“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 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 surveillance 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 bedspread, 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. 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 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.
PART TWO
22
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 descriptions. 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 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 training, 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.
23
BEING A PARENT to two sons involves complicated logistics. 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—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 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.
24
WE ENTER THE BRIGHT HEAT of the kitchen. Jeremy’s younger brother, Michael, is usually there, setting the table. (At one time, Laura thought it would be funny if we called Michael “Chad,” so that we would have two boys, Chad and Jeremy, in the house, but the joke proved to be too arcane and quickly died.) Our son Michael is a character. He has the intelligent eager expression of a little wolf. Unlike his older brother, who seems straightforward and strong and indulgent, already dad material, Michael is a trickster, a wily pipsqueak shape-shifter. He has a highly developed, but occasionally comic, compassion for the downtrodden.
For this reason he goes through phases. At nine, he threw his lot in with African Americans and claimed himself as one of them. He was enraged when I told him that he couldn’t be black, ever, because he himself was white. In his most recent phase, he decided that he was gay (he is now almost twelve) and that we were all to call him “McQueer,” which, he said, would be his trademark. At the dinner table his older brother told him wearily that if he went to school demanding that he be called McQueer, he’d get himself beaten up. Michael replied that such a result would be fine. “I can take it,” he said, reaching for the serving dish containing mashed potatoes. “Faggots like me have to take it.”
“Don’t be retarded. And don’t call yourself that,” Jeremy said.
“What?”
“That word.”
“What word?”
“The one you used. Anyway, dummy, you’re not gay.” Jeremy said this through a mouthful of food. “Not this week.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m not discussing this. This is ridiculous. Please pass the meatloaf.”
“I’m as queer as a three-dollar bill.”
“You can’t decide things like that. Come back when you start dating guys, and we’ll talk.” Great quantities of meatloaf were shoveled onto Jeremy’s plate and quickly disappeared into his mouth. I reminded myself that I should issue instructions to him now and then to chew. But he’s getting too old for that. Next year he’ll be out of the house. You can’t order a seventeen-year-old boy to chew his food.
“Me and my queer friends are gonna do something big,” Michael announced. Then he lifted his boyish fist. “Power to the queer nation.”
“‘My queer friends and I,’” Laura corrected him, with a weariness close to Jeremy’s.
“Hey, you’re queer, too, Mom?” Michael asked, seeing his advantage. “I never knew that.”
Changing the subject, my wife inquired, “How was school today?”
“It was a scene of unparalleled horror,” Michael told her. “This kid threw up in class.”
So much for that. Usually Laura and I let Jeremy be the spokesperson for worldliness when confronted with Michael’s latest idea and his latest expression, such as “a scene of unparalleled horror,” which, these last few days, he has employed every ten minutes.
“How’s German class?”
Michael pointed at the nearly empty serving tray. “Ich muß meine meatloaf haben, bitte.”
After going through a phase when he claimed that he would “convert” to African-Americanism, Michael tried to pass himself off as a Communist. “Property is theft,” he informed us one night over the tuna-noodle casserole. He was then just barely ten years old. His brother sighed his practiced sigh and asked him if he planned to start a career in shoplifting. Six months later Michael announced that he would grow up to be a Mormon missionary.
Mormonism! Where had that come from? Had we heard, he asked us one afternoon, that he would soon leave for Mozambique on a mission? He would have to learn Swahili, or whatever they spoke in that faraway nation, and he would have to do it right away. Jeremy asked him his opinions about Joseph Smith, and Michael said, “Who?” I used to catch Michael reading the encyclopedia—a dangerous hobby with a kid like that. So is surfing the Web. Weird ideas are out there for the picking: he is convinced, for example, that if you turn your TV set to a blank static channel, the dead will find a way to send you a message through the ambient snow on the screen, or through the white noise on the speakers. I have seen him sitting patiently next to the TV set, tuned, he claimed, to the Dead Channel.
Some of his interests, his habits of mind, can probably be credited to me. When he was about six years old, I was delegated—Laura ordered me—to go up to his bedroom and tell him a bedtime story. I climbed the stairs and in the dim light began a tale of Heroic Henry. This fellow had been born an orphan in a cabbage field but had been trained by a wizard in bravery, guile, and fighting skills. In the first story, Heroic Henry fights back an army of killer gnomes threatening the village. The villagers reward him with a beautiful house and bride. Then, somewhat abruptly, because I had grown a bit sleepy myself, Heroic Henry dies.
The Soul Thief Page 10