The Soul Thief (13 page)

“I’m not. Really I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. You’re deluded.

Listen: I
can’t
love you the way you love me. A woman has to love a man all the way down to the root. Otherwise, it’s the usual disaster. A true marriage exists between bodies and t h e s ou l t h i e f

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souls. And I can’t— I can’t love you that way. I like you. I even love you sometimes, for a man, for what you are. I gave you my bed to lie in and my body, too, because you deserved it. You needed a buddy in bed, and that was me. You’re a good man, maybe the best I’ve known. But we just slept with each other and liked each other a lot, and that’s not love.

That’s an arrangement.” She waits. “Did that other girl give you an ultimatum?”

“People are after you,” Nathaniel says to her.

“What?”

“People are after you. Those two, Coolberg and Theresa.”

“They are not after me. She may be jealous, but that’s her problem, not mine.”

“No, I think they’re really after you.”

“Honey. Nathaniel. You are really messed up. You should get help.”

“There’s something I have to do,” Nathaniel tells her. “I love you, Jamie, please, and I have to do this right now.”

More foolishness, maybe, but none of his actions are under his control. He stands up and takes her hand—she does not resist this time, as he thought she might—and he guides her into the bathroom. He sits her on the bathtub’s edge, and he squats down to unlace her shoes, first the left, then the right.

Kneeling before her, he takes her sneakers off. Jamie watches him quietly, unprotesting. He peels off her white socks, then grabs a washcloth.

“Oh, no,” she says.

Quickly he dips the washcloth into a stream of warm water and begins to wash her feet. He can feel her resistance, as she tenses her muscles and tendons, before that tension gives way to the sheer force of her astonishment.

“What are you doing?”

He does not look up. “I love you,” he says, keeping his 114

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eyes down. Tears are rolling off his cheeks. He does not wipe them away. When his task is completed, he tosses the washcloth on the floor, like any ordinary man. Out of abjection and pure longing, he bows his head before her. He waits.

Jamie takes Nathaniel’s face in her hands and lifts it so that she can look at him. “All right,” she says, the tears coming into her own eyes, laughing, shaking her head. “All right,”

she tells him, “take me to bed. Make me late to work.”

“That’s not what I’m telling you. That’s absolutely not what I’m asking for here.”

“I know what you’re asking for,” Jamie says equitably.

“But this is all you’ll get.”

Half an hour later, his eyes closed, then suddenly opened, tears and sweat dripping down onto her, he calls out her name, and in response Jamie comes at the same time that he does. Her facial expression is one of pleasure mixed with horrified surprise. After a moment—she has broken out into quick shocked laughter—he looks into her eyes and imagines that her spirit, without knowing how or why, has suddenly disobeyed the force of gravity that has governed it.

Her soul, no longer a myth but now a fact, ascends above her body. Like a little metallic bird unused to flight, unsteady in its progress, her soul rises and falls, frightened by the heights and by what it sees, but excited, too, by being married to him for a few seconds, just before it plummets back to earth.

21

Back in his apartment, more clothes seem to be missing, more objects burglarized. The Escher print has disappeared from the wall; the phone is gone. The notebook on the desk appears also to have been filched. You’d think someone would at least leave a thank-you note. Outside the window, down the block, an old woman wearing a grotesquely jaunty Easter bonnet keeps him under surveil-lance from behind her loaded-down grocery cart.

Nathaniel goes into his bedroom. It is dinnertime. The apartment is feasting on subtractions. In a few days they may take his name away along with his address. Who or what could possibly stop them? Still, he will fight them. A few objects still remain here, unstolen. A book on the bed-spread, the
Brownstone Eclogues
of America’s forgotten great poet, Conrad Aiken, whom even burglars don’t want to read, remains open to the stanzas he had been studying the day before. The poems consist of complicated farewell gestures to vanishing elements of American life—including the ordinary virtues. These poems, the intruders haven’t taken.

