Time had humanized him. I could tell that nothing that he and I were about to do would develop as I had anticipated. The scenario I had foreseen — recriminations, blame, righteous anger — gave way to my sudden intense bewilderment.

“Jerome,” I said. I stood and shook his hand.

“Let’s get out of this place,” he said, glancing around the hotel’s lobby with disapproval. “This hotel terrifies me. I thought you might like it. I don’t know why I believed that. Out-of-towners are sometimes impressed by it. But of course you wouldn’t be.” He sighed. “You were never an out-of-towner anywhere,” he said cryptically. “I’ve got a car here and a few errands to run. I drive now. I finally learned how. I learned directions. Then maybe we could go out to Santa Monica for dinner. What do you think?”

I nodded halfheartedly. “Seems fine.”

His car, a nondescript Toyota, was cluttered with books, DVDs, and plastic pint bottles of chocolate milk, a remedy, he told me, for the chronic sour stomach from which he suffered. He cleared off the passenger-side bucket seat, and within a few minutes we were on Hollywood Boulevard, passing the Walk of Fame. I noticed that Snow White and Darth Vader were circulating there, handling out discount coupons for local businesses. The sunburnt tourists seemed happy to have been given something, anything, by these mythic creatures; they clutched the orange coupons to their hearts. Snow White had been located in that same spot when I had brought my family here on vacation a few years ago. She had had a dotty expression on her face then, and she still had it. The job had deranged her, or perhaps she had suffered from heatstroke and the loss of her worldwide renown.

“Snow White should be institutionalized,” I said.

“Oh, she has been,” Coolberg knowingly informed me. We drove for another few minutes, and he stopped in front of a supermarket. “I just have to get one thing here,” he said. “A seasoning. Want to come in?”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay here in the car.” I didn’t want to find myself following him around.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

At the corner, someone with an odd, doughy face was hawking maps to the stars’ houses. Coolberg and I — it was unnerving — hadn’t really spoken. He had bragged that the day seemed unusually clear for L.A. (true) and that you could see the hills (also true). Maybe, he said, we should drive up to see “the vista” for ourselves. I had nodded. Sure, whatever. But he hadn’t asked me about myself, or my flight, or my past or present life, and I hadn’t asked him about American Evenings, or his health, or his personal arrangements — whether he was married or partnered or single. We hadn’t said a word about the period of antiquity in Buffalo we had shared. Buffalo possessed a drab unsightliness, a thrift-shop cast-off industrialism, compared to L.A., the capital of Technicolor representations. People were leaving there to come here. They were giving up objects for images. Besides, it was as if neither of us had the nerve to start a real conversation.

I looked down at the books in the car. Luminaries: Paul Bowles, Goethe, André Gide, Kawabata, Bessie Head. Books from everywhere, it seemed, many of them old editions with yellowed pages. A notebook was also there on the floor. I picked it up.

The outside of the notebook displayed my name in my own handwriting, Nathaniel Mason, and the date, 1973. I dropped the thing back on the floor as if I’d been slugged. Of course I was meant to see it; I was meant to toss it back onto the floor; I was meant to stare off into the distance, toward the maps of the stars and the brilliantly shabby street, lit by the perky late-afternoon sun.

On our way up one of the canyons — I think it must have been Beachwood, snaking upward just under the Hollywood sign — he kept his silence, but it was one of those silences in which you imagine the conversation that is simultaneously not occurring.

Where are we?

Oh, what a question! We are where we are.

Whose houses are these? Whose castles? What are these hairpin turns?

Don’t you admire the camellias? They bloom about this time of year. Those bushes can be pruned into any shape. Note the rose-petal-like flowers, in cream, white, red, or striated colors. Note how they’re surrounded by waxy green leaves?

Yes, very nice. We don’t have those at home in New Jersey.

What happened to you, Nathaniel? Whatever became of you?

My life changed, that’s what. What is my notebook doing on the floor of your car?

Eventually we reached the end of Beachwood Drive, stopped, looked (yes yes, I agreed: an impressive view), turned around, and began to creep back down the canyon on the same hairpin turns. I noticed that he was a rather disordered driver, slow to react, a poor calculator of distance. He was also unobservant, and, I could tell, wearied by the sights. The truth is that L.A. is a company town, and there isn’t all that much to show to tourists. Its arid provincial beauty quickly stupefies the innocent and bores the initiate.

“Shall we go to Santa Monica?” he asked, evidently bereft of other ideas. “Should we head out there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

HE HAD MADEa reservation at a restaurant on Ocean Boulevard, where we had a relatively clear line of sight to the palisade and the Pacific beyond it. It was a coolly perfect late afternoon, with faint wisps of cirrus clouds drifting in from the west. Around us, the cheerful chirps of the local song-birds mixed with slow pensive jazz. A saxophone, played live, from somewhere nearby, curlicued its way through “Satin Doll.” From the restaurant’s terrace, we were presented with a bright parade of in-line skaters, lovers, and their audiences, and they, too, made me think of tropical birds in brilliant colors, not a crow among them. There was no better place to be. Seated close to us was the usual mix of tourists, domestic and foreign, and local swells, most of them dressed in the gaudy clothes of joy. If you strained to listen, you could hear French and German spoken here and there in the restaurant. No Spanish, though, except back in the serving area and in the kitchen. As a habitué of such scenes, Coolberg took all this prodigality for granted in a way I could not, but he smiled at my keen curiosity, my outsider’s hunger for sights and sounds.

“Would you like some wine?” he asked me. “White or red? Maybe a white to start? They have a wonderful Sancerre here, so they tell me.”

“So they tell you?”

“I don’t drink,” he said, flagging down a waiter and ordering a bottle for me. “I can’t drink. I go to pieces.” The Sancerre came, was poured, was delicious, and Coolberg beamed his kindly cherub smile in my direction as he sipped his mineral water.

“You go to pieces?”

“I lose track of myself.”

“Ah,” I said, thinking that he had always been guilty of that particular error. I gulped, a bit, at the wine, whose quality was above my station in life. Nevertheless, I was trying to mind my manners. But manners or not, I had business to attend to. “Jerome, how did you find me?”

“Oh, that’s easy, these days. You can use the Web to find anybody. There’s no place to hide anymore. And if you can’t do it yourself, you hire a teenager to do your snooping for you. They know how to find Social Security numbers, credit cards—”

“Yes,” I said. “Identity theft.”

The phrase hung in the air for a moment.

“But…well. Anyway, I had been keeping track of you,” he said, going on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I knew where you were. Even after I moved out here, to Los Angeles, I studied where you had gone to.” He leaned back and glanced out toward the ocean, as if he were contemplating a trip. “You know. What had become of you, things like that.