The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [26]
Jamie’s physical apathy toward Nathaniel gives her a certain distance about his needs, all needs, the human comedy of neediness, including her own. Indifference to him makes her into a wise guy. She is unsullied by any desire for him, and yet…With her, there are always those ellipses.
Standing on a kitchen stool near her refrigerator, replacing a bulb in the overhead fixture, he tells her, “Uh, you know, Jamie, I’m kind of falling in love with you. I’ve been dreaming about you lately.”
“Oh,” she says, “you are? You have been? And…where did that come from? That’s an odd…” She tilts her head at him in silent inquiry.
“Yeah, I know,” he tells her, screwing in the bulb and flinching when it suddenly goes on.
“Because…well…this is awkward,” she says, “and…um, impossible, though not…heartrending yet…but…yes, certainly impossible…”
All the ellipses, the negative space around her responses to him—how could he not notice them? He lowers himself to where she has placed herself, near him. She touches him tenderly on the shoulder in thanks.
“I thought I would break my neck,” he tells her. “If I fell off that stool, I mean.”
Because what else is happening is that on certain other evenings when he lies on the floor of her little studio, surrounded by molded geometrical objects she has fished out of junkyards and altered and made beautiful with her blow-torch, he gazes up at the quasi cylinders, metal Möbius strips, and Styrofoam tetrahedrons hanging by wires and string from the ceiling, and he finds himself aroused and shaken by her talent, her vision of airworthy topological surfaces. Surely, somewhere in the United States another cabdriver is making skeletal flying machines out of Styrofoam and discarded plastic and junked metal, but he doesn’t know where. Only here, on the Niagara Frontier, is such a gifted woman perfecting her art.
So out of masculine dutifulness and the tribute that love pays to accomplishment, he cooks dinner for her, elaborate three-course concoctions. He prepares the meals like a servant, a slave to love; he does not eat much himself, being enamored. A man in love cannot eat, keyed up as he is for a long journey. He listens to her disquisitions about the soul of materials, the mysteries of negative space, the genius of Giacometti and of David Smith, and the plotlessness of her interestingly fucked-up life, a life she claims she would not trade for anyone else’s. In return, she lets him hold her in preprogrammed ways on certain predetermined nights, and on occasion she takes pity on his luckless erections. Is she beautiful? He hasn’t always paid attention to that; her physical appearance seems irrelevant to his infatuation.
If she loved him the way a woman loves a man, she’d be jealous of Theresa. Or so Nathaniel likes to think. What interests her more (she claims) is Nathaniel’s futile love for a lesbian sculptor, herself, and his nonsensical love for a blandly intelligent Marxist would-be academic and ironist. These are bad options. She remains intrigued by his waffling, his male duplicity. He is a case study in the problem of the masculine. For the time being, she has suspended her interest in other women, so that she can observe him unimpeded. She asks to hear what Theresa is like in bed, and when he starts to inform her, she abruptly refuses to hear the details. Sex between him and Theresa empties their souls of content, so she claims. Surely he can’t be considering a vanilla life with such a trifling female, this…cipher.
Nathaniel lies on Jamie’s mattress on the floor, watching her as she works. Clad in overalls, she taps and hammers away at the head of a small metallic bird. She applies percussive techniques at the workbench and then seems ready to use her fiery equipment to weld another wing onto the bird’s torso until she decides that two wings are probably enough. On other evenings she assembles and disassembles rhombic dodecahedrons, meditating aloud on their shape, humming along to the radio or keeping up a monologue on arcane geometrical matters. Did Nathaniel know that Alexander