The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [8]
The building outside of which they have stopped is yet another Buffalo structure, a large upstate New York house on a tiny lot, the front lawn so small that it could be mowed in two minutes. Nothing separates this house from the one next to it except a driveway. The neighborhood is cluttered and congested with houses; in this jungle of domiciles, trees have been forced out, to live elsewhere. Coolberg scrambles out of the car and walks in a slouching ramble toward the front door. Nathaniel would like to see him enter the house—he is not completely sure that Coolberg actually resides here—but in the meantime, Theresa has clambered into the front seat and has closed the door.
“Onward and upward,” she says, smiling briskly, as she loosens the rubber band from her ponytail so that her hair drops onto her shoulders. She puts the rubber band in her mouth and chews it as she fluffs out her hair. Suddenly she looks very naked.
Nathaniel drives to the end of the block. “Where to?” he asks. “Want to come back to my place?” With some effort, he creates a likely scenario. “We could talk. I could make scrambled eggs and coffee, and we could watch the sun come up.”
Theresa smiles, amused by him. “No, not tonight.” She touches the back of his neck in a seemingly tender gesture, though it feels more like a tease than affection. “I’m too gone. I’m much too gone to have breakfast with you.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” he says, not wanting to sound desperate. “We don’t have to have a meal together.”
“Take a right here,” she tells him, pointing at a streetlight up ahead. He signals a turn and follows her next instructions for another minute or so. Someone half a block away shouts or screams. City sounds.
“I want to call you. I want to see you again. Is that okay?”
“I guess so.” She sighs. “Just not tonight. We should be…I don’t know, alert. If I ever sleep with you, I want to be stone-cold sober. Besides, I already have somebody.” She takes out a slip of paper from her damp flak jacket and writes down her phone number. “Even though he’s not important and can be disposed of, I’ve got him. He’s not here, but he is somewhere. He exists, I mean. He has a residence. Anyway, I haven’t thought through the whole monogamy thing”—she shouts over the noise of the motor—“so I don’t have a position on sleeping with you. Yet.” She puts the slip of paper into his shirt’s front pocket. “Do you have somebody? You’re so cute you should never be alone.” In the noise created by the VW’s acceleration, the question seems loud and rhetorical, unanswerable, and a bit mean-spirited, coming from this beautiful woman who twice (or was it three times?) placed her hand on Nathaniel’s thigh. Does Theresa enjoy creating desire in him just to see herself doing it? To establish that she herself is unmoved? Like a laboratory scientist? Or a sleepy cat with its prey? That she can cast spells, that she is powerful? A rash of questions.
He therefore does not answer her inquiry about whether he has someone because the answer is “No, not now,” and those words are not the ones he wishes to utter as he shifts into second gear, sober from the intensity of loneliness and arousal and late-night animal longing. His hands are sweaty and he can’t think straight, and he feels sick with alcoholic lust, damp clothes, desolation, and maybe even neon-lighted love. Right now he would sleep with anything beautiful, if only beauty would sleep with him, this beauty or any other.
“Up there,” she says. “I’m up there.” They have found themselves on Hertel, and she points to an ice-cream shop, Lickety Split. Her apartment, she claims, is located upstairs from the ice cream and the service people who scoop it and the customers who eat it. All day, Nathaniel imagines, she inhales the smell