Saul even began to think of Gordy as a sentry. On certain days he imagined Gordy as an unemployed bodyguard. At times, when winter’s grip had loosened and the snows began to melt and the mud appeared, Saul would check the yard, and if Gordy was not there—Gordy, the faithful zombie, their own private security service, Sergeant Bartleby, the last creation of Dr. Frankenstein—Saul felt a strange furtive disappointment.
But it wasn’t as if they were going to sanction this strange behavior. Gordy could stand out there facing the house—in the sunshine, or the rain, or the snow, or the mud—but they were not about to invite him in, or ask him again, or again, or again, why he was there. You didn’t have conversations over extended periods of time with someone like Gordy Himmelman about motivations. He wasn’t smart enough to have reasons for doing what he did. If he did have reasons, by now he would have revealed them. Or they would have appeared on his face: it would have taken on an expression of yearning, or resentment, or rage.
But his face, through the fall and then on through the winter, and then on to spring and early summer, remained as blank as ever. His eyes, as always, were distant and lunar. There was nothing to be done about him.
Eight
On Sunday mornings, if Mary Esther didn’t stir, Saul and Patsy slept late. Usually Patsy awakened first. She would lie in bed watching the leaves of the linden shivering in the hot mottled summer air outside their bedroom window. Above her, hanging from the ceiling light fixture, a cardboard bird mobile turned slowly in the vestigial breezes. She gazed at it, vaguely admiring its equilibrium, its spiritless motion. Or she would examine Saul, wrestling with his angels as he muttered words that were all vowels—Hawaiian words, now that it was summertime and he was no longer dragging himself across the Arctic—and when she watched him and listened to his unintelligible garble, she tried to concentrate her attention on how it was she had married him, those steps of gradual womanly acknowledgment that had taken her toward him.
They had both been performers in those undergraduate days, Saul a musician and she a dancer, and they kept running into each other in the rehearsal halls.
She had really met him after a dance production of The Unnamable. She was one of the two dancers, and the production took place in a performance space with all of the seats on the north side. It was originally going to be staged in pitch dark—Patsy as a very young woman was interested in invisible performances—but the other dancer insisted on two black lights and a single candle with a metallic shade. Patsy finally conceded the point. Offstage, a woman read excerpts from the Beckett text, and Patsy danced to it: preoccupied but nevertheless formal movements engaged in at extreme slow motion, right at the borderline of stasis. She had worked for weeks on nearly imperceptible body movements, stillness-dancing. It had been a challenge because such dancing excited her and quieted her at the same time, as yoga did. A fourth woman, a composer of aleatory sounds, though post-Cage in style, created amplified background audio using sand in Dixie Cups, and with rubber bands, Slinkies, and a watering can with ball bearings inside.
Patsy had wished to give the impression that if you took your eyes away from her for even a moment, she would not look the same the next time you saw her: her body under the influence of the spoken text had become illusionary, metamorphic, even metastatic: she aimed herself at the audience and opened her bare arms to them, replicating the gestures of a night-blooming cereus, or a youthful prostitute under a streetlight, or a cancer, or Eurydice.
All four women were after a certain tone: they wanted the production to be both impossibly brainy and also, and inevitably, so erotic as to risk accusations of obscenity. If it seemed unbearably pretentious, well, that was a risk they would take.
After the third performance—all the tickets were free because the Beckett estate wouldn’t give them permission for the adaptation—Saul reintroduced himself to her outside the green room and began talking at great length about her performance. He had the piercing brown eyes of a repentant gangster, though he was gaunt in other respects, except for his thick peasant’s hands. He was highly excited by the text (“self-incriminated language,” he called it, “oxidizing in your ear”) and the sounds (“lyrical aural insults, with no bottom to them”), but most of all, it seemed, he was excited by Patsy. “You were moving but you weren’t moving,” he said, “the words were moving your body,” demonstrating that he had got it, that it hadn’t slipped past him. “It was psychokinetic,” he said, “and phonemic-kinetic,” which was going a bit far. They were talking in the hallway, Patsy holding her knapsack, the hour was getting late, and then Saul blurted out, “I kept imagining what it would be like to be partnered with you,” and then he blushed under his beard, self-astonished. Patsy smiled. So it would be like this, from now on? The blurting of truth in the wee hours?