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Perhaps they don’t care for the art of verse. He gazes down at the closing lines from “The Census-Takers.”

And we are the census-takers; the questions that ask
from corner and street, from lamp-post and sign and face;
The questions that later tonight will take you to task,
When you sit down alone, to think, in a lonely place.

Did you ever play blind-man’s buff in the bat-flit light?

Stranger, whose heart did you break? and what else did you do?—

The census-takers are coming to ask you tonight;
The truth will be hurrying home, and it’s time you knew.

Absolutely right. It’s time you knew. The lines have the quick comic jokiness, the perky melodramatic intelligence, of everyday despair. Meanwhile, Nathaniel stands up, sits down, kneels. He reads while fidgeting. He can no longer sit still. A prayer is coming upon him. When the spirit of prayer arrives in the bat-flit light, he must give way to it.

There is no organized religion whose articles of faith Nathaniel believes in. So when he prays, he has nothing to go on. He lacks authority figures and trustworthy spiritual guides. He prays sitting down or standing up or lying flat on the floor with his face bordered by his outstretched arms like a penitent. In his private faith are several articles: Life is a gift and is holy. Love is sacred. Existence is simple in its demands: We must serve others with loving-kindness. Some entity beyond our knowing is out there. Nathaniel believes that this unknowable force is paying attention to him. He has no idea why. The God that watches and loves him cannot be a personal God. Also: Is God, as the theologians insist, perfect? Somehow he doubts it. But he feels as if he knows as much about God as an ant knows about the room t h e s ou l t h i e f

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into which it creeps and crawls. Which is to say that he acknowledges that he knows nothing about God.

So today, now, this evening, he puts down the book and lies on the floor, placing his forehead on the linoleum tile.

His penis is still thick from his lovemaking with Jamie. His body, wracked with discomfort, spreads itself out flat. That is how it should be. The words travel up out of his mind into the great nothingness.

Thank you for my life,
he thinks,
thank you forever and always.

Thank you for the gift of this woman who is also holy and sacred to
me. Thank you for the sight of her and for my joy in her company and for
her moment of joy also with me. Thank you for my guardian, Gertrude
Stein. Blessings upon all the poor and unfortunate. May they be given food
and love as I have been given these gifts. Suffering is necessary, I know. I do
not know why it is necessary but I know that it is. Blessings upon all children and all innocent creatures such as animals at the zoo. Blessings upon
those who suffer. May their sufferings be relieved. Blessings upon my dear
mother and my kindly stepfather and my poor sister. Why have I been
called a devil? For myself I ask for very little. But I ask for your care for
this woman I love, for Jamie Esterson, who has danced for you, and I ask
that no harm come to her. May nothing harm her now, I beg of you.

Then everything goes dark.

All this happened a long time ago.

These days I work in a local arts agency writing up grant proposals. Our office puts poets (and sometimes out-of-work actors and musicians and dancers) into the schools. I am rather good at the work I do and take some pride in it.

I’m able to give a sense of urgency to the project descrip-tions. A certain studied eloquence is not beyond my reach. I have a good track record for landing foundation money. I can point to successes. People believe me.

For a brief period a few years ago I worked as an insurance adjuster but found the job distasteful—I had to go around discounting distress. My task was to soft-pedal the damages. After flooding, after windstorms, after fire, I showed up to say, “Well,
that’s
not so bad.” You can’t do such work for very long without suffering the consequences. The victims of calamity end up despising you. Years before my days as an adjuster, I served as an assistant editor for a small-town newspaper—I did some copyediting and reporting and sold advertising space. Before that, I was assigned to the role of the seemingly amiable person at the other end of the 122

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line to whom you talk when you call to ask about your utility bill. Prior to my time at Amalgamated Gas and Electric, I made phone calls—very briefly—at a collection agency. Early in my life as a working man, I delivered the mail.

My jobs have not defined me. With a minimum of train-ing, almost anyone could have had my employment record without leaving a trace.

