The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  No one I knew in L.A. had ever paid the slightest attention to these Angelyne billboards. But I loved them. I loved them more than the ocean, more than the Getty Museum, more than the canyons, more than Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. They spoke to the moralist in me. They were like Protestant cautionary tales to the supplicants and votaries of the dreamworld: here, presiding over the beautiful narcotic substances of the city, was this shopworn royalty figure, this majestic ruin, this queen without identity, this ex-beauty, this tautology (her full name was Angeline Angelyne) as powerful in her prodigious way as Ozymandias. She looked out at you, and if you dared, you looked back. You could ignore her; you could pray to her; you could deconstruct her; you could even bother to think about her; but whatever you did, she would continue being as blank and as melancholy as fading beauty itself, brooding down at you from this height, but, like the rest of us commoners, powerless against time.

  39

  I RETURNED TO the hotel. On the way I bought some postcards and mailed off one to Laura (a picture of the Hollywood sign), another to Jeremy (Malibu volleyball-playing beach bunnies), and a third to Michael (smog). A toothless wizened African American guy approached me and asked me for bus fare. I walked right past him, afraid of a shakedown from a practiced con. Back in the hotel, behind the front desk, the clerk roused himself from his customary insolent ennui and smirked quickly at me before composing himself again. Finding the best seat in the lobby, out of the way of commerce, I sat down to wait until Coolberg arrived. Moths fluttered around inside my stomach. Models and DJs and B-list Eurotrash movie stars came and went.

  I felt myself dozing off.

  I hate dreams. I hate them when they appear in literature, and I hate them when I myself have them. I distrust the truth-value that Freud assigned to them. Dreams lie as often as they tell the truth. Their imaginary castles, kingdoms, and dungeons are a cast-off collection of broken and obvious metaphors. When you hold them in your hand, you do not hold the key to anything. No door will open. You can live an honorable life without them.

  And yet in that lobby, I had a dream in which the two parts of my life were brought together at last. I walked down Sunset Boulevard and entered the People’s Kitchen. The place had been restored and spruced up. It was efficient and clean. The dispossessed and hungry who were fed there greeted me happily when I came in. Laura sat near the window and was conversing with Jamie, across from her. They gestured as they spoke. They were both beautiful. The two women leaned toward each other as women friends will, in the great intimacy of shared affections and interests. Jamie had been made whole again. The damage to her had been undone. Here, she was undestroyed. Theresa came by with a water pitcher and poured refills into their glasses. Nearby, my boys conversed with the street people, among whom I saw Ben the Burglar, smiling and laughing, and the old African American man on Sunset to whom I had just refused a handout. Once again I found myself caring for the victims of industrial decline, the poor and ill-fated. My history had been scrolled back and rewritten. I could love anyone and not be punished for it.

  40

  SOMEONE IN MY DREAM SAID, “Nathaniel, wake up.”

  When I opened my eyes, I took him in. Standing before me in the hotel lobby was Coolberg, tapping my shoe to rouse me. On his face was the kindest expression I have ever seen on the face of a fellow human. It was angelic, if you could imagine a middle-aged man—balding, slightly overweight, dressed in baggy trousers, rumpled shirt, and unpressed tie stained with spilled food—as angelic. He had the undefended appearance of a middle-aged cherub with a five o’clock shadow and bad posture.

  Time had humanized him. I could tell that nothing that he and I were about to do would develop as I had anticipated. The scenario I had foreseen—recriminations, blame, righteous anger—gave way to my sudden intense bewilderment.

  “Jerome,” I said. I stood and shook his hand.

  “Let’s get out of this place,” he said, glancing around the hotel’s lobby with disapproval. “This hotel terrifies me. I thought you might like it. I don’t know why I believed that. Out-of-towners are sometimes impressed by it. But of course you wouldn’t be.” He sighed. “You were never an out-of-towner anywhere,” he said cryptically. “I’ve got a car here and a few errands to run. I drive now. I finally learned how. I learned directions. Then maybe we could go out to Santa Monica for dinner. What do you think?”