Coffee, dates, much talk (because it was Saul), the love attack—he had massaged her feet after her last performance, talking about Schopenhauer as they reclined on her bed, still clothed. “I don’t think Schopenhauer is as pessimistic as people say he is, do you?” Saul asked. She had said she didn’t know. Nor did she want to give him the impression that she would try to find out. She was not going to scamper after his preoccupations just because they were his.
Still, he had the most beautiful skin she had ever seen on a man, and a winsome smile.
One evening in the fall they had met at a campus coffee house, and as he was walking her back to her apartment, a soft rain began to fall. They were both wearing sandals, and they both ambled across the grass, gradually increasing their speed to a jog as they held hands. Patsy had looked over at Saul and saw her own sudden shocked, unprovoked joy on his face.
Then he had called her at two in the morning and played some Charlie Parker for her over the phone. In Saul, love took the form of desperation-to-share. He invited her over to his apartment, where he cooked dinner, played his trombone, and asked her to dance for him. Saul turned all the lights off, and Patsy danced by the light of the streetlight, but there was no aleatoric, arranged sound, just the noise of the cars and the trucks passing by in the street, and so she danced to that, a dance for him, though resisting him as much as she could, a dance about that resistance, about the refusals of nakedness. They made love anyway when she was finished, Patsy still resisting him a little, all her movements initially sullen. She fucked him with sensual resentment; she let him know that she had her needs, too, that he could not apportion all the passions for himself.
She could not tell if he was able to appreciate or even to read the ways that she had made love to him at first, or to notice particularly how she did it, the way that a dancer like her performed sex, slyly, with touches of rhetoric, annoyance, always with an implicit audience watching the subtle errant moves, moves that were only half for herself, the other half for the purposes of visual expression, or even the denial of that need, any need, a statement of freedom: Look, I can play with this desire. And you can’t, exactly.
Living together, movies, dinners, escalating comfort in each other’s company, the unthinkability of not being together, the sense—where had this come from?—that they were setting up a small business together, and finally marriage. Soon, Saul could read all her gestures. That was both a triumph in human terms and a defeat in artistic ones. For consolation, she had someone with whom to discuss all aspects of life. Now here they were, in the Midwest, where everybody’s gestures were immediately readable. At these moments it no longer seemed inevitable that they should have met in the first place, that she should have ever loved him and finally married him. Arbitrary, the meeting, the love, all of it, a trick, after all, of the body she had trained and with which she now excited or soothed him. She might have loved anybody, but it had turned out to be this man, this Saul, a Scrabble player, a teacher. But there was no certainty of logic to it. He lay there now, the father of her daughter, his eyebrows twitching, his breath smelling of corn tassels. A man sleeping in bed in the morning is rarely a prize, it seemed to her at such m
oments. But she loved him, and her love puzzled her, as if Eros had played a prank on her and she wanted to unravel it. Because: if it had arrived as quickly and as haphazardly as that, it could depart just as fast. It worried her, that their courtship had started with Saul being her audience. She knew she was beautiful as a performer. But as anything else? As a wife?
Being a wife stalled out the art. Being a mother put a stop to it. And now, she realized, there was some feature about Saul she didn’t get—that she would never get.
“Oh, don’t analyze,” her friend Susan Palmer had once said. “Don’t try to figure out why you love some guy. You’ll only figure out that you shouldn’t. In my experience, guys—well, the grown-up boys I’ve known— don’t stand much scrutiny. They can barely stand up at all. You know what they’re all about, under the microscope? They’re all about their flaws, versus whatever else they’ve got. Their games.”
“No, really,” Patsy said. They were both working as tellers at the bank, and they were on their lunch break, in the back room, over sandwiches. There were no windows, and it felt very private in there. “It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to me. But. It’s a puzzle.”
