Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“What was the first?”

“Want another bottle of wine?”

“I’ve had enough.”

“So what? Who cares? You’re not driving anywhere.” He made a gesture at the waiter, and instead of wine ordered brandy. Then he began teasing his lower lip with his index finger. “Why do you care about that sculptor so much, that Jamie person? Why did you care?”

I reached for my wineglass. “Because I loved her. Because I never got over her.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes. About that I am very sure.” My syntax had acquired the stately formality of the truly inebriated. I was still wondering what he thought my greatest weapon was. “And by the way, who are you to be interrogating me about any of this?”

He smiled an impish smile. “The host of American Evenings, that’s who. And look. That’s exactly what we’ve been presented with.” He pointed in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. “A pleasantly wonderful American evening for the consumers of twilight and our national metaphysical ruin, as played out here, in the best of all possible worlds, in SoCal.”

I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly. “‘SoCal’?” Had he really employed that usage? “So this is another one of your American Evenings ? You don’t have your tape recorder on, do you?”

“Oh, no, Nathaniel, that would be illegal, immoral, and, what’s worse, impractical. You can’t pick up an adequate—”

“What did you do to her?” I interrupted him.

“To whom?”

“To Jamie.”

“To Jamie? I didn’t do anything to her.” He leaned back. “She was set upon. By dogs.”

“But you predicted it. You told me that day in the zoo. You said you were writing something called Shadow, whose story contained an Iago-like character named Trautwein, I remember that, who is tormenting another character, I think his name — and it was truly a ridiculous name, an affectedly literary name — was Ambrose, who loves this woman, an artist, and Ambrose…well, the person he loves is harmed, not directly, but by hired-out third parties. It’s not Othello, but it’s a third cousin once removed to that story. Trautwein sees to the harm.” I winced at my own alcoholic repetitions, but they were essential to the case I was making.

Somehow, coffee had appeared on the table. Coolberg picked up his cup. “It might have been a coincidence.”

“Okay,” I replied to him. “But what if it wasn’t? What if…let’s just say… hypothetically …what if you, or, um, someone like you, not you exactly, not you as you are now, what if this hypothetical past-tense person had hired…what if you had hired some young men, some thugs, for example, that you found hanging around the People’s Kitchen or some place like that, to beat her up, to do terrible violence to her? Well, no. Strike that. I take that back. Maybe all they were supposed to do was threaten her a little. A teeny-weeny act of intimidation, motivated by jealousy, let’s say. That’s all. They would walk up to her at the bus stop and slyly put the fear into her. And this…prank would scare her right out of town. Off she would go, to another…what? Venue. That was the goal. You know: give her a little 12-volt shock. Affright her with their boyish street-thug menace, which is, I might add, celebrated now on all the major screen media. We can’t get enough of that, can we? Sweet, sweet violence. So, anyway, with this plan, she’d leave town, pack up herself along with her few minor bruises, if she had any, and move, taking her little birds and blimps with her. But maybe the plan goes awry. Let’s suppose that the guys who are hired are not just sly. They’re criminal sociopaths instead. The 12-volt shock turns out to be 120 volts. And then it gets European and goes up to 240 volts. And what if…let’s just say…they got into it, these thugs that’d been hired, or were maybe just doing a favor — well, you’d only need a couple of them, and they couldn’t stop what they had started, their specialty not being staying within limits set for them by authority figures, after all, and they hate women anyway, and they sort of raped her, because it was possible, you know how one thing leads to another, don’t you, Jerome? I know I do. And she was raped. And after it happened, she couldn’t remember much of anything, so there were no arrests and no trials because she couldn’t identify anybody and the police were helpless, and she left town soon afterward, clearing the field, so to speak. What if that had happened?”

He looked directly at me. “Then I would have been a monster.” He glanced at the sky. “Then I would have been unable to live with myself.”

“But you had already hired a burglar. You had hired a burglar to steal clothes, my clothes, and then he got into his tasks, and he couldn’t stop, and he stole everything from my apartment, until nothing was left, only a book or two. And a mattress.” I leaned back. I felt like repeating myself. “You had already hired a burglar. It’s what you do. You’re still a burglar. You still steal clothes. I’ve listened to your show.”

“Is that what you think happened?” he asked me. “Is that really what you think?”

“Sometimes I think it,” I said. We were both speaking calmly, like gentlemen, over the coffee and the dessert.

“You think your apartment was being emptied by burglars?”

“Sure it was.”

“Oh, you poor guy,” he said. “It wasn’t being emptied by burglars. It was being emptied by you. You were moving out, or trying to. Don’t be such an innocent. You were trying to move in with her. With that Jamie person. This hopeless hopeless stupid idiotic romance you thought you had going on with her. It was making you crazy, you poor guy. We could all see it. Anybody who loved you could see it. And of course she wouldn’t let you take anything over there, into her place. Because there was no room, to start with. And because she didn’t love you the way you loved her and…she didn’t really want you over there. So you were storing your stuff somewhere else, in the meantime, until she would come around, as we used to say, come around to being the benign woman you believed she could be, the heterosexual wife or whatever she was that you had envisioned. You had assigned a certain set of emotions to her and were just waiting for her to have them, and meanwhile you were reading that soggy Romantic poetry and dragging the spectacle of your broken heart across the Niagara Frontier. Love? You were offering something you didn’t have to someone who didn’t want it.”

“I was storing my stuff somewhere else?”

“Of course you were.”

“If she was refusing me, why wasn’t I taking my stuff back to my own place?”

“Because that would have been an admission of defeat. You were always good at denial.”

“So where was I taking everything?”

He gave me that look again. “You poor guy,” he said again. “You persist in your habits, don’t you? Your ingrained habits of incomprehension. Willful incomprehension. And convenient amnesia. You’re just like this country. You’re a champion of strategic forgetting. You really can’t give up your innocence, can you? That sort of surprises me.” He glanced down at my glass of brandy as if it were responsible for my faults. “You can’t live without your disavowals. You told me that Jamie left you a letter behind in her apartment after she took off. It was addressed to you.”

“Yes.”

“What did it say?”

“I never opened it,” I admitted.

“I rest my case,” Coolberg said, signaling for the check. “Let’s go down to the pier.”