“Up there,” she says. “I’m up there.” They have found themselves on Hertel, and she points to an ice-cream shop, Lickety Split. Her apartment, she claims, is located upstairs from the ice cream and the service people who scoop it and the customers who eat it. All day, Nathaniel imagines, she inhales the smell of waffle cones. That’s what he smelled on her earlier: confectionary scents, cream and sugar spackled all over this girl.
“Good night,” whispers Theresa, giving him a peck on the cheek. Then she touches his face under the cheekbone with her finger, a kind of mini-caress. It feels like a depth charge, coming from her. “I’ve wanted to touch you in that spot all night,” she confesses. This is unlawful, Nathaniel thinks, the carnival style, the show-biz way she touches me. He reaches over to lay a hand on her, but she has maneuvered out of reach. “Give me a call…or something.”
She glances down as she shuts the car door, and Nathaniel can see her grinning to herself privately, as if she liked him once upon a time, hours ago; but for him to return that smile through the car window, the minimal effort invested in any facial expression, hardly seems worth the trouble. It would require optimism and a heroic spirit. He would have to hire a crane to lift his mouth into a grin. The entire evening has turned into a dead battery. It doesn’t matter what you hook it up to. Nothing will go anywhere because no motor will start.
In the light of the car’s high beams, he watches Theresa, accessorized with her flak jacket and her shiny tin medals of Lenin, her homage to the material world, skip up the sidewalk to her building, enter the front door to the foyer, efficiently take out a key, and make her beauty-pageant progress inside. A horrible thought: She is not drunk or tired at all. She’s just had enough of him.
4
WHAT WOULD GERTRUDE STEIN say about this evening?
For a long time being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he had known what he was doing standing and sitting where it was raining, and when he had come to be certain that he did not know and could not know that he was doing what he was doing with another who was also magnificent and living, that was the time he was certain that he would be driving to where he was concluding this evening and other evenings, and he certainly was driving, and anyway everyone agreed that he was driving to where he alone was concluding and sleeping. Occasionally Gertrude Stein explains his life to him, for the relief. She has accompanied him at odd moments ever since he heard her recorded voice one afternoon on the car radio as he was driving around doing errands.
When Nathaniel reaches his own apartment, half of a duplex on a seedy cul-de-sac near the campus, the front door has been jimmied open, and, for some reason, his mailbox has been unlocked to reveal its lack of contents. He steps inside and observes in the half-dark that the lamp near the entryway is now turned over and is lying sideways on the floor, a burglary prop. Somebody with a flashlight is fossicking in Nathaniel’s bedroom, pulling the drawers open, emptying them, checking the closets.
“Hey, you,” Nathaniel calls out. “What’re you doing? What in the fucking hell is this?”
The flashlight shines in his direction. “Me?” The voice is slurred. “Who’re you, man?” Nathaniel, who has been around the druggy block a few times, recognizes it as junkie speech. The tone carries with it an aura of super-sedated vagueness, along with a fuzzy pointless aggression, and the voice resonates with that sleepy absentminded hipster attitude.
“Who am I? I live here,” Nathaniel says to the burglar. “Fuck you. This is my place.”
“Well, this place is pathetic,” the burglar mutters. “You got nothin’ to steal. Less than nothing. This stuff is all complete shit. This is what you return to the store the day after Christmas. It’s like a church basement in here. I’m wasting my valuable time.”
“I know,” Nathaniel says, sitting down. He leans his head back against the wall, feeling a kind of Buddhist indifference to everything.
“All you got is these fucking paperbacks. Books every damn where. A lamp that doesn’t work. This junk clock radio. And a fuckin’ coffeepot,” the flashlight says directly into his face. “Which is rusting. A rusting coffeepot! How come you live this way? I got it better than you. And your clothes are all wet. What’s that?”
“I’m just a graduate student.”
“You don’t even have a bike. Or a stereo.”
“So?” Nathaniel says, feeling too tired to challenge him. “I walk everywhere or take the bus,” he lies. The VW, after all, had been a grudging gift from his stepfather, and the burglar might want to steal it. But, no; once having seen its butterscotch-colored paint job, no thief would want it. Nathaniel waits. “You going to leave now? There’s nothing here for you.”
