The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [6]
“That’s not your dream!” Theresa tells him. “That’s someone else’s dream. You took it.”
“Why do you say that?” Coolberg asks. “Why do you say that it’s not mine?”
“Because…you can’t have a dream like that,” she informs him. “Men don’t have burning-hotel dreams. That’s a woman’s dream.” Coolberg starts laughing as if caught out, and Nathaniel chooses at this moment to enter the room, just as Coolberg is saying, “Well, all right, then tell me what dreams a man is supposed to have.”
In the room five people glance at Nathaniel, their expressions ranging from indifference to curiosity. Two people whisper to each other near the bookcase, and, closer to the doorway, Theresa and Coolberg and an albino dwarfish man sit together on the floor by the bed. They share a beer, the bottle moving around from hand to hand. The albino gets up to leave. A certain intimacy at once falls between Coolberg and Theresa; they have the appearance of unindicted co-conspirators who share a complicated system of signals—lifted eyebrows, glances, finger flicks—all seemingly worked out in advance. Coolberg glances at Nathaniel, and Theresa says, “Well, look who’s here. It’s Nathaniel. My soaked twin.”
“Hello,” Coolberg says. “Oh, yes. You’re Nathaniel Mason. I’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re perfunctory things. Sit down.” Theresa pats the floor next to her. Nathaniel notices a small puddle of water under her jeans. From the rain. Soon a small puddle of water will form under himself, as he drains onto the floor.
Nathaniel gamely lowers himself to their level. Coolberg smiles at him menacingly. Years later he will realize that Coolberg’s first words to him consisted of a false claim, followed by a command, a pattern for their friendship, and that this charade was acted out in front of Theresa, who, like an accommodating audience member, encouraged the show. Once again, and equally thoughtlessly, she puts her hand on his—Nathaniel’s—leg. Coolberg sees her do it. “Nathaniel, you’re so cute when you’re wet,” she says. “You’re flagrant.”
“What is this, the state fair?” Coolberg asks.
Nathaniel takes in Coolberg’s face, stricken by a kind of internalized warfare. In one moment he appears to be a sickly child in a room through whose one window a winter sun shines in, briefly, at twilight, giving the child the farewell gift of its fading rusty light on the snow; in the next moment the expression diagnoses itself, disintegrates, and recombines into one of all-encompassing sympathy, before it turns bewilderingly into an Asia-Minorish sedulous gaze from one of the booths at the bazaar. The eyes miss nothing, but they are spectacularly dead.
“I don’t know anything about you,” Nathaniel says. “Except what people tell me.”
“Oh, what do they tell you?” Coolberg asks, delightedly, mockingly, dolorously, sweetly.
“See, that would be telling. What do you do, when you’re doing things?”
“You’re quoting The Prisoner. ‘That would be telling.’ As for me, I do everything,” Coolberg says, clumsily lighting up a Lucky.
“Guys, guys!” Theresa interrupts, very pleased to pretend that the two men are engaged in combat rather than verbal trickery, as she looks around the bedroom for an ashtray.
“I do everything,” Coolberg repeats. And then he starts singing.
“I’ve made a path
as a polymath
that no one else has trod!”
Theresa perks up. “He’s made a path as a polymath that no one else has trod!” She gives a whoop of laughter. “Siggie, you’re so Broadway.”
Who is Siggie? Coolberg ashes his cigarette into a beer bottle. These are juvenile tiresome antics; the anxious high spirits have a depressing effect. To hell with these people, the vodka says to Nathaniel, whereupon he stands up. He feels a bit unsteady, like a bird