Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  The albino deer had vanished, too. He’d seen no trace of it for days, though he had gone looking for it.

  Mary Esther lay in the rickety crib that Saul himself had assembled, following the confusing and contradictory instructions enclosed in the shipping box. Above the crib hung a mobile of cardboard stars and planets. Mary Esther slept and cried and gurgled while the mobile turned slowly in the small breezes caused by the visitors as they bent over the baby.

  When Saul’s brother Howie finally called, as Saul knew he would, he asked to speak to Mary Esther right away. “I gotta talk to her. Put her on,” he said. Saul told Howie that the baby was only a baby and couldn’t talk on the phone, but Howie argued and said that she certainly could. At a month old, she should start to learn how to use telecommunications. Saul brought the phone down to the baby’s ear, and Howie said whatever he had to say while Mary Esther appeared to smile, and after a minute or so, Saul took the phone away from his daughter and raised it to his ear to speak to Howie himself, but whatever Howie had had to tell his niece was finished, and the phone line had gone dead.

  Having a new baby was like having an affair or having committed a murder, Saul decided, as he patrolled the house: you couldn’t really talk about it. People found it disagreeable whenever you started up about your new child; if they were single or childless, they thought you were boastful and self-centered, and if they had children of their own, they were politely bored by your stories. Oh, yeah. Been there, done that, they said—a phrase Saul had always hated. Women could talk to other young mothers about their children, but men could not. There seemed to be a rule about this. Men could boast about their children but not discuss the intricacies of child care, though perhaps this was all changing. The birth of his daughter felt like the biggest event that had ever happened to him, and he had no one to talk to about it except Patsy, and even she, he thought, was getting bored with him, his husbanding of her. To husband: a dreary transitive verb meaning “to conserve, to save.”

  One night when Mary Esther was eight weeks old and the smell of early spring was pouring into the room from the purple lilacs in the driveway, Patsy awakened and found herself alone in bed. Checking the clock, she saw that it was three-thirty. Saul had to be up for work in three hours. From downstairs she heard very faintly the sound of groans and music. The groans weren’t Saul’s. She knew his groans very well. There was always a touch of irony to them. These were different. She put on her bathrobe.

  In the living room, sitting in his usual overstuffed chair and wearing his blue jeans and T-shirt, Saul was watching a porn film on the TV, the VCR whirring quietly. His head was propped against his arm as if he were listening attentively to a lecture. He glanced up at Patsy, flashed her a guilty wave with his left hand, then returned his gaze to the movie. On the TV screen, a man and a woman were having showy sex in a curiously grim manner inside a stalled freight elevator. They behaved as if they were under orders. Then Patsy realized that, of course, they were under orders, which was at least one reason why their lovemaking looked so odd.

  “What’s this, Saul?”

  “Video I rented.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “The store.”

  Moans had been dubbed onto the soundtrack, but they did not match the actors’ expressions. The man and the woman did not look at each other. For some reason a green ceramic poodle sat in the opposite corner of the freight elevator. “Not very classy, Saul.”

  “Well, no. Why do you suppose Howie didn’t want to talk to me? He didn’t stay on the line. He congratulated me and then said he wanted to speak to the baby. I don’t get it. There’s a lot I don’t get these days.”

  “Maybe he’s jealous. Of our having a daughter.”

  The woman on the TV set wheezled.

  “I doubt it. He’s making all the money, but he doesn’t come to visit and he doesn’t send us a present. It’s strange . . . I miss him. I miss everybody. Look at that, Patsy. She hasn’t taken her shoes off. That’s pretty strange. They’re having sex in the freight elevator and her shoes are still on. I guess the boys in the audience don’t like feet.”

  Patsy studied the TV screen. Unexpected sadness located her and settled in like a headache. She rested her eyes on the Matisse poster above Saul’s chair: naked people dancing in a ring. In this room the human body was excessively represented, and for a moment Patsy had the feeling that everything in life was probably too much, there was just too much to face down. Eventually you were done in by the altogether.

