The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [42]
Then everything goes dark.
PART TWO
22
ALL THIS HAPPENED a long time ago.
These days I work in a local arts agency writing up grant proposals. Our office puts poets (and sometimes out-of-work actors and musicians and dancers) into the schools. I am rather good at the work I do and take some pride in it. I’m able to give a sense of urgency to the project descriptions. A certain studied eloquence is not beyond my reach. I have a good track record for landing foundation money. I can point to successes. People believe me.
For a brief period a few years ago I worked as an insurance adjuster but found the job distasteful—I had to go around discounting distress. My task was to soft-pedal the damages. After flooding, after windstorms, after fire, I showed up to say, “Well, that’s not so bad.” You can’t do such work for very long without suffering the consequences. The victims of calamity end up despising you. Years before my days as an adjuster, I served as an assistant editor for a small-town newspaper—I did some copyediting and reporting and sold advertising space. Before that, I was assigned to the role of the seemingly amiable person at the other end of the line to whom you talk when you call to ask about your utility bill. Prior to my time at Amalgamated Gas and Electric, I made phone calls—very briefly—at a collection agency. Early in my life as a working man, I delivered the mail.
My jobs have not defined me. With a minimum of training, almost anyone could have had my employment record without leaving a trace.
I have become an altogether different person from the man I once was. Now I’m something, someone, else. You might not notice me. I am in disguise. Mine is an old story.
Keats describes his “knight-at-arms” who fell in love with a beautiful maid, la belle dame sans merci, as having awakened “on the cold hill’s side.” I woke up there, too, alone. Like Keats’s knight, I was found “palely loitering”—beautiful phrase. Cold hill’s side. Palely loitering.
23
BEING A PARENT to two sons involves complicated logistics. This is one of those clichés that happens to be true. You have to plan ahead to make sure the car has arrived in the correct place at the correct time. The scheduling of such matters may seem trivial, but family life cannot be managed otherwise. The weekly roster attached to the refrigerator dictates who should be where, and when. Without it, chaos would descend on all of us. Jeremy, our older boy, has to be picked up after swim practice at exactly six thirty p.m. most days. If I were to forget or slip up, he would feel demeaned and ignored. But I have never forgotten.
When I’m scheduled to get him, and my wife, Laura, stays at home to make dinner, I sit there waiting in the car facing the exit doors of the locker rooms. Outside, evening has come on, and darkness has descended, except for those scattered pools of illumination under the parking lot’s flood-lights. In cars near my own, other adults await their children, all of us clustered together in a parental flock. Some keep their motors running so that the warm interiors will seem comforting when their kids open the