“Jesus, Patsy. A puzzle? If you’ve got a blessing, any blessing at all, just count it. Don’t examine it. Are you crazy? Some of us don’t even have what you have.” Susan bit into her sandwich angrily, her eyes tearing up. Patsy didn’t know what Susan was talking about: Susan was married, after all, to a nice guy, the assistant city manager of Five Oaks, a fellow named Wyatt. They had two children. Wyatt’s mom was a little crazy, but so what? They lived model lives. Susan taught gymnastics to kids on weekends. She was beautiful, her gymnast figure still visible under her clothes. She had a trustworthy man sleeping next to her in bed each night. Still, Patsy had violated a rule: you never, ever brag to a coworker about loving your husband. It was bad manners, it was arrogant, and nobody’s business, besides.
But now, two years later, thinking of what Susan had told her, Patsy realized that loving Saul was not, in fact, the biggest event that had ever happened to her. Mary Esther was. Mary Esther had pushed everything and everybody else off the map, and she had turned Saul into a father. It was Mary Esther she thought about, Mary Esther who commanded her repertoire of emotions. Saul, she had discovered, was the means for Mary Esther to come into the world. He was . . . the word came to her unpleasantly, an expedient. As if to recoil from this recognition, Patsy began to rub Saul’s back. He slept naked during the summer, and she had just touched his back when the phone rang, downstairs, as if touching his skin had set off a bell elsewhere in the house.
In her nightgown, she ran down the stairs to get it before it woke anybody up, but she heard Mary Esther stirring and whimpering as she rose out of sleep. As soon as Patsy had picked up the phone, even before she heard the voice, she knew—the psychic insights of everyday life—that it was Saul’s mother, Delia.
“Patsy.” Delia’s voice was regimental somehow, feminine-military, without being hard. Patsy didn’t know how she did it. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
“No, no. I was up.” Patsy heard Delia’s toaster popping up in the background.
“Yes, I suppose. I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t have called. It’s—”
“Well, it’s not that early.” Without looking at her watch, Patsy knew it was eight thirty-nine.
“Well. Maybe it is in the Midwest. It’s always earlier there. And it isn’t just the time zones that cause that. In the Midwest it’s always last week, compared to here. Is Saul still asleep?”
Patsy glanced up the stairs. Mary Esther was beginning to sing softly, and if she got louder, Saul would eventually arise, dazedly, go into the nursery, and change her. “Yes, I think so. He’s still asleep.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Well, I need to talk to someone,” Delia said. “And I was hoping I’d get you. This isn’t the sort of information I should say to Saul. Or to Howie, either. Besides, I never know where Howie is. The last time I called him, I got him on his cell phone, and he was halfway up a mountain, climbing it. Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of climbing a mountain. Why not buy a postcard? Or get someone else to climb it? Well, what can you do with a son like that?”
“I don’t know,” Patsy said automatically. “What can you do?” Then she realized belatedly that it was not a question she should parrot back to Delia.
“You can’t do anything,” Delia said obligingly. Then her voice dropped an octave. “Are you alone? Well, I mean, can you keep a secret?”
“Sure.” Patsy looked down at her feet, at the polish flaking off her toenails.
“Don’t tell Saul. It’ll upset him. I just have to tell somebody, and it’s obvious I can’t tell my friends just now . . . well, it’s not that you’re convenient, Patsy, I’m not saying that. You know I love you, don’t you? I got so lucky, having a daughter-in-law like you.” Delia said these words distantly, and without inflection.
“Delia, what’s going on?” Patsy felt herself clutching the phone tightly.
“Well, it’s this way. You’re young, you’ll understand this, I think. I need to say this to somebody.” Delia waited and took an audible breath. “I have a new boyfriend,” she announced. “But I haven’t told Saul, or anybody.” Patsy waited for her to continue speaking, but she didn’t, as if she had faltered momentarily. “Well, one friend, but that’s it.”
