The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [38]
One day Zalman steals Calman’s clothes and begins to wear them. Now no one can tell Zalman and Calman apart, so alike do they appear. The two of them, master and man, are indistinguishable even to those who know them. Both have glossy black beards and brown eyes. Zalman begins to give orders to Calman, and Calman protests. He does not take orders! He himself is the merchant, Zalman the mere coachman! To no avail. Everything is upside down.
“I’m going,” says Nathaniel.
At last Simple Shmerel is summoned by the befuddled villagers, who want everything to return to normal. Simple Shmerel considers the puzzling situation, then orders the two men into an adjacent room. After a moment, Simple Shmerel speaks up. “Servant, come here!” he says. Almost instantly, Zalman opens the door and pokes his head in.
“Yes, sir?” he asks.
“There’s your Zalman,” points out Simple Shmerel. Apparently the habits of servitude cannot be broken.
Coolberg closes his book.
“Fuck you,” Nathaniel says.
“Obscenities again. So tiresome. Well, maybe,” Coolberg mutters, in an apparent non sequitur. The two men rise from the bench simultaneously as if under orders. Nathaniel feels light-headed, as if he is going under: he is gradually succumbing to some general anesthesia set loose at the zoo, or perhaps a hypnotic spell has been cast upon him. He needs a good night’s sleep. He hasn’t rested well lately. As he and Coolberg walk across the park, Theresa following them, Coolberg begins to narrate another plot summary, this time of the book he is writing, the one that takes place entirely at night, the one with Nathaniel in it, called Shadow.
In the story a young man, a student, a somewhat fever-brained type, loves two women at the same time. One of these women is a brilliant student, a polyglot, and a reader of Sumerian sacred texts; the other is a painter. Women have always loved this young man; he is gracious to them, considerate and thoughtful, and besides, he is disconcertingly beautiful, athletic, with long blond hair that the women imagine being trailed languorously over their bare skin under the covers as he kisses them, over their breasts and thighs, that is, until the force of Eros flings the covers back. But the strain of loving two women is one that few men can withstand. Even Ezra Pound lost his mind by loving two women. This young man, this character named Ambrose, develops an antipathy to daylight because in his doubleness, his double-heartedness, he fears that he will meet himself on the sidewalk coming toward himself from the opposite direction. At the same time that he is developing a phobia to daylight and the solidity of actual things, he is also receiving phone calls from an ambiguous Iago-like character named Trautwein, who, through brilliance and charm, gradually convinces him that the second woman, the painter he loves, who suffers for her art in poverty, has been cheating on him. There will be an unspecified fire. A violent death is indicated. However, certain parts of the story have only been sketched out; possibilities have presented themselves but have not turned into probabilities, much less inevitabilities.
“That’s crap,” Nathaniel says. “Sumerian texts? Please.” An implausible detail: it takes decades to learn how to read those texts. Nathaniel’s knees are shaky. Drops of perspiration appear as if by magic on his forehead, and unbidden tears spurt into his eyes. What if something were to happen to Jamie? What if these two sociopaths enacted…one of their fictions on her?
“I’ve got to go,” he says, taking off toward his car.
Behind him he hears Theresa shout, “My sweatpants. They’re in your car!”
What is the expression? Clothes make the man.
“I made you so beautiful,” the wind says. “And you didn’t thank me.”
20
JAMIE IS SLEEPING. She may even be sleeping with another woman. Anyway, she is not answering the phone.
Nathaniel waits for a day and then shows up on her doorstep, ringing ringing ringing the doorbell until she opens the door and says to him, “What happened to you? You’ve got bags under your