Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

Nathaniel has the house to himself. It is his, in temporary solitude, except for his shadow. He ascends the stairway. He pushes aside the door to Jeremy’s room.

Nathaniel Mason approaches the desk cluttered with Jeremy’s litter. Right there, on the left-hand side of the desk, is the draft of an essay for a college admissions form, printed out from Jeremy’s computer. Nathaniel bends down to read it.

The Things We Take for Granted

BY JEREMY MASON

What do we take for granted? And is taking things for granted natural, or a mistake? Or somehow both? When I ride the bus from my home to Emerson High School, which I attend, I know where all the curves in the road are way ahead of time. I can anticipate traffic jams. My fellow students sit in the same seats most days. I even know where there will be dogs barking in the neighborhood. Believe it or not, I know the names of some of the dogs because I have walked them, as a summer job! Thank goodness we, as humans, are capable of anticipating some events! That way, we are able to make plans. We can save money for a rainy day. We can outline a strategy, a plan of action. Otherwise we would be in the dark all the time, experiencing surprises each and every minute. Surprises are good but not when they are eternal. But there are some things that we must not ever take for granted, three above all. We should not take for granted our families, our beliefs, and our [strengths and weaknesses? loved ones? health?]

No one should ever take his or her family for granted. For example, my younger brother is weird, but he is always surprising me by how fearless he is. Last week he said to the family that he is planning to travel to India alone this coming summer to be “enlightened” by a guru he found on the Web, which I know for a fact he is not. He likes to attract attention to himself but he is basically harmless and courageous. He has said he is gay, but that was grandstanding. For example, I have seen him staring long and hard at Playboy magazine. My mother is quiet but she is always there for me and is always rooting for me in my athletic endeavors and academic achievements and is always in my corner. She keeps on me to study carefully and to give everything I can to academics and athletics. My dad too is quiet, but just as the old saying is that still waters run deep, I know that he

Nathaniel turns away from the page. In its cage to the side of the desk, Jeremy’s pet white rat, Amos, sticks its nose out from its bedding to see if anything is going on. Outside, a car may be pulling up in the driveway. Whatever his son has written about him can wait for his inspection. Soon they will all be home, his wife and his two children, and Nathaniel will have prepared a salad, peeled the potatoes and boiled them for mashing, and he will have laid the steaks tenderly on the grill. Will green beans be served? That depends. The front and back doors will rattle open, and tumult will fill the house as it does every evening. Laura has left him a note informing him where the dishes are hidden away in the refrigerator, and how he should prepare them. “Welcome home, sweetie,” the note begins, and it continues, “Were you on the radio? If you’re clueless about the dinner dishes, you should start by…”

(In the basement, near his worktable, where he is assembling a small blue birdhouse to be hung on the apple tree in the backyard, stands a compact companionable metallic duck, sturdily upright on its two metal legs. In the drawer of his worktable rests a sealed envelope. And inside the envelope is a folded message, surely a benediction, he believes — this hope constitutes his last article of faith, which he will clutch until the end of his days.)

Blessings, he thinks, on my family, on the poor and helpless, the brokenhearted, on the victims of violence and on its perpetrators. May they all be undestroyed. Blessings on everybody. Blessings without limit.

A last visit from Gertrude Stein, as she waves good-bye: For a long time, she too had been one being living.

Minutes later, in the kitchen, he takes the dishes out from the refrigerator one by one. He begins the preparations for dinner.

This is a work of fictions.

In this novel about thievery, I am happy to acknowledge some borrowed gifts. Theresa is correct about Coolberg’s dream: it does not belong to him but to Diane Arbus and can be found in her 1959 notebook #1, as printed in Revelations. Coolberg also has a habit of quoting, without attribution, passages from Joseph Stefano’s script for Psycho, along with other passages from the novels of E. M. Forster. The quotations from Gertrude Stein are largely paraphrases of her portrait of Matisse. The translation into English of Kleist’s The Marquise of O — is by David Luke and Nigel Reeves.

For certain details about Los Angeles flora and fauna I am grateful to Francesca Delbanco and Arden Reed. My grateful thanks also to Michael Collier and Louise Glück. The story of Simple Shmerel is derived from The Adventures of Simple Shmerel as told by Solomon Simon. My thanks to Carl Dennis for bringing these stories to my attention.

As always, thanks to Liz Darhansoff, Carol Houck Smith, Dan Frank, and Martha and Daniel Baxter.

Charles Baxter is the author of eight other works of fiction, including Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.