Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  “I’ve got a right to be paranoid,” Saul said angrily. “History encourages it. Plus, the man hates me. And for no reason: he doesn’t know me. I bet he’s a colonel in a Minuteman cadre. Or some militia or other. I’m going to get the Jewish Defense League on his case. They’ll blow him out of his yard straight into Lake Huron.”

  Patsy stood up. “I’ll call Mrs. O’Neill.”

  “You’d better not.” Saul looked alarmed. “What if she’s part of this conspiracy? She’d tip the rest of them off.”

  Patsy shrugged. In five minutes she was back.

  “Well?” While they ate, they had also been playing Scrabble, and when she was out of the room, Saul had traded two of his bad letters for better ones.

  “Mrs. O’Neill says his name is Bart Connell.”

  “A rabid anti-Semite.”

  “Not exactly. He has Alzheimer’s. He lives with his daughter. They don’t let him stray out of the yard—we’re talking category-three dementia, living on his own private planet. He used to wander off onto the road. He flew bombing missions during the Second World War. Then he worked as a mechanic at a Ford dealership. Could fix anything. Now he can’t, quote, figure out how to put a key to a keyhole. Shame on you, Saul. He’s a plain good man with all his mind gone.”

  Saul sulked.

  “And put those two letters back,” she said. “I saw what you did.”

  Saul’s students were younger than he remembered students were supposed to be for high school. Some were intelligent; others were not. How Saul performed in class didn’t seem to make that much difference one way or another. Those who were stupid stayed stupid, stubbornly. Some he inspired with an interest in American history, or with writing, or public speech. The work was hard, the preparations for his classes longer and more grueling than he had expected, the grading onerous, and the rewards only occasional, and he found himself now and then losing his train of thought from the effect of so many youthful eyes watching him, all those students wondering what he would do next. In the back of his classroom, the losers—those with learning deficiencies and antisocial habits—fell asleep or chewed gum or laughed inappropriately or wrote their illiterate little notes. Saul felt he should do something about them, and one of these days he would think of what that something would be. The mean-spirited, learning-disabled lost souls: he would attend to them sooner or later.

  The Five Oaks School District was close to bankruptcy, and in his classrooms the fluorescent lights flickered or burned out and were not replaced. There was always a shortage of chalk, and the windows leaked. The district had pink-slipped its remedial-reading teacher the previous year.

  In the teachers’ lounge, the talk was of their children, or health insurance, or places to go on vacation in July, or what had been on television the night before, or gossip. Sometimes Saul joined in. He often thought he was observing them and himself from a distance.

  Now and then in his classrooms he watched, with sympathy and irritation, the boys and girls falling in love with each other.

  One weekend evening in the late fall, an old blues guitarist whose music both Saul and Patsy liked was advertised as playing on the following Saturday night at Holbein College. The campus was on the other side of Five Oaks, about twenty minutes away. He would be performing in an auditorium in the campus student center, the ad said, and the event was open to the public, with tickets on sale at the door. The next weekend, Saul and Patsy dressed in the most drab-and-ratty clothes they still owned, to disguise themselves as postadolescent but preadult, and drove over to the campus one hour early, hoping that the concert hadn’t been sold out.

  They parked in a visitors’ parking lot and walked hand in hand to the front entrance. It was a mild, cool evening with a hint of rain in the distance. Students called to each other and tossed Frisbees on the lawns. In the student union, undergraduates in the latest complicated fashions, with faces fitted out with contemporary distastes and forms of earnestness, walked past them in the foyer, paying no attention to them, transfixed with themselves alone. They were beautiful but wanted to be admired for their minds, of all things. Saul stopped to inhale.

  “God,” he said. “I miss it. I miss being on a campus. I miss not being an adult, quite yet. I miss being twenty. I miss that stink.”

