The Soul Thief (9 page)

Nathaniel lies on Jamie’s mattress on the floor, watching her as she works. Clad in overalls, she taps and hammers away at the head of a small metallic bird. She applies percussive techniques at the workbench and then seems ready to t h e s ou l t h i e f

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use her fiery equipment to weld another wing onto the bird’s torso until she decides that two wings are probably enough. On other evenings she assembles and disassembles rhombic dodecahedrons, meditating aloud on their shape, humming along to the radio or keeping up a monologue on arcane geometrical matters. Did Nathaniel know that Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone fame, once designed an elaborate flying contraption built out of small tetrahedron cells? No, he didn’t. Or that Bell invented a man-lifting kite, the ancestor of parasailing devices? No.

She keeps up three or four projects at once. Dinners prepared by Nathaniel bake in the oven as she turns her brooding attention to a football-shaped piece of metal, perhaps a blimp or dirigible of some kind, meant to hang somehow in the air. Music from the radio: Bartók’s second string quartet—clangorous Magyar scraping and sawing,
sul ponti-cello
wiry screeching, a Mitteleuropean racket perfect for a sculptor’s studio—snarls its way out of the speakers into the air, keeping the blimp suspended. Around seven on the nights he is permitted to stay, they eat dinner, and one particular evening over lamb chops he asks her why she’s a Roman Catholic.

“Oh, that? I’m sick in love with the Virgin Mary,” she says unsmilingly. “She’s my girl. I’ve been in love with her since I was ten years old. She came to me in a dream and said my name out loud. She’s not an idea. She’s real. I saw her face on the wall inside a movie theater, just before the lights went down. She exists. I’ve danced for her. She’s a fact in my life.”

“A movie theater. Like Max Jacob.”

“Who?”

“Max Jacob. He was a French poet, pre–World War II.

Jewish. He saw the face of Jesus on the wall of a movie the-76

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ater, and when it happened a second time, he went to the Fathers of Zion, an order dedicated to converting the Jews.

At his baptism, Picasso served as his godfather.”

After dinner, he washes up, reads, and she takes a long bath in the claw-footed bathtub before she goes out to drive for Queen City Cab. On those nights when she isn’t working, she emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and she lies down with him on the mattress where he has been reading Norman O. Brown’s
Love’s Body,
a book whose ecstasies already seem dated and stale. Tonight, he puts the book aside. Together, naked under a comforter, they gaze up at the ceiling from which are suspended Jamie’s birds and blimps. Above the art and to the side, a ceiling fan rotates languidly.

“You know,” she says, “you’re kind of sweet, but I’ll never know why I got involved with you.”

“Because you thought I deserved it. You said so. You initi-ated this. Anyway, it’s not really involvement.”

“Oh, really? I
have
sucked your dick. That’s intimacy, isn’t it? Still, I guess you’re right. And I suppose I
did
start this, didn’t I? That’ll teach me. Why did I do that?” She drapes her left leg over him. Her thigh has a dancer’s taut muscular symmetry. “But you’re a delay. You’re just a man. You’re
temporary.
” She smiles at the ceiling. “You understand me.

That’s the danger part. It’s like I’m Nixon, and you’re my Haldeman.”

“Don’t think so. You’re not Nixon. No woman can be Nixon. Not possible. He’s one of us.”

“Okay okay. But you know me and the sum of me and you seem to know what I want,” she says in a friendly growl.

“You’re the first guy I’ve ever known who did. It’s unfair.”

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“That’s right. I do know. You want to fly away.”

“Right. And I want another girl,” she says, “to fly away with me. Not you. I can’t fly away anywhere with you. With you, I’m grounded. Men are beasts of the ground.”

“Uh . . . you sure about that?”

“Absolutely. You’re all creatures of the mud. You can’t help it. I know this feels weird. That desire I’m supposed to have for you? I don’t have it. I sometimes wish it were there, but it isn’t.” She waits. “I sort of love you anyway, but a girl can’t go on doing charity work for a mud-beast forever.”

“See, the thing is,” he says, “you can treat me as hypothetical. That’s an adjective that guy Coolberg uses with me.

