“Theresa?”
“That’s the one.”
“How’d she find you?”
“Guess you must’ve told her about me.”
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“Did she talk to you here?”
Ben shakes his head emphatically. “We’re finished, you and me. No more questions, and no more answers neither.”
Ben takes his spoon and taps it twice on the soup bowl. “No, wait a minute, I just thought of something.” He turns to gaze through his film-noir eyeglasses at Nathaniel for a long moment, during which the sounding clatter of dishware comes out of the kitchen, and Ben takes a stagy cigarette from his shirt pocket, sticks it into his mouth, and lights it with a safety match. Outside on the street, a car hoots. “You know what? I’m better than you.” He inhales and nods, agreeing with himself. “Much better. I love my wife, is the thing. I don’t have to apologize about that to no one. Okay, I’m a big screw-up. I’m a flop as a moneymaker. Mistakes were made. But I’m okay with that. You could even say I was happy, once I was dead.” He points the cigarette at Nathaniel, and Nathaniel flinches. “And you are whatever you are.”
17
Hideously perky and upbeat, Theresa on the phone informs Nathaniel that, yes, indeed, she will certainly discuss the theft of his clothing (a joke! for heaven’s sake! a
joke
!), but, no, she will not do so at his apartment or at hers, which she refers to as “
ma maison,
” the sexy irony in her voice side by side with comic pretentiousness. Then she coughs and says, “We’re certainly
not
going to have a ‘long serious talk,’ as you call it, while we’re sitting around somewhere. I don’t like sedentary quarrels.” Instead, they will meet at Delaware Park at the west end of the pond, and together they will jog until they reach the zoo, whereupon they will greet the lions and tigers and bears in the name of humanity before turning around and jogging back. Recriminations, she says with her customary cheerful detachment, are staged more effectively while doing something else, such as exercis-ing or monitoring wild animals. He offers to pick her up, but she says that she will walk over to the park from Hertel Avenue by herself, as a warm-up.
Halfway there, adjusting the volume control on the VW’s staticky inadequate radio while gazing out at the block south t h e s ou l t h i e f
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of the Central Park Grill, Nathaniel notices a man walking his dog, a huge mottled mongrel probably acquired at the pound. The dog pulls the man forward at the end of his—
the dog’s—leash, the man himself in the forward-tipping posture of a pre-topple, and just when the man does in fact lose his balance and Nathaniel simultaneously finds a good strong radio signal, he has one of those crippling thoughts that occasionally come into the mind unimpeded: Theresa is of course Coolberg’s lover. She plays the chords of be-trayal every day as a lark, monogamy being a hilariously bourgeois bad habit, as is, or was, the story of her ex, Robby the Robot who resides in Berkeley, and furthermore, if he—
Nathaniel—actually loved her instead of just thinking that he did, he would have already called her by now. He would have called her immediately. He would have confided in her, man to woman, lover to lover, as soon as he had found out from Jamie, who (the epiphanies will not stop) is the woman he actually loves, that Coolberg was clothed in his—
Nathaniel’s—autobiography. And now his actual clothes.
The pronouns are getting horribly mixed up. His, hers.
I am sometimes oblivious but seldom obtuse. Now I am both.
Maybe I am not actually here anymore.
18
In the precise spot where she had said she would be, Theresa, wearing warm-up garb, stands stretching and flexing, and when she catches sight of Nathaniel, she smiles.
It’s tough to carry through on a grudge against an attractive insincere woman when she smiles at you that way. The smile is like an irresistible cheap song. Nathaniel smiles back. He can’t help himself. No wonder they call what she has a
winning
smile. She wins. She always wins. Her hair’s held back in that same ponytail she had displayed when he first met her, and now she leans over to limber up, placing her hands almost flat on the ground, and when she straightens, she takes him in her arms quickly and kisses him in a perfunctory good-morning way.
“April fool,” she says.
“It’s still November.”
“You’re so serious,” she announces, tapping his chest.
“And literal. You’re
earnest.
I don’t like that part of you. Well, are you ready to run?”
He nods. She takes off her sweatpants and trots over to Nathaniel’s car, which she evidently knows is always t h e s ou l t h i e f
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unlocked on principle (another one of Nathaniel’s principles, like the nonexistence of a watch on his wrist), and drops them in.