“Delia,” Patsy said with whispered enthusiasm, “that’s great! Congratulations. Who is it?”
“See, that’s the thing.”
Patsy waited. “The thing. Okay,” she said.
“All right. He’s quite young,” Delia said. “He’s younger than I am. Quite a bit younger. Actually, he’s younger than you are. Actually, he’s almost eighteen. But, no, the truth is that he’s seventeen. I don’t want to mislead you. He’s seventeen.” Her voice, in announcing this fact, was worldly and neutral, uninvolved in what it was saying.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s quite legal. Though I haven’t checked. But here’s the icing on my particular cake. He’s the yard boy. His name is Jimmy. Jimmy the yard boy. What a cliché! I hired him to come over here to fix up the yard and to do some gardening, and he was unusually kind and considerate, absolutely not what I was expecting at all, of course, from a young man that age. You don’t expect young men to be kind and considerate. Usually they’re awful. And, I don’t know, mostly as a joke, a nothing, I made a little play for him, and now . . . Patsy, you won’t tell Saul, will you?”
“No, I won’t tell Saul.” Patsy considered this for a moment, what she would say next. After all, she was speaking to the Marschallin. The Marschallin had finally gotten her young man. “Is it a French novel or is it an American novel?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, if it was an American novel, you’d have an affair with him, and you’d both feel soiled and degraded, and then he’d tell his parents, and his mother would file a suit against you, and somebody would be shot dead after a few months, you know, out of pure rage, and then there would be church-lady morals and a big mess to clean up with the litigation. If it was a French novel, though, you two would both have a perfectly good time, and he would be grateful to you and, you know, tireless, and you would teach him a thing or two about sex and the ways of love, and he’d remember you happily for a few years, have other girlfriends more his age who would all love him for his boldness and attentiveness and expertise, and then he’d get married and settle down.”
“It’s actually more like the French version,” Delia said, a bit dryly. “So far.”
“Well, good for you,” Patsy said.
“But you know, in these matters, nothing is as simple as all that. I go through the house,” Delia resumed, “muttering his name, and I think of his parents and whether they’ll ever find out, and then I think, well, in a few weeks he’ll start school again, and it’ll be all over.
” She waited. “It will be over, and no harm will have come to anybody, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone. He says he hasn’t. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes it’s more complicated.”
Delia stopped talking.
“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Patsy said. Mary Esther’s cries upstairs were getting a bit louder now. Where was Saul?
“Oh, no, I’m not pregnant. I had my tubes tied a long time ago, and besides, I’m . . . no, it’s not that, believe me.”
“Well, what is it?” Patsy thought she knew what Delia would say, but she didn’t want to anticipate it.
“See, the little complication is, I love him,” Delia said, her voice still absolutely neutral, even a bit cold. “Just a little bit. Of course it’s completely ridiculous. I mean, he’s only a boy. This is like something middle-aged men do, with their proclivity for college girls. But I do love him. Patsy, he brings in little bouquets of flowers that he’s picked. A boy does this! He brings them in for me, and we put them in water together. And you should see his smile. I don’t think I’ve ever had a smile like that from a grown man. Men don’t smile like that spontaneously. They forget how. He smiles at me and my insides just knot up, because he’s so happy to see me.” Delia’s voice continued in its uninflected way.
“Count your blessings,” Patsy instructed her mother-in-law, using the phrase she had just been thinking of. Delia was right, of course: Saul had forgotten how to smile, except to produce a result. “Does he love you?”
“Of course not. He’s just a kid. And I’m just a middle-aged woman he . . . sometimes sleeps with. I’m a diversion. He doesn’t know from love. But he’s so devoted, and so sweet, and so kind—Patsy, he compliments me on my body, can you believe that?—and of course there’s his skin, and his body, which is gorgeous, and his smile, that it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love me, because he might as well love me, considering the way he treats me. Somehow I missed all this before, when I was an actual girl. Know what I mean? I thought when you were my age, you stopped doing foolishness like this. I thought women stopped falling in love, at least comme ça.”
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