Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“No, I haven’t.” He waits. “What’s this about the gods? I never heard of any. Besides God, I mean.”

“Oh, skepticism is so easy, Nathaniel. And lazy. Lazily uninteresting. This excursion — we should do it. The pagan gods have a new boldness. They desire to be seen. The name of God is changing in our time. Really. Don’t you agree? Besides, you have a car. I don’t drive. I have never driven. With me, practice doesn’t make perfect. I have no sense of direction.”

“Okay. But we should bring Theresa along, you know? If I’m going to take an excursion, it should be the three of us.”

In the long silence that follows, Jamie has shrugged and returned to washing and chopping and tossing vegetables into the stewpot. “Yes,” Coolberg says at last. “What a good idea. You call her. When do you want to go?”

“How about tomorrow night? It’s Sunday. The gods come out on Sunday, don’t they? It’s their day, Sunday. Right?”

“Fine,” Coolberg says angrily. Nathaniel hears the telltale click of the disconnection. Apparently Coolberg never says hello or good-bye.

When he returns to Jamie’s side, she asks him who it was, and when he tells her, she puts down her knife, drops her hands to her sides, and slowly leans sideways into him, a gesture of affection and, it seems — Nathaniel can’t be sure — protection. “I should be your guardian angel,” she says. “I think you need one.” She drops her head on his shoulder for a split second. Under the protective chef’s head scarf, her blond hair brushes against his neck. It feels blond.

“Do you know that guy who called me? Coolberg?”

“No,” she tells him. “It was the look on your face I recognized.”

“What look?”

“Like you were being pickpocketed. Or, I dunno, taken. You make me nervous,” Jamie tells him. “You’re too available. You need to be more vigilant. Close yourself down a little. Men shouldn’t be like you. Give me a call, if you ever think of it.”

JUST BEFORE HE LEAVESin the early afternoon, Nathaniel, who has finished mopping and disinfecting the floor near the kitchen drain, sees a guy escorting a pregnant woman, evidently his wife, through the front door and then to one of the long community tables. She walks past the entryway in deliberate stages, first limping from a bad left knee, then waving brokenly with her right arm for balance, as if she were directing traffic. Her progress comes in physical-therapy steps. Apparently she doubts that she will stay upright. Regaining her dignity, she sits down slowly before gazing at the dining area with the abstracted air of a queen about to announce a decree. Her husband — they are both wearing wedding rings — is white, and she is black, though their facial features are rather similar, with dark widely spaced eyes, Italian, as if they had both descended from the Medicis, one side in Italy, the other in Africa. It is the burglar and his wife, and when the burglar sees Nathaniel he nods, very quickly, a hi-but-don’t-come-over-here look.

When Nathaniel approaches them, the burglar glares at him, resisting. Nathaniel walks through his resistance. He says, “Hi. I’m Nathaniel.” He holds out his hand.

“Um, it’s Ben,” the burglar says, referring to himself. He gestures in his wife’s direction. “This here’s Luceel.”

“Hi, Luceel,” Nathaniel says. Luceel gazes at him before studying her hands in her lap. She has great physical beauty and will not exchange more than a quick once-over with just anybody. She is one of those women who rations out her glances. Maybe she is just shy.

“Um, hi. You two know each other?” she asks, looking at her fingers.

“We’ve met,” Ben says. “That’s all it is. We met someplace. He remembers me from a thing we did.” He sighs loudly, examining the traffic passing outside and shaking his head, as if the mere fact of the cars oppresses him, all those Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, with their purposeful owners.

“Right,” Nathaniel says. “Well. See you later. Nice to meet you, Luceel. Have a good afternoon, you guys.”

As he walks out the front door, he notices that they are conferring together, heads lowered, this topic having momentarily taken precedence over food and hunger.

In the afternoon he plays basketball in a city park with a group of guys he’s seen here before, most of them about his size, their elbows as aggressive as his own, their collective breath visibly rising above them in the cold autumn air, their sweat soaking through their shirts. One basket has a chain net hanging from the hoop; the other hoop, on the opposite court, is naked, with an unpadded support pole holding up the backboard — a funky urban playground for adults, inmates of the city. Nathaniel plays slowly and distractedly, but the other players, too, have strangely mournful expressions on their weekend faces, like the little men bowling in “Rip Van Winkle” who were unable to smile. Despite their gloom they all make self-encouraging male noises, and the noises free them. Doing a lay-up, Nathaniel allows himself a loud triumphant outcry.

The ball falls neatly through the hoop.

Back in his apartment after his shower, he gets Theresa on the line, and her apologies begin, one by one. Apologies? For what? She launches in with her mistakes in tone, advances to mistakes in behavior, and ends with the full self-indictment. “I’m a total fraud. Somebody should arrest me,” she says calmly. “Last night? That wasn’t me.” The confession of fraudulence sounds fraudulent, though it has charm. Nathaniel notices that she speaks quietly, intimately. Listening to her is like being in a sensual confessional booth across the hall from a hot steamy bedroom. Her statements emerge from her full of self-doubt, the sweetly narcissistic self-censorious note struck again and again, as if she is surprised to find that she actually likes him a bit more than she likes herself and is evoking her own dubious flaws so that he can refute her, thus showering her with praise and returning the conversation to the subject of her wonderful, winning self.

“See, the thing is,” she tells him, and then trails off into strategic mumbling. She admits her yearning to inhabit an intellectual realm that she has not by rights acquired citizenship to. “Oh, everyone else around here is so smart,” she confesses, “and all I can do is to put on an act.” Really, she says, she is just a simple girl brought up in buttfuck Iowa, the daughter of a manufacturer’s rep who sold prefabricated silos. She’s afraid of being dumb, a silo salesman’s daughter — that’s her breathy assertion.

She has mastered somehow a tonal mixture of the bogus and the seductive, so Nathaniel interrupts. “But you were quoting Valéry last night!” he says. “Who else does that?”

“That line, that’s the one line I know,” she says. “That one. I always quote it. ‘ Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regard-moi qui change!’ That gets me in the door, that line, it’s the key to the city.”

“Okay. Enough. You know something? When we came in last night,” Nathaniel says, before a coughing fit takes him over, “everyone thought we were a couple.”

“Yeah? You think so? Why?”

“Because they said so. Because we were both soaked. Because we looked it. There was a perception there. Of, what’s that word? Togetherness. That we were mated.”

“Yeah?” She waits. “Well, who knows? It could happen. You and me, I mean. I’d just have to dump my boyfriend. I’d have to cheat on him. Of course, that’s always a possibility. Sometimes I do despise him. He lives in Berkeley, half a million miles away. And, after all, he’s an out-and-out android, this guy. Robby. Robby the Robot.”