The burglar sighs. “Don’t I know it. You’re not going to attack me or nothin’?” he asks. He is young also, probably Nathaniel’s age, stoned, but—Nathaniel can see this in the semi-dark—wearing a wedding ring.
“No,” Nathaniel says. “Why would I do that?”
“Well,” the voice asks, coming out of the flashlight, “would you make me a cup of coffee, then? I don’t care if it tastes of rust. This has been an awful night.” Nathaniel reaches for the light switch, and the burglar says, “No, don’ do that. I can’t have you seein’ me.”
“Oh, okay,” Nathaniel says. So all right. So why not make a cup of coffee for a burglar? It is a revolutionary act. After going into the kitchen, he fills his coffeepot, the Mighty Midget, with Breakfast Blend and water, lets the brew percolate, and pours a cup. “Cream or sugar?” he calls out.
The burglar has nodded off on the sofa. “Cream or sugar?” Nathaniel repeats more loudly, approaching the guy, who smells of anise. Nathaniel shakes the burglar’s shoulder. The intruder still has a flashlight in one hand, a toy gun in the other, and a grocery bag at his feet.
“Aaargh,” the guy says. “No. I hate sugar. Sugar is a disguise. It’s bad for you. Gives me headaches. Black, just black, okay?”
“Okay, sure,” Nathaniel says. After returning to the kitchen, he pours the intruder and himself each a cup of coffee, goes back to the sofa, hands one of them to the guy, and sits down on the other side of the room from him.
“So,” Nathaniel says to the young man, in the near-dark, “you’re married?”
“Yuh,” the man says. “And my old lady got a baby on the way.” He sips the coffee. “Soon, too. See, I lost my job months ago. I was a janitor. Welfare’s run out and shit. She can’t work, my wife. She broke her leg in a fall she took downtown. Marble stairs, slippery, you know? Maybe we could sue. She just gimps around. Like a bug. What it is, we don’t have no parents, the two of us, like most people do.”
“Too bad.” Nathaniel waits. “Of course it doesn’t help things that you’ve got a habit. You must be a crummy thief if you shoot up before you go out to steal things.”
The man doesn’t respond to the critique of his lifestyle. “How come you live like this, man?” the burglar asks, sipping at his hot coffee, his voice calm. “This is one motherfuckin’ friendless apartment.” He pauses, contemplating it. “Are you a Spartan or something? ’Cause a lonesome soul lives here, I’ll tell you that. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Shit. I’d get me a comfortable chair, at least. And a TV set. Don’t you watch TV? Football? Johnny Carson?”
Nathaniel shakes his head. And, before dawn breaks, he tells the burglar about the entire night, about himself, his studies, his former home in Milwaukee, and how Theresa would not come home with him, which, considering the burglar’s presence, was probably a happy accident.
“You’re okay, man,” the burglar says a few minutes later, before he shakes Nathaniel’s hand to leave. “But, you know, you should get better locks on your door. You know, the dead-bolt kind? The kind you got here, they won’t stop a flea from coming in and sitting down on you.”
“Talk to my landlord,” Nathaniel instructs him, as he closes his eyes. It has been a long night. “But I don’t think he’ll listen to you, either.”
“See you around,” the burglar says, stepping quietly out. As he goes, Nathaniel has, at last, a quick look at him, and he wills himself to remember the face in case he should ever see it again.
“See you around,” Nathaniel replies as the burglar closes the door behind him. “Drop by again. Just knock next time.” He could always use another acquaintance, even one who steals. Still, he latches the door.
5
THE NEXT MORNING Nathaniel calls Theresa. The phone rings and rings and rings. Perhaps she is resting up after her social exertions. Or is out in the library, foraging in the stacks. Or is still actively caressing someone, somewhere—the two of them guttering and moaning into the sheets followed by sweaty laughter, the sun rising over her arched back, her fingers in someone’s mouth, her breasts damp from kisses, her thighs from semen. Ah, Nathaniel notes, yes, here it is, the poison of jealous erotic imagery, the first sign, the barbed hook in the heart. Theresa Theresa Theresa.