  “Saul,” she said, “you need more friends. People to talk to. Don’t turn into a sitcom sort of guy, one of those typical Americans. I’d hate that.”

  “Don’t I know it.” He waited. “I need a purpose, as long as you’re at it.”

  “Come upstairs.”

  “In a minute, my love, after this part.”

  “I don’t like to look at them. My idea of good porno is something else. I guess I don’t even like you looking at them, these two.”

  “It’s hell, isn’t it?”

  She touched his shoulder. “This is sort of furtive. Not that I’m a prude or anything.”

  “Oh, you can see it too, if you want. I’m not hiding it. I still have my jeans on. No jerking off or anything like that. I’m an impartial observer. I’m disinterested. See? I even know the proper definition of that often misused word.” He gave her a flat smile.

  “Why are you doing this, Saul? How come you’re watching this?”

  “Because I wanted to. Didn’t you read the training manual on me? I do this after my daughter is born. Besides, I wanted a real movie and I got this instead. I was in the video place and I went past the musicals and the action thrillers into the sad, private room where all the X’s were. There I was—me—full of curiosity.”

  “Curiosity? About what?”

  “Well, we, you and I, used to have fun. We used to get hot. So this . . . anyway, it’s like nostalgia, you know? Nostalgia for something. It’s like going into a museum where the exhibits are happy, and behind glass, and you watch the happiness, your nose on the glass, and it isn’t yours, so you watch more of it.”

  “This isn’t happiness you’re watching. Jesus, Saul, that’s a big soul error. And furthermore, this isn’t like you. Doesn’t it make you feel like shit or something?”

  He sat in his chair, thinking. Then he said, “Oh sure, it does. Very shit-like.” He clicked off the TV set, stood up, and put his arms around Patsy, and they embraced for what seemed to Patsy a long time. Behind Saul on the living-room bookshelf were volumes of history and literature—Saul’s collection of Dashiell Hammett and Samuel Eliot Morison and several volumes of the Loeb Classical Library—and the Scrabble game on the top shelf. They had not played the game for months. “Don’t leave me alone back here,” Patsy said. “Don’t leave me alone, okay?”

  “I loved you, Patsy,” he told her, and she shivered at the past tense of the verb. It felt like a decision on his part, a conscious act. It felt like the first step of a trial separation. “You know that. Always have.”

  “Not what I’m talking about.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just that you don’t get everything now,” she said. “I don’t give it all to you. Mary Esther gets some of it. You need to diversify.”

  They stood for a few moments longer, swaying slightly together. They were physically intimate, but it felt to Patsy as if their souls were miles apart, hers in Guatemala and Saul’s in Greenland.

  Two nights later, Saul finished diapering Mary Esther and then walked into the upstairs hallway toward the bathroom. He brushed against Patsy, who was heading downstairs. Under the ceiling lights her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. They did not speak, and for ten seconds she was a stranger to him. He could not remember why he had ever married her, and he could not remember having desire for her. She was a young, wearied mother, and she looked temporarily used up. For half a minute, he breathed in the pure air of despondency. After shaking for
a moment, he tried to regain his balance in the hallway in front of the open bathroom door, angry and frightened, feeling his wounds opening but bleeding inward rather than outward.

  When Saul entered his classroom the next day, Gordy and Bob greeted his arrival with rattled throat noises, sociopathic gargling. On their foreheads they had written MAD IN THE USA, in pencil. “Mad,” or “made” misspelled? Saul didn’t ask. Seated in their broken desks and only vaguely attentive, the other students fidgeted and smiled politely, picking at their frayed clothes uniformly one or two sizes too small.

  “Today,” Saul said, “we’re going to pretend that we’re young again. I don’t mean a year or two younger, I mean much younger. We’re going to think about what babies would say if they could talk.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket for his seven duplicate photographs of Mary Esther, in which she leaned against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap.

  “This is my daughter,” Saul said, passing the photographs out. “Mary Esther.” The four girls in the classroom made peculiar cooing sounds. The boys reacted with squirming nervous laughter, except for Gordy and Bob, who had suddenly turned to stone. “Babies want to say things, right? Except they can’t, not yet. What would she say if she could talk? Write it out on a sheet of paper. Give her some words.”