  Patsy studied him. “Yeah,” she said, “you do have that nostalgia thing going on. Come on, Saul. Enough about you. I’m hungry. Let’s get me a bag of potato chips.” After buying the tickets—the concert was far from being sold out, the blues having little purchase here at Holbein College— they walked down the student union hallway to an alcove where some vending machines stood. On one of the vending machines, the dispenser of individually bagged snack foods, someone had taped a warning sign:

  OUT OF ORDURE

  “God, I miss it,” Saul said. “Cleverness. Verbal agility. I wonder if a French major put that up,” Saul said. “Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Saul,” Patsy said, giving him a peeved look. “I know the poem.” She softened quickly. “You used to recite it to me, remember? To freak me out with Baudelaire?”

  “Yeah, I was just being nostalgic. Just as you say.” They stood there and watched the students parading by, accessorized with their preoccupations, and Saul glanced over at Patsy and saw instantly that she had outgrown the glamour of youth, the metallic sheen of immaturity and total enraptured self-mindedness. She had been glad to get out into the world where she lived now; he had not. Involuntarily, he put his hand over his heart.

  All through the concert he noticed from his wife’s stillness and concentration that, in fact, he understood the blues much better than she did. The old black guy up on the stage, with his gray hair and pressed pants and shoes spotted with flecks of mud, sang and played his heart out. Saul didn’t have to think about the music to get it; for him, no effort at translation was necessary.

  Also, he was beginning to suffer from insomnia, just like Harold, the barber. During the day while teaching his classes, he would feel drowsy, but when his head fell onto the pillow, he would sleep for an hour and then wake with the sensation that a movie-premiere arc-light was shining in his face. Along his legs and his chest there fluttered a distinct feeling of insects. This sensation made Saul want to jump out of his skin, leave his body behind like an ill-fitting pair of pajamas. At these times, still in his cocoon-body, he lay there thinking that the meaning of a serious career and of adulthood generally had escaped him. In the middle of the night, life did not seem to be the trifling joke he once thought it might be, nor were its problems merely academic ones. Devils lurked. At such times he would take Patsy, awake or asleep, into his arms. He wanted to admit that he had made a terrible mistake and that they were suffering the consequences of his misjudgments.

  After all, his brother, Howie, the entrepreneur, was on the West Coast, making West Coast money in various start-ups, fledgling technology and software projects of which Saul understood nothing. Howie was younger than Saul and already a millionaire, or so he claimed. Saul’s impression was that West Coast businesses were like West Coast football: you threw the ball up into the air and sort of expected someone to catch it, and usually someone did. Howie did not hesitate to call now and then to announce his various successes in vague incomprehensible detail. Then Saul’s mother, Delia, would call to talk about Howie’s successes to Saul, repeating the vague incomprehensible details at greater length and fuller incomprehensibility. Being an older brother whose idealism had resulted in a high school teaching job—this made Saul feel, during his bouts of insomnia at three in the morning, in his rented house, with midwestern farmland outside, as if he had been bested, outdone and undone. Sounds came up from the basement. Dream hounds bayed. Never again would he and his wife live in the fully human world. He had brought his wife out to this godforsaken place. The trouble with Patsy was that she said she liked it fine in Five Oaks. She could be sanctimonious about her adaptability. All he could do was hold o
n to her and wait for the hours to pass.

  If anything should happen to her, he thought, he would surely die.

  He climbed to the roof of the house to correct quizzes and tests. Staring out over the fields, he felt his attention disperse into the landscape, floating gradually into the topsoil, like pollen. Then he would look down and underline a sentence fragment in green ink.

  Saul’s mother, Delia, had lost her husband, Saul’s father, Norman, to a premature heart attack some years ago, when Howie had been eight years old and Saul ten. In a traffic jam outside Baltimore, Norman Bernstein had died quietly and submissively inside his Buick, his head slumped over the wheel, his car clogging the already clogged arterial-highway. Thinking of this, Saul sometimes imagined his father’s coronary thrombosis producing a traffic thrombosis, blocking the flow of vehicles for hours. His self-effacing father would have hated his own death for its public-nuisance value. He would have preferred to die in a private manner that would have bothered no one.