He drives down to the Broadway farmers’ market, buys two large bags’ worth of assorted vegetables, then takes them back to the People’s Kitchen, a little storefront co-op hunger-relief project on Allen Street. The butterscotch VW Beetle wheezes and squeaks and groans as he parks out in front, where a hapless bush occupying a small square of embattled dirt strokes the passenger-side door when he squeezes into the space. The People’s Kitchen stands next to an artist’s studio and is a block down from Mulligan’s Brick Bar. The neighborhood—Allentown—has a pleasantly lazy urban squalor. Nathaniel carries the vegetables inside, turns up the heat, causing the radiators to clank, raises the shades in the front and back, and, with the radio on, starts chopping carrots and boiling water. The poor and hungry and various assorted street people usually drop in starting around three in the afternoon for a meal. Sometimes Nathaniel serves, but today he is assigned to chop and boil and stir and clean.
In Buffalo, real estate is so cheap that almost any collective can buy or lease property, and Nathaniel has joined this one, the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance, not out of vague progressive ideals, but because he likes cooking and cleaning and serving, and because his soul has always thrived being around cast-off people—greaseballs and windbag artistes, hippies, losers, the poor and unwashed, and those with sociopolitical ambitions, the ones who forget to wear socks and who blow their noses on their shirtsleeves while making speeches. Besides, once when he was meditating over the direction of his life, the message came to him that he should do this work.
He knows about himself that all his charitable deeds are, at base, selfish. Such drudgery makes him feel better, lifting a dead weight off his soul and putting a lighter-than-air spiritual substance in its place.
Through the south-facing back kitchen window the sun shines cheerfully, an all-American sun, optimistic about everything. In Buffalo, the sun is a member in good standing of the Rotary Club. Things, the sun sings merrily, will get better better better better better better better better better. Nathaniel turns up the volume on the radio, tuned to the Buffalo NPR affiliate, in an effort to drown out the sun. They’re playing Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, the second movement, a demented scherzo of sea shanties interrupted by a sudden eerie calm evoking the approach of nothingness. Nathaniel knows his classical music: before she married Nathaniel’s stepfather, his mother played it day and night at home and in the car. Now he can recognize anything in the standard classical repertoire, and this knowledge burdens him. The sun shuts up.
When Nathaniel’s mother and stepfather were living in New York City, and he would return home from college during spring break and, later, during the summers, the sunlight had a curiously hard metallic sheen. On good spring days the light defined trees, buildings, and people alike with brilliant tactile clarity. Then, in late summer, like the old-time God of the ancients, enraged, the sun would melt down whatever it saw and start over again. In August, Nathaniel thought, the sopping gruesome heat in Manhattan liquefied the city. Someday the entire urban landscape would ooze into the Hudson. In New York, summer would be the season of doom.
By contrast, his childhood sun over Milwaukee tended to be Midwestern and diffident, hidden by clouds tossed up by moisture from the Great Lakes. For most of his youth, he had lived under vague, noncommittal skies, broken occasionally by raging storms. Then the clouds would part to reveal the banal blue immensity.
His parents had resided in a three-bedroom suburban house with a white picket fence and a large grassy backyard with a rose garden, an arbor, and a reflecting ball, and to this day Nathaniel believes that if his father hadn’t died of a sudden stroke in his forties, and if his sister hadn’t been in the automobile accident that took her speech away, he would still be living out there in the suburbs, selling insurance or working as an accountant, starting a family and following some harmless occupation under those noncommittal Mid-western skies. He’d have a white picket fence and a rose garden of his own and a very white wife; he’d have an indistinct human outline and would genially fade into his home and family and belongings.
He cleans and cuts up the carrots and sets to work on the potatoes. The beef and celery can wait. The Vaughan Williams symphony progresses into its third movement, a meditative adagio.
