The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [27]
She keeps up three or four projects at once. Dinners prepared by Nathaniel bake in the oven as she turns her brooding attention to a football-shaped piece of metal, perhaps a blimp or dirigible of some kind, meant to hang somehow in the air. Music from the radio: Bartók’s second string quartet—clangorous Magyar scraping and sawing, sul ponticello wiry screeching, a Mitteleuropean racket perfect for a sculptor’s studio—snarls its way out of the speakers into the air, keeping the blimp suspended. Around seven on the nights he is permitted to stay, they eat dinner, and one particular evening over lamb chops he asks her why she’s a Roman Catholic.
“Oh, that? I’m sick in love with the Virgin Mary,” she says unsmilingly. “She’s my girl. I’ve been in love with her since I was ten years old. She came to me in a dream and said my name out loud. She’s not an idea. She’s real. I saw her face on the wall inside a movie theater, just before the lights went down. She exists. I’ve danced for her. She’s a fact in my life.”
“A movie theater. Like Max Jacob.”
“Who?”
“Max Jacob. He was a French poet, pre–World War II. Jewish. He saw the face of Jesus on the wall of a movie theater, and when it happened a second time, he went to the Fathers of Zion, an order dedicated to converting the Jews. At his baptism, Picasso served as his godfather.”
After dinner, he washes up, reads, and she takes a long bath in the claw-footed bathtub before she goes out to drive for Queen City Cab. On those nights when she isn’t working, she emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and she lies down with him on the mattress where he has been reading Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, a book whose ecstasies already seem dated and stale. Tonight, he puts the book aside. Together, naked under a comforter, they gaze up at the ceiling from which are suspended Jamie’s birds and blimps. Above the art and to the side, a ceiling fan rotates languidly.
“You know,” she says, “you’re kind of sweet, but I’ll never know why I got involved with you.”
“Because you thought I deserved it. You said so. You initiated this. Anyway, it’s not really involvement.”
“Oh, really? I have sucked your dick. That’s intimacy, isn’t it? Still, I guess you’re right. And I suppose I did start this, didn’t I? That’ll teach me. Why did I do that?” She drapes her left leg over him. Her thigh has a dancer’s taut muscular symmetry. “But you’re a delay. You’re just a man. You’re temporary.” She smiles at the ceiling. “You understand me. That’s the danger part. It’s like I’m Nixon, and you’re my Haldeman.”
“Don’t think so. You’re not Nixon. No woman can be Nixon. Not possible. He’s one of us.”
“Okay okay. But you know me and the sum of me and you seem to know what I want,” she says in a friendly growl. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever known who did. It’s unfair.”
“That’s right. I do know. You want to fly away.”
“Right. And I want another girl,” she says, “to fly away with me. Not you. I can’t fly away anywhere with you. With you, I’m grounded. Men are beasts of the ground.”
“Uh…you sure about that?”
“Absolutely. You’re all creatures of the mud. You can’t help it. I know this feels weird. That desire I’m supposed to have for you? I don’t have it. I sometimes wish it were there, but it isn’t.” She waits. “I sort of love you anyway, but a girl can’t go on doing charity work for a mud-beast forever.”
“See, the thing is,” he says, “you can treat me as hypothetical. That’s an adjective that guy Coolberg uses with me. Hypothetical this and hypothetical that. You haven’t met him, but—”
“Oh, yes, I have,” Jamie announces, her hand drifting down his chest. “He came a few days ago to the People’s Kitchen and struck up a conversation with me.”
“This was when?” Nathaniel has a sudden flushed sensation.
“Last week, I think. He asked me about working there, like he was planning on joining