The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [3]
“Queer how?”
“Well, in the good way,” Theresa says. She thoughtlessly puts her hand on his thigh and strokes it. “Maybe he’ll tell you how he’s being blackmailed. That’s one of his best stories. Come on,” she says.
After standing up, she twirls around a lamppost and then dances barefoot into the street, neatly avoiding a car before managing a splashing two-step into a puddle, holding out her sandals as props, a serious Marxist hoofer, this girl, and Nathaniel, who can’t match her steps with his own, is stricken, as who would not be, by love-lightning for her. He follows her. The bum stays outside under the elm, watching them go.
In the apartment doorway everyone gets it. “You’re soaked! That is so cool. This is very MGM, you two. Did you just kiss out there? Standing up or sitting down? Do you even know each other? Did you just meet? Are you guys in a Stanley Donen movie or a Vincente Minnelli movie? Have you been introduced? Do you need to be? Do you want to dry off or is that soaked look a thing that you’d like to keep going for a while? Want a joint, want a beer? The beer’s in the kitchen and there’s more out on the fire escape unless someone stole it or squirreled it away. Why not sit down right here, on this floor? There’s whiskey if you want it. Is Marcuse correct about repressive tolerance or is ‘repressive tolerance’ another example of the collapse of that particular and once viable Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung nonsense? Buying off the masses with material goods? Well, everyone knows the answer to that question. Don’t stand out there. Come in. Dry off. Join the party.”
They do come in, they do attempt to dry off with kitchen rags, they drop their sandals in a pile of sneakers and boots and sandals by the door. Almost immediately, while Nathaniel is recalibrating his emotions in relation to the woman he has just partnered across the street, she disappears into another room. Holding a beer bottle (he has misplaced the six-pack that he himself had brought—perhaps it is still out on the bench in the park and is now being consumed by the elm-bum), he damply threads his way through the corridors of the party, long dreamlike hallways of grouped couples, trios, and quartets. His clothes stick to his skin. The smell of dope and cigarette smoke, the pollution produced by thought, mingles with the aroma of whatever is cooking in the tiny kitchen, where a whitish semi-liquid chive dip has been laid out on a gouged table, bread crusts of some sort piled on a plate nearby, and after he leans over for a bite of whatever it is, Nathaniel stops, pauses, before a disembodied conversation about Joseph Conrad’s Eastern gaze on Western eyes—the novelist is treated with friendly condescension for writing a variety of Polish in English that mistakes particularity for substance—a conversation that transitions into the weekend’s football game and the prospects of the Buffalo Bills. Someone in another room is singing “Which Side Are You On?” in a good tenor voice. Soon, having wandered in front of a phonograph, he hears, first, Joe Cocker, and quickly after that, Edith Piaf, the turntable being of the old-fashioned type with a spindle and a stack of LPs slapping down, one after the other, a vinyl collage, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” followed several minutes later by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, out of tune as usual, playing “Open Country Joy.”
The party carries with it a mood of heady desperation held in check by the usual energies of youth. When Nathaniel looks at his friends, they remind him of puppies in a cardboard box. What is Nixon, what is Vietnam, what is double-digit inflation and mounting unemployment and a life with no prospects compared to a woman sitting on a