  As for Delia, Saul’s mother had had a wild youth, Saul had understood from one or two family friends who had reported that she had been a real “firecracker,” but he also inferred from her indifferent manner of talking about her husband that the marriage had been a convenience of sorts, a way of starting a family with a reliable man, a means of avoiding loneliness; and his father’s death, while certainly a shock, had not plunged her into mind-numbing grief. She had traded passion for reliability, and when a reliable man dies, he leaves behind a sufficiently huge sum of life-insurance money to take care of everybody, and Saul’s father had done exactly that. Saul missed his dull, sweet, and reliable father the way a child misses a favorite dog, but every time he tried to speak to his mother (who was still, after all, in her mid-forties) about his dad, she listened carefully but did not participate in his sorrow, perhaps on principle.

  Musing about his mother, Saul recognized that she missed high school (not college, as he did) and the grand passions more than she missed her husband, who had been, in romance, a utility player. There was still an out-of-control quality to her emotions, an uncapped heat coming from her furnace heart that Saul was afraid of, both for her and himself. In her marriage, his mother had been undermatched. She was ready for a wonderful midlife crisis, and Saul was bracing himself for it.

  Whenever she called, she disparaged the Midwest, and Saul’s career choice, though she was careful never to criticize Patsy, or Saul and Patsy’s unseemly love for each other. She would praise, incomprehensibly, Saul’s brother, and always refer to Howie’s good looks and his parade of girlfriends—Saul suspected his brother had boyfriends as well—and his income. It was as if Saul and Patsy’s marriage, with its crazy love, was an error in taste or judgment; it lacked the interesting variety to be found in Howie’s succession of bedmates. It lacked anecdotal value. If Saul would only return to Baltimore, his mother intimated, perhaps she could set him straight.

  “Ma,” he said. “We’re staying here.” Any suggestion from his mother, no matter how sensible, had to be rejected, simply because it came from her.

  “Staying? Staying for what? For how long?”

  “For as long as it takes.”

  “As long as what takes? Honey, you’ll never have a normal life as long as you live there.”

  “What’s normal? Explain that to me.”

  “Ah, now you’re setting one of your traps. I know your tricks. You want me to say restaurants and concerts and good movies and book-stores, but I won’t.”

  “They have some of those things here.”

  “I didn’t say it!” She waited. “Think of Howie’s wonderful life, out there in San Francisco. I worry about you, living on that dirt road. I don’t like dirt roads. I don’t like the people who live on them—”

  “—You’ve never known anybody who lived on a dirt road, except those people, the Friedkins, who lived in that sixty-thousand-square-foot house out in that suburb where they—”

  “—Let me finish. I’m not talking about the Friedkins. I’m talking about you. Earning such a lousy salary. Don’t think I don’t admire your wonderful idealism. Everyone in the family admires your wonderful idealism, Saul, you know that. But it’s like you’ve fallen into a . . . cave.”

  “Like a bear,” Saul said, thoughtfully. “A bear in a cave. Now, that could be true.”

  “So move out. Find an urban cave this time.”

  “Don’t want to. I’m starting to like it here.”

  “What’s to like? Dirt? Fields? Sheep?”

  “They don’t have sheep here. No, I’ll tell you what there is to like about it, which you would discover if you ever came to visit.”

  “What?”

  “The indifference. Ma, I never lived with indifference before.”

  “Indifference?” she roared, and jingled her bracelets. He could smell her perfume over the phone. “You value indifference? Have you gone crazy?”

  “You never gave me a moment of it. You never left me alone.” Saul felt himself getting angry. “You were always kissing me.” Actually, now that he thought about it, the kissing had occurred before his father died. After his father died, she stopped with the kissing. Some psychic economy had gone to work on her. He was careful not to say that his father had always been the recipient of Delia’s genial and friendly indifference. She wasn’t cold, just cool to him. Even as a boy, Saul knew that his father was not a passionate man, that his thermostat was set lower than his mother’s—even Saul as a boy could see that his parents’ marriage lacked something. Nevertheless, Saul’s father had managed to thrive on his wife’s indifference, until he died; in death he had finally achieved a greater indifference than hers.

