The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [53]
“Are you going to call him?” she asked me.
“I guess so.” I nodded, so that I could agree with myself.
“Your hand is shaking.” She reached out and gripped me.
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well.” I tried to find the right words. “You know: it’s hard to find the right words when you’re about to talk to someone you once knew when you were someone else, someone you no longer are.”
She nodded. The quilt she had given me a few months after we had met each other, her love’s token, was up on the wall close to the phone. It had been stitched together, as some quilts are, from rags and cast-off clothes and found fabrics, and the pattern had been set in a series of tiny squares that evoked a child’s world of curlicues and stars and snowflakes. What I had always loved about Laura had been her kindness and innocence in the face of the world’s sophisticated cruelty. She was almost frighteningly guileless. This meant that about sixty percent of human behavior was simply beyond her comprehension. She had never wised up, and she never would. And yet—I insist on this, too—she was not a child. She just had a permanent immunity to evil. It baffled her.
“All right, I have to call him,” I said. “I have to do this myself now. I guess I need to be alone with this.”
She nodded and left the room as I dialed the number. “Dialed”! There are no dials on telephones anymore. Nevertheless, the verb lives on in its ghostly phantom way.
A briny-sounding woman answered after two rings, as if from an underwater world. “Mr. Coolberg’s office,” she gurgled. Background music at her end of the connection could be construed: Bill Evans, one of the solo keyboard albums, where he sounds like a jazz Debussy contemplating which form of addiction he’ll try next.
A pause, as I collected myself. “May I speak to…” I couldn’t say “Jerome,” and I couldn’t say “Mr. Coolberg,” and I couldn’t say “Jerome Coolberg,” and deciding that I couldn’t use any of these terms required an unhealthy and embarrassing amount of time; I was stymied. Finally I said, “Couldn’t I speak to him?”
She laughed at the grotesque phrase. “Whom shall I say is calling?”
I gave her my name.
She put me on hold, and a recorded voice came on urging me to contribute to my local NPR affiliate. This was followed by a blip on the wire and the sound of something breathing asthmatically into the mouthpiece one full continent away.
“Nathaniel,” he said at last.
“Jerome.”
“Thank you for calling back.”
“You’re welcome.”
“How are you?”
“Oh, I’m fine, I guess. You?”
He continued to take short stabbing breaths. It was him, all right. “I’m frightened,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of talking to you. This is like swimming across a lake in the middle of the forest and trying to see someone who has been reported as missing, and who may well have drowned. You keep swimming and searching, but you don’t want to see what you’re supposed to be looking for.” Coolberg hadn’t lost his taste for epic similes. I had no idea what he was talking about. Sometimes his brilliance just sounded like garble, a form of pre-cognition.
“Uh, right,” I said agreeably. It wasn’t as if I could answer such a statement. “Is that why you called?”
“No.”
“Did you want to talk? About—”
“No. Well, yes and no. I’ve done something. And I need to…well, I’m sorry to be so unclear, so vague. I can’t really talk about it over the phone. But I need to tell you about it by showing it to you. It’s important.” Indefinite reference always had a way of proliferating with him, as it did in the fiction of Henry James. After a while, you just lost the thread. Everything turned into “it.” At least on the page you could search through the previous paragraphs for what was being alluded to.
“Yes? How? What’s this ‘something’?”
“I have an idea, Nathaniel. I have an idea of what you should do. A bit of unfinished business that we can finish, you and I. Don’t say ‘no’ until you’ve heard it.”
“Yes? What?