Hypothetical this and hypothetical that. You haven’t met him, but—”

“Oh, yes, I have,” Jamie announces, her hand drifting down his chest. “He came a few days ago to the People’s Kitchen and struck up a conversation with me.”

“This was when?” Nathaniel has a sudden flushed sensation.

“Last week, I think. He asked me about working there, like he was planning on joining the collective. I couldn’t remember seeing him before. He’s friends with your other girlfriend, right? The real one? The one you’re cheating on, with me? Theresa? The straight girl with the great tits, the high IQ, and the ironic knowing smile?” There’s an accusa-tory pause. “Anyway, he asked me all sorts of questions about me. And you. Funny that I forgot to mention that I saw him.

He seemed to know that you and I had this . . . well, I don’t know, okay, this
hypothetical
thing going. He was curious about everything. He’s a collector of facts, I guess. And so he told me a little bit about himself.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, you know.”

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“Actually, no, I don’t.”

“Well, he said he grew up in Milwaukee, until his family moved to New York, an apartment on West End Avenue.

Didn’t
you
live in Milwaukee, too? And New York? That’s quite a coincidence. Anyway, he said he has a sister who was in a car accident and is mute. That’s a shame—I felt bad for him. He said his father died when he was quite young, of a stroke—”

Nathaniel sits up quickly. He feels cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, and his chest heats up. “Wait! What?

He said what?”

“You heard me.” She looks over at him. “What’s the matter?”

For a brief moment, Nathaniel looks down at his shape under the comforter, as if some part of him is no longer there. Where his right foot should be, nothing. Quickly he scrambles out of bed and rushes into Jamie’s bathroom. His stomach has been seized with a sudden twist of electric current. He is afraid that he may be having a heart attack. A metaphysical nausea instantly converts itself into physical nausea, and he leans over the toilet bowl, staring downward.

The seizure feels like a heart attack located in his gut.

Maybe, he thinks, a heart attack can strike anywhere in the body. You could have a heart attack in your brain.

Jamie appears in the bathroom doorway, as naked as he is.

In the midst of his nausea, he admires her legs. They are solid; they will not disappear on her. They will continue to hold her up, and maybe she will hold
him
up. “Nathaniel,” she says, “what’s going on?” She approaches him and puts her arm around him as if to support him, to keep him from falling.

He glances down to see if his right foot still exists. It does.

It has returned. This is crazy, he thinks.

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“That’s not his life,” Nathaniel says. Anger arrives belat-edly. “The stroke, the mute sister, Milwaukee, New York—

that’s all mine. That’s not his. It’s
my
life.”

“He’s claiming your life?” Jamie asks. “That’s preposterous.”

“Okay, yeah, I know. But that’s what he’s doing.”

“Are you feeling sick? Are you okay?” In the mirror’s reflection, Jamie’s face shows high-level concern, her daz-zling eyes signaling that she’s at home and the lights burn brightly. At this moment, when Nathaniel sees her face reversed in the mirror, he thinks that Jamie is the most beautiful woman he has ever looked upon, even though she is not beautiful. He is having another Gertrude Stein moment.
She is beautiful although she is not beautiful.

“I have to go,” Nathaniel tells her. On her bathroom mirror she has stuck a little decal that says waterfoul observation site. In the bathtub is her collection of yellow rubber ducks and ducklings and orange shampoo bottles.

The bathroom smells of primal girl. One of her metal dirigibles hangs from the bathroom ceiling. Jamie’s little tchotchkes constitute a conspiracy of the hapless and lovable and airborne.

“Can’t this wait?”

“I mean, it won’t. No, it can’t wait,” he says, his verbal confusion adding to his rage. Something must be done. He feels like pulling down a few window shades and tearing them into small bitter pieces.

“Why did he do all that? Why does he want your life? Is he in love with you?”

Nathaniel says nothing.

“I bet he’s in love with you.” She stands behind him and reaches around him to lean her head against his shoulders. “I’m sort of worried about you.” She waits while 80

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Nathaniel notices that “sort of ”—must everything she does be qualified?—and she touches him on the chest. “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Little whiffs of physical desire are making their way from her toward him, little fugitive hetero longings. In the mirror, her eyes bore into him and her brow is furrowed. Maybe his current psychic crisis ener-gizes her. His sudden suffering makes her want to bed him down. But it’s his suffering she wants to have, to lay her hands on, not him.