Before he has been able to stretch or loosen up, she takes off. Theresa has gained the distance of a city block when he finally catches her. He’s reasonably fit and manages to overtake her without too much trouble, but when they reach a jogging path, she sprints ahead of him.
“So what’s your question?” she asks him, throwing the words to him, backwards, behind her.
“Those shirts?” he asks. “That burglar?”
“Him? Ben? You introduced us, remember?” Nathaniel remembers no such thing. “Anyway, I wanted to wear one of your shirts, to have you close to me. Really, Nathaniel, I do have moments like that.”
Nathaniel jogs around a hissing overfed goose, which lunges at him, and he tries to coordinate his pace with Theresa’s. But she has a habit of changing her speed whenever he’s next to her. A bird seems to be flying alongside him, and one of his familiars, a bag lady with a Band-Aid on her forehead caked with dried blood, stares at him fixedly from a bench. He runs off to the side to make way for another jogger, and when he does, Theresa slows down.
“I don’t think I believe you. I think you gave my clothes to Coolberg.”
“Why would I do that?” She falls in behind him. “Well, maybe I
did
do that.”
“Are you seeing him?” he asks, throwing off the words to the wind.
She says something that sounds like “
Seeing
him? Of course I’m seeing him,” and Nathaniel would feign surprise and stop dead in his tracks, but he can’t pretend to be shocked—it would be insincere shock—and besides, he’s in 98
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no position to complain to her about anyone’s sexual duplicity. He’s not angry because he’s not jealous because he doesn’t love her. Also, she can’t see the expression on his face, so why bother? “And you,” she seems to say, from behind him. “You’re balling that dancer, that cabdriver.”
“How do you know?” he asks the wind.
“I followed you once,” the wind says to him, without inflection. “I looked in through the window at you two. She was performing for you. Scarves and shit. Very Isadora Duncan.”
This seems possible, so he drops the subject. Why isn’t
she
angry, if she took the trouble to be a voyeur? Maybe she just has a little curiosity about him, a shallow blank desire that lighted on him before it found its way into another corner, to another object, a suitable target for her brand of erotic whimsy. She is a kind of avant-garde lover, the type who will try anything without being truly invested in it. Voyeurism suits her perfectly; from where she watches, she occupies a zone of safety.
“Is Coolberg wearing my clothes right now?”
“Could be. He’s writing a story. He needs to be you for a while.”
“Oh, no.” He feels as if he’s been kicked in the stomach.
He struggles for breath as he runs. At last he manages a question. “What’s the story about?”
Theresa catches up to him, jogs alongside him for a minute, then accelerates. Ahead of him, tossing up mud and dirt from her running shoes, she says, “He’s writing a book called
Shadow.
” She’s panting slightly now from her exertions. “The first part is about a solar eclipse. The second section is set around the time of World War I and is about someone named Pierre Chadeau who’s followed around by his cousin, Henri l’Ombre, a ghost, who died on the front in t h e s ou l t h i e f
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Belgium. The third part takes place entirely at night. That’s the one with you in it.”
“What role do I play? What do I do?”
She slows down again, turning around, jogging backwards, facing him. She seems to have no fear of stumbling or running blindly, backwards, into anything. She raises her hands to her forehead and sticks her index fingers out toward him, as horns. “You’re the devil,” she says, grinning.
19
The zoo should have been loud and smelly, with children milling around taunting the big cats for having been caught and caged, their kiddie-mockery accompanied by peanut shells launched toward the bars, and contemptuous laughter hurled at the now harmless teeth, the useless claws. There should have been trumpeting by unhappy elephants, desperate despairing silent roars sent up into the air by the voiceless imprisoned zebras, and there should have been peacock-shrieking.
But sometimes it happens that we enter a public place and find that, for once, the law of averages has broken down.
We step gingerly into the darkened movie theater; the film starts, and we are the only ones in attendance, the only spec-tators to laugh or scream or yawn in the otherwise empty and silent rows of seats. We drive for miles and see no one coming in the other direction, the road for once being ours alone. Our high beams stay on.
Where is everybody?
