The Soul Thief (19 page)

41

He had made a 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.

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“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.

“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—

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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 vin-dictive 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.”

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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 eti-quette 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.

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“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 doo-fus 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 188

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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 require-ments 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, dismis-sively. 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.”

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“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.”

“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 won-190

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dering 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.

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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 . . .