The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [62]
“Why you? You’re being obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.” He glanced to his right as a recently disgraced film actress sat down near us with a female friend. Other people in the restaurant were watching them.
“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re talking about this, do you know what happened to Theresa?”
“Theresa?” he laughed. “Her? Oh, she scuzzied herself back into the great membrane.”
“What does that mean?” Twilight was beginning to come on. The waiter lit the candle on our table. The ocean currents went their way. Planet Earth hurtled through space. The galaxy turned on its axis.
“She wasn’t much to begin with, was she? And she wasn’t much later either. So now, I imagine, she isn’t much at all. All that tiresome irony of hers, that sophomoric knowingness. I don’t think irony as a stance is very intelligent, do you? Well, I mean it has the appearance of intelligence, but that’s all it has. It goes down this far”—he held his hand at knee level—“but it doesn’t go any farther.”
“She was pretty,” I said, feeling the need to defend her.
“No,” Coolberg said. “I don’t agree. Theresa was attractive without being pretty. She had the banal sensibilities of a local librarian who’s moved to the big city and has started serious drinking and making semi-comical overstatements to disguise her obvious gaps. All those Soviet medals! Come on. And one memorized line of French poetry. What a doofus she was. Poor thing. There’s a difference between—well, attraction and prettiness, and she never got it. All of her books were borrowed, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she’s wherever she is.”
“But you were her lover.”
He blew air out of his mouth in response to this irrelevant observation.
“And Jamie?” I asked quickly. “Jamie Esterson? The sculptor? She worked at the People’s Kitchen, remember?” I felt a shadow fall over me, as if I were about to get sick very soon. Could you become mentally destabilized in an instant? People talk about panic attacks, the feeling of the sudden oncoming locomotive and you, caught on the tracks in a stalled automobile. Anyway, I saw the shadow there, and I fought it off by looking out at the sidewalk and quietly counting the cars on Ocean Boulevard. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
He flinched. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to her. No idea at all.”
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
He ordered the salmon, and I ordered the cassoulet. Night dropped its black lace around us. He began to tell me what had happened to him. After leaving the East and never quite collecting a college degree, he had turned up in Los Angeles, having written a screenplay, a musical, Fire Escape, whose odd locale had been a downtown apartment building with a cast of colorful urban characters (“If you could imagine Rear Window as a musical, which I could, in those days, then you could imagine the script”). Although the screenplay had been optioned, the project went nowhere, but its readers noticed a certain flare in it, a soigné knowingness about plot requirements and genre conventions. Slowly he built up a lattice-work of friends, among them a programming manager at a local public-radio affiliate. Oh, this was dull. He would not bore me any longer with the banal details of what he had accomplished and where he had been and whom he had known. He had a life. Everyone has a life. If I cared, I could check on it. I could hire my own gumshoe teenager to snoop. No one cares about the particulars, he said—an obvious lie and the first mis-statement to emerge from his cherubic face so far. He was, after all, the host of American Evenings. In a sense, he was hosting it now. This was one of those evenings he so prized.
“I’m interested in the particulars,” I said, tipping back my third glass of wine. The waiter came to pour the remainder of the bottle’s contents into my glass. “Such as: Are you married?” I thought of current conversational protocols. “Do you have a partner? Is there someone?”
“Oh,