I have become an altogether different person from the man I once was. Now I’m something, someone, else. You might not notice me. I am in disguise. Mine is an old story.

Keats describes his “knight-at-arms” who fell in love with a beautiful maid,
la belle dame sans merci,
as having awakened

“on the cold hill’s side.” I woke up there, too, alone. Like Keats’s knight, I was found “palely loitering”—beautiful phrase. Cold hill’s side. Palely loitering.

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Being a parent to two sons involves complicated logis-tics. This is one of those clichés that happens to be true. You have to plan ahead to make sure the car has arrived in the correct place at the correct time. The scheduling of such matters may seem trivial, but family life cannot be managed otherwise. The weekly roster attached to the refrigerator dictates who should be where, and when. Without it, chaos would descend on all of us. Jeremy, our older boy, has to be picked up after swim practice at exactly six thirty p.m. most days. If I were to forget or slip up, he would feel demeaned and ignored. But I have never forgotten.

When I’m scheduled to get him, and my wife, Laura, stays at home to make dinner, I sit there waiting in the car facing the exit doors of the locker rooms. Outside, evening has come on, and darkness has descended, except for those scattered pools of illumination under the parking lot’s flood-lights. In cars near my own, other adults await their children, all of us clustered together in a parental flock. Some keep their motors running so that the warm interiors will seem comforting when their kids open the door. Certain parents—

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I am one of them—think that this practice wastes gasoline and is ecologically unsound. My car will warm up fast enough once I have started the engine.

It is peaceful here. I keep the radio going, usually tuned to the public radio classical music station, sometimes to a local jazz station that is struggling to stay afloat. The afternoon programming director at the classical station likes the music of Hector Berlioz and often puts that composer’s shorter pieces into the rotation. A few weeks ago, they were playing
Harold in Italy
while I watched the kids straggle out.

What’s odd is that the girls always show up first. You’d think the boys would appear before the girls do, but, no, it’s the girls who emerge initially, with their hair pulled back or scrunched up. They often stand there while their eyes get used to the semi-dark. They look exhausted. They scan the parking lot for their parents. (The rich kids scurry to their own vehicles and drive off, but ours is a public school in the suburbs, and there isn’t that much flaunting of wealth.) The girls find where their moms or dads have parked, and they clamber in. The cars start up and drive away.

Then the boys wander out, many of them wearing earbuds connected to their iPods. Boys, I have noticed, listen to music much more often than girls do. Although they take longer to shower and dress (why? it is a great mystery), they have invariably failed to comb their hair. Their hair goes up and out every whichway. The boys’ faces have that circle-around-the-eyes raccoon look from the swimming goggles they wear, and, also like the girls, they have the appearance of complete exhaustion.

If I am part of a car pool, Jeremy and one or two of his teammates will throw their backpacks in the trunk and drop themselves wordlessly onto the front or back seat. Instantly the car smells of chlorine. If Jeremy is alone, he tosses his t h e s ou l t h i e f

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gear on the floor and sits down next to me. I ask him how his day went, and he usually shrugs and says, “Okay.” I have learned not to push a conversation on him. He’s usually too tired to make a social effort anyway.

All he wants, most nights, is to get home so that he can eat dinner. His appetite seems to know no bounds; he’s always famished.

You would think that in a car pool the boys would start talking to each other, but they don’t. They just sit there, mute, waiting to be delivered. Sometimes a few syllables are muttered, a sentence fragment here or there: that’s all. Tiny shards of music—death metal, hip-hop, rap, folk rock, whatever—fly around the car’s interior from their earbuds.

On the night the radio station was playing
Harold in Italy,
I accidentally kept it on. Typically I turn the car’s radio off when Jeremy gets in. I had forgotten I was listening to it.

Halfway home, Jeremy pulled his earbuds out and pointed at the radio.

“What’s
that
?” he asked. “What are you listening to?”

“Haven’t any idea,” I said, hitting the off/on button, to bring forth silence.

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We enter the bright heat of the kitchen.