The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [40]
“This is desperation you’re witnessing,” he says, gripping her. All at once, the thought occurs to him that what he’s expressing is not love but hysteria, rising out of his own emptiness. He is in the grip of inflated speech, exaggeration, all the insincere locutions of opacity and self-deception. He is becoming, he feels with sudden queasy recognition, like a character in a plot dreamed up by someone like Coolberg. Nevertheless, he goes on, believing that he can explain himself, as his language veers further out of his control, as if he were behind the wheel and the steering had failed in the car—a dirt road, a tree straight ahead of him, an accident resulting in the loss of speech. “I’m a desperate man,” he says, the words coming out of his mouth unaccompanied by inflections. “Oh, I love you. I can’t say it enough. My dear, you’re the one.” Appalled by himself, and triumphant, he waits for her response.
This time she does pull her hand away firmly. “No, Nathaniel,” she says quietly. “Nathaniel, I am not the one. Listen to yourself.”
“You are. You are, you are, you are.”
Sometimes he was insisting what he was sure about and when he was sure about it, he could not stop himself from insisting because it was the thing that he was knowing and by knowing this thing he could be correctly insisting and not stopping what he was telling and saying and telling again and again and again by really knowing. Why did Gertrude Stein continue speaking to him? Why would she not leave him alone? She loved women, too; that was why. She understood.
“I’m not. Really I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. You’re deluded. Listen: I can’t love you the way you love me. A woman has to love a man all the way down to the root. Otherwise, it’s the usual disaster. A true marriage exists between bodies and souls. And I can’t—I can’t love you that way. I like you. I even love you sometimes, for a man, for what you are. I gave you my bed to lie in and my body, too, because you deserved it. You needed a buddy in bed, and that was me. You’re a good man, maybe the best I’ve known. But we just slept with each other and liked each other a lot, and that’s not love. That’s an arrangement.” She waits. “Did that other girl give you an ultimatum?”
“People are after you,” Nathaniel says to her.
“What?”
“People are after you. Those two, Coolberg and Theresa.”
“They are not after me. She may be jealous, but that’s her problem, not mine.”
“No, I think they’re really after you.”
“Honey. Nathaniel. You are really messed up. You should get help.”
“There’s something I have to do,” Nathaniel tells her. “I love you, Jamie, please, and I have to do this right now.” More foolishness, maybe, but none of his actions are under his control. He stands up and takes her hand—she does not resist this time, as he thought she might—and he guides her into the bathroom. He sits her on the bathtub’s edge, and he squats down to unlace her shoes, first the left, then the right. Kneeling before her, he takes her sneakers off. Jamie watches him quietly, unprotesting. He peels off her white socks, then grabs a washcloth.
“Oh, no,” she says.
Quickly he dips the washcloth into a stream of warm water and begins to wash her feet. He can feel her resistance, as she tenses her muscles and tendons, before that tension gives way to the sheer force of her astonishment.
“What are you doing?”
He does not look up. “I love you,” he says, keeping his eyes down. Tears are rolling off his cheeks. He does not wipe them away. When his task is completed, he tosses the washcloth on the floor, like any ordinary man. Out of abjection and pure longing, he bows his head before her. He waits.
Jamie takes Nathaniel’s face in her hands and lifts it so that she can look at him. “All right,” she says, the tears coming into her own eyes, laughing, shaking her head. “All right,” she tells him, “take me to bed. Make me late to work.”
“That’s not what I’m telling you. That’s absolutely not what I’m asking for here.”
“I know what you’re asking