  Saul knew he was testing the Cossacks. He was screwing up their heads with parental love that they themselves had never sampled. For Gordy Himmelman, the idea of an actual father would be the mystery beyond all mysteries. It would make him crazy, and that might be interesting. At the back of the room, Gordy, in all his bewilderment, studied the photograph. His face expressed the staring-nothing with which he was on intimate terms. All his feelings were bricked up; and nothing escaped from him.

  His was the zombie point of view.

  Nevertheless, he bent down over his desk, pencil in hand.

  At the end of the hour, Saul collected the papers, and his students shuffled out into the hallway. Saul had noticed that poor readers did not lift their feet off the floor. You could hear them coming down the hallway from the slide and scrape and squeal of their shoes.

  He searched for Gordy Himmelman’s paper. Here it was, mad in America, several lines of scrawled writing.

  They thro me up in to the air. Peopl come in when I screem and thro me up in to the air. They stik my face up. They never cacht me.

  The next lines were heavily erased.

  her + try it out . You ink

  Saul held up the paper to read the illegible words, and he saw the word “kick” again, next to the word “lidel.”

  His head randomly swimming, Saul held the photographs of his daughter, the little kike thoughtfully misspelled by Gordon Himmelman, before bringing the photos to his chest absentmindedly. From the hallway he heard the sound of lively braying laughter.

  That night, Saul, fortified with Mad Dog’s no-brand beer, read the want ads, deeply interested. The want ads were full of trash and leavings, employment opportunities (most of them at Five Oaks’s largest employer, WaldChem, where every job was lethal), and the promise of new lives amid the advertised wreckage of the old. He read the personals like a scholar, checking for verbal nuance. Sitting in his overstuffed chair, he had been scanning the columns when his eye stopped on a singular item.

  BEEHIVES FOR SALE—MUST SELL. SHELLS, FRAMES, EXTRACTOR. ALSO INCL. SMOKER AND PROTECTIVE HAT TOOLS AND FACE COVERING. GOOD CONDITION. ANY OFFER CONSIDERED. EAGER TO DEAL. $$$ POTENTIAL. CALL AFTER 7PM. 890-7236.

  Saul took Mary Esther out of her pendulum chair and held her as he walked around the house, thick with plans and vision. In the vision, he stood proudly in front of Patsy, holding a jar of honey. Sunlight slithered through its glass and transformed the room itself into pure gold. Sweetness was everywhere. Honey would make all the desires right again between them. The peaceable kingdom would return, and the arrows would fly backward away from their targets and find themselves on the string of the bow as the bow itself was unstrung and put away into its case. Gordy Himmelman, meanwhile, would have erased himself from the planet. He would have caused himself in a feat of Flash Gordon–like magic to dematerialize. In this dream, whose colors resembled those of the porn film, Patsy accepted Saul’s gift. She couldn’t stop smiling at him. She tore off her clothes, his too. She poured the honey over Saul.

  It was one of his better daydreams. Gazing at the newspapers and magazines piling up next to the TV set and VCR, as he held and burped Mary Esther, Saul found himself shaking with a kind of excitement. Irony, his constant lifelong faithful sidekick, was asleep, or on vacation, and in its heady absence Saul began to reimagine himself as a money-maker, a beekeeper, a man Patsy could not stop herself from loving. Rescue me, he thought, not sure if the words were his or Patsy’s or just came from that great old song.

  He did not accuse Gordy of anti-Semitism, or of anything else. He ignored him, as he ignored Bob Pawlak. At the end of the school year they would all go away and drain down into the earth and the dirt and swill they came from and become one with the stones and the all-embracing sewage. A new principle: Some things you can’t help; some things you can’t save, and you’re better off not trying.

