The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [2]
They introduce themselves. They are both graduate students, both looking for the same mal-addressed party, a party in hiding. In homage to his gesture, she takes off her footwear and puts her arm in his. This is the epoch of bare feet in public life; it is also the epoch of instantaneous bondings. Nathaniel quickly reminds her—her name is Theresa, which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French, or otherwise foreign—that they have met before here in Buffalo, at a political meeting whose agenda had to do with resistance to the draft and the war. But with her flashing eyes, she has no interest in his drabby small talk, and she playfully mocks his Midwestern accent, particularly the nasalized vowels. This is an odd strategy, because her Midwestern accent is as broad and flat as his own. She presents herself with enthusiasm; she has made her banality exotic. She has met everyone; she knows everyone. Her anarchy is perfectly balanced with her hyperacuity about tone and timbre and atmosphere and drift. With her, the time of day is either high noon or midnight. But right now, she simply wants to find the locale of this damn party.
Again the rain starts.
Nathaniel and Theresa pass a park bench. “Let’s sit down here for a sec,” she says, pointing. She grins. Maybe she doesn’t want to find the party after all. “Let’s sit down in the rain. We’ll get soaked. You’ll be the Yin and I’ll be…the other one. The Yang.” She points her index finger at him, assigning him a role.
“What? Why?” Nathaniel has no idea what she is talking about.
“Why? Because it’s so Gene Kelly, that’s why. Because it’s not done. No sensible person sits down in the rain.” She salts the word “sensible” with cheerful derision. “It’s not, I don’t know, wise. There’s the possibility of viral pneumonia, right? You’d have to be a character in a Hollywood musical to sit down in the rain. Anyway, we’ll arrive at the party soaking wet. Our clothes will be attached to our skin, and we’ll be visible.” She seems to inflect all her adjectives unnecessarily. Also, she has a habit of laughing subvocally after every other sentence, as if she were monitoring her own conversation and found herself wickedly amusing. Together they do as she suggests, and she takes his hand in a moment of what seems to be spontaneous fellow feeling. “I can stand a little rain,” she says quietly, fingering his fingers, quoting from somewhere. She leans back on the park bench to let the droplets fall into her eyes. To see her is heaven, Nathaniel thinks. No wonder she wears a flak jacket. They wait there. A minute passes. “Boompadoop-boom ba da boompadoopboom,” she sings, Comden-and-Greenishly.
“Look at that,” he says, pointing to a building opposite them. Through the second-floor window of a huge run-down house, the party that they have been seeking is visible. The nondifferentiated uproar of conversation floods out onto the street and makes its way to them in the drizzle. To his left, he sees a bum standing under a diseased elm, eyeing them. “That’s it. That’s us. There’s the party. We found it.”
Theresa straightens, squints, wiping water from her eyes. “Yes. You’re right. There’s the place. What a wreck. I hope it has a fire escape. Hey, I think I see that kid, Coolberg,” she says. “Right there. Near the second window. On the right. See him?”
“Who?”
“Coolberg? Oh, he’s a…something. Nobody knows what he is, actually. He hangs