Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“It was a little hobby of mine,” he continued. “So. When you were engaged to Laura, I found out. That was easy. Really, ridiculously easy. You can’t imagine. When you were married, I saw the announcement. That was easy, too — finding out, I mean. You don’t even need a detective for such things. I followed you from job to job, just, you know, keeping tabs, the post office, the gas company, et cetera, all of it from a distance, of course from a distance, my distance, where I’d note things down in my record book, and when your son Jeremy was born, I marked the date on my calendar. August twenty-third, wasn’t it? Yes. August twenty-third. A good day. I almost sent you a card.” He laughed quietly. “And when your wife hit that pedestrian, that vindictive man, I saw the court records of the litigation. Then there was your second son, Michael. A July Fourth baby, born to fireworks, a little patriot, a…Yankee Doodle Dandy.” He smiled tenderly and tapped his index finger on the table. “I noticed all of the milestones, each and every one of them. My eye was on the sparrow.”

I must have stared at him. It was like being in the audience at a show given by a psychic who tells you details about your dead grandmother.

“But why?” I asked him. “Why did you do that? Why did you—”

“Keep track?” He leaned forward. “Please. If you have to ask me such a question, then you’re never going to know.” I could smell lemongrass on his breath. Probably he drank herbal tea all day. “Your son Jeremy is on the swim team, the breast-stroke and the medley, and your wife has a little business dealing in quilts.” He rubbed at his jaw. “Quite a diversified family. I almost bought one from her, and then I thought better of it.”

“You thought better of it? You do more than keep track,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Sure. I do. I do more. But I won’t bore you with additional details about your life. After all, it’s your life. You’re living it.”

It’s important to say here that I wasn’t angry, or shocked, or disbelieving, or amused by what he was telling me. I was simply and overwhelmingly neutral now, as if witnessing a unique force of nature manifesting itself in front of me. “So,” I said, “you became a student of my life.”

“Well, obsession stinks of eternity.” He reached out for a piece of bread, then spread butter all over it. He hadn’t lost his gift for plummy phrases.

“Why me ?” I had never before seen so much butter applied to a slice of bread. Coolberg had the uncertain etiquette of a child born to poverty, and I remembered that he had always eaten like an orphan in a crowded noisy dining hall. “ Why me? ”

“Why you? You’re being obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.” He glanced to his right as a recently disgraced film actress sat down near us with a female friend. Other people in the restaurant were watching them.

“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re talking about this, do you know what happened to Theresa?”

“Theresa?” he laughed. “Her? Oh, she scuzzied herself back into the great membrane.”

“What does that mean?” Twilight was beginning to come on. The waiter lit the candle on our table. The ocean currents went their way. Planet Earth hurtled through space. The galaxy turned on its axis.

“She wasn’t much to begin with, was she? And she wasn’t much later either. So now, I imagine, she isn’t much at all. All that tiresome irony of hers, that sophomoric knowingness. I don’t think irony as a stance is very intelligent, do you? Well, I mean it has the appearance of intelligence, but that’s all it has. It goes down this far”—he held his hand at knee level—“but it doesn’t go any farther.”

“She was pretty,” I said, feeling the need to defend her.

“No,” Coolberg said. “I don’t agree. Theresa was attractive without being pretty. She had the banal sensibilities of a local librarian who’s moved to the big city and has started serious drinking and making semi-comical overstatements to disguise her obvious gaps. All those Soviet medals! Come on . And one memorized line of French poetry. What a doofus she was. Poor thing. There’s a difference between — well, attraction and prettiness, and she never got it. All of her books were borrowed, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she’s wherever she is.”

“But you were her lover.”

He blew air out of his mouth in response to this irrelevant observation.

“And Jamie?” I asked quickly. “Jamie Esterson? The sculptor? She worked at the People’s Kitchen, remember?” I felt a shadow fall over me, as if I were about to get sick very soon. Could you become mentally destabilized in an instant? People talk about panic attacks, the feeling of the sudden oncoming locomotive and you, caught on the tracks in a stalled automobile. Anyway, I saw the shadow there, and I fought it off by looking out at the sidewalk and quietly counting the cars on Ocean Boulevard. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

He flinched. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to her. No idea at all.”

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

He ordered the salmon, and I ordered the cassoulet. Night dropped its black lace around us. He began to tell me what had happened to him. After leaving the East and never quite collecting a college degree, he had turned up in Los Angeles, having written a screenplay, a musical, Fire Escape, whose odd locale had been a downtown apartment building with a cast of colorful urban characters (“If you could imagine Rear Window as a musical, which I could, in those days, then you could imagine the script”). Although the screenplay had been optioned, the project went nowhere, but its readers noticed a certain flare in it, a soigné knowingness about plot requirements and genre conventions. Slowly he built up a lattice-work of friends, among them a programming manager at a local public-radio affiliate. Oh, this was dull. He would not bore me any longer with the banal details of what he had accomplished and where he had been and whom he had known. He had a life. Everyone has a life. If I cared, I could check on it. I could hire my own gumshoe teenager to snoop. No one cares about the particulars, he said — an obvious lie and the first mis-statement to emerge from his cherubic face so far. He was, after all, the host of American Evenings. In a sense, he was hosting it now. This was one of those evenings he so prized.

“I’m interested in the particulars,” I said, tipping back my third glass of wine. The waiter came to pour the remainder of the bottle’s contents into my glass. “Such as: Are you married?” I thought of current conversational protocols. “Do you have a partner? Is there someone?”

“Oh, there’s always someone,” he said vaguely, dismissively. He watched an old man rumble by on the sidewalk stabilized by a walker. He was accompanied by his elderly wife, and both were wearing identical blue blazers. No: they were not married. They were twins.

“Who’s yours? You seem to know about mine,” I said.

“What does it matter? Are you trying to take a moral inventory? It wouldn’t be anyone you know. Love is generic. Besides, that’s not what you’re really interested in.”

“What am I really interested in? Since you seem to be the expert.”

“Well, okay, to start with, here’s a subject of interest: What am I doing with your notebook from years ago? Why was it reposing on the floor of my car? Which you surely took note of, that notebook, when I was in the supermarket buying garlic and arrowroot?”

“I did.”

“Isn’t it interesting?” he asked. “So far, we haven’t talked about those days. You never asked me back then, or ever, why I had your clothes stolen or why I was wearing them. You went around with that expression on your face as if you understood each and every one of my actions, as if you understood everything and accepted all of it. No one will ever tell you this except me, so I’ll say it: that expression appeared to comprehend everything that anybody could present to it. Your tolerance was positively grotesque in its limitlessness. What didn’t you accept? It was your greatest weapon. No: your second-greatest weapon.”