  On a fine warm day in April, Saul drove out to the north side of town, where he bought the wooden frames and the other equipment from a laconic man named Gunderson. Gunderson wore overalls and boots. Using the flat of his hand, he rubbed the top of his bald head with a farmer’s gesture of suspicion as he examined Saul’s white shirt, pressed pants, funky two-day growth of beard, and brown leather shoes. “Don’t wear black clothes around these fellas,” Gunderson said, meaning the bees. “Bees hate black. Just hate it. Don’t know why, but they do.” Saul paid him in cash, and Gunderson counted the money after Saul handed it over, wetting his thumb to turn the bills.

  With Mad Dog’s pickup, Saul brought it all back to Whitefeather Road. He stored his purchases behind the garage. He took out books on beekeeping from the public library and studied their instructions with care. He made notes on a yellow tablet and calculated hive placement. The bees needed direct sunlight, and water nearby. By phone he bought a colony of bees complete with a queen from an apiary in South Carolina, using his credit card number. He did not think he was being hysterical, though the possibility had occurred to him.

  When the bee box arrived at the main post office, he received an angry call from the assistant postal manager telling him to come down and pick up this damn humming thing.

  As it turned out, the bees liked Saul. They were more predictable than his students, and they worked harder. He was calm and slow around them and talked to them when he removed them from the shipping box and introduced them into the shells and frames, following the instructions he had learned by heart. The hives and frames sat unsteadily on the platform he had laid down on bricks near two fence posts on the edge of the property. But the structure was, he thought, steady enough for bees. He gorged them on sugar syrup, sprinkling it over them before letting them free, shaking them into the frames. Some of them settled on his gloved hands and were so drowsy that, when he pushed them off, they waterfalled into the hive. When the queen and the other bees were enclosed, he replaced the frames inside the shell, being careful to put a feeder with sugar water nearby, outside the shell.

  The books had warned him about the loud buzzing sound of angry bees, but for the first few days Saul never heard it. Something about Saul seemed to keep the bees occupied and unirritated. He was stung twice, once on the wrist and once on the back of the neck, but the pain was pointed and directed and so focused that he could manage it. It was unfocused pain that he couldn’t stand.

  Out at the back of the property, a quarter-mile away from the house, the hives and the bees wouldn’t bother anyone, he thought. “Just don’t bring them in here,” Patsy told him, glancing through one of his apiary books. “Not that they’d come. I just want them and me to have a little distance between us, is all.” She smiled with uncertainty. “Bees,
Saul? Honey? You are quite an amazing literalist.”

  “I am? I thought they were metaphors.”

  “Literal metaphors,” she corrected him. “Just don’t buy a herd of cows. We can get milk at the store.”

  And then one night, balancing his checkbook at his desk, with Mary Esther half-asleep in the crook of his left arm, Saul felt a moment of calm peacefulness, the rarest of all his emotions, and he remembered for that instant exactly what it was like to be in that blessed condition. He hadn’t felt that way for at least eighteen months. Under his desk lamp, with his daughter drooling on his Northwestern University sweatshirt, he sat forward, waiting. A presence made itself felt behind him. When he turned around, he saw Patsy in worn jeans and a T-shirt watching him from the doorway. Her arms were folded, and her breasts were outlined perfectly beneath the cloth. No bra, God save us, he thought, no bra, her nipples visible like the floodlights of heaven across the river. She was holding on her face a tentative expression of sly playfulness. She would be able to do the erotic thing, but it might sometimes be an effort, but she was there again, and she was ready. Saul could see her working at it. He would have to help her out. He would have to pitch in. She couldn’t do this by herself because . . . because she didn’t feel like it.

  “Well, aren’t you something?” he said. “Kind of sleek-looking.”

  “Aren’t I something? Yes, I am. Just look at me.”

  “Come here, babe,” he said.

  “‘Babe’? We don’t have to do endearments. How about if you come over here?”

  “No, you first. I gotta put the baby down. I’ve got the baby here.”

  “Ah, yes. Saul and the baby.” She came into the room, her bare feet whisking against the wood floor, and she put her arms around him so that the baby wasn’t also embraced, and she pressed herself against him strategically and stealthily.