  I nodded halfheartedly. “Seems fine.”

  His car, a nondescript Toyota, was cluttered with books, DVDs, and plastic pint bottles of chocolate milk, a remedy, he told me, for the chronic sour stomach from which he suffered. He cleared off the passenger-side bucket seat, and within a few minutes we were on Hollywood Boulevard, passing the Walk of Fame. I noticed that Snow White and Darth Vader were circulating there, handling out discount coupons for local businesses. The sunburnt tourists seemed happy to have been given something, anything, by these mythic creatures; they clutched the orange coupons to their hearts. Snow White had been located in that same spot when I had brought my family here on vacation a few years ago. She had had a dotty expression on her face then, and she still had it. The job had deranged her, or perhaps she had suffered from heatstroke and the loss of her worldwide renown.

  “Snow White should be institutionalized,” I said.

  “Oh, she has been,” Coolberg knowingly informed me. We drove for another few minutes, and he stopped in front of a supermarket. “I just have to get one thing here,” he said. “A seasoning. Want to come in?”

  “Oh, I think I’ll stay here in the car.” I didn’t want to find myself following him around.

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  At the corner, someone with an odd, doughy face was hawking maps to the stars’ houses. Coolberg and I—it was unnerving—hadn’t really spoken. He had bragged that the day seemed unusually clear for L.A. (true) and that you could see the hills (also true). Maybe, he said, we should drive up to see “the vista” for ourselves. I had nodded. Sure, whatever. But he hadn’t asked me about myself, or my flight, or my past or present life, and I hadn’t asked him about American Evenings, or his health, or his personal arrangements—whether he was married or partnered or single. We hadn’t said a word about the period of antiquity in Buffalo we had shared. Buffalo possessed a drab unsightliness, a thrift-shop cast-off industrialism, compared to L.A., the capital of Technicolor representations. People were leaving there to come here. They were giving up objects for images. Besides, it was as if neither of us had the nerve to start a real conversation.

  I looked down at the books in the car. Luminaries: Paul Bowles, Goethe, André Gide, Kawabata, Bessie Head. Books from everywhere, it seemed, many of them old editions with yellowed pages. A notebook was also there on the floor. I picked it up.

  The outside of the notebook displayed my name in my own handwriting, Nathaniel Mason, and the date, 1973. I dropped the thing back on the floor as if I’d been slugged. Of course I was meant to see it; I was meant to toss it back onto the floor; I was meant to stare off into the distance, toward the maps of the stars and the brilliantly shabby street, lit by the perky late-afternoon sun.

  On our way up one of the canyons—I think it must have been Beachwood, snaking upward just under the Hollywood sign—he kept his silence, but it was one of those silences in which you imagine the conversation that is simultaneously not occurring.

  Where are we?

  Oh, what a question! We are where we are.

  Whose houses are these? Whose castles? What are these hairpin turns?

  Don’t you admire the camellias? They bloom about this time of year. Those bushes can be pruned into any shape. Note the rose-petal-like flowers, in cream, white, red, or striated colors. Note how they’re surrounded by waxy green leaves?

  Yes, very nice. We don’t have those at home in New Jersey.

  What happened to you, Nathaniel? Whatever became of you?

  My life changed, that’s what. What is my notebook doing on the floor of your
car?

  Eventually we reached the end of Beachwood Drive, stopped, looked (yes yes, I agreed: an impressive view), turned around, and began to creep back down the canyon on the same hairpin turns. I noticed that he was a rather disordered driver, slow to react, a poor calculator of distance. He was also unobservant, and, I could tell, wearied by the sights. The truth is that L.A. is a company town, and there isn’t all that much to show to tourists. Its arid provincial beauty quickly stupefies the innocent and bores the initiate.

  “Shall we go to Santa Monica?” he asked, evidently bereft of other ideas. “Should we head out there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

  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.

  “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—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 vindictive 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.”

  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 etiquette 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.

  “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 doofus 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 flin
ched. “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 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 requirements 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, dismissively. 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.