  “Indifference is a terrible thing, kiddo,” Delia was saying. “Awful. Cold. Cold at the heart.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never lived with it,” Saul said, knowing that he was saying the-thing-which-was-not. “Imagine people not caring that much what you do. Imagine people leaving you alone.”

  “You’re describing a nightmare.”

  “Now you’re guessing. When did people ever leave you alone? When did they ever leave me alone? Never. That’s when.”

  “Saulie, let’s not fight.” She sighed dramatically. “Furthermore, if you’re baiting me to talk about Norman, I won’t. Maybe you should move to another city. If only you were in Detroit. You have relatives in Detroit.”

  “Exactly what Harold says. You been talking to him?”

  “Who’s Harold?”

  “He’s my barber. He says people look like me in Detroit. Or New York, I forget which.”

  “Last time I talked to Patsy,” Saul’s mother said, changing the subject, “a couple of weeks back, she said you’d joined a bowling league.” Delia waited. “You, bowling? Jews don’t bowl.”

  “Another eleventh commandment!” Saul protested. “Besides, what do you know about Jews?”

  “I’m Jewish. That’s all I have to know about it. And I know you’re Jewish, and you’re trying to aggravate me.”

  Saul felt his breathing passages getting clogged. He gasped for air. “Ma,” he said, “you’re giving me asthma. Let’s not discuss this.”

  “Have you been to a doctor?” He replied with silence. “For your breathing, go to a doctor. Honey,” she said, “what am I going to say to my friends about you?”

  “You can say Saul and Patsy are getting comfortable in Michigan.”

  “All right, Saul. I give up. You want me to say that, that’s what I’ll say. Pour your life down the drain, if that’s your ambition. I accept it.” She sighed, a two-note sigh. “But let me tell you something, my friend. It’s not a normal life you’re leading out there.”

  “Okay, Ma. I’ll bite. What kind of a life is it?”

  “It’s nothing, and that’s my last word on the subject. You’re living in nothingness. It’ll eat you up. As anyone with a brain in his head would tell you. But I won’t interfere. Maybe nothingness suits you.”

  “Oh, I thriv
e on it. It is my mother’s milk.”

  There was a long pause.

  “All right, be sarcastic,” she said. “I can tell we aren’t making progress. Goodbye, honey. I’ll call again in two weeks.” She made artificial and insincere kissing noises on the mouthpiece.

  “Bye, Ma.” Saul hung up the telephone in the kitchen and walked into the living room, where Patsy was watching the Sunday-afternoon movie, From Here to Eternity. “Take off your clothes,” he said. “We’re going to mess around.”

  She kept her eyes on the screen. “Not now. I don’t want to right now. At least not until this scene is over.” She glanced up at him. “Did the Marschallin call, sweetheart? You must’ve just talked to her.”

  Saul waited impatiently until the movie was over.

  In the April tournament held at the Aqua Bowl, Saul scored 201, 194, and 132, and at the party afterward at Mad Dog Bettermine’s summer house on the Tittabawassee River, he was exultant. Everyone had been told to bring a favorite CD to the party, and Saul, in an ironic mood that then gave way to earnestness, had brought Etta James singing Billie Holiday.

  Mad Dog taught shop class and coached the wrestling team. No one had ever seen him button a collar around his own neck. For the party, his statuesque girlfriend Karla had prepared two huge casseroles, one with tuna and the other with chicken, and in the back room Mad Dog was busy rolling joints packed with the most powerful Colombian—grown, Mad Dog claimed, in the wet upper altitudes—that money could buy. Around the room on bookshelves were Mad Dog’s Lionel trains, including a complete model of the Twentieth Century Limited with baggage car, lounge, Pullman sleepers, diner, coaches, and engines. The track had been laid on top of a little red carpet. Sitting on a blue beanbag chair, Saul asked, his voice thickening with smoke, why Mad Dog didn’t run his trains on a layout but had set them up on a bookshelf display instead.