The earth has been emptied except for us as we make our stuttering progress through the dark. We take each turn expecting that someone will appear out of nowhere to keep us company for t h e s ou l t h i e f
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a moment. In the doctor’s anteroom, no one else is waiting and fidgeting with nerves, and the receptionist has vanished; or we find ourselves alone in the fun-house at the seedy carnival, where, because of our solitude, there will be no fun no matter what we do; or we enter the restaurant where no one else is dining, though the candles have all been lit and the place settings have been nicely arranged. The waitstaff has collectively decamped to some other bistro even though they have left the lights on in this one. The water boiling in the kitchen sends up a cloud of steam. The maître d’ has abandoned his station; we can sit anywhere we please. The outward-bound commuter train starts, but no one else sits in the car, and no conductor ambles down the aisle to punch a hole in our ticket. In the drugstore no one is behind the cash register, and the druggist has left the prescription med-ications unmonitored on their assorted shelves. We enter the church for the funeral, and we are the first to arrive, and we must sit without the help of the ushers. Where are they?
No sound, not a single note or a chord or a melody line from the organ loft, consoles and sustains us.
Such occasions are so rare that when they occur, we often think
I don’t belong here, something is wrong
or
Why didn’t they inform
me?
or
Let there be someone, anyone, else.
But for the duration, when the law of averages no longer applies, we are the sole survivors, the only audience for what reality wishes to show us. This may be what the prophets once felt, this ultimate final aloneness.
So it was for Nathaniel and Theresa entering the Buffalo Zoo. “It looks like the maintenance hour,” she says, briefly jogging in place. “Nobody’s here.”
“Nobody’s here,” Nathaniel says, repeating her phrase, stating the obvious out of sheer surprise.
“And the cages are empty,” she says, pointing. Before 102
c h a r l e s b a x t e r
them is a large zoological space defined by bars in front and walls on the side, and a small landscape near the back with a water trough, on which float a few haystraws. Where is the rightful inhabitant, the animal?
“Isn’t there a sign for what’s supposed to be in there?”
he asks.
She looks up. “No.” She turns and with a thin smile seems about to say something. Then she touches her finger to her mouth and shakes her head twice. How complicated, and yet how simple, her inner dialogues must be.
Nathaniel pivots away from her and walks in a northward direction. Here are other cages, a few with identifying labels, and although some animals are on display, they are, one and all, sleeping. Here is Mika the Tiger, stretched out, eyes closed, possibly tranquilized. Over there is Gottfried the Panther—the name is affixed to the bars—also slumbering.
Have all the animals here been given narcotics? He remembers a story about the Cumaen Sybil, who was granted a wish for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth to accompany it, and who was immured in some sort of pen, where she grew older and older and smaller and smaller, until she was no larger than a spot of dust, crying out for death to deliver her.
Perhaps they have brought her here.
“I’m not a devil,” Nathaniel says to Theresa.
“Well, it’s his story,” Theresa informs him, rubbing down her calves, “and he’ll decide what you are. You present various temptations, don’t you? In the meantime he’s wearing your shirts and your shoes.” She takes his hand. “I don’t see why you have a problem with that.”
“Ever heard of private property? Ever heard of theft?
Besides, where has he been? I haven’t seen him lately. It’s as if he’s been hiding,” Nathaniel says, releasing her hand but t h e s ou l t h i e f
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keeping his eye on her legs, which are ostentatiously long and smooth-muscled. “He doesn’t answer the phone and he doesn’t seem to live in the building where I thought he lived.”
“Nothing dates like the past,” Theresa says with a slow drag on the word “past,” as if this exposition were all old, tedious information with which she couldn’t be bothered.
“Well, where is he, then?”
Theresa points. “Coolberg? He’s right over there.”
In the distance, through the pedestrian avenue between cages and the shuttered popcorn stand, is a bench on which Coolberg sits, facing them, one arm flung back. Theresa has conjured him out of nothing. When Nathaniel sees him, Coolberg raises his eyes from the book he’s reading and meets Nathaniel’s gaze, quizzically. The gaze turns into another stare. Some sort of telepathy has informed him that now is the moment for the exchange of glances. Under his unzippered jacket, the Brooks Brothers shirt he wears does not quite fit him, and the trousers need alteration, downward, about a half inch. The shoes appear to fit perfectly.