The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [17]
The ball falls neatly through the hoop.
Back in his apartment after his shower, he gets Theresa on the line, and her apologies begin, one by one. Apologies? For what? She launches in with her mistakes in tone, advances to mistakes in behavior, and ends with the full self-indictment. “I’m a total fraud. Somebody should arrest me,” she says calmly. “Last night? That wasn’t me.” The confession of fraudulence sounds fraudulent, though it has charm. Nathaniel notices that she speaks quietly, intimately. Listening to her is like being in a sensual confessional booth across the hall from a hot steamy bedroom. Her statements emerge from her full of self-doubt, the sweetly narcissistic self-censorious note struck again and again, as if she is surprised to find that she actually likes him a bit more than she likes herself and is evoking her own dubious flaws so that he can refute her, thus showering her with praise and returning the conversation to the subject of her wonderful, winning self.
“See, the thing is,” she tells him, and then trails off into strategic mumbling. She admits her yearning to inhabit an intellectual realm that she has not by rights acquired citizenship to. “Oh, everyone else around here is so smart,” she confesses, “and all I can do is to put on an act.” Really, she says, she is just a simple girl brought up in buttfuck Iowa, the daughter of a manufacturer’s rep who sold prefabricated silos. She’s afraid of being dumb, a silo salesman’s daughter—that’s her breathy assertion.
She has mastered somehow a tonal mixture of the bogus and the seductive, so Nathaniel interrupts. “But you were quoting Valéry last night!” he says. “Who else does that?”
“That line, that’s the one line I know,” she says. “That one. I always quote it. ‘Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regard-moi qui change!’ That gets me in the door, that line, it’s the key to the city.”
“Okay. Enough. You know something? When we came in last night,” Nathaniel says, before a coughing fit takes him over, “everyone thought we were a couple.”
“Yeah? You think so? Why?”
“Because they said so. Because we were both soaked. Because we looked it. There was a perception there. Of, what’s that word? Togetherness. That we were mated.”
“Yeah?” She waits. “Well, who knows? It could happen. You and me, I mean. I’d just have to dump my boyfriend. I’d have to cheat on him. Of course, that’s always a possibility. Sometimes I do despise him. He lives in Berkeley, half a million miles away. And, after all, he’s an out-and-out android, this guy. Robby. Robby the Robot.”
“So let me ask you a question,” Nathaniel says, improvising. “There’s something I can’t remember about what happened when I drove you home. Did I talk about my father and my sister last night? Coolberg said I did.”
“Oh, him. Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t hear you saying anything like that. Forget him, all right?”
“All right. Sure. But I can’t forget him—he just called. Listen: he wants to go to Niagara Falls tomorrow evening. To see the gods come out, is what he says. I told him I wouldn’t go unless I brought you along. Can you come?” To break the pause that follows, he asks, “Will you come? You’ve got to.”
“All right,” she says. “Yes. But what’s all this about the gods? What gods?”
“How should I know? I’m not acquainted with them. You should ask him.”
“Nathaniel,” she says.
“What?”
“Take me somewhere. Right now. Okay? Come get me and take me somewhere. I’m alone here and I can’t stand it and I need to be delivered. I’ve been drinking stale burned coffee and having a breakdown. The kind where you tear paper into little strips and then stare at the phone? And you watch the sun crossing the sky? A day with no future? That kind.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“No, no, don’t ask me. I don’t care. Uh, wait: I do care. Last night, you said something about the Mirrored Room. The one in the Albright-Knox? Floors, ceilings, walls—all mirrors? That Lucas Samaras piece. We could do a trip over there. We need a break. We could