“Oh, Jamie, not now,” he says. He turns around and kisses her, then breaks the embrace to put his clothes on.

The metallic bird hanging to the side of the door sways back and forth, given life by his rushed departure.

15

No one answers at the Coolberg residence. Nor does he respond to pressed call buttons in the apartment building where, numerous times, Nathaniel has dropped him off. On the callboard are six names:

Wendego

Highsmith

Augenblick

H. Jones

Bürger-Wilson

Golyadkin

In Nathaniel’s current state, they all feel like bogus names invented by a mad postmaster. No Coolberg here. Is there a Coolberg anywhere? The name itself sounds fictional and implausible, a poor effort at whimsy.

He calls Coolberg’s number all night. No one answers.

At home the next morning, he stares at the telephone before calling his stepfather at his New York office on Water Street, near the East River with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. On warm days when the wind is right, his stepfather 82

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claims, he can get a whiff of the Fulton Fish Market.

Nathaniel hates to disturb him, but he needs some advice from a fully qualified adult. His stepfather is a “semi-pro capitalist,” as he calls himself. An investor in start-up companies, he’s an easygoing, charming moneymaker unafflicted by true greed. He doesn’t mind being disturbed at work.

He’s placid and detached, observing with disinterested attention the tidal flow of capital. All he wants is to get his hands in that water from time to time and scoop out a few cupfuls of cash. The system continues to function thanks to coolheaded minor players like him. The raptors come and go on huge reptilian wings. Nothing surprises this man; nothing shocks him. His worldliness is a perpetual relief from everyone else’s naïveté.

After chatting for a minute or so, his stepfather says, “So.

Buddy boy. Something on your mind?” Nathaniel tells him that he has a problem. “Tell me,” his stepfather says quietly, and Nathaniel hears an audible creak as his stepfather leans back in his leather chair. All successful middle-aged males love to listen to stories and to give advice, Nathaniel has noticed. They feel that mere survival has given them the right to pontificate. It’s the Polonius syndrome; they all have it. But this one, this man, adores narratives; he is, by nature, an anecdotalist.

Nathaniel explains the intricacies concerning Coolberg to his stepfather, presenting the story as straightforwardly as possible. When he is finished, his stepfather clears his throat. He is going to respond to Nathaniel’s story with another story. It is his way.

During his junior year in college in Maine, his stepfather says, a particularly bad winter dropped itself down over the community: colossal snows, day after day of subzero tem-peratures, radiators clanking all day, students coughing and t h e s ou l t h i e f

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getting frostbite and pneumonia. “Imagine the silences.

Everything muffled. You couldn’t even see outside,” he says.

“The frost and snow blocked the windows.” No one could go anywhere. No one wanted to risk driving off the roads into a slow demise from disorientation and hypothermia.

The roads were more or less impassable, but because most of the college faculty lived nearby, classes went on as scheduled. The sidewalks had snow piled on either side as high as your head—it was like walking through a tunnel just to get to calculus class. Old men died shoveling out their driveways.

Their wives began talking to their cats on a daily, hourly basis.

People had the feeling that the snows would never stop, that the flakes would continue to drift downward forever, lazily and implacably covering everything in a terrible white stupor.

“An old-fashioned winter. So we all burrowed in and found various occupations.” The college bookworms curled up with their books; the basketball players played endless rounds in the gym; the lovers stayed in their beds, making love nonstop in the hope of reviving spring. Some slept together naked
with their doors open,
on display—modesty, for some reason, having abandoned them, the terrible privacy of a perpetual snowstorm calling forth its opposite, prideful noisy exhibitionism and shamelessness more often associ-ated with the exposed skin of the tropics than with New England. Such cohabitation wasn’t allowed in those days, but all the rules were being ignored. But for everyone else, those not completely erased by studiousness or by the fortunes visited by love, the snows became a spiritual and psychological problem—how to be distracted from the maddening iron chill, the accumulating white silences falling out of the sky?