The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [61]
“Would you like some wine?” he asked me. “White or red? Maybe a white to start? They have a wonderful Sancerre here, so they tell me.”
“So they tell you?”
“I don’t drink,” he said, flagging down a waiter and ordering a bottle for me. “I can’t drink. I go to pieces.” The Sancerre came, was poured, was delicious, and Coolberg beamed his kindly cherub smile in my direction as he sipped his mineral water.
“You go to pieces?”
“I lose track of myself.”
“Ah,” I said, thinking that he had always been guilty of that particular error. I gulped, a bit, at the wine, whose quality was above my station in life. Nevertheless, I was trying to mind my manners. But manners or not, I had business to attend to. “Jerome, how did you find me?”
“Oh, that’s easy, these days. You can use the Web to find anybody. There’s no place to hide anymore. And if you can’t do it yourself, you hire a teenager to do your snooping for you. They know how to find Social Security numbers, credit cards—”
“Yes,” I said. “Identity theft.”
The phrase hung in the air for a moment.
“But…well. Anyway, I had been keeping track of you,” he said, going on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I knew where you were. Even after I moved out here, to Los Angeles, I studied where you had gone to.” He leaned back and glanced out toward the ocean, as if he were contemplating a trip. “You know. What had become of you, things like that.
“It was a little hobby of mine,” he continued. “So. When you were engaged to Laura, I found out. That was easy. Really, ridiculously easy. You can’t imagine. When you were married, I saw the announcement. That was easy, too—finding out, I mean. You don’t even need a detective for such things. I followed you from job to job, just, you know, keeping tabs, the post office, the gas company, et cetera, all of it from a distance, of course from a distance, my distance, where I’d note things down in my record book, and when your son Jeremy was born, I marked the date on my calendar. August twenty-third, wasn’t it? Yes. August twenty-third. A good day. I almost sent you a card.” He laughed quietly. “And when your wife hit that pedestrian, that vindictive man, I saw the court records of the litigation. Then there was your second son, Michael. A July Fourth baby, born to fireworks, a little patriot, a…Yankee Doodle Dandy.” He smiled tenderly and tapped his index finger on the table. “I noticed all of the milestones, each and every one of them. My eye was on the sparrow.”
I must have stared at him. It was like being in the audience at a show given by a psychic who tells you details about your dead grandmother.
“But why?” I asked him. “Why did you do that? Why did you—”
“Keep track?” He leaned forward. “Please. If you have to ask me such a question, then you’re never going to know.” I could smell lemongrass on his breath. Probably he drank herbal tea all day. “Your son Jeremy is on the swim team, the breast-stroke and the medley, and your wife has a little business dealing in quilts.” He rubbed at his jaw. “Quite a diversified family. I almost bought one from her, and then I thought better of it.”
“You thought better of it? You do more than keep track,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Sure. I do. I do more. But I won’t bore you with additional details about your life. After all, it’s your life. You’re living it.”
It’s important to say here that I wasn’t angry, or shocked, or disbelieving, or amused by what he was telling me. I was simply and overwhelmingly neutral now, as if witnessing a unique force of nature manifesting itself in front of me. “So,” I said, “you became a student of my life.”
“Well, obsession stinks of eternity.” He reached out for a piece of bread, then spread butter all over it. He hadn’t lost his gift for plummy phrases.
“Why me?” I had never before seen so much butter applied to a slice of bread. Coolberg had the uncertain