During his lifetime, Nathaniel’s father had run an elaborate charade: he gave the appearance of being just a standard-issue dad—a person you didn’t have to pay much attention to. An astoundingly unremarkable man, display-case ordinary, an estate-planning attorney who worked at a law firm in downtown Milwaukee, he played catch with his son on weekends or did household repairs while he hummed the same tunes over and over again, “Blue Moon” or “Where or When.” Clumsy and not a true handyman, he was nevertheless willing to repair anything if asked, carrying up his toolbox from the basement and laughing, “Look out, house! I’m coming!” He told jokes around the dinner table. In the morning he would playfully bonk his sleepy son on the head with the rolled-up newspaper to wake him. He would go fishing with his friends on Lake Winnitonka. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, he watched Wolverine football on Saturdays if he had the time. He made of himself a generic parent, sweet and well-meaning and doubtlessly in a consensual relationship with routine. If he harbored quiet desperation, he kept it to himself.
After his death, he acquired perfection. Perfection dropped like an alarming protective covering over his memory, as Nathaniel and Catherine, his son and daughter, helplessly recognized—they saw it happen. No one could remember their father’s flaws. Once he was gone, his benign imperturbable self became painfully lovable and thus toxic. His monkey way of scratching his back, his unpleasant habit of picking his teeth after dinner, his insistence on pouring too much garlic salt over the steaks before he grilled them, that strange equanimity of his—he never seemed to get angry, irritability being all he could manage—all of it coalesced into the composite of an affable man who, in everyone’s collective memory, gave nobody the advantage of having a case against him. He had been sweet and generous. Who had noticed? Nobody. His virtues came back, as virtues will, to haunt the living.
He had taken his children for walks on trails through the city parks and into the playgrounds, where he had pushed them on the swings. He had carried first Catherine and then Nathaniel, as kids, on his shoulders; they had grabbed on to his hair to stabilize themselves and to steer him. He remembered birthdays, took the family on excursions to movies, and always showed up for school functions. He was a patiently good man who seemed to relish his nonentity status, his lack of individuality. Nathaniel on the basketball team, Catherine in gymnastics: he was there to witness them both. His habit of saying, “You’ve enlightened me.” The beer after dinner, the affectionate kisses on the top of the head, his patience in teaching his kids how to swim or to ride a bicycle or to approach the net, his interest in history and Russian nineteenth-century fiction, his demand on New Year’s Eve that his wife sit in his lap—oh, it was unforgivable, all of it, the entire inventory, it was a fortress that could never be breached
once he was gone.
After her father’s death, Catherine, silent and spectral, would sleepwalk into Nathaniel’s bedroom. She would clear away his discarded clothes on the floor. Then she would descend, convulsed with sobs, and curl up like a dog. Already half a ghost herself, she brought herself to her brother’s room so that he might witness her grief. If there had been consolation to be offered, Nathaniel had no idea where to find it. Their father, a genial guy they had taken for granted, was now fully absent and had taken all comfort with him. What was there to say? Nothing much. Nathaniel resorted to patting his sister on the back as she lay there on the floor beside his bed.
She had been a strong solid smart girl, with brilliant blue eyes that had ice traces in them. As a field hockey player and a rock singer fronting a high school band called Strep Throat, she had been good at raising her voice. With her particular appetites and raucousness, she would have been loved early on in the ordinary course of things by some brave boy who might have noticed and admired her. She was an inventory-taker, a psychic accountant, habitually noting quantities and qualities in rooms and in people. But after her father’s death, a single inventory took over the others. “There was only one of him,” she would sigh, over and over again.
She formed a new appetite for oblivion.
Nathaniel had not guessed that his sister could be furtive, brazenness having been her usual tactic, but, freed from stability, she developed a gift for secrecy. She joyfully took up drinking, a habit for which she had a calling. Alcoholism brought out her stealthy side, the midnight joy of beer from the refrigerator and whiskey from the cupboard. Nothingness called to her and she answered. At first she drank alone or with strangers. Her mother concealed all the liquor bottles—a guileless woman, she first tried hiding them behind the detergent boxes in the laundry room, where they were as obvious as Easter eggs—before throwing all of them out.
The Soul Thief Page 3